ORBBuf: A Robust Buffering Method for Remote Visual SLAM

TL;DR

ORBBuf is a novel buffering method designed to mitigate the impact of network data loss on remote visual SLAM systems, significantly improving robustness and accuracy across various scenarios.

Contribution

The paper introduces ORBBuf, an efficient greedy-like algorithm that optimizes frame buffering based on a similarity metric, enhancing remote visual SLAM robustness.

Findings

ORBBuf reduces SLAM error (RMSE) up to 50 times compared to existing methods.

It is effective across different SLAM algorithms, sensor types, environments, and network conditions.

The method is implemented on ROS and validated with extensive real-world datasets.

Abstract

The data loss caused by unreliable network seriously impacts the results of remote visual SLAM systems. From our experiment, a loss of less than 1 second of data can cause a visual SLAM algorithm to lose tracking. We present a novel buffering method, ORBBuf, to reduce the impact of data loss on remote visual SLAM systems. We model the buffering problem as an optimization problem by introducing a similarity metric between frames. To solve the buffering problem, we present an efficient greedy-like algorithm to discard the frames that have the least impact on the quality of SLAM results. We implement our ORBBuf method on ROS, a widely used middleware framework. Through an extensive evaluation on real-world scenarios and tens of gigabytes of datasets, we demonstrate that our ORBBuf method can be applied to different state-estimation algorithms (DSO and VINS-Fusion), different sensor data (both monocular images and stereo images), different scenes (both indoor and outdoor), and different network environments (both WiFi networks and 4G networks). Our experimental results indicate that the network losses indeed affect the SLAM results, and our ORBBuf method can reduce the RMSE up to 50 times comparing with the Drop-Oldest and Random buffering methods.