Learning from Internet: Handling Uncertainty in Robotic Environment Modeling

Uncertainty is a great challenge for environment perception of autonomous robots. For instance, while building semantic maps (i.e., maps with semantic labels such as object names), the robot may encounter unexpected objects of which it has no knowledge. It will lead to inevitable failures in traditional environment modeling software. The abundant knowledge being accumulated on the Internet has the potential to assist robots to handle such kind of uncertainly. However, existing researches have not touched this issue yet. This paper proposes a cloud-based semantic mapping engine named SemaCloud, which can not only augment robot's environment modeling capability by the rich cloud resources but also cope with uncertainty by utilizing the Internet knowledge on necessary. It adopts a state-of-art Deep Neural Network (DNN) for real-time and accurate recognition of pre-trained objects. If an object is beyond the knowledge of this DNN, a special mechanism named QoS-aware cloud phase transition is triggered to seek help from existing recognition services on the Internet. By a set of carefully-designed algorithms, it can maximize benefits and minimize the negative impacts on the Quality of Service (QoS) properties of robotic applications, which is essential to many robot scenarios. The experiments on both open datasets and real robots show that our work can handle uncertainly successfully in robotic semantic mapping without sacrificing critical real-time constraints.