Probabilistic Semantic Data Association for Collaborative Human-Robot Sensing

Humans cannot always be treated as oracles for collaborative sensing. Robots, thus, need to maintain beliefs over unknown world states when receiving semantic data from humans, as well as account for possible discrepancies between the human-provided data and these beliefs. To this end, this article introduces the problem of semantic data association (SDA) in relation to conventional data association problems for sensor fusion. It then develops a novel probabilistic semantic data association (PSDA) algorithm to rigorously address SDA in general settings, unlike previous work on semantic data fusion, which developed heuristic techniques for specific settings. PSDA is further incorporated into a recursive hybrid Bayesian data fusion scheme that uses Gaussian mixture priors for object states and softmax functions for semantic human sensor data likelihoods. Simulations of a multiobject search task show that PSDA enables robust collaborative state estimation under a wide range of conditions where semantic human sensor data can be erroneous or contain significant reference ambiguities.