A scene graph based shared 3D world model for robotic applications

This paper presents a novel approach for representing and maintaining a shared 3D world model for robotic applications. This approach is based on the scene graph concept which has been adapted to the requirements of the robotic domain. A key feature is the temporal and centralized sharing of all available 3D data in the leaves of the graph structure. The approach enables tracking of dynamic objects, incorporates uncertainty and allows for annotations by semantic tags. A demonstration is given for a perception application that exploits the temporal sharing of 3D data. A Region of Interest (ROI) is extracted from the stored scene data in order to accelerate processing cycle times.