Interpretation and Alignment of 2D Indoor Maps : Towards a Heterogeneous Map Representation

Sammanfattning: Mobile robots are increasingly being used in automation solutions with notable examples in service robots, such as home-care, and warehouses. Autonomy of mobile robots is particularly challenging, since their work space is not deterministic, known a priori, or fully predictable. Accordingly, the ability to model the work space, that is robotic mapping, is among the core technologies that are the backbone of autonomous mobile robots. However, for some applications the abilities of mapping and localization do not meet all the requirements, and robots with an enhanced awareness of their surroundings are desired. For instance, a map augmented with semantic labels is instrumental to support Human-Robot Interaction and high-level task planning and reasoning.This thesis addresses this requirement through an interpretation and integration of multiple input maps into a semantically annotated heterogeneous representation. The heterogeneity of the representation should to contain different interpretations of an input map, establish and maintain associations among different input sources, and construct a hierarchy of abstraction through model-based representation. The structuring and construction of this representation are at the core of this thesis, and the main objectives are: a) modeling, interpretation, semantic annotation, and association of the different data sources into a heterogeneous representation, and b) improving the autonomy of the aforementioned processes by curtailing the dependency of the methods on human input, such as domain knowledge.This work proposes map interpretation techniques, such as abstract representation through modeling and semantic annotation, in an attempt to enrich the final representation. In order to associate multiple data sources, this work also proposes a map alignment method. The contributions and general observations that result from the studies included in this work could be summarized as: i) manner of structuring the heterogeneous representation, ii) underlining the advantages of modeling and abstract representations, iii) several approaches to semantic annotation, and iv) improved extensibility of methods by lessening their dependency on human input.The scope of the work has been focused on 2D maps of well-structured indoor environments, such as warehouses, home, and office buildings.