ViWiD: Leveraging WiFi for Robust and Resource-Efficient SLAM

TL;DR

ViWiD introduces a dual-layered indoor SLAM system that combines WiFi and Visual sensors to reduce resource consumption while maintaining or improving localization accuracy.

Contribution

The paper presents ViWiD, a novel WiFi-Visual sensor fusion approach that significantly reduces compute and memory needs in indoor SLAM without sacrificing performance.

Findings

Achieves 4.3x reduction in compute resources

Achieves 4x reduction in memory usage

Maintains or exceeds state-of-the-art SLAM accuracy

Abstract

Recent interest towards autonomous navigation and exploration robots for indoor applications has spurred research into indoor Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) robot systems. While most of these SLAM systems use Visual and LiDAR sensors in tandem with an odometry sensor, these odometry sensors drift over time. To combat this drift, Visual SLAM systems deploy compute and memory intensive search algorithms to detect `Loop Closures', which make the trajectory estimate globally consistent. To circumvent these resource (compute and memory) intensive algorithms, we present ViWiD, which integrates WiFi and Visual sensors in a dual-layered system. This dual-layered approach separates the tasks of local and global trajectory estimation making ViWiD resource efficient while achieving on-par or better performance to state-of-the-art Visual SLAM. We demonstrate ViWiD's performance on four datasets, covering over 1500 m of traversed path and show 4.3x and 4x reduction in compute and memory consumption respectively compared to state-of-the-art Visual and Lidar SLAM systems with on par SLAM performance.