RAVIC: Reliable Agents in Centralized Visual Collaborative SLAM

Visual Collaborative Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) uses multiple mobile devices to capture images of their surroundings and map their environment collectively while simultaneously determining their position. In centralized approaches, a single server merges visual features from these devices to build a shared map. Offloading computationally intensive tasks benefits resource-limited mobile devices. However, due to unpredictable and heterogeneous communication links, maps at the server and on the devices can become asynchronous, potentially leading to real-time localization failures. To address these issues, we present Reliable Agents in Centralized Visual Collaborative SLAM (RAVIC), which employs an optimised server-to-agent communication strategy. This includes a novel keyframe selection method that exploits the server’s global map to improve tracking under high agent mobility and network latency. In addition, adjustments to agent-to-server communication and agent tracking algorithm reduce the computational demands on mobile devices, leading to a reduction in average tracking processing time of up to 27.2 ms. Our evaluation using benchmark datasets and different network conditions shows a drastic reduction in track loss probability from 61.4% to only 1.0% utilising merged map data in collaborative scenarios, demonstrating that collaboration increases the reliability of individual agents.