Semi-task-dependent and uncertainty-driven world model maintenance

Nearly every task a domestic robot could potentially solve requires a description of the robot’s environment which we call a world model. One problem underexposed in the literature is the maintenance of world models. Rather than on creating a world model, this work focuses on finding a strategy that determines when to update which object in the world model. The decision whether or not to update an object is based on the expected information gain obtained by the update, the action cost of the update and the task the robot performs. The proposed strategy is validated during both simulations and real world experiments. The extended series of simulations is performed to show both the performance gain with respect to a benchmark strategy and the effect of the various parameters. The experiments show the proposed approach on different set-ups and in different environments.