ContraMap: Contrastive Uncertainty Mapping for Robot Environment Representation

TL;DR

ContraMap is a novel contrastive mapping approach that jointly predicts environment structure and spatial uncertainty in real time, improving efficiency and coherence over Bayesian methods.

Contribution

It introduces a contrastive continuous mapping method with an explicit uncertainty class trained via synthetic noise, enabling efficient joint environment and uncertainty prediction.

Findings

ContraMap maintains mapping quality while providing spatially coherent uncertainty estimates.

It is significantly more efficient than Bayesian kernelmap baselines.

Experiments demonstrate effectiveness in 2D occupancy, 3D semantic, and scene reconstruction tasks.

Abstract

Reliable robot perception requires not only predicting scene structure, but also identifying where predictions should be treated as unreliable due to sparse or missing observations. We present ContraMap, a contrastive continuous mapping method that augments kernel-based discriminative maps with an explicit uncertainty class trained using synthetic noise samples. This formulation treats unobserved regions as a contrastive class, enabling joint environment prediction and spatial uncertainty estimation in real time without Bayesian inference. Under a simple mixture-model view, we show that the probability assigned to the uncertainty class is a monotonic function of a distance-aware uncertainty surrogate. Experiments in 2D occupancy mapping, 3D semantic mapping, and tabletop scene reconstruction show that ContraMap preserves mapping quality, produces spatially coherent uncertainty estimates, and is substantially more efficient than Bayesian kernelmap baselines.