SuMa: Efficient LiDARbased Semantic SLAM Reliable and accurate localization and mapping are key components of most autonomous systems. Besides geometric information about the mapped environment, the semantics plays an important role to enable intelligent navigation behaviors. In most realistic environments, this task is particularly complicated due to dynamics caused by moving objects, which can corrupt the mapping step or derail localization. In this paper, we propose an extension of a recently published surfelbased mapping approach exploiting threedimensional laser range scans by integrating semantic information to facilitate the mapping process. The semantic information is efficiently extracted by a fully convolutional neural network and rendered on a spherical projection of the laser range data. This computed semantic segmentation results in pointwise labels for the whole scan, allowing us to build a semanticallyenriched map with labeled surfels. This semantic map enables us to reliably filter moving objects, but also improve the projective scan matching via semantic constraints. Our experimental evaluation on challenging highways sequences from KITTI dataset with very few static structures and a large amount of moving cars shows the advantage of our semantic SLAM approach in comparison to a purely geometric, stateoftheart approach.

Exploiting Sparse Semantic HD Maps for SelfDriving Vehicle Localization In this paper we propose a novel semantic localization algorithm that exploits multiple sensors and has precision on the order of a few centimeters. Our approach does not require detailed knowledge about the appearance of the world, and our maps require orders of magnitude less storage than maps utilized by traditional geometry and LiDAR intensitybased localizers. This is important as selfdriving cars need to operate in large environments. Towards this goal, we formulate the problem in a Bayesian filtering framework, and exploit lanes, traffic signs, as well as vehicle dynamics to localize robustly with respect to a sparse semantic map. We validate the effectiveness of our method on a new highway dataset consisting of 312km of roads. Our experiments show that the proposed approach is able to achieve 0.05m lateral accuracy and 1.12m longitudinal accuracy on average while taking up only 0.3% of the storage required by previous LiDAR intensitybased approaches.