Paper ID: 2310.00085

PEACE: Prompt Engineering Automation for CLIPSeg Enhancement in Aerial Robotics

Haechan Mark Bong, Rongge Zhang, Antoine Robillard, Ricardo de Azambuja, Giovanni Beltrame

Safe landing is an essential aspect of flight operations in fields ranging from industrial to space robotics. With the growing interest in artificial intelligence, we focus on learning-based methods for safe landing. Our previous work, Dynamic Open-Vocabulary Enhanced SafE-Landing with Intelligence (DOVESEI), demonstrated the feasibility of using prompt-based segmentation for identifying safe landing zones with open vocabulary models. However, relying on a heuristic selection of words for prompts is not reliable, as it cannot adapt to changing environments, potentially leading to harmful outcomes if the observed environment is not accurately represented by the chosen prompt. To address this issue, we introduce PEACE (Prompt Engineering Automation for CLIPSeg Enhancement), an enhancement to DOVESEI that automates prompt engineering to adapt to shifts in data distribution. PEACE can perform safe landings using only monocular cameras and image segmentation. PEACE shows significant improvements in prompt generation and engineering for aerial images compared to standard prompts used for CLIP and CLIPSeg. By combining DOVESEI and PEACE, our system improved the success rate of safe landing zone selection by at least 30\% in both simulations and indoor experiments.

Submitted: Sep 29, 2023