Multi-sensor semantic mapping and exploration of indoor environments

The human perception of the external world appears as a natural, immediate and effortless task. It is achieved through a number of “low-level” sensory-motor processes that provide a high-level representation adapted to complex reasoning and decision. Compared to these representations, mobile robots usually provide only low-level obstacle maps that lack such highlevel information. We present a mobile robot whose goal is to autonomously explore an unknown indoor environment and to build a semantic map containing high-level information similar to those extracted by humans and that will be rapidly and easily interpreted by users to assess the situation. This robot was developed under the Panoramic and Active Camera for Object Mapping (PACOM)¹ project whose goal is to participate in a French exploration and mapping contest called CAROTTE². We will detail in particular how we integrated visual object recognition, room detection, semantic mapping, and exploration. We demonstrate the performances of our system in an indoor environment.