Combining object modeling and recognition for active scene exploration

Active scene exploration incorporates object recognition methods for analyzing a scene of partially known objects and exploration approaches for autonomous modeling of unknown parts. In this work, recognition, exploration, and planning methods are extended and combined in a single scene exploration system, enabling advanced techniques such as multi-view recognition from planned view positions and iterative recognition by integration of new objects from a scene. Here, a geometry based approach is used for recognition, i.e. matching objects from a database. Unknown objects are autonomously modeled and added to the recognition database. Next-Best-View planning is performed both for recognition and modeling. Moreover, 3D measurements are merged in a Probabilistic Voxel Space, which is utilized for planning collision free paths, minimal occlusion views, and verifying the poses of the recognized objects against all previous information. Experiments on an industrial robot with attached 3D sensors are shown for scenes with household and industrial objects.