Semantic Mapping for Mobile Robots in Indoor Scenes: A Survey

Sensing and mapping its surroundings is an essential requirement for a mobile robot. Geometric maps endow robots with the capacity of basic tasks, e.g., navigation. To co-exist with human beings in indoor scenes, the need to attach semantic information to a geometric map, which is called a semantic map, has been realized in the last two decades. A semantic map can help robots to behave in human rules, plan and perform advanced tasks, and communicate with humans on the conceptual level. This survey reviews methods about semantic mapping in indoor scenes. To begin with, we answered the question, what is a semantic map for mobile robots, by its definitions. After that, we reviewed works about each of the three modules of semantic mapping, i.e., spatial mapping, acquisition of semantic information, and map representation, respectively. Finally, though great progress has been made, there is a long way to implement semantic maps in advanced tasks for robots, thus challenges and potential future directions are discussed before a conclusion at last.