Information-based reduced landmark SLAM

Abstract

In this paper, we present an information-based approach to select a reduced number of landmarks and poses for a robot to localize itself and simultaneously build an accurate map. We develop an information theoretic algorithm to efficiently reduce the number of landmarks and poses in a SLAM estimate without compromising the accuracy of the estimated trajectory. We also propose an incremental version of the reduction algorithm which can be used in SLAM framework resulting in information based reduced landmark SLAM. The results of reduced landmark based SLAM algorithm are shown on Victoria park dataset and a Synthetic dataset and are compared with standard graph SLAM (SAM [6]) algorithm. We demonstrate a reduction of 40-50% in the number of landmarks and around 55% in the number of poses with minimal estimation error as compared to standard SLAM algorithm.