A Robot's Search for Meaning: Semantics as a Common Representation for Heterogeneous Robot State Estimation and Collaboration

Mapping and navigation have gone hand-in-hand since long before robots existed. Maps are a key form of communication, allowing someone who has never been somewhere to nonetheless navigate that area successfully. In the context of multi-robot systems, the maps and information that flow between robots are what enables effective collaboration, whether those robots are operating simultaneously or years apart in time. In this thesis, we argue that maps must go beyond encoding purely geometric or color information in order to enable increasingly complex autonomy, particularly between robots. We propose systems for mapping and localization, showing that semantic maps can be an important end in themselves as well as a means to achieve improved global localization in a variety of contexts. We then build on these ideas and employ semantic maps to underly a framework for multi-robot autonomy, focusing in particular on air and ground robots operating in outdoor 2.5D environments. A distinguishing characteristic of this thesis is that we strongly emphasize field experiments and testing, and by doing so demonstrate that these ideas can work at scale in the real world. Our experiments range in location from low Earth orbit to underground mines, and from rural towns to near city centers. We also perform extensive simulation experiments to validate our ideas at even larger scales. These experiments and systems constitute a step forward in the state-of-the-art of large-scale, collaborative multi-robot systems operating with real communication, navigation, and perception constraints.