Olfaction, Vision, and Semantics for Mobile Robots. Results of the IRO Project
Javier Monroy,
Jose-Raul Ruiz-Sarmiento,
Francisco-Angel Moreno,
Cipriano Galindo,
Javier Gonzalez-Jimenez
Affiliations
Javier Monroy
Machine Perception and Intelligent Robotics group (MAPIR), Dept. of System Engineering and Automation Biomedical Research Institute of Malaga (IBIMA), University of Malaga, 29071 Málaga, Spain
Jose-Raul Ruiz-Sarmiento
Machine Perception and Intelligent Robotics group (MAPIR), Dept. of System Engineering and Automation Biomedical Research Institute of Malaga (IBIMA), University of Malaga, 29071 Málaga, Spain
Francisco-Angel Moreno
Machine Perception and Intelligent Robotics group (MAPIR), Dept. of System Engineering and Automation Biomedical Research Institute of Malaga (IBIMA), University of Malaga, 29071 Málaga, Spain
Cipriano Galindo
Machine Perception and Intelligent Robotics group (MAPIR), Dept. of System Engineering and Automation Biomedical Research Institute of Malaga (IBIMA), University of Malaga, 29071 Málaga, Spain
Javier Gonzalez-Jimenez
Machine Perception and Intelligent Robotics group (MAPIR), Dept. of System Engineering and Automation Biomedical Research Institute of Malaga (IBIMA), University of Malaga, 29071 Málaga, Spain
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.
