Multi-robot LiDAR SLAM: a practical case study in underground tunnel environments

Abstract: Multi-robot SLAM aims at localizing and building a map with multiple robots, interacting with each other. In the work described in this article, we analyze the pipeline of a decentralized LiDAR SLAM system to study the current limitations of the state of the art, and we discover a significant source of failures, i.e., that the loop detection is the source of too many false positives. We therefore develop and propose a new heuristic to overcome these limitations. The environment taken as reference in this work is the highly challenging case of underground tunnels. We also highlight potential new research areas still under-explored.