Robot Pose Nowcasting: Forecast the Future to Improve the Present

In recent years, the effective and safe collaboration between humans and machines has gained significant importance, particularly in the Industry 4.0 scenario. A critical prerequisite for realizing this collaborative paradigm is precisely understanding the robot's 3D pose within its environment. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel vision-based system leveraging depth data to accurately establish the 3D locations of robotic joints. Specifically, we prove the ability of the proposed system to enhance its current pose estimation accuracy by jointly learning to forecast future poses. Indeed, we introduce the concept of Pose Nowcasting, denoting the capability of a system to exploit the learned knowledge of the future to improve the estimation of the present. The experimental evaluation is conducted on two different datasets, providing state-of-the-art and real-time performance and confirming the validity of the proposed method on both the robotic and human scenarios.