Bayesian Deep Graph Matching for Correspondence Identification in Collaborative Perception

摘要

Correspondence identification is essential for multirobot collaborative perception, which aims to identify the same objects in order to ensure consistent references of the objects by a group of robots/agents in their own fields of view. Although recent deep learning methods have shown encouraging performance on correspondence identification, they suffer from two shortcomings, including the inability to address non-covisibility in collaborative perception that is caused by occlusion and limited fields of view of the agents, and the inability to quantify and reduce uncertainty to improve correspondence identification. To address both issues, we propose a novel uncertainty-aware deep graph matching method for correspondence identification in collaborative perception. Our new approach formulates correspondence identification as a deep graph matching problem, which identifies correspondences based upon graph representations that are constructed from the agents' observations. We introduce a novel deep graph matching network under the Bayesian framework to explicitly quantify uncertainty in the identified correspondences. In addition, we design a novel loss function that explicitly reduces correspondence uncertainty and perceptual non-covisibility during learning. We evaluate our approach in the robotics applications of collaborative assembly and multi-robot coordination using high-fidelity simulations and physical robots. Experiments have shown that, through addressing both uncertainty and non-covisibility, our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance of correspondence identification.