For both indoor and outdoor environments, we propose an efficient and novel method for different scales and sparse 3D point clouds registration that cannot be handled by the current popular ICP approaches. Our algorithm efficiently detects the scale difference between point clouds and uses the keyframes to estimate the relative pose for calculating the scale difference. The algorithm applies a filter and computes the final transformation which coverages to a global minimum. The good estimation of transform and scale helps in the calculation of the covariance matrix using a closed form solution efficiently. This covariance between point clouds helps in the estimation of information matrix for pose-graph SLAM.
In this work, we propose a novel, bio-inspired multi-sensory SLAM approach called ViTa-SLAM. Compared to other multisensory SLAM variants, this approach allows for a seamless multi-sensory information fusion whilst naturally interacting with the environment. The algorithm is empirically evaluated in a simulated setting using a biomimetic robot platform called the WhiskEye. Our results show promising performance enhancements over existing bio-inspired SLAM approaches in terms of loop-closure detection.
Simultaneous Localization & Mapping (SLAM) is the process of building a mutual relationship between localization and mapping of the subject in its surrounding environment. With the help of different sensors, various types of SLAM systems have developed to deal with the problem of building the relationship between localization and mapping. A limitation in the SLAM process is the lack of consideration of dynamic objects in the mapping of the environment. We propose the Dynamic Object Tracking SLAM (DyOb-SLAM), which is a Visual SLAM system that can localize and map the surrounding dynamic object…
Observability is a key aspect of the state estimation problem of SLAM, However, the dimension and variables of SLAM system might be changed with new features, to which little attention is paid in the previous work. In this paper, a unified approach of observability analysis for SLAM system is provided, whether the dimension and variables of SLAM system are changed or not, we can use this approach to analyze the local or total observability of the SLAM system.
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
SLAM is becoming a key component of robotics and augmented reality (AR) systems. While a large number of SLAM algorithms have been presented, there has been little effort to unify the interface of such algorithms, or to perform a holistic comparison of their capabilities. This is a problem since different SLAM applications can have different functional and non-functional requirements. For example, a mobile phonebased AR application has a tight energy budget, while a UAV navigation system usually requires high accuracy. SLAMBench2 is a benchmarking framework to evaluate existing and future SLAM…
Commonly, SLAM algorithms are focused on a static environment, however, there are several scenes where dynamic objects are present. This work presents the STDyn-SLAM an image feature-based SLAM system working on dynamic environments using a series of sub-systems, like optic flow, orb features extraction, visual odometry, and convolutional neural networks to discern moving objects in the scene. The neural network is used to support object detection and segmentation to avoid erroneous maps and wrong system localization. The STDyn-SLAM employs a stereo pair and is developed for outdoor environmen…
Accurate 3D point cloud map generation is a core task for various robot missions or even for data-driven urban analysis. To do so, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensor-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) technology have been elaborated. To compose a full SLAM system, many odometry and place recognition methods have independently been proposed in academia. However, they have hardly been integrated or too tightly combined so that exchanging (upgrading) either single odometry or place recognition module is very effort demanding. Recently, the performance of each module has be…
HERO-SLAM: Hybrid Enhanced Robust Optimization of Neural SLAM
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学自动化学院）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）
Benchmarking Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms is important to scientists and users of robotic systems alike. But through their many configuration options in hardware and software, SLAM systems feature a vast parameter space that scientists up to now were not able to explore. The proposed SLAM Hive Benchmarking Suite is able to analyze SLAM algorithms in 1000's of mapping runs, through its utilization of container technology and deployment in a cluster. This paper presents the architecture and open source implementation of SLAM Hive and compares it to existing efforts on …
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is considered to be a fundamental capability for intelligent mobile robots. Over the past decades, many impressed SLAM systems have been developed and achieved good performance under certain circumstances. However, some problems are still not well solved, for example, how to tackle the moving objects in the dynamic environments, how to make the robots truly understand the surroundings and accomplish advanced tasks. In this paper, a robust semantic visual SLAM towards dynamic environments named DS-SLAM is proposed. Five threads run in parallel in DS-…
Quadrupeds are robots that have been of interest in the past few years due to their versatility in navigating across various terrain and utility in several applications. For quadrupeds to navigate without a predefined map a priori, they must rely on SLAM approaches to localize and build the map of the environment. Despite the surge of interest and research development in SLAM and quadrupeds, there still has yet to be an open-source package that capitalizes on the onboard sensors of an affordable quadruped. This motivates the A1 SLAM package, which is an open-source ROS package that provides th…
The main contribution of this paper is a new submap joining based approach for solving large-scale Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) problems. Each local submap is independently built using the local information through solving a small-scale SLAM; the joining of submaps mainly involves solving linear least squares and performing nonlinear coordinate transformations. Through approximating the local submap information as the state estimate and its corresponding information matrix, judiciously selecting the submap coordinate frames, and approximating the joining of a large number of su…
Polytechnique Montréal（蒙特利尔综合理工学院）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
To achieve collaborative tasks, robots in a team need to have a shared understanding of the environment and their location within it. Distributed Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) offers a practical solution to localize the robots without relying on an external positioning system (e.g. GPS) and with minimal information exchange. Unfortunately, current distributed SLAM systems are vulnerable to perception outliers and therefore tend to use very conservative parameters for inter-robot place recognition. However, being too conservative comes at the cost of rejecting many valid loop clo…
Evergreen Valley High School（埃弗格林谷高中）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
We present Human and Geometric Importance SLAM (HGI-SLAM), a novel approach to loop closure using salient and geometric features. Loop closure is a key element of SLAM, with many established methods for this problem. However, current methods are narrow, using either geometric or salient based features. We merge their successes into a model that outperforms both types of methods alone. Our method utilizes inexpensive monocular cameras and does not depend on depth sensors nor Lidar. HGI-SLAM utilizes geometric and salient features, processes them into descriptors, and optimizes them for a bag of…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
In recent years, visual SLAM has achieved great progress and development, but in complex scenes, especially rotating scenes, the error of mapping will increase significantly, and the slam system is easy to lose track. In this article, we propose an InterpolationSLAM framework, which is a visual SLAM framework based on ORB-SLAM2. InterpolationSLAM is robust in rotating scenes for Monocular and RGB-D configurations. By detecting the rotation and performing interpolation processing at the rotated position, pose of the system can be estimated more accurately at the rotated position, thereby improv…
Sapienza University of Rome（罗马大学）；Robert Bosch Corporate Research（罗伯特·博世企业研究部）
Nowadays, SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) is considered by the Robotics community to be a mature field. Currently, there are many open-source systems that are able to deliver fast and accurate estimation in typical real-world scenarios. Still, all these systems often provide an ad-hoc implementation that entailed to predefined sensor configurations. In this work, we tackle this issue, proposing a novel SLAM architecture specifically designed to address heterogeneous sensors' configuration and to standardize SLAM solutions. Thanks to its modularity and to specific design patterns, …
CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université de Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；Ictineu Submarins（伊克蒂内乌潜艇公司）；NAV ON TIME（准时导航公司）
This article presents a new open-source C++ implementation to solve the SLAM problem, which is focused on genericity, versatility and high execution speed. It is based on an original object oriented architecture, that allows the combination of numerous sensors and landmark types, and the integration of various approaches proposed in the literature. The system capacities are illustrated by the presentation of an inertial/vision SLAM approach, for which several improvements over existing methods have been introduced, and that copes with very high dynamic motions. Results with a hand-held camera …
WaterSplat-SLAM: Photorealistic Monocular SLAM in Underwater Environment
Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University（清华大学电子工程系）；Key Laboratory of Marine Robotics, Shenyang（沈阳海洋机器人重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学电子及计算机工程学系）
School of Integrated Circuits, Tsinghua University（清华大学集成电路学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a critical technology that enables autonomous robots to be aware of their surrounding environment. With the development of deep learning, SLAM systems can achieve a higher level of perception of the environment, including the semantic and text levels. However, current works are limited in their ability to achieve a natural-language level of perception of the world. To address this limitation, we propose LP-SLAM, the first language-perceptive SLAM system that leverages large language models (LLMs). LP-SLAM has two major features: (a) it can detect…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Google（谷歌）
In this paper a low-drift monocular SLAM method is proposed targeting indoor scenarios, where monocular SLAM often fails due to the lack of textured surfaces. Our approach decouples rotation and translation estimation of the tracking process to reduce the long-term drift in indoor environments. In order to take full advantage of the available geometric information in the scene, surface normals are predicted by a convolutional neural network from each input RGB image in real-time. First, a drift-free rotation is estimated based on lines and surface normals using spherical mean-shift clustering,…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Object SLAM uses additional semantic information to detect and map objects in the scene, in order to improve the system's perception and map representation capabilities. Quadrics and cubes are often used to represent objects, but their single shape limits the accuracy of object map and thus affects the application of downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce superquadrics (SQ) with shape parameters into SLAM for representing objects, and propose a separate parameter estimation method that can accurately estimate object pose and adapt to different shapes. Furthermore, we present a lightweig…
Task-driven SLAM Benchmarking For Robot Navigation
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Georgia Institute of Technology（电气与计算机工程学院，机器人与智能机器研究所，佐治亚理工学院）；School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology（机械工程学院，电气与计算机工程学院，佐治亚理工学院）
University of Freiburg（弗赖堡大学）；University of Technology Nuremberg（纽伦堡工业大学）
Robots operating in the open world encounter various different environments that can substantially differ from each other. This domain gap also poses a challenge for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) being one of the fundamental tasks for navigation. In particular, learning-based SLAM methods are known to generalize poorly to unseen environments hindering their general adoption. In this work, we introduce the novel task of continual SLAM extending the concept of lifelong SLAM from a single dynamically changing environment to sequential deployments in several drastically differing en…
A Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system must be robust to support long-term mobile vehicle and robot applications. However, camera and LiDAR based SLAM systems can be fragile when facing challenging illumination or weather conditions which degrade their imagery and point cloud data. Radar, whose operating electromagnetic spectrum is less affected by environmental changes, is promising although its distinct sensing geometry and noise characteristics bring open challenges when being exploited for SLAM. % However, there are still open challenges since most existing visual and LiDAR …
The dynamic factors in the environment will lead to the decline of camera localization accuracy due to the violation of the static environment assumption of SLAM algorithm. Recently, some related works generally use the combination of semantic constraints and geometric constraints to deal with dynamic objects, but problems can still be raised, such as poor real-time performance, easy to treat people as rigid bodies, and poor performance in low dynamic scenes. In this paper, a dynamic scene-oriented visual SLAM algorithm based on object detection and coarse-to-fine static probability named CFP-…
We study a semantic SLAM problem faced by a robot tasked with autonomous weeding under the corn canopy. The goal is to detect corn stalks and localize them in a global coordinate frame. This is a challenging setup for existing algorithms because there is very little space between the camera and the plants, and the camera motion is primarily restricted to be along the row. To overcome these challenges, we present a multi-camera system where a side camera (facing the plants) is used for detection whereas front and back cameras are used for motion estimation. Next, we show how semantic features i…
This paper proposes an A*SLAM system that features combining two sets of fisheye stereo cameras and taking the image edge as the SLAM features. The dual fisheye stereo camera sets cover the full environmental view of the SLAM system. From each fisheye stereo image pair, a panorama depth image can be directly extracted for initializing the SLAM feature. The edge feature is an illumination invariant feature. The paper presents a method of the edge-based simultaneous localization and mapping process using both the normal and inverted images interchangeably.
University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
We propose a novel end-to-end RGB-D SLAM, iDF-SLAM, which adopts a feature-based deep neural tracker as the front-end and a NeRF-style neural implicit mapper as the back-end. The neural implicit mapper is trained on-the-fly, while though the neural tracker is pretrained on the ScanNet dataset, it is also finetuned along with the training of the neural implicit mapper. Under such a design, our iDF-SLAM is capable of learning to use scene-specific features for camera tracking, thus enabling lifelong learning of the SLAM system. Both the training for the tracker and the mapper are self-supervised…
This paper proposes a novel simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) approach, namely Attention-SLAM, which simulates human navigation mode by combining a visual saliency model (SalNavNet) with traditional monocular visual SLAM. Most SLAM methods treat all the features extracted from the images as equal importance during the optimization process. However, the salient feature points in scenes have more significant influence during the human navigation process. Therefore, we first propose a visual saliency model called SalVavNet in which we introduce a correlation module and propose an adapt…
Multicam-SLAM: Non-overlapping Multi-camera SLAM for Indirect Visual Localization and Navigation
School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学电子信息与电气工程学院）；School of Mechanical and Power Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology（华东理工大学机械与动力工程学院）
In this paper, we consider the problem of planar graph-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) that involves both poses of the autonomous agent and positions of observed landmarks. We present CPL-SLAM, an efficient and certifiably correct algorithm to solve planar graph-based SLAM using the complex number representation. We formulate and simplify planar graph-based SLAM as the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) on the product of unit complex numbers, and relax this nonconvex quadratic complex optimization problem to convex complex semidefinite programming (SDP). Furthermore, we sim…
Reliability of SLAM systems is considered one of the critical requirements in modern autonomous systems. This directed the efforts to developing many state-of-the-art systems, creating challenging datasets, and introducing rigorous metrics to measure SLAM performance. However, the link between datasets and performance in the robustness/resilience context has rarely been explored. In order to fill this void, characterization of the operating conditions of SLAM systems is essential in order to provide an environment for quantitative measurement of robustness and resilience. In this paper, we arg…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Object SLAM introduces the concept of objects into Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and helps understand indoor scenes for mobile robots and object-level interactive applications. The state-of-art object SLAM systems face challenges such as partial observations, occlusions, unobservable problems, limiting the mapping accuracy and robustness. This paper proposes a novel monocular Semantic Object SLAM (SO-SLAM) system that addresses the introduction of object spatial constraints. We explore three representative spatial constraints, including scale proportional constraint, symmetrical…
In this paper, we present the RISE-SLAM algorithm for performing visual-inertial simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), while improving estimation consistency. Specifically, in order to achieve real-time operation, existing approaches often assume previously-estimated states to be perfectly known, which leads to inconsistent estimates. Instead, based on the idea of the Schmidt-Kalman filter, which has processing cost linear in the size of the state vector but quadratic memory requirements, we derive a new consistent approximate method in the information domain, which has linear memory r…
DDN-SLAM: Real-time Dense Dynamic Neural Implicit SLAM
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Saarland University of Applied Sciences（萨尔应用技术大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Dalian Maritime University（大连海事大学）
LST-SLAM: A Stereo Thermal SLAM System for Kilometer-Scale Dynamic Environments
PEAK-Lab, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州）峰值实验室）；School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学电子与电气工程学院）
We propose DSP-SLAM, an object-oriented SLAM system that builds a rich and accurate joint map of dense 3D models for foreground objects, and sparse landmark points to represent the background. DSP-SLAM takes as input the 3D point cloud reconstructed by a feature-based SLAM system and equips it with the ability to enhance its sparse map with dense reconstructions of detected objects. Objects are detected via semantic instance segmentation, and their shape and pose is estimated using category-specific deep shape embeddings as priors, via a novel second order optimization. Our object-aware bundle…
Existing simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms are not robust in challenging low-texture environments because there are only few salient features. The resulting sparse or semi-dense map also conveys little information for motion planning. Though some work utilize plane or scene layout for dense map regularization, they require decent state estimation from other sources. In this paper, we propose real-time monocular plane SLAM to demonstrate that scene understanding could improve both state estimation and dense mapping especially in low-texture environments. The plane measurem…
