Grounding semantic maps in spatial databases

This article contributes a framework for semantic map representation, called SEMAP, to overcome this missing aspect. It is able to manage full 3D maps with geometric object models and the corresponding semantic annotations as well as their relative spatial relations. For that, spatial database technology is used to solve the representational and querying problems efficiently. This article describes the extensions necessary to make a spatial database suitable for robotic applications. Especially, we add 3D spatial operators and a tree of transformations to represent relative position information. We evaluate the implemented capabilities and present real life use cases of SEMAP in different application domains.