Semantic Mapping Using Mobile Robots

Semantic Mapping with Mobile Robots

After decades of unrealistic predictions and expectations, robots have finally escaped from industrial workplaces and made their way into our homes, offices, museums and other public spaces. These service robots are increasingly present in our environments and many believe that it is in the area of service and domestic robotics that we will see the largest growth within the next few years. In o...

Semantic Mapping for Service Robots: Building and Using Maps for Mobile Manipulators in Semi-structured Environments

Sonar Mapping for Mobile Robots

We address the problem of building environment maps from ultrasonic range data obtained from multiple viewpoints. We present a novel environment modelling technique called the `response grid' that allows us to build occupancy maps in highly specular environments. We present three di erent approaches that utilise this technique: a Bayesian probabilisitic approach, a Dempster-Shafer evidential re...

Mapping and exploration with mobile robots using coverage maps

Exploration and mapping belongs to the fundamental tasks of mobile robots. In the past, many approaches have used occupancy grid maps to represent the environment during the map building process. Occupancy grids, however, are based on the assumption that each cell is either occupied or free. In this paper we introduce coverage maps as an alternative way of representing the environment of a robo...

Probabilistic Topological Mapping for Mobile Robots using Urn Models

We present an application of Bayesian modeling and inference to topological mapping in robotics. This is a potentially difficult problem due to (a) the combinatorial nature of the state space, and (b) perceptual aliasing by which two different landmarks in the environment can appear similar to the robot’s sensors. Hence, this presents a challenging approximate inference problem, complicated by ...