Lifelong update of semantic maps in dynamic environments

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for lifelong updating of semantic maps in dynamic environments, enabling robots to maintain accurate, consistent, and user-friendly high-level representations over time.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach for updating and maintaining semantic maps in dynamic settings, including semantic transfer, consistency enforcement, and discovery of new semantics.

Findings

Successfully deployed on thousands of robots in real homes.

Improves map consistency despite dynamic objects.

Enhances user experience with lifelong semantic mapping.

Abstract

A robot understands its world through the raw information it senses from its surroundings. This raw information is not suitable as a shared representation between the robot and its user. A semantic map, containing high-level information that both the robot and user understand, is better suited to be a shared representation. We use the semantic map as the user-facing interface on our fleet of floor-cleaning robots. Jitter in the robot's sensed raw map, dynamic objects in the environment, and exploration of new space by the robot are common challenges for robots. Solving these challenges effectively in the context of semantic maps is key to enabling semantic maps for lifelong mapping. First, as a robot senses new changes and alters its raw map in successive runs, the semantics must be updated appropriately. We update the map using a spatial transfer of semantics. Second, it is important to keep semantics and their relative constraints consistent even in the presence of dynamic objects. Inconsistencies are automatically determined and resolved through the introduction of a map layer of meta-semantics. Finally, a discovery phase allows the semantic map to be updated with new semantics whenever the robot uncovers new information. Deployed commercially on thousands of floor-cleaning robots in real homes, our user-facing semantic maps provide a intuitive user experience through a lifelong mapping robot.