Dynamic Objects Relocalization in Changing Environments with Flow Matching
This addresses the challenge of task and motion planning in robotics for dynamic environments, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods like Flow Matching for a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of relocalizing dynamic objects in changing environments like households or warehouses, where objects are moved by human activities, and proposes FlowMaps, a model based on Flow Matching that infers multimodal object locations over space and time, with results providing statistical evidence to support the hypotheses.
Task and motion planning are long-standing challenges in robotics, especially when robots have to deal with dynamic environments exhibiting long-term dynamics, such as households or warehouses. In these environments, long-term dynamics mostly stem from human activities, since previously detected objects can be moved or removed from the scene. This adds the necessity to find such objects again before completing the designed task, increasing the risk of failure due to missed relocalizations. However, in these settings, the nature of such human-object interactions is often overlooked, despite being governed by common habits and repetitive patterns. Our conjecture is that these cues can be exploited to recover the most likely objects' positions in the scene, helping to address the problem of unknown relocalization in changing environments. To this end we propose FlowMaps, a model based on Flow Matching that is able to infer multimodal object locations over space and time. Our results present statistical evidence to support our hypotheses, opening the way to more complex applications of our approach. The code is publically available at https://github.com/Fra-Tsuna/flowmaps