CamSLAM: Advanced Real-Time Mapping and Localization

CamSLAM

CamSLAM™ is a navigation software platform that provides fast, accurate real-time mapping and localization. It offers superior navigation, mapping, and safety for a range of robotic and related mobility applications including augmented and virtual reality, person tracking, robot/ drone control, vehicle navigation, and tele-manipulation.

Technology

The CamSLAM software platform exploits highly optimized vision algorithms for accurate localization. It works with multiple sensors for robust, low-power, real-time localization on mobile platforms.

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Key Capabilities of CamSLAM Suite

Navigation

  • Precisely locates in 3D both indoors and outdoors
  • Live GPS-denied navigation
  • Superior open-loop navigation algorithms provide high-accuracy estimates of movement with low drift rates

Mapping

  • Visual map generation and map-assisted navigation
  • Maps and tags areas of interest
  • Automatic real-time construction and updating of landmark maps with loop closures to reset navigation drift

Obstacle Detection and Safety

  • Robust stereo vision algorithms
  • Stereo-based 3D sensing enables high-accuracy obstacle detection and avoidance
  • Can use multiple sensors for dynamic performance in challenging conditions including motion blur, bumping into walls, moving people, and dark areas

Path Planning

  • Real-time localization enables repeatable precision
  • Dynamically creates maps to ensure low-drift errors in subsequent runs

Features

  • Can capture and process synchronized data from multiple sensors including accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, barometer, odometer, GPS and monocular/stereo camera data to form an optimal localization solution in real-time
  • Computes six degree of freedom (3D position and 3D orientation) navigation tracks in real time
  • Can continuously track visual features and estimate 3D location of scene points over large windows of time
  • Robust in difficult situations such as crowded areas, dark area, fast or very jerky platform motions
  • Able to generate visual landmark maps on the fly in real time and use landmarks to re-acquire positional constraints when revisiting a site
  • Maps can be stored and reused to improve localization, guide navigation, and provide highly accurate route re-tracing
  • Software libraries run on multiple devices such as those running Windows, Linux, and ARM-based processors
  • Runs on low-powered smartphone processors

Hardware and Sensors

CamSLAM is designed to run on low-cost sensor and processor hardware and can be ported to smartphones. SRI offers clients extensive hardware layer expertise integrating CamSLAM with COTS hardware including SRI sensor-processor boards incorporating multiple sensors: stereo/monocular cameras, IMU, barometer, magnetometer, GPS etc. with embedded FPGA/ARM processor and smartphone processor boards.


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