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Olfaction is a valuable source of information about the environment that has not been sufficiently exploited in mobile robotics yet. Certainly, odor information can contribute to other sensing modalities, e.g., vision, to accomplish high-level robot activities, such as task planning or execution in human environments. This paper organizes and puts together the developments and experiences on combining olfaction and vision into robotics applications, as the result of our five-years long project IRO: Improvement of the sensory and autonomous capability of Robots through Olfaction. Particularly, it investigates mechanisms to exploit odor information (usually coming in the form of the type of volatile and its concentration) in problems such as object recognition and scene–activity understanding. A distinctive aspect of this research is the special attention paid to the role of semantics within the robot perception and decision-making processes. The obtained results have improved the robot capabilities in terms of efficiency, autonomy, and usefulness, as reported in our publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the localization of a gas emission source within a real-world human environment with a mobile robot. Our approach is based on an efficient and coherent system that fuses different sensor modalities (i.e., vision and chemical sensing) to exploit, for the first time, the semantic relationships among the detected gases and the objects visually recognized in the environment. This novel approach allows the robot to focus the search on a finite set of potential gas source candidates (dynamically updated as the robot operates), while accounting for the non-negligible uncertainties in the object recognition and gas classification tasks involved in the process. This approach is particularly interesting for structured indoor environments containing multiple obstacles and objects, enabling the inference of the relations between objects and between objects and gases. A probabilistic Bayesian framework is proposed to handle all these uncertainties and semantic relations, providing an ordered list of candidates to be the source. This candidate list is updated dynamically upon new sensor measurements to account for objects not previously considered in the search process. The exploitation of such probabilities together with information such as the locations of the objects, or the time needed to validate whether a given candidate is truly releasing gases, is delegated to a path planning algorithm based on Markov decision processes to minimize the search time. The system was tested in an office-like scenario, both with simulated and real experiments, to enable the comparison of different path planning strategies and to validate its efficiency under real-world conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Object recognition is a cornerstone task in autonomous and/or assistance systems like robots, autonomous vehicles, or those assisting to visually impaired, aiming to achieve a certain level of understanding of their surroundings. Probabilistic models, such as Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), have been successfully applied to this end given their ability to exploit contextual and situation information, e.g. a bowl is typically found in a cabinet and not in a night-stand. In this work we propose to evolve CRFs into Ontology-based Conditional Random Fields (ob CRFs), which define a multi-level structure where each level assigns a category with different granularity to the same set of objects. For example, a level could assign to an object the category appliance or furniture , while the next one could categorize it into the tv , microwave , cabinet , or table types. In this way, general categorizations can guide the classification into more specialized ones (and vice versa), improving recognition success, and mitigating the CRFs limitations when modeling a high number of object categories (shared, in general, by Machine Learning techniques). To set the categories in each level we propose to mimic the hierarchical structure of ontologies, where categories are naturally codified following a subsumption ordering. This leads us to the second advantage of ob CRFs : the multi-labeling of objects provides a richer understanding of the scene, which can be leveraged for accomplishing high-level tasks (e.g. object search or scheduling). Our approach has been tested with scenes from two state-of-the-art datasets: Robot@Home and Cornell-RGBD , outperforming the results provided by standard CRFs. Highlights • A novel model for object recognition called Ontology-based CRF is proposed. • It uses a multiple-level structure mimicking the subsumption ordering of Ontologies. • Each level jointly categorizes the same set of objects with different granularity. • Granularity ranges from specialized types (oven, fridge) to general ones (appliance). • The proposal has been assessed with the Robot@Home and Cornell-RGBD datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]