Teaching Robots Novel Objects by Pointing at Them

Abstract: Robots that must operate in novel environments and collaborate with humans must be capable of acquiring new knowledge from human experts during operation. We propose teaching a robot novel objects it has not encountered before by pointing a hand at the new object of interest. An end-to-end neural network is used to attend to the novel object of interest indicated by the pointing hand and then to localize the object in new scenes. In order to attend to the novel object indicated by the pointing hand, we propose a spatial attention modulation mechanism that learns to focus on the highlighted object while ignoring the other objects in the scene. We show that a robot arm can manipulate novel objects that are highlighted by pointing a hand at them. We also evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture on a synthetic dataset constructed using emojis and on a real-world dataset of common objects.