DK-SMF: Domain Knowledge-Driven Semantic Modeling Framework for Service Robots

Modern robotic systems are evolving toward conducting missions based on semantic knowledge. Such systems require environmental modeling as essential for successful mission execution. However, there is an inefficiency in that manual modeling is required whenever a new environment is given, and adaptive modeling that can adapt to the environment is needed. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework that enables autonomous environmental modeling for service robots by fusing domain knowledge with open-vocabulary-based Vision-Language Models (VLMs). When a robot is deployed in a new environment, it builds occupancy maps through autonomous exploration and extracts semantic information about objects and places. Furthermore, we introduce human–robot collaborative modeling beyond robot-only environmental modeling. The collected semantic information is stored in a structured database and utilized on demand. To verify the applicability of the proposed framework to service robots, experiments are conducted in a simulated home environment and a real-world indoor corridor. Through the experiments, the proposed framework achieved over 80% accuracy in semantic information extraction in both environments. Semantic information about various types of objects and places was extracted and stored in the database, demonstrating the effectiveness of DK-SMF for service robots.