Decentralised SLAM with Low-Bandwidth Communication for Teams of Vehicles

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for teams of collaborating vehicles where the communication bandwidth is limited. We present a novel SLAM algorithm that enables multiple vehicles to acquire a joint map, but which can cope with arbitrary latency and bandwidth limitations such as typically found in airborne vehicle applications. The key idea is to represent maps in information form (negative log-likelihood), and to selectively communicate subsets of the information tailored to the available communication resources. We show that our communication scheme preserves the consistency, which has important ramifications for data association problems. We also provide experimental results that illustrate the effectiveness of our approach in comparison with previous techniques.