Action-By-Detection: Efficient Forklift Action Detection for Autonomous Mobile Robots in Warehouses

Alexander Prutsch, Horst Possegger, Horst Bischof

Abstract: Understanding actions of other agents increases the efficiency of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) since they encompass intention and indicate future movements. We propose a new method that allows us to infer vehicle actions using a shallow image-based classification model. The actions are classified via bird’s-eye view scene crops, where we project the detections of a 3D object detection model onto a context map. We learn map context information and aggregate temporal sequence information without requiring object tracking. This results in a highly efficient classification model that can easily be deployed on embedded AMR hardware. To evaluate our approach, we create new large-scale synthetic datasets showing warehouse traffic based on real vehicle models and geometry.