Search in the real world: Active visual object search based on spatial relations

Objects are integral to a robot's understanding of space. Various tasks such as semantic mapping, pick-and-carry missions or manipulation involve interaction with objects. Previous work in the field largely builds on the assumption that the object in question starts out within the ready sensory reach of the robot. In this work we aim to relax this assumption by providing the means to perform robust and large-scale active visual object search. Presenting spatial relations that describe topological relationships between objects, we then show how to use these to create potential search actions. We introduce a method for efficiently selecting search strategies given probabilities for those relations. Finally we perform experiments to verify the feasibility of our approach.