Abstract
A robotic workshop assistant has been a long-standing grand challenge for robotics, speech, computer vision, and artificial intelligence (AI) research. We revisit the goal of visual identification of tools from human queries in the current era of Large Vision-and-Language models (like GPT4 (OpenAI 2023)). We find that current off-the-shelf models (that are trained on internet images) are unable to overcome the domain shift and unable to identify small, obscure tools in cluttered environments. Furthermore, these models are unable to match tools to their intended purpose or affordances. We present a novel system for online domain adaptation that can be run directly on a small on-board processor. The system uses Hyperdimensional Computing (HD) (Kanerva 2009), a fast and efficient neuromorphic method. We adapted CLIP (Radford et al. 2021) to work with explicit ("I need the hammer") and implicit purpose-driven queries ("Drive these nails"), and even with depth images as input. This demo allows the user to try out various real tools and interact via free-form audio.