This paper introduces a new dataset dedicated to multi-robot stereo-visual and inertial Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM). This dataset consists in five indoor multi-robot scenarios acquired with ground and aerial robots in a former Air Museum at ONERA Meudon, France. Those scenarios were designed to exhibit some specific opportunities and challenges associated to collaborative SLAM. Each scenario includes synchronized sequences between multiple robots with stereo images and inertial measurements. They also exhibit explicit direct interactions between robots through the detection of mounted AprilTag markers [1]. Ground-truth trajectories for each robot were computed using Structure-from-Motion algorithms and constrained with the detection of fixed AprilTag markers placed as beacons on the experimental area. Those scenarios have been benchmarked on state-of-the-art monocular, stereo and visual-inertial SLAM algorithms to provide a baseline of the single-robot performances to be enhanced in collaborative frameworks.
This article introduces a decentralized multi-robot algorithm for Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) inspired from previous work on collaborative mapping [1]. This method makes robots jointly build and exchange i) a collection of 3D dense locally consistent submaps, based on a Truncated Signed Distance Field (TSDF) representation of the environment, and ii) a pose-graph representation which encodes the relative pose constraints between the TSDF submaps and the trajectory keyframes, derived from the odometry, inter-robot observations and loop closures. Such loop closures are spotted by aligning and fusing the TSDF submaps. The performances of this method have been evaluated on multi-robot scenarios built from the EuRoC dataset [2].
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