On the Importance of Being Contextual

Unmanned vehicles are an important evolutionary step for increased safety in a range of missions from passive observation to active exploration to aggressive proaction. To achieve this goal, these vehicles must be reliably autonomous, with effective context interpretation - the continuous understanding and monitoring of the external environment being an essential step on this path. In this approach, appropriate accounting for context should increase the system´s perception performance by exploiting opportunistic cues in the visual context and leveraging domain-based anticipated cues from the exosystem. Espousing an emerging probabilistic approach to context monitoring in sensory-based vehicle control systems, we account for partial certainties in the operating environment external to the vision system´s field of regard. Our results point to the promise of multimodal awareness as the key to improved vehicle control performance across a broad spectrum of future mission spaces