Kimera-Multi: a System for Distributed Multi-Robot Metric-Semantic Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Understand

We present the first fully distributed multi-robot system for dense metric-semantic Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM).

• Our system, dubbed Kimera-Multi, is implemented by a team of robots equipped with visual-inertial sensors, and builds a 3D mesh model of the environment in real-time, where each face of the mesh is annotated with a semantic label (e.g., building, road, objects).
• In Kimera-Multi, each robot builds a local trajectory estimate and a local mesh using Kimera.
• Then, when two robots are within communication range, they initiate a distributed place recognition and robust pose graph optimization protocol with a novel incremental maximum clique outlier rejection; the protocol allows the robots to improve their local trajectory estimates by leveraging inter-robot loop closures.