Language-guided Active Sensing of Confined, Cluttered Environments via Object Rearrangement Planning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Weihan, Ren, Hanwen, Qureshi, Ahmed H.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Chen, Weihan
Ren, Hanwen
Qureshi, Ahmed H.
author_facet Chen, Weihan
Ren, Hanwen
Qureshi, Ahmed H.
contents Language-guided active sensing is a robotics subtask where a robot with an onboard sensor interacts efficiently with the environment via object manipulation to maximize perceptual information, following given language instructions. These tasks appear in various practical robotics applications, such as household service, search and rescue, and environment monitoring. Despite many applications, the existing works do not account for language instructions and have mainly focused on surface sensing, i.e., perceiving the environment from the outside without rearranging it for dense sensing. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce the first language-guided active sensing approach that allows users to observe specific parts of the environment via object manipulation. Our method spatially associates the environment with language instructions, determines the best camera viewpoints for perception, and then iteratively selects and relocates the best view-blocking objects to provide the dense perception of the region of interest. We evaluate our method against different baseline algorithms in simulation and also demonstrate it in real-world confined cabinet-like settings with multiple unknown objects. Our results show that the proposed method exhibits better performance across different metrics and successfully generalizes to real-world complex scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_02308
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Language-guided Active Sensing of Confined, Cluttered Environments via Object Rearrangement Planning
Chen, Weihan
Ren, Hanwen
Qureshi, Ahmed H.
Robotics
Language-guided active sensing is a robotics subtask where a robot with an onboard sensor interacts efficiently with the environment via object manipulation to maximize perceptual information, following given language instructions. These tasks appear in various practical robotics applications, such as household service, search and rescue, and environment monitoring. Despite many applications, the existing works do not account for language instructions and have mainly focused on surface sensing, i.e., perceiving the environment from the outside without rearranging it for dense sensing. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce the first language-guided active sensing approach that allows users to observe specific parts of the environment via object manipulation. Our method spatially associates the environment with language instructions, determines the best camera viewpoints for perception, and then iteratively selects and relocates the best view-blocking objects to provide the dense perception of the region of interest. We evaluate our method against different baseline algorithms in simulation and also demonstrate it in real-world confined cabinet-like settings with multiple unknown objects. Our results show that the proposed method exhibits better performance across different metrics and successfully generalizes to real-world complex scenarios.
title Language-guided Active Sensing of Confined, Cluttered Environments via Object Rearrangement Planning
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02308