Predictive Spatio-Temporal Scene Graphs for Semi-Static Scenes

Abstract:We have seen tremendous recent progress in our ability to build "spatio-semantic" representations that enable robots to perform complex reasoning across geometry and semantics. However, the vast majority of these methods lack any ability to perform reasoning across time. This is a desirable property in situations where a robot repeatedly observes an environment where instances may change in between observations, but in a structured way. Consider as an example a home environment where the location of a mug typically moves from the cupboard to a countertop to the sink and then back to the cupboard on a daily basis. We should be able to learn this cyclic behavior and use it to predict the state of the mug in the future. In this work, we propose a method that is able to perform this type of tempo-spatio-semantic reasoning. Underpinning the method is a filter, Perpetua*, that performs Bayesian reasoning on the states of the environment that are observed over time. This filter is integrated within a 3D scene graph structure that we call PredictiveGraphs, where nodes represent objects and edges function as Perpetua* filters encoding spatio-semantic relationships. We validate the method in both simulation and real-world dynamic navigation tasks, where our real-world experiments consist of an environment that is undergoing semi-static changes at a bi-hourly frequency over a period of three weeks. In both settings, we demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines in predicting future environment states, even in the presence of distributional shifts.

Accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). Webpage at this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2605.00121 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2605.00121v2 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.00121 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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