Semantic RGB-D Perception for Cognitive Service Robots

Abstract

Cognitive robots need to understand their surroundings not only in terms of geometry, but they also need to categorize surfaces, detect objects, estimate their pose, etc. Due to their nature, RGB-D sensors are ideally suited to many of these problems, which is why we developed efficient RGB-D methods to address these tasks. In this chapter, we outline the continuous development and usage of RGB-D methods, spanning three applications: Our cognitive service robot Cosero, which participated with great success in the international RoboCup@Home competitions, an industrial kitting application, and cluttered bin picking for warehouse automation. We learn semantic segmentation using convolutional neural networks and random forests and aggregate the surface category in 3D by RGB-D SLAM. We use deep learning methods to categorize surfaces, to recognize objects and to estimate their pose. Efficient RGB-D registration methods are the basis for the manipulation of known objects. They have been extended to non-rigid registration, which allows for transferring manipulation skills to novel objects.