Semantic perception for ground robotics

Abstract

Semantic perception involves naming objects and features in the scene, understanding the relations between them, and understanding the behaviors of agents, e.g., people, and their intent from sensor data. Semantic perception is a central component of future UGVs to provide representations which 1) can be used for higher-level reasoning and tactical behaviors, beyond the immediate needs of autonomous mobility, and 2) provide an intuitive description of the robot's environment in terms of semantic elements that can shared effectively with a human operator. In this paper, we summarize the main approaches that we are investigating in the RCTA as initial steps toward the development of perception systems for UGVs.