From SLAM to Situational Awareness: Challenges and Survey

The knowledge that an intelligent and autonomous mobile robot has and is able to acquire of itself and the environment, namely the situation, limits its reasoning, decision-making, and execution skills to efficiently and safely perform complex missions. Situational awareness is a basic capability of humans that has been deeply studied in fields like Psychology, Military, Aerospace, Education, etc., but it has barely been considered in robotics, which has focused on ideas such as sensing, perception, sensor fusion, state estimation, localization and mapping, spatial AI, etc. In our research, we connected the broad multidisciplinary existing knowledge on situational awareness with its counterpart in mobile robotics. In this paper, we survey the state-of-the-art robotics algorithms, we analyze the situational awareness aspects that have been covered by them, and we discuss their missing points. We found out that the existing robotics algorithms are still missing manifold important aspects of situational awareness. As a consequence, we conclude that these missing features are limiting the performance of robotic situational awareness, and further research is needed to overcome this challenge. We see this as an opportunity, and provide our vision for future research on robotic situational awareness.