Sketched Floor plans versus SLAM maps: A Comparison
This work addresses the challenge of integrating human-friendly floor plans into robotic systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing mapping techniques without major breakthroughs.
The paper tackled the problem of aligning hand-drawn floor plans with SLAM maps for robotic applications, presenting an algorithm that enables their use in tasks like specifying no-go regions and object location, with a user study showing no statistical performance difference between the two map types.
Maps --- specifically floor plans --- are useful for a variety of tasks from arranging furniture to designating conceptual or functional spaces (e.g., kitchen, walkway). We present a simple algorithm for quickly laying a floor plan (or other conceptual map) onto a SLAM map, creating a one-to-one mapping between them. Our goal was to enable using a floor plan (or other hand-drawn or annotated map) in robotic applications instead of the typical SLAM map created by the robot. We look at two use cases, specifying "no-go" regions within a room and locating objects within a scanned room. Although a user study showed no statistical difference between the two types of maps in terms of performance on this spatial memory task, we argue that floor plans are closer to the mental maps people would naturally draw to characterize spaces.