RGBD object recognition and visual texture classification for indoor semantic mapping

We present a mobile robot whose goal is to autonomously explore an unknown indoor environment and to build a semantic map containing high-level information similar to those extracted by humans. This information includes the rooms, their connectivity, the objects they contain and the material of the walls and ground. This robot was developed in order to participate in a French exploration and mapping contest called CAROTTE whose goal is to produce easily interpretable maps of an unknown environment. In particular we present our object detection approach based on a color+depth camera that fuse 3D, color and texture information through a neural network for robust object recognition. We also present the material recognition approach based on machine learning applied to vision. We demonstrate the performances of these modules on image databases and provide examples on the full system working in real environments.