Jose Luis Matez Bandera PhD defense (Jun’25)

We are delighted to announce that on June 16, 2025, José Luis Matez Bandera successfully defended his PhDthesis, “Advances in Indoor Semantic Mapping for Mobile Robotics,” at the University of Málaga. The examining committee awarded him the highest possible distinction, Cum Laude. The thesis addresses a fundamental challenge in mobile robotics: enabling robots to interpret high-level, human-like information about their surroundings. This goes beyond simple geometry, allowing robots to recognize, categorize, and understand the function of objects and places. José Luis’s research focused on creating and improving semantic maps, which integrate geometric data with high-level knowledge. This allows a robot to reason more effectively about its environment and make smarter decisions.

To achieve this, the thesis tackled three core challenges:

• Semantic categorization of places using an active attention mechanism to optimize environmental observation.
• Real-time structural 3D reconstruction based on planar geometry.
• Creation of object-oriented semantic maps, proposing two novel methods that address current limitations in instance-based semantic mapping.
• Additionally, the research introduced a novel method to solve the problem of visual localization with heterogeneous detectors. The proposed method leverages structural information from semantic maps to enforce coplanarity constraints, effectively guiding the matching of features from different detectors.