SLAM à la carte - GPGPU for Globally Consistent Scan Matching.

Abstract

The computational complexity of SLAM is large and constitutes a challenge for real-time processing of a huge amount of sensor data with the limited resources of a mobile robot. Often, notebooks are used to control a mobile system and even these computing devices have nowadays graphics cards which allow general purpose computation using many cores. SLAM a la carte (graphique) exploits these capabilities and carries out 3D scan registrations on the GPU. A speed-up of more than one order of magnitude for precise 3D mapping is reported.