Active object search using a pyramid approach to determine the next-best-view

Abstract

The development of service robotics continues to arouse interest in the scientific community due to the complexity of the activities performed like interaction in human environments, identifying and manipulating objects, and even learning by themselves. This paper proposed to improve the perception of the environment by searching for objects in service robotics tasks. We present the development and implementation of an active object search method based on three main phases: Firstly, image pyramid segmentation to examine in detail the im- age features. Second step, object detection at each level of the pyramid through a local feature descriptor and a mutual information calculation. Finally, the next camera position selection through analyzing the object detections accumulation in the pyramid. To evaluate the implementation of the proposed method, we use a NAO robot in a familiar place for humans, such as an office or a home. Ordinary objects are part of our database with the premise that a robot must know them before looking for an object. The results in the experiments showed an acceptable performance in simulation and with a real platform.