Efficient object search through probability-based viewpoint selection

Conference paper (2020)

Authors

Alejandra C. Hernandez Carlos III University of Madrid
Erik Derner Czech Technical University
Clara Gomez Carlos III University of Madrid
Ramon Barber Carlos III University of Madrid
R. Babuska Learning & Autonomous Control - Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering , Czech Technical University
Research Group
Learning & Autonomous Control (Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering) (TU Delft)
Service robots Object search Semantic scene understanding Viewpoint selection
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Published Date

2020

Language

English

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Faculty

Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering

Department

Cognitive Robotics

Research Group

Learning & Autonomous Control

Abstract

The ability to search for objects is a precondition for various robotic tasks. In this paper, we address the problem of finding objects in partially known indoor environments. Using the knowledge of the floor plan and the mapped objects, we consider object-object and object-room co-occurrences as prior information for identifying promising locations where an unmapped object can be present. We propose an efficient search strategy that determines the best pose of the robot based on the analysis of the candidate locations. We optimize the probability of finding the target object and the distance travelled through a cost function.To evaluate our method, several experiments in simulated and real-world environments were performed. The results show that the robot successfully finds the target object in the environment while covering only a small portion of the search space. The real-world experiments with the TurtleBot 2 mobile robot validate the proposed approach and demonstrate that the method performs well also in real environments.