Examining the Interactions and Dependencies between Active Vision and Reasoning

机器学习方法的成功，例如深度学习神经网络，已经改变了计算视觉和人工智能（AI）。虽然令人兴奋，但在机器人环境中，这些方法如何应用似乎存在不确定性。在2015年Int。机器人与自动化大会（ICRA）上的两份报告强调了这一点。D. Rus（麻省理工学院）的全体会议主题强调“机器人不能把事情弄清楚”：它们不能对它们的环境和任务进行推理。G. Hager（约翰霍普金斯大学）介绍了他的机器人视觉研讨会，强调了机器人传感系统需要利用注意力和环境，这是“弄清楚事情”的关键要素。也许还需要更多的东西。***我的研究项目的长期目标是使用计算语言来发展和形式化具有预测能力的人类视觉和视觉认知理论，从而进一步推动视觉科学，并使用这些来告知实际机器人和机器视觉系统的工程（不一定是模仿）。在此背景下，目前的建议侧重于如何将主动视觉和推理策略相结合，以开发有效的主动推理方法。我们的研究计划建议将推理机制的需求与主动感知的能力联系起来，从机器视觉的角度来看，这是由人类视觉神经生物学的现代理解所强烈推动的。我们的假设是，视觉算法必须以动态的方式对当前的输入、环境和任务进行调整，以便使系统能够捕捉到人类视觉中看到的普遍性。我们的目标是开发计算机视觉算法并展示它们的性能，测试这个基本假设，但要以机器人感知需求为基础，为家庭、老年人和体弱者提供自主陪伴机器人。***先进机器人研究对加拿大的重要性很容易证明；NSERC投资了“战场机器人战略网络”，我是该网络的共同负责人（PI: G. Dudek）。该网络既涉及机器人的基础研究，也涉及各种领域的应用，包括用于自然资源、健康、安全等领域的地面、机载、水基机器人。即使付出了如此巨大的努力，机器人技术和机器人感知的一些方面仍未被涵盖；这个建议解决了其中一个需求。机器人应该了解他们的环境和情况，能够推理如何执行他们的任务，他们的行动的效果和影响，并能够确定他们的行动可能是不正确的，并制定更好的计划来完成他们的任务。这些似乎不仅对实现自然资源和制造业应用的稳健性至关重要，而且对家庭和老年人的伴侣机器人的安全性和类似人类的行为也至关重要

The successes of machine learning methods, such as those found in Deep Learning Neural Networks, have transformed computational vision and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Although exciting, in a robotic context, there seems to be uncertainty about how these methods apply. At the 2015 Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), two presentations emphasize this. D. Rus's (MIT) plenary keynote stressed that "robots can't figure things out": they cannot reason about their circumstances and tasks. G. Hager (Johns Hopkins U), introducing his Workshop on Robotic Vision, highlighted the need for robotic sensing systems to exploit attention and context, key elements for "figuring things out". Perhaps something more is needed.***The long-term goal of my research program is to use the language of computation to develop and formalize theories of human vision and visual cognition that have predictive power, thus furthering vision science, and use these to inform the engineering (and not necessarily mimic) of practical robot and machine vision systems. Within this context, the current proposal focuses on how active vision and reasoning strategies may be coupled in order to develop effective active reasoning methods. Our research plan proposes bridging the needs of inference mechanisms to the capabilities of active perception, with a perspective on machine vision that is strongly motivated by a modern understanding of human visual neurobiology. It is our hypothesis that the visual algorithms must be tunable to the input, environment and task of the moment, in a dynamic fashion, in order to enable a system to capture the generality seen in human vision. The goal is to develop computer vision algorithms and demonstrate their performance, testing this basic hypothesis, but being grounded in the robotic perception needs of autonomous companion robots for home, for the elderly, and for the infirm.***The importance of advanced robotics research to Canada is easy to demonstrate; NSERC has invested in the Strategic Network for Field Robotics, of which I am a co-PI (PI: G. Dudek). That network addresses both basic research into robotics as well as applications across a wide variety of domains covering terrestrial, airborne, water-based robots for natural resources, health, security and more. Even with this large effort, there are aspects of robotics and robotic perception not covered; this proposal addresses one of those needs. Robots should understand their environment and circumstances, be able to reason about how to perform their tasks, the effects and impacts of their actions, and be able to determine when their actions may not be correct and develop better plans for achieving their tasks. These seem critical not only for achieving robustness in applications in natural resources and manufacturing, but also safety and human-like behaviour for companion robots in the home and for the elderly.**