Interactive Floor Mapping with Depth Sensors.

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms have been growing popular in indoor navigation and mapping. However, it often fails in many real-world environments, such as low-lighting, fast motion, featureless walls, and large buildings. There are also usability issues with the 3D point clouds for actual indoor localization and mapping for humans and autonomous robots. In this study, we use depth sensor to generate 3D point cloud and then register that to the 2D building floor plan or footprint. We extract the ground plane from the point cloud and create a 2D point cloud and contours to be registered to the map. The experiments show that 2D map is more intuitive than 3D point cloud. Furthermore, the contour map reduces computational time in orders of magnitude. We also developed a graphical user interface to enable the user to register the 2D point cloud interactively. It is a new way to use SLAM data. Our case studies in large office buildings demonstrate that this approach is simple, intuitive, and effective to enhance the localization and mapping in the real-world.