Alice-SLAM: Accurate and Lite-Communication Collaborative SLAM for Resource-Constrained Multi-Agent

Multi-agent collaborative simultaneous localization and mapping (Mac-SLAM) facilitates mutual localization among multi-agent and mapping in unknown environments. However, Mac-SLAM faces two main practical challenges in resource-constrained situations: heavy communication load and conflicts among multi-source maps. To address these issues, we propose Alice-SLAM: an accurate and lite-communication client-server collaborative SLAM system, reducing communication load while accuracy-guaranteed. Specifically, regarding high communication demand, we optimize communication load by compressing keyframe data and sharing only key map information instead of full map information. For inconsistency among multi-maps, we combine specific bundle adjustments (BA) and an adaptive strategy for active map optimization to enhance the consistency of the global map. A set of experiments demonstrates the superior accuracy and reduced communication load of the proposed Alice-SLAM on the EuRoC dataset and in multi-user augmented reality (AR) experiments conducted in our lab, highlighting its effectiveness in resource-constrained cases. We plan to open-source our code¹ to encourage further research and collaboration in this area.