  Deep networks have brought significant advances in robot perception, enabling
to improve the capabilities of robots in several visual tasks, ranging from
object detection and recognition to pose estimation, semantic scene
segmentation and many others. Still, most approaches typically address visual
tasks in isolation, resulting in overspecialized models which achieve strong
performances in specific applications but work poorly in other (often related)
tasks. This is clearly sub-optimal for a robot which is often required to
perform simultaneously multiple visual recognition tasks in order to properly
act and interact with the environment. This problem is exacerbated by the
limited computational and memory resources typically available onboard to a
robotic platform. The problem of learning flexible models which can handle
multiple tasks in a lightweight manner has recently gained attention in the
computer vision community and benchmarks supporting this research have been
proposed. In this work we study this problem in the robot vision context,
proposing a new benchmark, the RGB-D Triathlon, and evaluating state of the art
algorithms in this novel challenging scenario. We also define a new evaluation
protocol, better suited to the robot vision setting. Results shed light on the
strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches and on open issues, suggesting
directions for future research.
