SLAM is one of the most fundamental areas of research in robotics and computer vision. State of the art solutions has advanced significantly in terms of accuracy and stability. Unfortunately, not all the approaches are available as open-source solutions and free to use. The results of some of them are difficult to reproduce, and there is a lack of comparison on common datasets. In our work, we make a comparative analysis of state-of-the-art open-source methods. We assess the algorithms based on accuracy, computational performance, robustness, and fault tolerance. Moreover, we present a comparison of datasets as well as an analysis of algorithms from a practical point of view. The findings of the work raise several crucial questions for SLAM researchers.
A robot localization problem demands a fair comparison of the positioning algorithms. A reference trajectory of the robot's movement is needed to estimate errors and evaluate a quality of the localization. In this article, we propose the Prior Distribution Refinement method for generating a reference trajectory of a mobile robot with the Monte Carlo-based localization system. The proposed approach can be applied for both indoor and outdoor environments of an arbitrary size without the need for expensive position tracking sensors or intervention in the testing infrastructure. The reference trajectory is generated by running the algorithm over a so-called Particles' Transition Graph, obtained from a resampling stage of Monte Carlo localization. The prior distribution of particles is then refined by forward-backward propagation through the graph and exploring the connections between particles. The Viterbi algorithm is applied afterwards to generate a reference trajectory based on refined particles' distribution. We demonstrate that such an approach is capable of generating accurate estimates of a mobile robot's position and orientation with the only requirement of moderate quality of localization system being used as a core algorithm for iterative optimization.
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