PRISM: Pose Registration for Integrated Semantic Mapping

Many robotics applications involve navigating to positions specified in terms of their semantic significance. A robot operating in a hotel may need to deliver room service to a named room. In a hospital, it may need to deliver medication to a patient's room. The Building-Wide Intelligence Project at UT Austin has been developing a fleet of autonomous mobile robots, called BWIBots, which perform tasks in the computer science department. Tasks include guiding a person, delivering a message, or bringing an object to a location such as an office, lecture hall, or classroom. The process of constructing a map that a robot can use for navigation has been simplified by modern SLAM algorithms. The attachment of semantics to map data, however, remains a tedious manual process of labeling locations in otherwise automatically generated maps. This paper introduces a system called PRISM to automate a step in this process by enabling a robot to localize door signs – a semantic markup intended to aid the human occupants of a building – and to annotate these locations in its map.