Measuring robustness of Visual SLAM
This work addresses the robustness problem in visual SLAM for robotics, but it is incremental as it focuses on evaluation and dataset creation rather than proposing a new method.
The authors evaluated the robustness of ORBSLAM2 for indoor robot navigation, finding that while accuracy is often good, robustness remains an issue, and they introduced a new large dataset with thousands of sequences to support this analysis.
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is an essential component of robotic systems. In this work we perform a feasibility study of RGB-D SLAM for the task of indoor robot navigation. Recent visual SLAM methods, e.g. ORBSLAM2 \cite{mur2017orb}, demonstrate really impressive accuracy, but the experiments in the papers are usually conducted on just a few sequences, that makes it difficult to reason about the robustness of the methods. Another problem is that all available RGB-D datasets contain the trajectories with very complex camera motions. In this work we extensively evaluate ORBSLAM2 to better understand the state-of-the-art. First, we conduct experiments on the popular publicly available datasets for RGB-D SLAM across the conventional metrics. We perform statistical analysis of the results and find correlations between the metrics and the attributes of the trajectories. Then, we introduce a new large and diverse HomeRobot dataset where we model the motions of a simple home robot. Our dataset is created using physically-based rendering with realistic lighting and contains the scenes composed by human designers. It includes thousands of sequences, that is two orders of magnitude greater than in previous works. We find that while in many cases the accuracy of SLAM is very good, the robustness is still an issue.