A General Relationship between Optimality Criteria and Connectivity Indices for Active Graph-SLAM
This work addresses the computational bottleneck in active SLAM systems, offering a faster alternative for online decision-making, though it is incremental as it builds on existing optimal design theory.
The paper tackles the computational intractability of uncertainty quantification in active graph-SLAM by establishing a general relationship between the Fisher information matrix and the graph Laplacian, enabling the use of graph connectivity indices as utility functions with optimality guarantees. Experimental results show that this method achieves equivalent decision-making for active SLAM in a fraction of the time.
Quantifying uncertainty is a key stage in active simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), as it allows to identify the most informative actions to execute. However, dealing with full covariance or even Fisher information matrices (FIMs) is computationally heavy and easily becomes intractable for online systems. In this work, we study the paradigm of active graph-SLAM formulated over \textit{SE(n)}, and propose a general relationship between the FIM of the system and the Laplacian matrix of the underlying pose-graph. This link makes possible to use graph connectivity indices as utility functions with optimality guarantees, since they approximate the well-known optimality criteria that stem from optimal design theory. Experimental validation demonstrates that the proposed method leads to equivalent decisions for active SLAM in a fraction of the time.