Sensor fusion-based semantic map building

This paper describes a sensor fusion-based semantic map building which can improve the capabilities of a mobile robot in various domains including localization, path-planning and mapping. To build a semantic map, various environmental information, such as doors and cliff areas, should be extracted autonomously. Therefore, we propose a method to detect doors, cliff areas and robust visual features using a laser scanner and a vision sensor. The GHT (General Hough Transform) based recognition of door handles and the geometrical features of a door are used to detect doors. To detect the cliff area and robust visual features, the tilting laser scanner and SIFT features are used, respectively. The proposed method was verified by various experiments and showed that the robot could build a semantic map autonomously in various indoor environments.