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

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.