Vision-Language Model Reasoning for Contextual Semantic Mapping in Intralogistics
For autonomous mobile robots in intralogistics, this work provides a method to infer contextual object properties (movability) using VLMs, enabling context-aware navigation, but the approach is incremental as it combines existing techniques.
This paper presents a contextual semantic mapping pipeline for intralogistics robots that integrates SLAM, SAM, instance clustering, and VLM reasoning to infer object movability without task-specific training. The pipeline achieves 98.93% mIoU for semantic classification and 89.17% mAcc for movability estimation.
Autonomous mobile robots operating in intralogistics environments rely on geometric maps for localization and navigation, but lack semantic understanding of objects and their contextual properties. We present a contextual semantic mapping pipeline that combines SLAM-based geometric mapping, SAM-based instance segmentation, instance clustering, and VLM multi-view reasoning to produce a contextual semantic map representation encoding geometric structure, object class, and object movability. By aggregating observations across multiple viewpoints and querying a VLM in a zero-shot, open-vocabulary setting, the pipeline infers contextual object properties--here demonstrated through movability--without requiring task-specific training or predefined object categories. We evaluate three VLMs under two prompting strategies and conduct a component-wise analysis of the pipeline. The proposed pipeline achieves 98.93 % mIoU for semantic classification and 89.17 % mAcc for object movability estimation. Component analysis identifies VLM reasoning as the primary bottleneck for contextual understanding and instance clustering as the main limitation for panoptic performance. The resulting semantic map supports context-aware filtering and robust navigation in dynamic intralogistics environments.