Kitting in the Wild through Online Domain Adaptation

Technological developments call for increasing perception and action capabilities of robots. Among other skills, vision systems that can adapt to any possible change in the working conditions are needed. Since these conditions are unpredictable, we need benchmarks which allow to assess the generalization and robustness capabilities of our visual recognition algorithms. In this work we focus on robotic kitting in unconstrained scenarios. As a first contribution, we present a new visual dataset for the kitting task. Differently from standard object recognition datasets, we provide images of the same objects acquired under various conditions where camera, illumination and background are changed. This novel dataset allows for testing the robustness of robot visual recognition algorithms to a series of different domain shifts both in isolation and unified. Our second contribution is a novel online adaptation algorithm for deep models, based on batch-normalization layers, which allows to continuously adapt a model to the current working conditions. Differently from standard domain adaptation algorithms, it does not require any image from the target domain at training time. We benchmark the performance of the algorithm on the proposed dataset, showing its capability to fill the gap between the performances of a standard architecture and its counterpart adapted offline to the given target domain

Human-Centric Partitioning of the Environment

In this paper, we present an object based approach for human-centric partitioning of the environment. Our approach for determining the human-centric regionsis to detect the objects that are commonly associated withfrequent human presence. In order to detect these objects, we employ state of the art perception techniques. The detected objects are stored with their spatio-temporal information inthe robot’s memory to be later used for generating the regions.The advantages of our method is that it is autonomous, requires only a small set of perceptual data and does not even require people to be present while generating the regions.The generated regions are validated using a 1-month dataset collected in an indoor office environment. The experimental results show that although a small set of perceptual data isused, the regions are generated at densely occupied locations.QC 20171018</p