Cloud-Based Framework for Scalable and Real-Time Multi-Robot SLAM

In the past decade, multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has been widely studied. However, the problem of collaborative SLAM with a large number of robots, such as dozens of robots, is far from being well solved. The challenges stem from not only the computation complexity in large-scale map merging but also the inefficiency to enable the parallel computing in this process, which is indispensable for us to make avail of the frontier of computing technology such as powerful cloud infrastructure. To effectively address these challenges, especially the latter one, we propose a scalable and real-time multi-robot visual SLAM framework based on the cloud robotic paradigm. The prominent feature of our framework is that it can distribute the SLAM process to multiple computing hosts in a cluster, which enables map building in parallel. To eliminate the bottleneck from data sharing between different sub-tasks, we also introduce diversified messaging pattern for various messaging scenarios, as well as the consistency policies for map data. The evaluations on the prototype of our framework, have shown that our method can do support as many as 256 robot entities simultaneously, without any compromising on the precision of poses estimation and map building.