Decentralized visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a powerful tool for multi-robot applications in environments where absolute positioning systems are not available. Being visual, it relies on cameras, cheap, lightweight and versatile sensors, and being decentralized, it does not rely on communication to a central ground station. In this work, we integrate state-of-the-art decentralized SLAM components into a new, complete decentralized visual SLAM system. To allow for data association and co-optimization, existing decentralized visual SLAM systems regularly exchange the full map data between all robots, incurring large data transfers at a complexity that scales quadratically with the robot count. In contrast, our method performs efficient data association in two stages: in the first stage a compact full-image descriptor is deterministically sent to only one robot. In the second stage, which is only executed if the first stage succeeded, the data required for relative pose estimation is sent, again to only one robot. Thus, data association scales linearly with the robot count and uses highly compact place representations. For optimization, a state-of-the-art decentralized pose-graph optimization method is used. It exchanges a minimum amount of data which is linear with trajectory overlap. We characterize the resulting system and identify bottlenecks in its components. The system is evaluated on publicly available data and we provide open access to the code.
 This paper describes a new algorithm for cooperative and persistent simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) using multiple robots. Recent pose graph representations have proven very successful for single robot mapping and localization. Among these methods, incremental smoothing and mapping (iSAM) gives an exact incremental solution to the SLAM problem by solving a full nonlinear optimization problem in real-time. In this paper, we present a novel extension to iSAM to facilitate online multi-robot mapping based on multiple pose graphs. Our main contribution is a relative formulation of the relationship between multiple pose graphs that avoids the initialization problem and leads to an efficient solution when compared to a completely global formulation. The relative pose graphs are optimized together to provide a globally consistent multi-robot solution. Efficient access to covariances at any time for relative parameters is provided through iSAM, facilitating data association and loop closing. The performance of the technique is illustrated on various data sets including a publicly available multi-robot data set. Further evaluation is performed in a collaborative helicopter and ground robot experiment. This paper presents a new approach to the multi-robot map-alignment problem that enables teams of robots to build joint maps without initial knowledge of their relative poses. The key contribution of this work is an optimal algorithm for merging (not necessarily overlapping) maps that are created by different robots independently. Relative pose measurements between pairs of robots are processed to compute the coordinate transformation between any two maps. Noise in the robot-to-robot observations, propagated through the map-alignment process, increases the error in the position estimates of the transformed landmarks, and reduces the overall accuracy of the merged map. When there is overlap between the two maps, landmarks that appear twice provide additional information, in the form of constraints, which increases the alignment accuracy. Landmark duplicates are identified through a fast nearest-neighbor matching algorithm. In order to reduce the computational complexity of this search process, a kd-tree is used to represent the landmarks in the original map. The criterion employed for matching any two landmarks is the Mahalanobis distance. As a means of validation, we present experimental results obtained from two robots mapping an area of 4,800 m2