Action Selection for Interactive Object Segmentation in Clutter

Robots operating in human environments are often required to recognise, grasp and manipulate objects. Identifying the locations of objects amongst their complex surroundings is therefore an important capability. However, when environments are unstructured and cluttered, as is typical for indoor human environments, reliable and accurate object segmentation is not always possible because the scene representation is often incomplete or ambiguous. We overcome the limitations of static object segmentation by enabling a robot to directly interact with the scene with non-prehensile actions. Our method does not rely on object models to infer object existence. Rather, interaction induces scene motion and this provides an additional clue for associating observed parts to the same object. We use a probabilistic segmentation framework in order to identify segmentation uncertainty. This uncertainty is then used to guide a robot while it manipulates the scene. Our probabilistic segmentation approach recursively updates the segmentation given the motion cues and the segmentation is monitored during interaction, thus providing online feedback. Experiments performed with RGB-D data show that the additional source of information from motion enables more certain object segmentation that was otherwise ambiguous. We then show that our interaction approach based on segmentation uncertainty maintains higher quality segmentation than competing methods with increasing clutter.