An expected perception architecture using visual 3D reconstruction for a humanoid robot

The maintenance of a stable and coherent representation of the surrounding environment is an essential capability in cognitive robotic systems. Most systems employ some form of 3D perception to create internal representations of space (maps) to support tasks such as navigation, manipulation and interaction. The creation and update of such representations may represent a significant effort in the overall computation performed by the robot. In this paper we propose an architecture based on the concept of Expected Perception that allows lightweight map updates whenever the course of action happens according to the robot's expectations. It is only when the robot's predictions and the real world outcomes differ, that corrections must be done at its full extent. We performed experiments and show results in a real robotic platform with stereo (3D) perception where map corrections are proposed by simple image level (2D) comparisons. © 2011 IEEE.