June 2010: I attended Robotics: Science and Systems, which was as usual a very stimulating conference, and particularly enjoyable this year as it was hosted by close colleagues and friends of mine in Zaragoza. We presented a paper by Hauke Strasdat, J. M. M. Montiel and myself called Scale Drift-Aware Large Scale Monocular SLAM. In this work, we have applied an optimisation approach right through the monocular SLAM problem, and studied the particular issues that arise due to the use of a single camera. Since monocular vision cannot measure metric scale, the maps it generates are subject to scale drift which becomes experimentally apparent when large loops are closed. We show how to take account of this during loop optimisation. This work relates closely to the RobotVision software library for SLAM optimisation that we have recently released open source, which includes code to replicate the results in the paper.
Scale Drift-Aware Large Scale Monocular SLAM (PDF format),
Hauke Strasdat, J. M. M. Montiel and Andrew J. Davison, RSS 2010.
