Human-like perception for embodied intelligent robots: A review

Recent years, robot technology has made great progress benefiting from the breakthrough of sensor technology, new generation artificial intelligence, Information Communication Technology, etc., which results in more flexible, more dexterous and smarter robots for more complex application scenarios. Perception is the initialization of realizing specific tasks for robots, which should obtain enough information, understand the information, and make right decision. The emerging embodied intelligence provides a new paradigm for robots to deal with more dynamic and complex tasks, that is, embodied intelligent robots, where requires the the robots to be able to perceive more efficiently, more accurately, and smarter. As the behavioral pattern of human can be good guidance when handling different tasks, human-like perception gradually comes into view for embodied intelligent robots. To explore the development process and future trend of robot perception, a review from the perspective of human-like perception for embodied intelligent robots is carried out in this paper. The development trend towards to human-like perception for robot is analyzied, which the definition of human-like perception is provided. The technical path for realizing human-like perception is summarized, including multimodal sense, hierarchical understanding, and active decision and execution. The application potential and key challenges of human-like perception are discussed as well. It is a timely and significant review for the perception investigation of the emerging embodied intelligent robots, which could be an important reference for future works in this domain.