Exploring the effect of meta-structural information on the global consistency of SLAM

Abstract

Accurate online estimation of the environment structure simultaneously with the robot pose is a key capability for autonomous robotic vehicles. Classical simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms make no assumptions about the configuration of the points in the environment, however, real world scenes have significant structure (ground planes, buildings, walls, ceilings, etc.) that can be exploited. In this paper, we introduce meta-structural information associated with geometric primitives into the estimation problem and analyze their effect on the global structural consistency of the resulting map. Although we only consider the effect of adding planar and orthogonality information for the estimation of 3D points in a Manhattan-like world, this framework can be extended to any type of geometric, kinematic, dynamic or even semantic information. We evaluate our approach on a city-like simulated environment. We highlight the advantages of the proposed solution over SLAM formulation considering no prior knowledge about the configuration of 3D points in the environment.