# ViTa-SLAM: A Bio-inspired Visuo-Tactile SLAM for Navigation while Interacting with Aliased Environments

## TL;DR

ViTa-SLAM is a novel bio-inspired SLAM framework that integrates vision and tactile sensing, enabling robots to navigate and recognize environments even in ambiguous or aliased scenes by fusing multi-sensory data.

## Contribution

It introduces a new multi-sensory SLAM approach combining vision and tactile data, improving robustness in ambiguous environments over previous visual-only or tactile-only methods.

## Key findings

- Successfully handles ambiguous scenes with sensor fusion.
- Enhances environment recognition through combined visuo-tactile data.
- Provides a natural interaction mechanism during navigation.

## Abstract

RatSLAM is a rat hippocampus-inspired visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) framework capable of generating semi-metric topological representations of indoor and outdoor environments. Whisker-RatSLAM is a 6D extension of the RatSLAM and primarily focuses on object recognition by generating point clouds of objects based on whisking information. This paper introduces a novel extension to both former works that is referred to as ViTa-SLAM that harnesses both vision and tactile information for performing SLAM. This not only allows the robot to perform natural interaction with the environment whilst navigating, as is normally seen in nature, but also provides a mechanism to fuse non-unique tactile and unique visual data. Compared to the former works, our approach can handle ambiguous scenes in which one sensor alone is not capable of identifying false-positive loop-closures.