BoxMap: Efficient Structural Mapping and Navigation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, Zili, Allum, Christopher, Andersson, Sean B., Tron, Roberto
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909342855331840
author Wang, Zili
Allum, Christopher
Andersson, Sean B.
Tron, Roberto
author_facet Wang, Zili
Allum, Christopher
Andersson, Sean B.
Tron, Roberto
contents While humans can successfully navigate using abstractions, ignoring details that are irrelevant to the task at hand, most existing robotic applications require the maintenance of a detailed environment representation which consumes a significant amount of sensing, computing, and storage. These issues are particularly important in a resource-constrained setting with limited power budget. Deep learning methods can learn from prior experience to abstract knowledge of unknown environments, and use it to execute tasks (e.g., frontier exploration, object search, or scene understanding) more efficiently. We propose BoxMap, a Detection-Transformer-based architecture that takes advantage of the structure of the sensed partial environment to update a topological graph of the environment as a set of semantic entities (e.g. rooms and doors) and their relations (e.g. connectivity). These predictions from low-level measurements can then be leveraged to achieve high-level goals with lower computational costs than methods based on detailed representations. As an example application, we consider a robot equipped with a 2-D laser scanner tasked with exploring a residential building. Our BoxMap representation scales quadratically with the number of rooms (with a small constant), resulting in significant savings over a full geometric map. Moreover, our high-level topological representation results in 30.9% shorter trajectories in the exploration task with respect to a standard method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_06263
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BoxMap: Efficient Structural Mapping and Navigation
Wang, Zili
Allum, Christopher
Andersson, Sean B.
Tron, Roberto
Robotics
While humans can successfully navigate using abstractions, ignoring details that are irrelevant to the task at hand, most existing robotic applications require the maintenance of a detailed environment representation which consumes a significant amount of sensing, computing, and storage. These issues are particularly important in a resource-constrained setting with limited power budget. Deep learning methods can learn from prior experience to abstract knowledge of unknown environments, and use it to execute tasks (e.g., frontier exploration, object search, or scene understanding) more efficiently. We propose BoxMap, a Detection-Transformer-based architecture that takes advantage of the structure of the sensed partial environment to update a topological graph of the environment as a set of semantic entities (e.g. rooms and doors) and their relations (e.g. connectivity). These predictions from low-level measurements can then be leveraged to achieve high-level goals with lower computational costs than methods based on detailed representations. As an example application, we consider a robot equipped with a 2-D laser scanner tasked with exploring a residential building. Our BoxMap representation scales quadratically with the number of rooms (with a small constant), resulting in significant savings over a full geometric map. Moreover, our high-level topological representation results in 30.9% shorter trajectories in the exploration task with respect to a standard method.
title BoxMap: Efficient Structural Mapping and Navigation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.06263