Inferring door locations from a teammate’s trajectory in stealth human-robot team operations

Abstract

Robot perception is generally viewed as the interpretation of data from various types of sensors such as cameras. In this paper, we study indirect perception where a robot can perceive new information by making inferences from non-visual observations of human teammates. As a proof-of-concept study, we specifically focus on a door detection problem in a stealth mission setting where a team operation must not be exposed to the visibility of the team's opponents. We use a special type of the Noisy-OR model known as BN2O model of Bayesian inference network to represent the inter-visibility and to infer the locations of the doors, i.e., potential locations of the opponents. Experimental results on both synthetic data and real person tracking data achieve an F-measure of over .9 on average, suggesting further investigation on the use of non-visual perception in human-robot team operations.