Furniture Free Mapping using 3D Lidars

TL;DR

This paper presents a SLAM-based method using dual 3D Lidars to generate furniture-free maps in indoor environments, achieving high precision in wall preservation and enabling applications like room segmentation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel SLAM approach with orthogonal Lidars for furniture removal and room segmentation in indoor mapping.

Findings

99.60% precision in wall preservation

Effective furniture removal in indoor environments

Enables room segmentation applications

Abstract

Mobile robots depend on maps for localization, planning, and other applications. In indoor scenarios, there is often lots of clutter present, such as chairs, tables, other furniture, or plants. While mapping this clutter is important for certain applications, for example navigation, maps that represent just the immobile parts of the environment, i.e. walls, are needed for other applications, like room segmentation or long-term localization. In literature, approaches can be found that use a complete point cloud to remove the furniture in the room and generate a furniture free map. In contrast, we propose a Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM)-based mobile laser scanning solution. The robot uses an orthogonal pair of Lidars. The horizontal scanner aims to estimate the robot position, whereas the vertical scanner generates the furniture free map. There are three steps in our method: point cloud rearrangement, wall plane detection and semantic labeling. In the experiment, we evaluate the efficiency of removing furniture in a typical indoor environment. We get $99.60\%$ precision in keeping the wall in the 3D result, which shows that our algorithm can remove most of the furniture in the environment. Furthermore, we introduce the application of 2D furniture free mapping for room segmentation.