Panoramic-environmental description as robots' visual short-term memory

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an environmental description for robots to memorize temporality and spatiality of wide-range environment. The description is region-based and the environment is described as a mosaic of regions. The description consists of three components: panoramic labelled image that is a segmented color panoramic image, region database that has spatial and temporal information about each region, and regions relation network that describes adjacency state between regions. The description is constantly updated in the background of other visual processing. The description enables robots to detect changes in the environment, to grasp their characteristics, and to memorize them. Moreover, we implement the environmental description on the humanoid robot Saika and show how it expands the robot's behavior.