Multi-Robot Collaborative Mapping with Integrated Point-Line Features for Visual SLAM

Abstract

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) enables mobile robots to autonomously perform localization and mapping tasks in unknown environments. Despite significant progress achieved by visual SLAM systems in ideal conditions, relying solely on a single robot and point features for mapping in large-scale indoor environments with weak-texture structures can affect mapping efficiency and accuracy. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-robot collaborative mapping method based on point-line fusion to address this issue. This method is designed for indoor environments with weak-texture structures for localization and mapping. The feature-extraction algorithm, which combines point and line features, supplements the existing environment point feature-extraction method by introducing a line feature-extraction step. This integration ensures the accuracy of visual odometry estimation in scenes with pronounced weak-texture structure features. For relatively large indoor scenes, a scene-recognition-based map-fusion method is proposed in this paper to enhance mapping efficiency. This method relies on visual bag of words to determine overlapping areas in the scene, while also proposing a keyframe-extraction method based on photogrammetry to improve the algorithm’s robustness. By combining the Perspective-3-Point (P3P) algorithm and Bundle Adjustment (BA) algorithm, the relative pose-transformation relationships of multi-robots in overlapping scenes are resolved, and map fusion is performed based on these relative pose relationships. We evaluated our algorithm on public datasets and a mobile robot platform. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm exhibits higher robustness and mapping accuracy. It shows significant effectiveness in handling mapping in scenarios with weak texture and structure, as well as in small-scale map fusion.