Context-Aware Risk Estimation in Home Environments: A Probabilistic Framework for Service Robots

TL;DR

This paper introduces a probabilistic, context-aware framework for service robots to estimate accident-prone regions in home environments, enhancing safety and risk awareness through semantic graph modeling.

Contribution

It proposes a novel semantic graph-based risk propagation method for real-time hazard estimation in indoor scenes, improving interpretability and deployment efficiency.

Findings

Achieved 75% binary risk detection accuracy.

Strong alignment with human perception of hazards.

Effective risk inference even with occluded or unlabeled objects.

Abstract

We present a novel framework for estimating accident-prone regions in everyday indoor scenes, aimed at improving real-time risk awareness in service robots operating in human-centric environments. As robots become integrated into daily life, particularly in homes, the ability to anticipate and respond to environmental hazards is crucial for ensuring user safety, trust, and effective human-robot interaction. Our approach models object-level risk and context through a semantic graph-based propagation algorithm. Each object is represented as a node with an associated risk score, and risk propagates asymmetrically from high-risk to low-risk objects based on spatial proximity and accident relationship. This enables the robot to infer potential hazards even when they are not explicitly visible or labeled. Designed for interpretability and lightweight onboard deployment, our method is validated on a dataset with human-annotated risk regions, achieving a binary risk detection accuracy of 75%. The system demonstrates strong alignment with human perception, particularly in scenes involving sharp or unstable objects. These results underline the potential of context-aware risk reasoning to enhance robotic scene understanding and proactive safety behaviors in shared human-robot spaces. This framework could serve as a foundation for future systems that make context-driven safety decisions, provide real-time alerts, or autonomously assist users in avoiding or mitigating hazards within home environments.