Advanced Vision Algorithm Helps Robots Learn to See in 3D

When fed 3D models of household items in bird's-eye view (left), a new algorithm is able to guess what the objects are, and what their

overall 3D shapes should be. This image shows the guess in the center, and the actual 3-D model on the right Credit: Ben Burchfield Robots are reliable in industrial settings, where recognizable objects appear at predictable times in familiar circumstances. But life at home is messy. Put a robot in a house, where it must navigate unfamiliar territory cluttered with foreign objects, and it's useless. Now researchers have developed a new computer vision algorithm that gives a robot the ability to recognize three-dimensional objects and, at a glance, intuit items that are partially obscured or tipped over, without needing to view them from multiple angles. "It sees the front half of a pot sitting on a counter and guesses there's a handle in the rear and that might be a good place to pick it up from," said Ben Burchfiel, a Ph.D. candidate in the field of computer vision and robotics at Duke University.