A Minimalistic Approach to Appearance-Based Visual SLAM

This paper presents a vision-based approach to SLAM in indoor / outdoor environments with minimalistic sensing and computational requirements. The approach is based on a graph representation of robot poses, using a relaxation algorithm to obtain a globally consistent map. Each link corresponds to a relative measurement of the spatial relation between the two nodes it connects. The links describe the likelihood distribution of the relative pose as a Gaussian distribution. To estimate the covariance matrix for links obtained from an omni-directional vision sensor, a novel method is introduced based on the relative similarity of neighbouring images. This new method does not require determining distances to image features using multiple view geometry, for example. Combined indoor and outdoor experiments demonstrate that the approach can handle qualitatively different environments (without modification of the parameters), that it can cope with violations of the "flat floor assumption&q...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TROB
• Authors: Henrik Andreasson, Tom Duckett, Achim J. Lilienthal
• Keywords: Multiple View Geometry, Omni-directional Vision Sensor, TROB 2008, Vision-based Approach