SlideSLAM: Sparse, Lightweight, Decentralized Metric-Semantic SLAM for Multi-Robot Navigation

TL;DR

SlideSLAM introduces a real-time, decentralized metric-semantic SLAM framework that enables heterogeneous robot teams to collaboratively build object-based maps, integrating semantic recognition and inter-robot communication for improved multi-robot navigation.

Contribution

It presents a novel decentralized SLAM algorithm combining semantic segmentation, place recognition, and communication, suitable for heterogeneous multi-robot systems in real-time.

Findings

Effective multi-robot map merging demonstrated in indoor and outdoor environments.

Real-time operation achieved on aerial and ground platforms.

Outperforms existing methods on public datasets.

Abstract

This paper develops a real-time decentralized metric-semantic SLAM algorithm that enables a heterogeneous robot team to collaboratively construct object-based metric-semantic maps. The proposed framework integrates a data-driven front-end for instance segmentation from either RGBD cameras or LiDARs and a custom back-end for optimizing robot trajectories and object landmarks in the map. To allow multiple robots to merge their information, we design semantics-driven place recognition algorithms that leverage the informativeness and viewpoint invariance of the object-level metric-semantic map for inter-robot loop closure detection. A communication module is designed to track each robot's observations and those of other robots whenever communication links are available. The framework supports real-time, decentralized operation onboard the robots and has been integrated with three types of aerial and ground platforms. We validate its effectiveness through experiments in both indoor and outdoor environments, as well as benchmarks on public datasets and comparisons with existing methods. The framework is open-sourced and suitable for both single-agent and multi-robot real-time metric-semantic SLAM applications. The code is available at: https://github.com/KumarRobotics/SLIDE_SLAM.