General Place Recognition Survey: Towards Real-World Autonomy

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent advancements in place recognition for robotics, emphasizing the need for scalable, adaptable solutions to support real-world autonomous systems within the SLAM 2.0 framework.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art PR methods, challenges, datasets, and future directions, bridging the gap between research and real-world robotic applications.

Findings

Highlighting the importance of PR in SLAM 2.0

Reviewing key PR datasets and open-source tools

Identifying challenges and future research directions

Abstract

In the realm of robotics, the quest for achieving real-world autonomy, capable of executing large-scale and long-term operations, has positioned place recognition (PR) as a cornerstone technology. Despite the PR community's remarkable strides over the past two decades, garnering attention from fields like computer vision and robotics, the development of PR methods that sufficiently support real-world robotic systems remains a challenge. This paper aims to bridge this gap by highlighting the crucial role of PR within the framework of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) 2.0. This new phase in robotic navigation calls for scalable, adaptable, and efficient PR solutions by integrating advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. For this goal, we provide a comprehensive review of the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) advancements in PR, alongside the remaining challenges, and underscore its broad applications in robotics. This paper begins with an exploration of PR's formulation and key research challenges. We extensively review literature, focusing on related methods on place representation and solutions to various PR challenges. Applications showcasing PR's potential in robotics, key PR datasets, and open-source libraries are discussed. We conclude with a discussion on PR's future directions and provide a summary of the literature covered at: https://github.com/MetaSLAM/GPRS.