Conceptual Design of the Memory System of the Robot Cognitive Architecture ArmarX

We consider the memory system as a key component of any technical cognitive system that can play a central role in bridging the gap between high-level symbolic discrete representations used for reasoning, planning and semantic scene understanding and low-level sensorimotor continuous representations used for control. In this work we described conceptual and technical characteristics such a memory system has to fulfill, together with the underlying data representation. We identify these characteristics based on the experience we gained in developing our ARMAR humanoid robot systems and discuss practical examples that demonstrate what a memory system of a humanoid robot performing tasks in human-centered environments should support, such as multi-modality, introspectability, hetero associativity, predictability or an inherently episodic structure. Based on these characteristics, we extended our robot software framework ArmarX into a unified cognitive architecture that is used in robots of the ARMAR humanoid robot family. Further, we describe, how the development of robot software led us to this novel memory-enabled cognitive architecture and we show how the memory is used by the robots to implement memory-driven behaviors.