New algorithm could enable household robots to better
identify objects in cluttered environments.
For household robots ever to be practical, they’ll need to
be able to recognize the objects they’re supposed to manipulate. But while
object recognition is one of the most widely studied topics in artificial
intelligence, even the best object detectors still fail much of the time.
Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory believe that household robots should take advantage of
their mobility and their relatively static environments to make object
recognition easier, by imaging objects from multiple perspectives before making
judgments about their identity. Matching up the objects depicted in the
different images, however, poses its own computational challenges.