Collaborative semantic perception and relative localization based on map matching

In order to enable a team of robots to operate successfully, retrieving accurate relative transformation between robots is the fundamental requirement. So far, most research on relative localization mainly focus on geometry features such as points, lines and planes. To address this problem, collaborative semantic map matching is proposed to perform semantic perception and relative localization. This paper performs semantic perception, probabilistic data association and nonlinear optimization within an integrated framework. Since the voxel correspondence between partial maps is a hidden variable, a probabilistic semantic data association algorithm is proposed based on Expectation-Maximization. Instead of specifying hard geometry data association, semantic and geometry association are jointly updated and estimated. The experimental verification on Semantic KITTI benchmarks demonstrate the improved robustness and accuracy.