Fast, Robust, Accurate, Multi-Body Motion Aware SLAM

Simultaneous ego localization and surrounding object motion awareness are significant issues for the navigation capability of unmanned systems and virtual-real interaction applications. Robust and accurate data association at object and feature levels is one of the key factors in solving this problem. However, currently available solutions ignore the complementarity among different cues in the front-end object association and the negative effects of poorly tracked features on the back-end optimization. It makes them not robust enough in practical applications. Motivated by these observations, we make up rigid environment as a unified whole to assist state decoupling by integrating high-level semantic information, ultimately enabling simultaneous multi-states estimation. A filter-based multi-cues fusion object tracker is proposed for establishing more stable object-level data association. Combined with the object’s motion priors, the motion-aided feature tracking algorithm is proposed to improve the feature-level data association performance. Furthermore, a novel state estimation factor graph is designed which integrates a specific feature observation uncertainty model and the intrinsic priors of tracked object, and solved through sliding-window optimization. Our system is evaluated using the KITTI dataset and achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art object pose estimation systems both quantitatively and qualitatively. We have also validated our system on simulation environment and a real-world dataset to confirm the potential application value in different practical scenarios.