Cooperative SLAM on small mobile robots

Abstract

We present a method for simultaneous localization and mapping for robots. The focus of our work is to use multiple small mobile robots which have only limited sensing and computational resources. Our robots each uses a laser pointer and an event based vision sensor to compute distances to its surroundings. The acquired data is used to update an occupancy map which can be shared among many robots at the same time. Here we demonstrate initial results for our proof-of-concept implementation. It runs in real-time using a mobile robot platform with an event based vision sensor for data acquisition. Distance estimates to objects are transferred to a remote computer to build a map of the environment. The results of our work can be used in future technical implementations, and for further investigations into cooperative mapping.