A Review of Scene Representations for Robot Manipulators
It synthesizes existing knowledge for robotics researchers, but is incremental as it reviews rather than introduces new methods.
This review addresses the problem of how robots build internal representations of the world from sensor data to perform tasks like manipulation, by providing an overview of scene representations used for robot manipulators.
For a robot to act intelligently, it needs to sense the world around it. Increasingly, robots build an internal representation of the world from sensor readings. This representation can then be used to inform downstream tasks, such as manipulation, collision avoidance, or human interaction. In practice, scene representations vary widely depending on the type of robot, the sensing modality, and the task that the robot is designed to do. This review provides an overview of the scene representations used for robot manipulators (robot arms). We focus primarily on representations which are built from real world sensing and are used to inform some downstream robotics task.