Related papers: BoxMap: Efficient Structural Mapping and Navigatio…
Autonomous robots exploring unknown environments face a significant challenge: navigating effectively without prior maps and with limited external feedback. This challenge intensifies in sparse reward environments, where traditional…
Intelligent embodied agents (e.g. robots) need to perform complex semantic tasks in unfamiliar environments. Among many skills that the agents need to possess, building and maintaining a semantic map of the environment is most crucial in…
Humans are expert explorers. Understanding the computational cognitive mechanisms that support this efficiency can advance the study of the human mind and enable more efficient exploration algorithms. We hypothesize that humans explore new…
Mobile service robots are increasingly prevalent in human-centric, real-world domains, operating autonomously in unconstrained indoor environments. In such a context, robotic vision plays a central role in enabling service robots to…
We introduce DualMap, an online open-vocabulary mapping system that enables robots to understand and navigate dynamically changing environments through natural language queries. Designed for efficient semantic mapping and adaptability to…
What is a good visual representation for autonomous agents? We address this question in the context of semantic visual navigation, which is the problem of a robot finding its way through a complex environment to a target object, e.g. go to…
In this paper, we propose a method that, given a partial grid map of an indoor environment built by an autonomous mobile robot, estimates the amount of the explored area represented in the map, as well as whether the uncovered part is still…
In this paper, we address the problem of autonomous multi-robot mapping, exploration and navigation in unknown, GPS-denied indoor or urban environments using a swarm of robots equipped with directional sensors with limited sensing…
This article presents a novel approach to identifying and classifying intersections for semantic and topological mapping. More specifically, the proposed novel approach has the merit of generating a semantically meaningful map containing…
The deployment of autonomous service robots in human-centric environments is hindered by a critical gap in perception and planning. Traditional navigation systems rely on expensive LiDARs that, while geometrically precise, are semantically…
We present a semantically rich graph representation for indoor robotic navigation. Our graph representation encodes: semantic locations such as offices or corridors as nodes, and navigational behaviors such as enter office or cross a…
We present a novel mapping framework for robot navigation which features a multi-level querying system capable to obtain rapidly representations as diverse as a 3D voxel grid, a 2.5D height map and a 2D occupancy grid. These are inherently…
Mapping is crucial for spatial reasoning, planning and robot navigation. Existing approaches range from metric, which require precise geometry-based optimization, to purely topological, where image-as-node based graphs lack explicit…
To autonomously navigate and plan interactions in real-world environments, robots require the ability to robustly perceive and map complex, unstructured surrounding scenes. Besides building an internal representation of the observed scene…
Volumetric maps are widely used in robotics due to their desirable properties in applications such as path planning, exploration, and manipulation. Constant advances in mapping technologies are needed to keep up with the improvements in…
Robotic tasks such as planning and navigation require a hierarchical semantic understanding of a scene, which could include multiple floors and rooms. Current methods primarily focus on object segmentation for 3D scene understanding.…
This paper presents a strategy to guide a mobile ground robot equipped with a camera or depth sensor, in order to autonomously map the visible part of a bounded three-dimensional structure. We describe motion planning algorithms that…
Object detection and global localization play a crucial role in robotics, spanning across a great spectrum of applications from autonomous cars to multi-layered 3D Scene Graphs for semantic scene understanding. This article proposes BOX3D,…
The paper proposes a reliable and robust planning solution to the long range robotic navigation problem in extremely cluttered environments. A two-layer planning architecture is proposed that leverages both the environment map and the…
Human navigation in built environments depends on symbolic spatial information which has unrealised potential to enhance robot navigation capabilities. Information sources such as labels, signs, maps, planners, spoken directions, and…