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 obvi-slam


ObVi-SLAM: Long-Term Object-Visual SLAM

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract-- Robots responsible for tasks over long time scales must be able to localize consistently and scalably amid geometric, viewpoint, and appearance changes. Existing visual SLAM approaches rely on low-level feature descriptors that are not robust to such environmental changes and result in large map sizes that scale poorly over long-term deployments. In contrast, object detections are robust to environmental variations and lead to more compact representations, but most object-based SLAM systems target short-term indoor deployments with close objects. In this paper, we introduce ObVi-SLAM to overcome these challenges by leveraging the best of both approaches. ObVi-SLAM uses low-level visual features for high-quality short-term visual odometry; and to ensure global, long-term consistency, ObVi-SLAM builds an uncertainty-aware longterm map of persistent objects and updates it after every deployment. In the factor graph, factors with solid deployment sessions spanning different weather and lighting lines are present for all optimizations, whereas use of factors with conditions, we empirically show that ObVi-SLAM generates dashed lines is dependent on if the optimization is local or global.