Towards a Prototypical Approach to Tool-Use Improvisation

When a robot is operating in a dynamic environment, it cannot be assumed that a tool required to solve a given task will always be available. In case of a missing tool, an ideal response would be to find a substitute to complete the task. In this paper, we present a proof of concept of a grounded knowledge-based approach to tool substitution where knowledge is generated in an unsupervised manner from robot's sensory data about objects. Such robot-centric grounded knowledge is then used to identify a substitute from the available objects in the environment.