SlideSLAM: Sparse, Lightweight, Decentralized Metric-Semantic SLAM for Multi-Robot Navigation
Microsoft（微软公司）；GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学GRASP实验室）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校电气与计算机工程系）
Xu Liu, Jiuzhou Lei, Ankit Prabhu, Yuezhan Tao, Igor Spasojevic, Pratik Chaudhari, Nikolay Atanasov, Vijay Kumar
备注：
Xu Liu, Jiuzhou Lei, and Ankit Prabhu contributed equally to this work
This paper develops a real-time decentralized metric-semantic SLAM algorithm that enables a heterogeneous robot team to collaboratively construct object-based metric-semantic maps. The proposed framework integrates a data-driven front-end for instance segmentation from either RGBD cameras or LiDARs and a custom back-end for optimizing robot trajectories and object landmarks in the map. To allow multiple robots to merge their information, we design semantics-driven place recognition algorithms that leverage the informativeness and viewpoint invariance of the object-level metric-semantic map for inter-robot loop closure detection. A communication module is designed to track each robot's observations and those of other robots whenever communication links are available. The framework supports real-time, decentralized operation onboard the robots and has been integrated with three types of aerial and ground platforms. We validate its effectiveness through experiments in both indoor and outdoor environments, as well as benchmarks on public datasets and comparisons with existing methods. The framework is open-sourced and suitable for both single-agent and multi-robot real-time metric-semantic SLAM applications. The code is available at: https://github.com/KumarRobotics/SLIDE_SLAM.
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 Zurich（苏黎世大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Decentralized visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a powerful tool for multi-robot applications in environments where absolute positioning systems are not available. Being visual, it relies on cameras, cheap, lightweight and versatile sensors, and being decentralized, it does not rely on communication to a central ground station. In this work, we integrate state-of-the-art decentralized SLAM components into a new, complete decentralized visual SLAM system. To allow for data association and co-optimization, existing decentralized visual SLAM systems regularly exchange the full…
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing（萨格勒布大学电气工程与计算学院）
This paper describes an application of the Cartographer graph SLAM stack as a pose sensor in a UAV feedback control loop, with certain application-specific changes in the SLAM stack such as smoothing of the optimized pose. Pose estimation is performed by fusing 3D LiDAR/IMU-based proprioception with GPS position measurements by means of pose graph optimisation. Moreover, partial environment maps built from the LiDAR data (submaps) within the Cartographer SLAM stack are marshalled into OctoMap, an Octree-based voxel map implementation. The OctoMap is further used for navigation tasks such as pa…
Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (v-SLAM) and navigation of multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in an unknown environment have grown in popularity for both research and education. However, due to the complex hardware setup, safety precautions, and battery constraints, extensive physical testing can be expensive and time-consuming. As an alternative solution, simulation tools lower the barrier to carry out the algorithm testing and validation before field trials. In this letter, we customize the ROS-Gazebo-PX4 simulator in deep and provide an end-to-end simulation solution for…
Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；University of the West of England（西英格兰大学）
RatSLAM is a rat hippocampus-inspired visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) framework capable of generating semi-metric topological representations of indoor and outdoor environments. Whisker-RatSLAM is a 6D extension of the RatSLAM and primarily focuses on object recognition by generating point clouds of objects based on whisking information. This paper introduces a novel extension to both former works that is referred to as ViTa-SLAM that harnesses both vision and tactile information for performing SLAM. This not only allows the robot to perform natural interaction with the env…
3D Foundation Model-Based Loop Closing for Decentralized Collaborative SLAM
Department of Computer and Software Engineering, Polytechnique Montréal（计算机与软件工程系，蒙特利尔理工学院）；Oxford Robotics Institute, Dept. of Engineering Science, University of Oxford（牛津大学机器人研究所，工程科学系）
Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Federal Research Center for 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人工智能研究所）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）
Exploration is an important step in autonomous navigation of robotic systems. In this paper we introduce a series of enhancements for exploration algorithms in order to use them with vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) methods. We evaluate developed approaches in photo-realistic simulator in two modes: with ground-truth depths and neural network reconstructed depth maps as vSLAM input. We evaluate standard metrics in order to estimate exploration coverage.
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Visible light positioning (VLP) technology is a promising technique as it can provide high accuracy positioning based on the existing lighting infrastructure. However, existing approaches often require dense lighting distributions. Additionally, due to complicated indoor environments, it is still challenging to develop a robust VLP. In this work, we proposed loosely-coupled multi-sensor fusion method based on VLP and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), with light detection and ranging (LiDAR), odometry, and rolling shutter camera. Our method can provide accurate and robust robotics l…
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) remains challenging for a number of downstream applications, such as visual robot navigation, because of rapid turns, featureless walls, and poor camera quality. We introduce the Differentiable SLAM Network (SLAM-net) along with a navigation architecture to enable planar robot navigation in previously unseen indoor environments. SLAM-net encodes a particle filter based SLAM algorithm in a differentiable computation graph, and learns task-oriented neural network components by backpropagating through the SLAM algorithm. Because it can optimize all mod…
MINES ParisTech, PSL Research University（巴黎高等矿业学院，巴黎文理研究大学）
The Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is both the historical algorithm for multi-sensor fusion and still state of the art in numerous industrial applications. However, it may prove inconsistent in the presence of unobservability under a group of transformations. In this paper we first build an alternative EKF based on an alternative nonlinear state error. This EKF is intimately related to the theory of the Invariant EKF (IEKF). Then, under a simple compatibility assumption between the error and the transformation group, we prove the linearized model of the alternative EKF automatically captures the…
Gaining spatial awareness of the Operating Room (OR) for surgical robotic systems is a key technology that can enable intelligent applications aiming at improved OR workflow. In this work, we present a method for semantic dense reconstruction of the OR scene using multiple RGB-D cameras attached and registered to the da Vinci Xi surgical system. We developed a novel SLAM approach for robot pose tracking in dynamic OR environments and dense reconstruction of the static OR table object. We validated our techniques in a mock OR by collecting data sequences with corresponding optical tracking traj…
Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院自主系统实验室）
Visual robot navigation within large-scale, semi-structured environments deals with various challenges such as computation intensive path planning algorithms or insufficient knowledge about traversable spaces. Moreover, many state-of-the-art navigation approaches only operate locally instead of gaining a more conceptual understanding of the planning objective. This limits the complexity of tasks a robot can accomplish and makes it harder to deal with uncertainties that are present in the context of real-time robotics applications. In this work, we present Topomap, a framework which simplifies …
Decentralized Pose Graph Riemannian Optimization for Object-based Multi-Robot SLAM
College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学控制科学与工程学院）；Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University（同济大学上海智能自主系统研究院）；Division of Decision and Control Systems, School of EECS, KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院电气工程与计算机科学学院决策与控制系统系）
Universidad de Chile（智利大学）；Advanced Mining Technology Center（先进采矿技术中心）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
We propose a Visual-SLAM based localization and navigation system for service robots. Our system is built on top of the ORB-SLAM monocular system but extended by the inclusion of wheel odometry in the estimation procedures. As a case study, the proposed system is validated using the Pepper robot, whose short-range LIDARs and RGB-D camera do not allow the robot to self-localize in large environments. The localization system is tested in navigation tasks using Pepper in two different environments: a medium-size laboratory, and a large-size hall.
Visual-inertial SLAM is essential for robot navigation in GPS-denied environments, e.g. indoor, underground. Conventionally, the performance of visual-inertial SLAM is evaluated with open-loop analysis, with a focus on the drift level of SLAM systems. In this paper, we raise the question on the importance of visual estimation latency in closed-loop navigation tasks, such as accurate trajectory tracking. To understand the impact of both drift and latency on visual-inertial SLAM systems, a closed-loop benchmarking simulation is conducted, where a robot is commanded to follow a desired trajectory…
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…
Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo（东京大学工业科学研究所）；Microsoft（微软）
Robot navigation technology is required to accomplish difficult tasks in various environments. In navigation, it is necessary to know the information of the external environments and the state of the robot under the environment. On the other hand, various studies have been done on SLAM technology, which is also used for navigation, but also applied to devices for Mixed Reality and the like. In this paper, we propose a robot-device calibration method for navigation with a device using SLAM technology on a robot. The calibration is performed by using the position and orientation information give…
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）
IIIT Hyderabad（国际信息技术研究所海得拉巴分校）；University of Tartu（塔尔图大学）
We present UrbanFly: an uncertainty-aware real-time planning framework for quadrotor navigation in urban high-rise environments. A core aspect of UrbanFly is its ability to robustly plan directly on the sparse point clouds generated by a Monocular Visual Inertial SLAM (VINS) backend. It achieves this by using the sparse point clouds to build an uncertainty-integrated cuboid representation of the environment through a data-driven monocular plane segmentation network. Our chosen world model provides faster distance queries than the more common voxel-grid representation, and UrbanFly leverages th…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research（新加坡资讯通信研究院）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）
SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) seeks to provide a moving agent with real-time self-localization. To achieve real-time speed, SLAM incrementally propagates position estimates. This makes SLAM fast but also makes it vulnerable to local pose estimation failures. As local pose estimation is ill-conditioned, local pose estimation failures happen regularly, making the overall SLAM system brittle. This paper attempts to correct this problem. We note that while local pose estimation is ill-conditioned, pose estimation over longer sequences is well-conditioned. Thus, local pose estimation…
Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) has drawn increasing interests in autonomous driving. However, LiDAR-SLAM suffers from accumulating errors which can be significantly mitigated by Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). Precise Point Positioning (PPP), an accurate GNSS operation mode independent of base stations, gains more popularity in unmanned systems. Considering the features of the two technologies, LiDAR-SLAM and PPP, this paper proposes a SLAM system, namely P3-LOAM (PPP based LiDAR Odometry and Mapping) which couples LiDAR-SLAM a…
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；Oculus Research（奥库鲁斯研究院）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）
Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) are strongly limited in their payload and power capacity. In order to implement autonomous navigation, algorithms are therefore desirable that use sensory equipment that is as small, low-weight, and low-power consuming as possible. In this paper, we propose a method for autonomous MAV navigation and exploration using a low-cost consumer-grade quadrocopter equipped with a monocular camera. Our vision-based navigation system builds on LSD-SLAM which estimates the MAV trajectory and a semi-dense reconstruction of the environment in real-time. Since LSD-SLAM only deter…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)（麻省理工学院（MIT））；Northeastern University（东北大学）
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a critical capability in autonomous navigation, but in order to scale SLAM to the setting of "lifelong" SLAM, particularly under memory or computation constraints, a robot must be able to determine what information should be retained and what can safely be forgotten. In graph-based SLAM, the number of edges (measurements) in a pose graph determines both the memory requirements of storing a robot's observations and the computational expense of algorithms deployed for performing state estimation using those observations; both of which can grow unbo…
Control-Barrier-Aided Teleoperation with Visual-Inertial SLAM for Safe MAV Navigation in Complex Environments
Learning Systems and Robotics Lab, School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich（学习系统与机器人实验室，计算、信息与技术学院，慕尼黑技术大学）；Smart Robotics Lab, School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich（智能机器人实验室，计算、信息与技术学院，慕尼黑技术大学）；Smart Robotics Lab, Department of Computing, Imperial College London（智能机器人实验室，计算系，伦敦帝国理工学院）；Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intellig（慕尼黑机器人与机器智能研究所）
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）
Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems are an essential component in agricultural robotics that enable autonomous navigation and the construction of accurate 3D maps of agricultural fields. However, lack of texture, varying illumination conditions, and lack of structure in the environment pose a challenge for Visual-SLAM systems that rely on traditional feature extraction and matching algorithms such as ORB or SIFT. This paper proposes 1) an object-level feature association algorithm that enables the creation of 3D reconstructions robustly by taking advantage of the struct…
In this paper, a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based method is proposed to navigate the robot team through unknown complex environments, where the geometric centroid of the robot team aims to reach the goal position while avoiding collisions and maintaining connectivity. Decentralized robot-level policies are derived using a mechanism of centralized learning and decentralized executing. The proposed method can derive end-to-end policies, which map raw lidar measurements into velocity control commands of robots without the necessity of constructing obstacle maps. Simulation and indoor…
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…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
Although Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) has been an active research topic for decades, current state-of-the-art methods still suffer from instability or inaccuracy due to feature insufficiency or its inherent estimation drift, in many civilian environments. To resolve these issues, we propose a navigation system combing the SLAM and prior-map-based localization. Specifically, we consider additional integration of line and plane features, which are ubiquitous and more structurally salient in civilian environments, into the SLAM to ensure feature sufficiency and localization robust…
Scalable Outdoors Autonomous Drone Flight with Visual-Inertial SLAM and Dense Submaps Built without LiDAR
Technical University of Munich（技术大学慕尼黑）；School of Computation, Information and Technology（计算、信息与技术学院）；Mobile Robotics Lab（移动机器人实验室）；Department of Computing（计算学院）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）；Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering（机械与过程工程学院）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI)（慕尼黑机器人与机器智能研究所）；Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)（慕尼黑机器学习中心）
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Sensing and Robotics for Infrastructure Laboratory（基础设施感知与机器人实验室）；Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science & Engineering（麻省理工学院-WHOI联合海洋学/应用海洋科学与工程计划）；Robust Autonomy Lab（自主性实验室）
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) frameworks for autonomous navigation rely on robust data association to identify loop closures for back-end trajectory optimization. In the case of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) equipped with multibeam echosounders (MBES), data association is particularly challenging due to the scarcity of identifiable landmarks in the seabed, the large drift in dead-reckoning navigation estimates to which AUVs are prone and the low resolution characteristic of MBES data. Deep learning solutions to loop closure detection have shown excellent performance on d…
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…
Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；UIUC（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
This paper studies the problem of image-goal navigation which involves navigating to the location indicated by a goal image in a novel previously unseen environment. To tackle this problem, we design topological representations for space that effectively leverage semantics and afford approximate geometric reasoning. At the heart of our representations are nodes with associated semantic features, that are interconnected using coarse geometric information. We describe supervised learning-based algorithms that can build, maintain and use such representations under noisy actuation. Experimental st…
SLAM-Based Navigation and Fault Resilience in a Surveillance Quadcopter with Embedded Vision Systems
Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University（古鲁·戈宾德·辛格·因德拉普拉斯塔大学）；Delhi Skill and Entrepreneurship University (DSEU)（德里技能与创业大学（DSEU））；Delhi Institute of Tool Engineering（德里工具工程学院）
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…
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…
