A Region of Interest (ROI) Sharing Protocol for Multirobot Cooperation With Distributed Sensing Based on Semantic Stability

This paper introduces a region of interest (ROI) sharing protocol for robots, each of which observes different regions in the same scene. This type of observation is generally referred to as “distributed sensing.” The ROI sharing protocol is implemented based on a concept of semantic stability, which helps to find a stable context by selecting sufficient information from an image or a scene. The semantic stability is formulated based on semantic relatedness and the information gap in the relations found in the ROI. Moreover, the necessary and sufficient information is determined by selecting the best ROI from a given image. Finally, the best ROI is shared between the robots for making cooperation. Experimental results show that the ROI sharing is efficient in terms of task performance and robustness.