Making Sense of Indoor Spaces Using Semantic Web Mining and Situated Robot Perception

Intelligent Autonomous Robots deployed in human environments must have understanding of the wide range of possible semantic identities associated with the spaces they inhabit – kitchens, living rooms, bathrooms, offices, garages, etc. We believe robots should learn this information through their own exploration and situated perception in order to uncover and exploit structure in their environments – structure that may not be apparent to human engineers, or that may emerge over time during a deployment. In this work, we combine semantic web-mining and situated robot perception to develop a system capable of assigning semantic categories to regions of space. This is accomplished by looking at web-mined relationships between room categories and objects identified by a Convolutional Neural Network trained on 1000 categories. Evaluated on real-world data, we show that our system exhibits several conceptual and technical advantages over similar systems, and uncovers semantic structure in the environment overlooked by ground-truth annotators.