Room layout estimation from rapid omnidirectional exploration

Abstract

A new generation of practical, low-cost indoor robots is now using wide-angle cameras to aid navigation, but usually this is limited to position estimation via sparse feature-based SLAM. Such robots usually have little global sense of the dimensions, demarcation or identities of the rooms they are in, information which would be very useful to enable behaviour with much more high level intelligence. In this paper we show that we can augment an omni-directional SLAM pipeline with straightforward dense stereo estimation and simple and robust room model fitting to obtain rapid and reliable estimation of the global shape of typical rooms from short robot motions. We have tested our method extensively in real homes, offices and on synthetic data. We also give examples of how our method can extend to making composite maps of larger rooms, and detecting room transitions.