Interactive Perception: Leveraging Action in Perception and Perception in Action

Abstract

Recent approaches in robot perception follow the insight that perception is facilitated by interaction with the environment. These approaches are subsumed under the term Interactive Perception (IP). This view of perception provides the following benefits. First, interaction with the environment creates a rich sensory signal that would otherwise not be present. Second, knowledge of the regularity in the combined space of sensory data and action parameters facilitates the prediction and interpretation of the sensory signal. In this survey, we postulate this as a principle for robot perception and collect evidence in its support by analyzing and categorizing existing work in this area. We also provide an overview of the most important applications of IP. We close this survey by discussing remaining open questions. With this survey, we hope to help define the field of Interactive Perception and to provide a valuable resource for future research.