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