Exploiting Structural Properties of Buildings Towards General Semantic Mapping Systems

Semantic mapping is one of the most active and promising research areas within autonomous mobile robotics. Informally, a semantic map associates a high-level human-understandable label (like “office” or “corridor”) to a portion of an environment. Most semantic mapping approaches are based on classifiers that, given some features perceived by robot sensors in a physical place, associate a semantic label to the place. These approaches are often tested on a limited number of homogeneous places (e.g., few rooms within a single building). This line of action seems to hinder the development of methods for constructing semantic maps that can be (re)used in a number of previously unseen environments. In this paper, we aim at contributing to make semantic mapping methods more general. In particular, we focus on indoor environments and we consider the following research question: to what extent are the semantic mapping approaches shown to label rooms in a single building expected to work when applied to different buildings?