Related papers: Signage-Aware Exploration in Open World using Venu…
Navigational signs are common aids for human wayfinding and scene understanding, but are underutilized by robots. We argue that they benefit robot navigation and scene understanding, by directly encoding privileged information on actions,…
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…
Navigational signs enable humans to navigate unfamiliar environments without maps. This work studies how robots can similarly exploit signs for mapless navigation in the open world. A central challenge lies in interpreting signs: real-world…
In this article, we propose a novel navigation framework that leverages a two layered graph representation of the environment for efficient large-scale exploration, while it integrates a novel uncertainty awareness scheme to handle dynamic…
We discuss the process of building semantic maps, how to interactively label entities in them, and how to use them to enable context-aware navigation behaviors in human environments. We utilize planar surfaces, such as walls and tables, and…
Being able to explore an environment and understand the location and type of all objects therein is important for indoor robotic platforms that must interact closely with humans. However, it is difficult to evaluate progress in this area…
Text recognition technology applied to street-view storefront signs is increasingly utilized across various practical domains, including map navigation, smart city planning analysis, and business value assessments in commercial districts.…
Current technological advances open up new opportunities for bringing human-machine interaction to a new level of human-centered cooperation. In this context, a key issue is the semantic understanding of the environment in order to enable…
Robots require a semantic understanding of their surroundings to operate in an efficient and explainable way in human environments. In the literature, there has been an extensive focus on object labeling and exhaustive scene graph…
Scene graphs enhance 3D mapping capabilities in robotics by understanding the relationships between different spatial elements, such as rooms and objects. Recent research extends scene graphs to hierarchical layers, adding and leveraging…
This paper presents a system for autonomous semantic exploration and dense semantic target mapping of a complex unknown environment using a ground robot equipped with a LiDAR-panoramic camera suite. Existing approaches often struggle to…
We propose a novel approach to robot-operated active understanding of unknown indoor scenes, based on online RGBD reconstruction with semantic segmentation. In our method, the exploratory robot scanning is both driven by and targeting at…
Semantic maps allow a robot to reason about its surroundings to fulfill tasks such as navigating known environments, finding specific objects, and exploring unmapped areas. Traditional mapping approaches provide accurate geometric…
Mobile robots in unstructured, mapless environments must rely on an obstacle avoidance module to navigate safely. The standard avoidance techniques estimate the locations of obstacles with respect to the robot but are unaware of the…
Humans routinely leverage semantic hints provided by signage to navigate to destinations within novel Large-Scale Indoor (LSI) environments, such as hospitals and airport terminals. However, this capability remains underexplored within the…
Embodied scene understanding requires not only comprehending visual-spatial information that has been observed but also determining where to explore next in the 3D physical world. Existing 3D Vision-Language (3D-VL) models primarily focus…
Seamless Human-Robot Interaction is the ultimate goal of developing service robotic systems. For this, the robotic agents have to understand their surroundings to better complete a given task. Semantic scene understanding allows a robotic…
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…
To carry out autonomous 3D scanning and online reconstruction of unknown indoor scenes, one has to find a balance between global exploration of the entire scene and local scanning of the objects within it. In this work, we propose a novel…
The development of embodied agents that can communicate with humans in natural language has gained increasing interest over the last years, as it facilitates the diffusion of robotic platforms in human-populated environments. As a step…