Majorization Minimization Methods for Distributed Pose Graph Optimization with Convergence Guarantees
This addresses the problem of efficient and reliable distributed optimization in multi-robot SLAM, offering incremental improvements with theoretical guarantees.
The paper tackles distributed pose graph optimization for multi-robot SLAM by proposing majorization minimization methods, showing they converge to first-order critical points and achieve faster convergence with better solutions on 2D and 3D datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods.
In this paper, we consider the problem of distributed pose graph optimization (PGO) that has extensive applications in multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). We propose majorization minimization methods to distributed PGO and show that our proposed methods are guaranteed to converge to first-order critical points under mild conditions. Furthermore, since our proposed methods rely a proximal operator of distributed PGO, the convergence rate can be significantly accelerated with Nesterov's method, and more importantly, the acceleration induces no compromise of theoretical guarantees. In addition, we also present accelerated majorization minimization methods to the distributed chordal initialization that have a quadratic convergence, which can be used to compute an initial guess for distributed PGO. The efficacy of this work is validated through applications on a number of 2D and 3D SLAM datasets and comparisons with existing state-of-the-art methods, which indicates that our proposed methods have faster convergence and result in better solutions to distributed PGO.