Collaborative Visual Inertial SLAM for Multiple Smart Phones

TL;DR

This paper presents a multi-agent collaborative visual-inertial SLAM system for multiple smartphones that improves mapping accuracy and efficiency through centralized data processing and environment sharing.

Contribution

It introduces a centralized architecture for multi-smartphone visual-inertial SLAM that enables independent exploration and robust map merging with comparable accuracy to high-resource systems.

Findings

System achieves mapping accuracy similar to VINS-Mono.

Effective environment overlap detection and map merging.

Validated on public datasets and real environments.

Abstract

The efficiency and accuracy of mapping are crucial in a large scene and long-term AR applications. Multi-agent cooperative SLAM is the precondition of multi-user AR interaction. The cooperation of multiple smart phones has the potential to improve efficiency and robustness of task completion and can complete tasks that a single agent cannot do. However, it depends on robust communication, efficient location detection, robust mapping, and efficient information sharing among agents. We propose a multi-intelligence collaborative monocular visual-inertial SLAM deployed on multiple ios mobile devices with a centralized architecture. Each agent can independently explore the environment, run a visual-inertial odometry module online, and then send all the measurement information to a central server with higher computing resources. The server manages all the information received, detects overlapping areas, merges and optimizes the map, and shares information with the agents when needed. We have verified the performance of the system in public datasets and real environments. The accuracy of mapping and fusion of the proposed system is comparable to VINS-Mono which requires higher computing resources.