FRAME: A Modular Framework for Autonomous Map Merging: Advancements in the Field
This addresses the challenge of autonomous map merging for multi-robot systems in complex environments, representing an incremental improvement over traditional methods.
The paper tackles the problem of merging 3D point cloud maps for multi-robot exploration by using place recognition and learned descriptors to detect overlaps efficiently, resulting in faster processing, improved accuracy, and robustness in underground environments.
In this article, a novel approach for merging 3D point cloud maps in the context of egocentric multi-robot exploration is presented. Unlike traditional methods, the proposed approach leverages state-of-the-art place recognition and learned descriptors to efficiently detect overlap between maps, eliminating the need for the time-consuming global feature extraction and feature matching process. The estimated overlapping regions are used to calculate a homogeneous rigid transform, which serves as an initial condition for the GICP point cloud registration algorithm to refine the alignment between the maps. The advantages of this approach include faster processing time, improved accuracy, and increased robustness in challenging environments. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed framework is successfully demonstrated through multiple field missions of robot exploration in a variety of different underground environments.