Tag Archives: Active Perception

Using active perception for object classification

February 11, 2018 09:16 ,

Patten, T., Martens, W. & Fitch, R., Monte Carlo planning for active object classification, Auton Robot (2018) 42: 391, DOI: 10.1007/s10514-017-9626-0.

Classifying objects in complex unknown environments is a challenging problem in robotics and is fundamental in many applications. Modern sensors and sophisticated perception algorithms extract rich 3D textured information, but are limited to the data that are collected from a given location or path. We are interested in closing the loop around perception and planning, in particular to plan paths for better perceptual data, and focus on the problem of planning scanning sequences to improve object classification from range data. We formulate a novel time-constrained active classification problem and propose solution algorithms that employ a variation of Monte Carlo tree search to plan non-myopically. Our algorithms use a particle filter combined with Gaussian process regression to estimate joint distributions of object class and pose. This estimator is used in planning to generate a probabilistic belief about the state of objects in a scene, and also to generate beliefs for predicted sensor observations from future viewpoints. These predictions consider occlusions arising from predicted object positions and shapes. We evaluate our algorithms in simulation, in comparison to passive and greedy strategies. We also describe similar experiments where the algorithms are implemented online, using a mobile ground robot in a farm environment. Results indicate that our non-myopic approach outperforms both passive and myopic strategies, and clearly show the benefit of active perception for outdoor object classification.

Posted in: Robotics , Tagged: ,

Using two different environment representations: a detailed one for SLAM, a coarse one for selecting actions for active perception

February 11, 2018 09:12 ,

Nelson, E., Corah, M. & Michael, N., Environment model adaptation for mobile robot exploration,Auton Robot (2018) 42: 257, DOI: 10.1007/s10514-017-9669-2.

In this work, we propose a methodology to adapt a mobile robot’s environment model during exploration as a means of decreasing the computational complexity associated with information metric evaluation and consequently increasing the speed at which the system is able to plan actions and travel through an unknown region given finite computational resources. Recent advances in exploration compute control actions by optimizing information-theoretic metrics on the robot’s map. These metrics are generally computationally expensive to evaluate, limiting the speed at which a robot is able to explore. To reduce computational cost, we propose keeping two representations of the environment: one full resolution representation for planning and collision checking, and another with a coarse resolution for rapidly evaluating the informativeness of planned actions. To generate the coarse representation, we employ the Principal of Relevant Information from rate distortion theory to compress a robot’s occupancy grid map. We then propose a method for selecting a coarse representation that sacrifices a minimal amount of information about expected future sensor measurements using the Information Bottleneck Method. We outline an adaptive strategy that changes the robot’s environment representation in response to its surroundings to maximize the computational efficiency of exploration. On computationally constrained systems, this reduction in complexity enables planning over longer predictive horizons, leading to faster navigation. We simulate and experimentally evaluate mutual information based exploration through cluttered indoor environments with exploration rates that adapt based on environment complexity leading to an order-of-magnitude increase in the maximum rate of exploration in contrast to non-adaptive techniques given the same finite computational resources.

Posted in: Mobile robot SLAM, Robotics , Tagged: ,

A novel approach to use POMDP in practical active perception, where rewards are needed to penalize uncertainty and therefore reomve the piecewise-linear and convex property of the value function

February 11, 2018 09:08 ,

Satsangi, Y., Whiteson, S., Oliehoek, F.A. et al., Exploiting submodular value functions for scaling up active perception, Auton Robot (2018) 42: 209, DOI: 10.1007/s10514-017-9666-5.

In active perception tasks, an agent aims to select sensory actions that reduce its uncertainty about one or more hidden variables. For example, a mobile robot takes sensory actions to efficiently navigate in a new environment. While partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a natural model for such problems, reward functions that directly penalize uncertainty in the agent’s belief can remove the piecewise-linear and convex (PWLC) property of the value function required by most POMDP planners. Furthermore, as the number of sensors available to the agent grows, the computational cost of POMDP planning grows exponentially with it, making POMDP planning infeasible with traditional methods. In this article, we address a twofold challenge of modeling and planning for active perception tasks. We analyze ρ POMDP and POMDP-IR, two frameworks for modeling active perception tasks, that restore the PWLC property of the value function. We show the mathematical equivalence of these two frameworks by showing that given a ρ POMDP along with a policy, they can be reduced to a POMDP-IR and an equivalent policy (and vice-versa). We prove that the value function for the given ρ POMDP (and the given policy) and the reduced POMDP-IR (and the reduced policy) is the same. To efficiently plan for active perception tasks, we identify and exploit the independence properties of POMDP-IR to reduce the computational cost of solving POMDP-IR (and ρ POMDP). We propose greedy point-based value iteration (PBVI), a new POMDP planning method that uses greedy maximization to greatly improve scalability in the action space of an active perception POMDP. Furthermore, we show that, under certain conditions, including submodularity, the value function computed using greedy PBVI is guaranteed to have bounded error with respect to the optimal value function. We establish the conditions under which the value function of an active perception POMDP is guaranteed to be submodular. Finally, we present a detailed empirical analysis on a dataset collected from a multi-camera tracking system employed in a shopping mall. Our method achieves similar performance to existing methods but at a fraction of the computational cost leading to better scalability for solving active perception tasks.

Posted in: Probability and statistics, Robotics , Tagged: ,

A nice review on the topic of active perception

February 11, 2018 09:04 ,

Ruzena BajcsyYiannis AloimonosJohn K. Tsotsos, Revisiting active perception, Auton Robot (2018) 42: 177, DOI: 10.1007/s10514-017-9615-3.

Despite the recent successes in robotics, artificial intelligence and computer vision, a complete artificial agent necessarily must include active perception. A multitude of ideas and methods for how to accomplish this have already appeared in the past, their broader utility perhaps impeded by insufficient computational power or costly hardware. The history of these ideas, perhaps selective due to our perspectives, is presented with the goal of organizing the past literature and highlighting the seminal contributions. We argue that those contributions are as relevant today as they were decades ago and, with the state of modern computational tools, are poised to find new life in the robotic perception systems of the next decade.

Posted in: Robotics , Tagged: ,