Recent approaches in robotics follow the insight that perception is facilitated by interactivity with the environment. These approaches are subsumed under the term of Interactive Perception (IP). We argue that IP provides the following benefits: (i) any type of forceful interaction with the environment creates a new type of informative sensory signal that would otherwise not be present and (ii) any prior knowledge about the nature of the interaction supports the interpretation of the signal. This is facilitated by knowledge of the regularity in the combined space of sensory information and action parameters. The goal of this survey is to postulate this as a principle and collect evidence in support by analyzing and categorizing existing work in this area. We also provide an overview of the most important applications of Interactive Perception. We close this survey by discussing the remaining open questions. Thereby, we hope to define a field and inspire future work.

For robots to be able to manipulate in unknown and unstructured environments the robot should be capable of operating under partial observability of the environment. Object occlusions and unmodeled environments are some of the factors that result in partial observability. A common scenario where this is encountered is manipulation in clutter. In the case that the robot needs to locate an object of interest and manipulate it, it needs to perform a series of decluttering actions to accurately detect the object of interest. To perform such a series of actions, the robot also needs to account for the dynamics of objects in the environment and how they react to contact. This is a non trivial problem since one needs to reason not only about robot-object interactions but also object-object interactions in the presence of contact. In the example scenario of manipulation in clutter, the state vector would have to account for the pose of the object of interest and the structure of the surrounding environment. The process model would have to account for all the aforementioned robot-object, object-object interactions. The complexity of the process model grows exponentially as the number of objects in the scene increases. This is commonly the case in unstructured environments. Hence it is not reasonable to attempt to model all object-object and robot-object interactions explicitly. Under this setting we propose a hypothesis based action selection algorithm where we construct a hypothesis set of the possible poses of an object of interest given the current evidence in the scene and select actions based on our current set of hypothesis. This hypothesis set tends to represent the belief about the structure of the environment and the number of poses the object of interest can take. The agent's only stopping criterion is when the uncertainty regarding the pose of the object is fully resolved.

In this work, we propose to reconstruct a complete 3-D model of an unknown object by fusion of visual and tactile information while the object is grasped. Assuming the object is symmetric, a first hypothesis of its complete 3-D shape is generated. A grasp is executed on the object with a robotic manipulator equipped with tactile sensors. Given the detected contacts between the fingers and the object, the initial full object model including the symmetry parameters can be refined. This refined model will then allow the planning of more complex manipulation tasks. The main contribution of this work is an optimal estimation approach for the fusion of visual and tactile data applying the constraint of object symmetry. The fusion is formulated as a state estimation problem and solved with an iterative extended Kalman filter. The approach is validated experimentally using both artificial and real data from two different robotic platforms.

In this work, we propose to reconstruct a complete 3-D model of an unknown object by fusion of visual and tactile information while the object is grasped. Assuming the object is symmetric, a first hypothesis of its complete 3-D shape is generated from a single view. This initial model is used to plan a grasp on the object which is then executed with a robotic manipulator equipped with tactile sensors. Given the detected contacts between the fingers and the object, the full object model including the symmetry parameters can be refined. This refined model will then allow the planning of more complex manipulation tasks. The main contribution of this work is an optimal estimation approach for the fusion of visual and tactile data applying the constraint of object symmetry. The fusion is formulated as a state estimation problem and solved with an iterative extended Kalman filter. The approach is validated experimentally using both artificial and real data from two different robotic platforms.

We propose a novel human-robot-interaction framework for robust visual scene understanding. Without any a-priori knowledge about the objects, the task of the robot is to correctly enumerate how many of them are in the scene and segment them from the background. Our approach builds on top of state-of-the-art computer vision methods, generating object hypotheses through segmentation. This process is combined with a natural dialog system, thus including a `human in the loop' where, by exploiting the natural conversation of an advanced dialog system, the robot gains knowledge about ambiguous situations. We present an entropy-based system allowing the robot to detect the poorest object hypotheses and query the user for arbitration. Based on the information obtained from the human-robot dialog, the scene segmentation can be re-seeded and thereby improved. We present experimental results on real data that show an improved segmentation performance compared to segmentation without interaction.

We propose a method for multi-modal scene exploration where initial object hypothesis formed by active visual segmentation are confirmed and augmented through haptic exploration with a robotic arm. We update the current belief about the state of the map with the detection results and predict yet unknown parts of the map with a Gaussian Process. We show that through the integration of different sensor modalities, we achieve a more complete scene model. We also show that the prediction of the scene structure leads to a valid scene representation even if the map is not fully traversed. Furthermore, we propose different exploration strategies and evaluate them both in simulation and on our robotic platform.