On-line novelty detection for autonomous mobile robots

We propose a novelty filter that can operate on-line, so that each new input is evaluated for novelty with respect to the data seen so far. The novelty filter learns to ignore inputs that have been sensed previously, or where similar inputs have been perceived. We demonstrate the use of the novelty filter on a series of simple inspection tasks using a mobile robot. The robot highlights those parts of an environment that are novel in some way, that is they are not part of the model acquired during exploration of a different environment. We show the effectiveness of the method using inputs from both sonar sensors and a monochrome camera.