Aiming at the application environment of indoor mobile robots, this paper proposes a sparse object-level SLAM algorithm based on an RGB-D camera. A quadric representation is used as a landmark to compactly model objects, including their position, orientation, and occupied space. The state-of-art quadric-based SLAM algorithm faces the observability problem caused by the limited perspective under the plane trajectory of the mobile robot. To solve the problem, the proposed algorithm fuses both object detection and point cloud data to estimate the quadric parameters. It finishes the quadric initialization based on a single frame of RGB-D data, which significantly reduces the requirements for perspective changes. As objects are often observed locally, the proposed algorithm uses the symmetrical properties of indoor artificial objects to estimate the occluded parts to obtain more accurate quadric parameters. Experiments have shown that compared with the state-of-art algorithm, especially on the forward trajectory of mobile robots, the proposed algorithm significantly improves the accuracy and convergence speed of quadric reconstruction. Finally, we made available an opensource implementation to replicate the experiments.
Object-oriented SLAM is a popular technology in autonomous driving and robotics. In this paper, we propose a stereo visual SLAM with a robust quadric landmark representation method. The system consists of four components, including deep learning detection, object-oriented data association, dual quadric landmark initialization and object-based pose optimization. State-of-the-art quadric-based SLAM algorithms always face observation related problems and are sensitive to observation noise, which limits their application in outdoor scenes. To solve this problem, we propose a quadric initialization…
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Australian Centre for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) is a fundamental problem in mobile robotics. While point-based SLAM methods provide accurate camera localization, the generated maps lack semantic information. On the other hand, state of the art object detection methods provide rich information about entities present in the scene from a single image. This work marries the two and proposes a method for representing generic objects as quadrics which allows object detections to be seamlessly integrated in a SLAM framework. For scene coverage, additional dominant planar structures are modeled as infini…
In Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) problems, high-level landmarks have the potential to build compact and informative maps compared to traditional point-based landmarks. In this work, we focus on the parameterization of frequently used geometric primitives including points, lines, planes, ellipsoids, cylinders, and cones. We first present a unified representation based on quadrics, leading to a consistent and concise formulation. Then we further study a decomposed model of quadrics that discloses the symmetric and degenerated properties of a primitive. Based on the decomposition, …
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；Dyson Technology Ltd.（戴森科技有限公司）
There are many possibilities for how to represent the map in simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM). While sparse, keypoint-based SLAM systems have achieved impressive levels of accuracy and robustness, their maps may not be suitable for many robotic tasks. Dense SLAM systems are capable of producing dense reconstructions, but can be computationally expensive and, like sparse systems, lack higher-level information about the structure of a scene. Human-made environments contain a lot of structure, and we seek to take advantage of this by enabling the use of quadric surfaces as features in…
Convex Hull-based Algebraic Constraint for Visual Quadric SLAM
School of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University（同济大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Institute of Intelligent Vehicles, Tongji University（同济大学智能车辆研究所）；School of Surveying and Geo-Informatics, Tongji University（同济大学测量与地理信息学院）
ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚研究委员会机器人视觉卓越中心）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
In this paper, we use 2D object detections from multiple views to simultaneously estimate a 3D quadric surface for each object and localize the camera position. We derive a SLAM formulation that uses dual quadrics as 3D landmark representations, exploiting their ability to compactly represent the size, position and orientation of an object, and show how 2D object detections can directly constrain the quadric parameters via a novel geometric error formulation. We develop a sensor model for object detectors that addresses the challenge of partially visible objects, and demonstrate how to jointly…
The scale ambiguity problem is inherently unsolvable to monocular SLAM without the metric baseline between moving cameras. In this paper, we present a novel scale estimation approach based on an object-level SLAM system. To obtain the absolute scale of the reconstructed map, we derive a nonlinear optimization method to make the scaled dimensions of objects conforming to the distribution of their sizes in the physical world, without relying on any prior information of gravity direction. We adopt the dual quadric to represent objects for its ability to fit objects compactly and accurately. In th…
ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision（ARC机器人视觉卓越中心）；Queensland University of Technology (QUT)（昆士兰科技大学）
Research in Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) is increasingly moving towards richer world representations involving objects and high level features that enable a semantic model of the world for robots, potentially leading to a more meaningful set of robot-world interactions. Many of these advances are grounded in state-of-the-art computer vision techniques primarily developed in the context of image-based benchmark datasets, leaving several challenges to be addressed in adapting them for use in robotics. In this paper, we derive a formulation for Simultaneous Localization And Mappin…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯农工大学）
This paper presents a novel method to reduce the scale drift for indoor monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). We leverage the prior knowledge that in the indoor environment, the line segments form tight clusters, e.g. many door frames in a straight corridor are of the same shape, size and orientation, so the same edges of these door frames form a tight line segment cluster. We implement our method in the popular ORB-SLAM2, which also serves as our baseline. In the front end we detect the line segments in each frame and incrementally cluster them in the 3D space. In the back e…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) plays an important role in outdoor and indoor applications ranging from autonomous driving to indoor robotics. Outdoor SLAM has been widely used with the assistance of LiDAR or GPS. For indoor applications, the LiDAR technique does not satisfy the accuracy requirement and the GPS signals will be lost. An accurate and efficient scene sensing technique is required for indoor SLAM. As the most promising 3D sensing technique, the opportunities for indoor SLAM with fringe projection profilometry (FPP) systems are obvious, but methods to date have not ful…
Australian Center for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) is a fundamental problem in mobile robotics. While sparse point-based SLAM methods provide accurate camera localization, the generated maps lack semantic information. On the other hand, state of the art object detection methods provide rich information about entities present in the scene from a single image. This work incorporates a real-time deep-learned object detector to the monocular SLAM framework for representing generic objects as quadrics that permit detections to be seamlessly integrated while allowing the real-time performance. Finer recon…
Interdisciplinary Institute of Technological Innovation (3IT)（跨学科技术创新研究所（3IT））
For robots navigating using only a camera, illumination changes in indoor environments can cause re-localization failures during autonomous navigation. In this paper, we present a multi-session visual SLAM approach to create a map made of multiple variations of the same locations in different illumination conditions. The multi-session map can then be used at any hour of the day for improved re-localization capability. The approach presented is independent of the visual features used, and this is demonstrated by comparing re-localization performance between multi-session maps created using the …
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,…
ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚研究理事会机器人视觉卓越中心）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
Current approaches to object-oriented SLAM lack the ability to incorporate prior knowledge of the scene geometry, such as the expected global orientation of objects. We overcome this limitation by proposing a geometric factor that constrains the global orientation of objects in the map, depending on the objects' semantics. This new geometric factor is a first example of how semantics can inform and improve geometry in object-oriented SLAM. We implement the geometric factor for the recently proposed QuadricSLAM that represents landmarks as dual quadrics. The factor probabilistically models the …
College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学信息科学与工程学院）
Visual slam technology is one of the key technologies for robot to explore unknown environment independently. Accurate estimation of camera pose based on visual sensor is the basis of autonomous navigation and positioning. However, most visual slam algorithms are based on static environment assumption and cannot estimate accurate camera pose in dynamic environment. In order to solve this problem, a visual SLAM algorithm for indoor dynamic environment is proposed. Firstly, some moving objects are eliminated based on the depth information of RGB-D camera, and the initial camera pose is obtained …
Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）
2D LiDAR SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) is widely used in indoor environments due to its stability and flexibility. However, its mapping procedure is usually operated by a joystick in static environments, while indoor environments often are dynamic with moving objects such as people. The generated map with noisy points due to the dynamic objects is usually incomplete and distorted. To address this problem, we propose a framework of 2D-LiDAR-based SLAM without manual control that effectively excludes dynamic objects (people) and simplify the process for a robot to map an environme…
Simultaneous mapping and localization (SLAM) in an real indoor environment is still a challenging task. Traditional SLAM approaches rely heavily on low-level geometric constraints like corners or lines, which may lead to tracking failure in textureless surroundings or cluttered world with dynamic objects. In this paper, a compact semantic SLAM framework is proposed, with utilization of both geometric and object-level semantic constraints jointly, a more consistent mapping result, and more accurate pose estimation can be obtained. Two main contributions are presented int the paper, a) a robust …
TWC-SLAM: Multi-Agent Cooperative SLAM with Text Semantics and WiFi Features Integration for Similar Indoor Environments
Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ)（广东人工智能与数字经济实验室）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；College of natural resources and environment（自然资源与环境学院）
In this paper, we evaluate eight popular and open-source 3D Lidar and visual SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) algorithms, namely LOAM, Lego LOAM, LIO SAM, HDL Graph, ORB SLAM3, Basalt VIO, and SVO2. We have devised experiments both indoor and outdoor to investigate the effect of the following items: i) effect of mounting positions of the sensors, ii) effect of terrain type and vibration, iii) effect of motion (variation in linear and angular speed). We compare their performance in terms of relative and absolute pose error. We also provide comparison on their required computational …
We present a fast, scalable, and accurate Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system that represents indoor scenes as a graph of objects. Leveraging the observation that artificial environments are structured and occupied by recognizable objects, we show that a compositional scalable object mapping formulation is amenable to a robust SLAM solution for drift-free large scale indoor reconstruction. To achieve this, we propose a novel semantically assisted data association strategy that obtains unambiguous persistent object landmarks, and a 2.5D compositional rendering method that enable…
Exploring an unfamiliar indoor environment and avoiding obstacles is challenging for visually impaired people. Currently, several approaches achieve the avoidance of static obstacles based on the mapping of indoor scenes. To solve the issue of distinguishing dynamic obstacles, we propose an assistive system with an RGB-D sensor to detect dynamic information of a scene. Once the system captures an image, panoptic segmentation is performed to obtain the prior dynamic object information. With sparse feature points extracted from images and the depth information, poses of the user can be estimated…
Applications involving autonomous navigation and planning of mobile agents can benefit greatly by employing online Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques, however, their proper implementation still warrants an efficient amalgamation with any offline path planning method that may be used for the particular application. In this paper, such a case of amalgamation is considered for a LiDAR-based indoor mapping system which presents itself as a 2D coverage path planning problem implemented along with online SLAM. This paper shows how classic offline Coverage Path Planning (CPP) can…
SemanticTopoLoop: Semantic Loop Closure With 3D Topological Graph Based on Quadric-Level Object Map
Institute of Robotics and Automatic Information System, College of Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University（南开大学人工智能学院机器人与自动化信息系统研究所）；Tianjin Key Laboratory of Intelligent Robotics, Nankai University（南开大学天津市智能机器人重点实验室）
Federal Research Center “Computer Science and Control” of Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院计算机科学与控制联邦研究中心）
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is one of the key components of a control system that aims to ensure autonomous navigation of a mobile robot in unknown environments. In a variety of practical cases a robot might need to travel long distances in order to accomplish its mission. This requires long-term work of SLAM methods and building large maps. Consequently the computational burden (including high memory consumption for map storage) becomes a bottleneck. Indeed, state-of-the-art SLAM algorithms include specific techniques and optimizations to tackle this challenge, still their pe…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳市人工智能与机器人研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
This work presents a novel dense RGB-D SLAM approach for dynamic planar environments that enables simultaneous multi-object tracking, camera localisation and background reconstruction. Previous dynamic SLAM methods either rely on semantic segmentation to directly detect dynamic objects; or assume that dynamic objects occupy a smaller proportion of the camera view than the static background and can, therefore, be removed as outliers. Our approach, however, enables dense SLAM when the camera view is largely occluded by multiple dynamic objects with the aid of camera motion prior. The dynamic pla…
Singtel Cognitive and AI Lab for Enterprises（新电信企业认知与人工智能实验室）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Indoor self-localization is a highly demanded system function for smartphones. The current solutions based on inertial, radio frequency, and geomagnetic sensing may have degraded performance when their limiting factors take effect. In this paper, we present a new indoor simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system that utilizes the smartphone's built-in audio hardware and inertial measurement unit (IMU). Our system uses a smartphone's loudspeaker to emit near-inaudible chirps and then the microphone to record the acoustic echoes from the indoor environment. Our profiling measurements sh…
FR-SLAM: A SLAM Improvement Method Based on Floor Plan Registration
Suzhou Campus Southeast University（东南大学苏州校区）；Nanjing center for applied mathematics（南京应用数学中心）；School of Automation（自动化学院）；School of Cyber Science and Engineering（网络科学与工程学院）；Shenzhen Research Institute Southeast University（东南大学深圳研究院）；Samsung Electronics（三星电子）；Samsung Electronics(China) R&D Center（三星电子（中国）研发中心）
MG-SLAM: Structure Gaussian Splatting SLAM with Manhattan World Hypothesis
Department of Information Science and Technology and Department of Complexity Science and Engineering, The University of Tokyo（信息科学与技术系和复杂科学与工程系，东京大学）；Institute of Medical Robotics and Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（医疗机器人研究所和自动化系，上海交通大学）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, Columbia University（机械工程系，哥伦比亚大学）；School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（电子与电气工程学院，南洋理工大学）；Department of Computer Science, Dalian University of Technology（计算机科学系，大连理工大学）
University at Buffalo（布法罗大学）；University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）
Recent trends have accelerated the development of spatial applications on mobile devices and robots. These include navigation, augmented reality, human-robot interaction, and others. A key enabling technology for such applications is the understanding of the device's location and the map of the surrounding environment. This generic problem, referred to as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), is an extensively researched topic in robotics. However, visual SLAM algorithms face several challenges including perceptual aliasing and high computational cost. These challenges affect the accur…
MDF: Multi-Modal Data Fusion with CNN-Based Object Detection for Enhanced Indoor Localization Using LiDAR-SLAM
Department of Artificial Intelligence Convergence, Pukyong National University（人工智能融合系，浦项国立大学）；School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham Ningbo China（计算机科学学院，诺丁汉国际大学）
Real-Time Indoor Object SLAM with LLM-Enhanced Priors
Students of Contextual Robotics Institute, University of California San Diego（情境机器人研究所研究生，加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California San Diego（计算机科学与工程系 faculty，加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
In this paper, a simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm for tracking the motion of a pedestrian with a foot-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) is proposed. The algorithm uses two maps, namely, a motion map and a magnetic field map. The motion map captures typical motion patterns of pedestrians in buildings that are constrained by e.g. corridors and doors. The magnetic map models local magnetic field anomalies in the environment using a Gaussian process (GP) model and uses them as position information. These maps are used in a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter (RBPF) to cor…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳人工智能与机器人研究院）；Touchlab Limited（触觉实验室有限公司）；the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
This work presents a novel RGB-D-inertial dynamic SLAM method that can enable accurate localisation when the majority of the camera view is occluded by multiple dynamic objects over a long period of time. Most dynamic SLAM approaches either remove dynamic objects as outliers when they account for a minor proportion of the visual input, or detect dynamic objects using semantic segmentation before camera tracking. Therefore, dynamic objects that cause large occlusions are difficult to detect without prior information. The remaining visual information from the static background is also not enough…
It is often desirable to capture and map semantic information of an environment during simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Such semantic information can enable a robot to better distinguish places with similar low-level geometric and visual features and perform high-level tasks that use semantic information about objects to be manipulated and environments to be navigated. While semantic SLAM has gained increasing attention, there is little research on semanticlevel data association based on semantic objects, i.e., object-level data association. In this paper, we propose a novel objec…
Humanoid robots are playing increasingly important roles in real-life tasks especially when it comes to indoor applications. Providing robust solutions for the tasks such as indoor environment mapping, self-localisation and object recognition are essential to make the robots to be more autonomous, hence, more human-like. The well-known Aldebaran service robot Pepper is a suitable candidate for achieving these goals. In this paper, a hybrid system combining Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm with object recognition is developed and tested with Pepper robot in real-world cond…
Recent interest towards autonomous navigation and exploration robots for indoor applications has spurred research into indoor Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) robot systems. While most of these SLAM systems use Visual and LiDAR sensors in tandem with an odometry sensor, these odometry sensors drift over time. To combat this drift, Visual SLAM systems deploy compute and memory intensive search algorithms to detect `Loop Closures', which make the trajectory estimate globally consistent. To circumvent these resource (compute and memory) intensive algorithms, we present ViWiD, which in…
Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón (I3A)（阿拉贡工程研究院（I3A））；Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学）
This paper presents ORB-SLAM, a feature-based monocular SLAM system that operates in real time, in small and large, indoor and outdoor environments. The system is robust to severe motion clutter, allows wide baseline loop closing and relocalization, and includes full automatic initialization. Building on excellent algorithms of recent years, we designed from scratch a novel system that uses the same features for all SLAM tasks: tracking, mapping, relocalization, and loop closing. A survival of the fittest strategy that selects the points and keyframes of the reconstruction leads to excellent r…
Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón (I3A), Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学阿拉贡工程研究所（I3A））；Oculus Research
We present ORB-SLAM2 a complete SLAM system for monocular, stereo and RGB-D cameras, including map reuse, loop closing and relocalization capabilities. The system works in real-time on standard CPUs in a wide variety of environments from small hand-held indoors sequences, to drones flying in industrial environments and cars driving around a city. Our back-end based on bundle adjustment with monocular and stereo observations allows for accurate trajectory estimation with metric scale. Our system includes a lightweight localization mode that leverages visual odometry tracks for unmapped regions …
Towards Autonomous Indoor Parking: A Globally Consistent Semantic SLAM System and A Semantic Localization Subsystem
School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Key Laboratory of System Control and Information Processing, Ministry of Education of China, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai（自动化与智能感知学院、系统控制与信息处理重点实验室、中华人民共和国教育部、上海交通大学、上海）
State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacturing for Vehicle Body, Hunan University（湖南大学汽车车身先进设计制造国家重点实验室）
This paper proposes a new method that fuses acoustic measurements in the reverberation field and low-accuracy inertial measurement unit (IMU) motion reports for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Different from existing studies that only use acoustic data for direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimates, the source's distance from sensors is calculated with the direct-to-reverberant energy ratio (DRR) and applied as a new constraint to eliminate the nonlinear noise from motion reports. A particle filter is applied to estimate the critical distance, which is key for associating the source's …
