Semantic SLAM with Autonomous Object-Level Data Association

It is often desirable to capture and map semantic information of an environment during simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Such semantic information can enable a robot to better distinguish places with similar low-level geometric and visual features and perform high-level tasks that use semantic information about objects to be manipulated and environments to be navigated. While semantic SLAM has gained increasing attention, there is little research on semanticlevel data association based on semantic objects, i.e., object-level data association. In this paper, we propose a novel object-level data association algorithm based on bag of words algorithm, formulated as a maximum weighted bipartite matching problem. With object-level data association solved, we develop a quadratic-programming-based semantic object initialization scheme using dual quadric and introduce additional constraints to improve the success rate of object initialization. The integrated semantic-level SLAM system can achieve high-accuracy object-level data association and real-time semantic mapping as demonstrated in the experiments. The online semantic map building and semantic-level localization capabilities facilitate semantic-level mapping and task planning in a priori unknown environment.