NF-iSAM: Incremental Smoothing and Mapping via Normalizing Flows
This addresses the challenge of non-Gaussian inference in robotics SLAM, offering a novel incremental solution for real-world applications.
The paper tackled the problem of performing simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) with non-Gaussian factors or non-linear models by introducing NF-iSAM, a method that uses normalizing flows for inference, achieving efficient incremental updates comparable to iSAM2 in non-Gaussian settings.
This paper presents a novel non-Gaussian inference algorithm, Normalizing Flow iSAM (NF-iSAM), for solving SLAM problems with non-Gaussian factors and/or non-linear measurement models. NF-iSAM exploits the expressive power of neural networks, and trains normalizing flows to draw samples from the joint posterior of non-Gaussian factor graphs. By leveraging the Bayes tree, NF-iSAM is able to exploit the sparsity structure of SLAM, thus enabling efficient incremental updates similar to iSAM2, albeit in the more challenging non-Gaussian setting. We demonstrate the performance of NF-iSAM and compare it against the state-of-the-art algorithms such as iSAM2 (Gaussian) and mm-iSAM (non-Gaussian) in synthetic and real range-only SLAM datasets.