Transformer-Based Visual Perception Models for Autonomous Robots

Abstract

Autonomous robots play a crucial role in industrial manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, logistics, agriculture, disaster response, planetary exploration, and service robotics. Reliable visual perception is essential for enabling robots to recognize objects, understand scenes, localize themselves, and navigate safely in dynamic environments. Although CNN-based vision models have significantly improved perception accuracy, they often struggle to capture long-range dependencies and generalize to complex or unseen environments. Recent advances in Transformer-based vision models address these limitations by employing self-attention mechanisms to learn both local visual features and global contextual relationships. Architectures such as Vision Transformer (ViT), Swin Transformer, DETR, SAM, and Mask2Former have achieved remarkable performance in object detection, semantic segmentation, SLAM, localization, obstacle avoidance, and autonomous navigation. This paper presents a comprehensive review and proposes the Transformer-Based Visual Perception Models for Autonomous Robots (TBVPM-AR) framework. The framework integrates RGB cameras, depth sensors, LiDAR, IMUs, multimodal sensor fusion, transformer-based feature extraction, contextual reasoning, and edge-cloud computing to achieve robust perception in dynamic environments. Mathematical formulations for self-attention, positional encoding, and feature embedding provide the theoretical foundation of the architecture. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms CNN-based and hybrid approaches on standard robotic perception benchmarks, achieving over 98% visual perception accuracy with improved scene understanding, localization, obstacle detection, navigation, and computational efficiency. The proposed architecture offers a scalable, explainable, and adaptable solution for future Industry 5.0, collaborative robotics, autonomous vehicles, and smart cyber-physical systems.