Visual SLAM shows significant progress in recent years due to high attention from vision community but still, challenges remain for low-textured environments. Feature based visual SLAMs do not produce reliable camera and structure estimates due to insufficient features in a low-textured environment. Moreover, existing visual SLAMs produce partial reconstruction when the number of 3D-2D correspondences is insufficient for incremental camera estimation using bundle adjustment. This paper presents Edge SLAM, a feature based monocular visual SLAM which mitigates the above mentioned problems. Our proposed Edge SLAM pipeline detects edge points from images and tracks those using optical flow for point correspondence. We further refine these point correspondences using geometrical relationship among three views. Owing to our edge-point tracking, we use a robust method for two-view initialization for bundle adjustment. Our proposed SLAM also identifies the potential situations where estimating a new camera into the existing reconstruction is becoming unreliable and we adopt a novel method to estimate the new camera reliably using a local optimization technique. We present an extensive evaluation of our proposed SLAM pipeline with most popular open datasets and compare with the state-of-the art. Experimental result indicates that our Edge SLAM is robust and works reliably well for both textured and less-textured environment in comparison to existing state-of-the-art SLAMs.

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The generation of robust global maps of an unknown cluttered environment through a collaborative robotic framework is challenging. We present a collaborative SLAM framework, CORB2I-SLAM, in which each participating robot carries a camera (monocular/stereo/RGB-D) and an inertial sensor to run odometry. A centralized server stores all the maps and executes processor-intensive tasks, e.g., loop closing, map merging, and global optimization. The proposed framework uses well-established Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO), and can be adapted to use Visual Odometry (VO) when the measurements from inertial sensors are noisy. The proposed system solves certain disadvantages of odometry-based systems such as erroneous pose estimation due to incorrect feature selection or losing track due to abrupt camera motion and provides a more accurate result. We perform feasibility tests on real robot autonomy and extensively validate the accuracy of CORB2I-SLAM on benchmark data sequences. We also evaluate its scalability and applicability in terms of the number of participating robots and network requirements, respectively.

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