Efficient Sparse Pose Adjustment for 2D mapping

• Published in: 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems pp. 22 - 29
• Main Authors: Konolige, K, Grisetti, G, Kümmerle, Rainer, Burgard, W, Limketkai, B, Vincent, R
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.10.2010
• Subjects: Linear systems; Optimization; Robustness; Simultaneous localization and mapping; Sparse matrices
• ISBN: 9781424466740; 1424466741
• ISSN: 2153-0858
• DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2010.5649043

Pose graphs have become a popular representation for solving the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem. A pose graph is a set of robot poses connected by nonlinear constraints obtained from observations of features common to nearby poses. Optimizing large pose graphs has been a bottleneck for mobile robots, since the computation time of direct nonlinear optimization can grow cubically with the size of the graph. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for constructing and solving the linear subproblem, which is the bottleneck of these direct methods. We compare our method, called Sparse Pose Adjustment (SPA), with competing indirect methods, and show that it outperforms them in terms of convergence speed and accuracy. We demonstrate its effectiveness on a large set of indoor real-world maps, and a very large simulated dataset. Open-source implementations in C++, and the datasets, are publicly available.