The human mind does not see a visual scene as pixels; rather it is able to pick out objects of interest and selectively reason about them. Although object-based reasoning represents a core feature of human reasoning, only recently has it been possible to study in robotics due to advances in computer vision for segmentation and classification of objects from camera images. Our recent paper published at ICRA 2019, titled Multi-Object Search in Object-Oriented POMDPs, takes a stab at the problem by solving a novel multi-object search (MOS) task: without knowing in advance where the objects are located, a robot must find them in an indoor, roomed environment. We formulate the MOS task within a new framework called an object-oriented partially observable Markov decision process (OO-POMDP). An OO-POMDP represents the state and observation spaces in terms of classes and objects.  The structure afforded by OO-POMDPs supports reasoning about each object independently while also providing a means for grounding language commands from a human on task onset. A human, for example, may issue an initial command such as “Find the mugs in the kitchen and books in the library,” where a robot can associate the locations to each object class so as to improve its search. We show that OO-POMCP with grounded language commands is sufficient for solving challenging MOS tasks both in simulation and on a physical mobile robot, which has applications for rescue- and home- robots. 

Interestingly, the OO-POMDP allows the robot to recover from lies or mistakes in what a human tells it. If the person tells the robot “Find the mug in the kitchen,” the robot will first look in the kitchen for the objects. But after failing to find them in the kitchen, it will then systematically search the rest of the environment. Our OO-POMCP inference algorithm allows the robot to quickly and efficiently use all the information it has to find the object.