A Semantic Mapping Framework for Service Robots

Lucyanno Frota and Rui P. Rocha

In Proc. of 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC‘25), 832–839, Catania, Italy, Mar. 10–15, 2025. DOI: 10.1145/3672608.3707779

Abstract

Service robots are undergoing a massification process similar to what happened with personal computers and cell phones a few decades ago. Their ubiquitous coexistence and interaction with humans requires that their representation models of the workspace go beyond metric information used for safe navigation. They are also required to assign semantic meaning to objects and places, i.e. to build semantic maps, in order to understand scenes and engage in human-like interactions. This paper proposes the Semantic MAPping (SMAP) framework to provide a service robot operating in human populated environments with a semantic mapping layer on top of a metric SLAM layer. SMAP is modular, expandable, and efficient enough to run locally on the robot. It has been implemented in Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2) using modular Docker containers. Preliminary experiments with a Pioneer 3-DX mobile robot having a system on module Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier demonstrated its potential for future service robotics applications.

Index Terms — Semantic mapping; service robot; system on module; ROS 2; docker.

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BibTeX

@inproceedings{Frota_Rocha_25,

author = {Frota, Lucyanno and Rocha, Rui P.},

title = {A semantic mapping framework for service robots},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC '25)},

pages = {832--839},

year = {2025},

publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},

address = {Catania, Italy},

doi = {10.1145/3672608.3707779}

}

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