Robotics Perception in Adversarial Environments

Robotics perception research has advanced tremendously in recent years thanks to the development of affordable and cutting edge sensor technologies (e.g., LiDAR, sonars, etc.) and data-driven techniques. While progress is still being made, several of these methods are trained, applied and evaluated with abundant and high-quality data. However, many field or in-the-wild robotics applications face substantial performance drops with respect to applications in constrained/structured environments due to low-quality visual data common in these scenarios; which suffers from various types of degradation and environmental disturbances (fog, ash, or inclement weather). And although some of these artifacts can be overcome by sophisticated algorithms and models, their impact becomes more noticeable as the level of degradation or change passes some empirical threshold. Based on this, and as an extension of the ICRA 2019 workshop on "Underwater Robotics Perception", the goal of this Research Topic is to review the recent progress of robust visual perception technologies and methods in challenging adversarial environments.