ExplORB-SLAM: Active Visual SLAMExploiting the Pose-graph Topology

Abstract

Deploying autonomous robots capable of exploring unknown environments has long been a topic of great relevance to the robotics community. In this work, we take a further step in that direction by presenting an open-source active visual SLAM framework that leverages the accuracy of a state-of-the-art graph-SLAM system and takes advantage of the fast utility computation that exploiting the structure of the underlying pose-graph offers. We achieve fast decision making through careful estimation of a posteriori weighted pose-graphs and by employing a utility function that balances exploration and exploitation principles.