Multi-Robot Object SLAM Using Distributed Variational Inference

• Published in: IEEE robotics and automation letters Vol. 9; no. 10; pp. 8722 - 8729
• Main Authors: Cao, Hanwen, Shreedharan, Sriram, Atanasov, Nikolay
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.10.2024
• Subjects: Distributed robot systems; Kalman filters; Mirrors; multi-robot SLAM; Multi-robot systems; Optimization; probability and statistical methods; Robot kinematics; Simultaneous localization and mapping; Static analysis; Trajectory
• ISSN: 2377-3766; 2377-3766
• DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2024.3451389

Multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) enables a robot team to achieve coordinated tasks by relying on a common map of the environment. Constructing a map by centralized processing of the robot observations is undesirable because it creates a single point of failure and requires pre-existing infrastructure and significant communication throughput. This letter formulates multi-robot object SLAM as a variational inference problem over a communication graph subject to consensus constraints on the object estimates maintained by different robots. To solve the problem, we develop a distributed mirror descent algorithm with regularization enforcing consensus among the communicating robots. Using Gaussian distributions in the algorithm, we also derive a distributed multi-state constraint Kalman filter (MSCKF) for multi-robot object SLAM. Experiments on real and simulated data show that our method improves the trajectory and object estimates, compared to individual-robot SLAM, while achieving better scaling to large robot teams, compared to centralized multi-robot SLAM.