Tag Archives: Long-term Slam

Faster long-term SLAM through direct use of Lie groups in filtering

May 21, 2018 07:52 ,

Kruno Lenac, Josip Ćesić, Ivan Marković, and Ivan Petrović, Exactly sparse delayed state filter on Lie groups for long-term pose graph SLAM, The International Journal of Robotics Research Vol 37, Issue 6, pp. 585 – 610 DOI: 10.1177/0278364918767756.

In this paper we propose a simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) back-end solution called the exactly sparse delayed state filter on Lie groups (LG-ESDSF). We derive LG-ESDSF and demonstrate that it retains all the good characteristics of the classic Euclidean ESDSF, the main advantage being the exact sparsity of the information matrix. The key advantage of LG-ESDSF in comparison with the classic ESDSF lies in the ability to respect the state space geometry by negotiating uncertainties and employing filtering equations directly on Lie groups. We also exploit the special structure of the information matrix in order to allow long-term operation while the robot is moving repeatedly through the same environment. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed SLAM solution, we conducted extensive experiments on two different publicly available datasets, namely the KITTI and EuRoC datasets, using two front-ends: one based on the stereo camera and the other on the 3D LIDAR. We compare LG-ESDSF with the general graph optimization framework (g2o) when coupled with the same front-ends. Similarly to g2o the proposed LG-ESDSF is front-end agnostic and the comparison demonstrates that our solution can match the accuracy of g2o, while maintaining faster computation times. Furthermore, the proposed back-end coupled with the stereo camera front-end forms a complete visual SLAM solution dubbed LG-SLAM. Finally, we evaluated LG-SLAM using the online KITTI protocol and at the time of writing it achieved the second best result among the stereo odometry solutions and the best result among the tested SLAM algorithms.

Posted in: Mobile robot SLAM , Tagged: , ,

A very interesting review of current approaches to SLAM based on smoothing (i.e., graph optimization) and in clustering the map into submaps

July 22, 2015 09:37 ,

Jiantong Cheng, Jonghyuk Kim, Jinliang Shao, Weihua Zhang, Robust linear pose graph-based SLAM, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Volume 72, October 2015, Pages 71-82, ISSN 0921-8890, DOI: 10.1016/j.robot.2015.04.010.

This paper addresses a robust and efficient solution to eliminate false loop-closures in a pose-graph linear SLAM problem. Linear SLAM was recently demonstrated based on submap joining techniques in which a nonlinear coordinate transformation was performed separately out of the optimization loop, resulting in a convex optimization problem. This however introduces added complexities in dealing with false loop-closures, which mostly stems from two factors: (a) the limited local observations in map-joining stages and (b) the non block-diagonal nature of the information matrix of each submap. To address these problems, we propose a Robust Linear SLAM by (a) developing a delayed optimization for outlier candidates and (b) utilizing a Schur complement to efficiently eliminate corrupted information block. Based on this new strategy, we prove that the spread of outlier information does not compromise the optimization performance of inliers and can be fully filtered out from the corrupted information matrix. Experimental results based on public synthetic and real-world datasets in 2D and 3D environments show that this robust approach can cope with the incorrect loop-closures robustly and effectively.

Posted in: Mobile robot SLAM , Tagged: , , ,

A nice SLAM approach based on hybrid Normal Distribution Transform (NDT) + occupancy grid maps intended for long term operation in dynamic environments

May 4, 2015 10:23 ,

Erik Einhorn, Horst-Michael Gross, Generic NDT mapping in dynamic environments and its application for lifelong SLAM, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Volume 69, July 2015, Pages 28-39, ISSN 0921-8890, DOI: 10.1016/j.robot.2014.08.008.

In this paper, we present a new, generic approach for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). First of all, we propose an abstraction of the underlying sensor data using Normal Distribution Transform (NDT) maps that are suitable for making our approach independent from the used sensor and the dimension of the generated maps. We present several modifications for the original NDT mapping to handle free-space measurements explicitly. We additionally describe a method to detect and handle dynamic objects such as moving persons. This enables the usage of the proposed approach in highly dynamic environments. In the second part of this paper we describe our graph-based SLAM approach that is designed for lifelong usage. Therefore, the memory and computational complexity is limited by pruning the pose graph in an appropriate way.

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