Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Also known as SLAM

Ask about this topic

Overview

SLAM estimates a robot’s changing position and a consistent map at the same time, enabling navigation where GPS or prior maps are unavailable. Systems combine camera, LiDAR, radar, sonar, and inertial measurements using feature or scan matching, sensor-fusion filters, and factor-graph optimization with loop closure to limit accumulated drift. Dense mapping increasingly uses neural fields, semantic scene graphs, and 3D Gaussian splatting, evaluated on indoor RGB-D benchmarks as well as outdoor driving and field-robot datasets. A central challenge is balancing accuracy, dense and useful maps, and real-time resource limits while remaining reliable in dynamic, low-texture, or changing environments.

Latest papers

CardsList

198 papers20 papers in the last four weeks, down 5% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

May 11, 2026

MAGS-SLAM: Monocular Multi-Agent Gaussian Splatting SLAM for Geometrically and Photometrically Consistent Reconstruction

Collaborative photorealistic 3D reconstruction from multiple agents enables rapid large-scale scene capture for virtual production and cooperative multi-robot exploration. While recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) SLAM algorithms can generate high-fidelity real-time mapping, most of the existing multi-agent Gaussian SLAM methods still rely on RGB-D sensors to obtain metric depth and simplify cross-agent alignment, limiting their deployment on low-cost or power-constrained robotic platforms, especially given the wider availability of RGB cameras. To address this challenge, we propose MAGS-SLAM, the first RGB-only multi-agent 3DGS SLAM framework for collaborative scene reconstruction. Each agent independently builds local monocular Gaussian submaps and transmits compact submap summaries rather than raw observations. To facilitate robust collaboration in the presence of monocular scale ambiguity, our framework integrates compact submap communication, geometry- and appearance-aware loop verification, and occupancy-aware Gaussian fusion, enabling coherent global reconstruction without active depth sensors. We further introduce ReplicaMultiagent Plus, a benchmark containing larger robot teams for evaluating collaborative Gaussian SLAM. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that MAGS-SLAM, using RGB images alone, achieves tracking accuracy, rendering quality, and geometric quality that are competitive with or superior to those of state-of-the-art RGB-D collaborative Gaussian SLAM methods.

Zhihao Cao, Qi Shao, Shuhao Zhai +4

ETH Zurich, Switzerland · University of Liverpool, United Kingdom · Harbin Engineering University, China +4

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping3D Gaussian SplattingMulti-Robot Systems3DGS SLAM3D ReconstructionVisual SLAM
AskPDF
May 10, 2026

Above and Below: Heterogeneous Multi-robot SLAM Across Surface and Underwater Domains

Multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a fundamental task in multi-robot operations. Robots must have a common understanding of their location and that of their team members to complete coordinated actions. However, multi-robot SLAM between Uncrewed Surface Vessels (USVs) and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) has primarily been achieved through acoustic pinging between robots to retrieve range measurements; a measurement technique requires that robots to be in similar locations simultaneously, have an uninterrupted path for signal propagation, and may necessitate synchronized clocks. This is especially challenging in complex, cluttered maritime environments, where structures may impede signals. However, these same structures may be observable above and below the water's surface, presenting an opportunity for inter-robot SLAM loop closure between USV and AUV data streams. This work builds upon recent research on inter-robot SLAM loop closure between USV and AUV data, extending it to propose a centralized multi-robot SLAM system. Each robot performs its state estimation, and we detect loop closures between each AUV and the USV data. These inter-robot loop closures are used to merge each robot's state estimate into a centralized graph, yielding estimates for the whole time history of the USV and all AUVs in the system. Validation is performed using real-world perceptual data in three different environments. Results show improved errors for AUVs in the multi-robot SLAM system compared to single-robot SLAM over the same trajectories. To our knowledge, this is the first instance of a multi-robot SLAM system with AUVs and USVs built on loop closures rather than acoustic distance measurements.

John McConnell, Armon Shariati, Paul Szenher +1

United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD, USA · Shield-AI, San Diego CA, USA · Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, USA

Simultaneous Localization and MappingMulti-Robot SystemsUnderwater RoboticsLoop Closure Detection
AskPDF
May 7, 2026

Dr-BA: Separable Optimization for Direct Radar Bundle Adjustment & Localization

This paper introduces Dr-BA, a first-of-its-kind radar bundle adjustment (BA) framework that operates directly on 2D spinning radar intensity images. Unlike camera or lidar sensors, radar is largely unaffected by precipitation, making it a critical modality for autonomous systems that require all-weather robustness. Existing state estimation approaches using spinning radar typically extract sparse point clouds from range-azimuth-intensity measurements and apply point cloud alignment techniques to estimate vehicle motion, scene structure, or to localize within an existing map. In contrast, Dr-BA uses the full radar returns from multiple scans to jointly estimate dense maps and sensor poses. By formulating the problem as a separable optimization, we derive an efficient and general solution that decouples pose estimation from mapping. In addition to solving the BA problem, this formulation naturally extends to direct radar-only localization (DRL) within a previously built map. Dr-BA achieves state-of-the-art radar-based BA and cross-session localization performance, demonstrated on more than 200 km of on-road data across five distinct routes. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/utiasASRL/dr_ba.

Daniil Lisus, Cedric Le Gentil, Timothy D. Barfoot

Robotics Institute, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Simultaneous Localization and MappingMap-Based LocalizationRobot Localization
AskPDF
May 6, 2026

Dr-PoGO: Direct Radar Pose-Graph Optimization

This paper introduces Dr-PoGO, a method for Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) using a 2D spinning radar. Unlike cameras or lidars that require line-of-sight, millimetre-wave radars can `see' through dust, falling snow, rain, etc. Accordingly, it is a great modality for robust perception regardless of the weather conditions. While most existing radar-based SLAM methods rely on the extraction of point clouds or features to perform ego-motion estimation, Dr-PoGO leverages direct registration techniques for odometry (DRO) and loop-closure registration. An off-the-shelf radar-focused place recognition algorithm, RaPlace, provides loop-closure candidates. As RaPlace does not provide relative transformations, Dr-PoGO introduces a coarse-to-fine registration that uses visual features and descriptors to obtain an initial guess for the direct transformation refinement. The global trajectory is optimized in a pose-graph optimization. Dr-PoGO demonstrates state-of-the-art performance over 300km of data in various real-world automotive environments. Our implementation is publicly available: https://github.com/utiasASRL/dr_pogo.

Cedric Le Gentil, Weican Li, Leonardo Brizi +1

Robotics Institute University of Toronto. · Department of Computer, Control, and Management Engineering “Antonio Ruberti”, Sapienza University of Rome.

Simultaneous Localization and MappingRelative Pose EstimationMillimeter-Wave RadarmmWave Radar SensingPose Graph OptimizationRobot Localization
AskPDF
May 4, 2026

DynoSLAM: Dynamic SLAM with Generative Graph Neural Networks for Real-World Social Navigation

Traditional Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms rely heavily on the static environment assumption, which severely limits their applicability in real-world spaces populated by moving entities, such as pedestrians. In this work, we propose DynoSLAM, a tightly-coupled Dynamic GraphSLAM architecture that integrates socially-aware Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) directly into the factor graph optimization. Unlike conventional approaches that use rigid constant-velocity heuristics or deterministic single-agent neural priors, our framework formulates pedestrian motion forecasting as a stochastic World Model. By utilizing Monte Carlo rollouts from a trained GNN, we capture the multimodal epistemic uncertainty of human interactions and embed it into the SLAM graph via a dynamic Mahalanobis distance factor. We demonstrate through extensive simulated experiments that this stochastic formulation not only maintains highly accurate retrospective tracking but also prevents the optimization failures caused by the deterministic "argmax problem". Ultimately, extracting the empirical mean and covariance matrices of future pedestrian states provides a mathematically rigorous, probabilistic safety envelope for downstream local planners, enabling anticipatory and collision-free robot navigation in densely crowded environments.

Danil Tokhchukov, Veronika Morozova, Gonzalo Ferrer

Applied AI Institute, Moscow, Russia.

Simultaneous Localization and MappingDynamic SLAMPedestrian Behavior ModelingGraph Neural NetworksPedestrian Trajectory PredictionSocial Robot Navigation+2
AskPDF
Apr 30, 2026

Learning-Based Hierarchical Scene Graph Matching for Robot Localization Leveraging Prior Maps

Accurate localization is a fundamental requirement for autonomous robots operating in indoor environments. Scene graphs encode the spatial structure of an environment as a hierarchy of semantic entities and their relationships, and can be constructed both online from robot sensor data and offline from architectural priors such as Building Information Models (BIM). Matching these two complementary representations enables drift correction in SLAM by grounding robot observations against a known structural prior. However, establishing reliable node-to-node correspondences between them remains an open challenge: existing combinatorial methods are prohibitively expensive at scale, and prior learned approaches address only flat graph matching, ignoring the multi-level semantic structure present in both representations. Here we present a learned, end-to-end differentiable pipeline that augments both graphs with semantically motivated edge types encoding intra- and inter- level relationships, explicitly exploiting this hierarchy to enable simultaneous matching from high-level room concepts down to low-level wall surfaces. Trained exclusively on floor plans, the proposed method outperforms the combinatorial baseline in F1 on real LiDAR environments while running an order of magnitude faster, demonstrating viable zero-shot generalization for BIM-assisted robot localization.

Nimrod Millenium Ndulue, Jose Andres Millan-Romera, Matteo Giorgi +2

Authors are with the Automation and Robotics Research Group, Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg. Holger Voos is also associated with the Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg. · Author is with the University of Pisa.

Simultaneous Localization and MappingGraph Representation LearningGraph MatchingMap-Based Localization
AskPDF
Apr 29, 2026

Seamless Indoor-Outdoor Mapping for INGENIOUS First Responders

In several applications it is desired to have 3D models not only from the outdoor spaces but also from inside the building. In the context of First Responder enhancement in large scale natural and man-made disasters, a method is presented to achieve this goal with a high degree of automation. Therefore an autonomously flying aerial mapping system is combined with a person-carried indoor positioning system. Automatically recognized markers (AprilTags) are geo-referenced by the aerial system and their coordinates are sent to the ground-based system. By looking at the AprilTags before entering the building, the ground-based system is registered to world coordinates. Without the further need of any global positioning, it creates a point cloud from the indoor spaces that fits with the point could from the aerial view. This allows a co-visualization of both point-clouds as a seamless indoor-outdoor 3D model in real time.

Jürgen Wohlfeil, Henry Meißner, Adrian Schischmanow +4

Institute of Optical Systems (OS), German Aerospace Center (DLR) Berlin, Germany

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping3D ReconstructionDisaster ResponsePoint Cloud Registration
AskPDF
Apr 28, 2026

RADIO-ViPE: Online Tightly Coupled Multi-Modal Fusion for Open-Vocabulary Semantic SLAM in Dynamic Environments

We present RADIO-ViPE (Reduce All Domains Into One -- Video Pose Engine), an online semantic SLAM system that enables geometry-aware open-vocabulary grounding, associating arbitrary natural language queries with localized 3D regions and objects in dynamic environments. Unlike existing approaches that require calibrated, posed RGB-D input, RADIO-ViPE operates directly on raw monocular RGB video streams, requiring no prior camera intrinsics, depth sensors, or pose initialization. The system tightly couples multi-modal embeddings -- spanning vision and language -- derived from agglomerative foundation models (e.g., RADIO) with geometric scene information. This coupling takes place in initialization, optimization and factor graph connections to improve the consistency of the map from multiple modalities. The optimization is wrapped within adaptive robust kernels, designed to handle both actively moving objects and agent-displaced scene elements (e.g., furniture rearranged during ego-centric session). Experiments demonstrate that RADIO-ViPE achieves state-of-the-art results on the dynamic TUM-RGBD benchmark while maintaining competitive performance against offline open-vocabulary methods that rely on calibrated data and static scene assumptions. RADIO-ViPE bridges a critical gap in real-world deployment, enabling robust open-vocabulary semantic grounding for autonomous robotics and unconstrained in-the-wild video streams. Project page: https://be2rlab.github.io/radio_vipe

Zaid Nasser, Mikhail Iumanov, Tianhao Li +3

Biomechatronics and Energy-Efficient Robotics (BE2R) Lab, ITMO University, Saint Petersburg, Russia

Simultaneous Localization and MappingVisual SLAMMultimodal Sensor Fusion3D Visual Grounding
AskPDF
Apr 28, 2026

Robust Graph Matching through Semantic Relationship Generation for SLAM

Graph-based representations such as Scene Graphs enable localization in structured indoor environments by matching a locally observed graph, constructed from sensor data, to a prior map. This process is particularly challenging in environments with repetitive or symmetric layouts, where structural cues alone are often insufficient to resolve ambiguities. We propose a semantic-enhanced graph matching approach that explicitly models relations between detected objects and structural elements, such as rooms and wall planes. Objects are detected from RGB-D data and integrated into the graph, and their relations to structural elements are exploited to filter candidate correspondences prior to geometric verification, significantly reducing ambiguity and search complexity. The proposed method is integrated within the iS-Graphs framework and evaluated in synthetic and simulated environments. Results show that semantic relations significantly reduce the number of candidate matches, improve computational efficiency, and enable faster convergence, particularly in symmetric scenarios where purely geometric approaches fail.

David Perez-Saura, Jose Andres Millan-Romera, Miguel Fernandez-Cortizas +3

Automation and Robotics Research Group, Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust, University of Luxembourg, 1855 Luxembourg, Luxembourg · Computer Vision and Aerial Robotics Group at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040, Spain (CVAR-UPM) at the Centre for Automation and Robotics (UPM-CSIC)

Simultaneous Localization and MappingGraph MatchingMap-Based Localization
AskPDF
Apr 24, 2026

Flow4DGS-SLAM: Optical Flow-Guided 4D Gaussian Splatting SLAM

Handling the dynamic environments is a significant research challenge in Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Recent research combines 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with SLAM to achieve both robust camera pose estimation and photorealistic renderings. However, using SLAM to efficiently reconstruct both static and dynamic regions remains challenging. In this work, we propose an efficient framework for dynamic 3DGS SLAM guided by optical flow. Using the input depth and prior optical flow, we first propose a category-agnostic motion mask generation strategy by fitting a camera ego-motion model to decompose the optical flow. This module separates dynamic and static Gaussians and simultaneously provides flow-guided camera pose initialization. We boost the training speed of dynamic 3DGS by explicitly modeling their temporal centers at keyframes. These centers are propagated using 3D scene flow priors and are dynamically initialized with an adaptive insertion strategy. Alongside this, we model the temporal opacity and rotation using a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to adaptively learn the complex dynamics. The empirical results demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance in tracking, dynamic reconstruction, and training efficiency.

Yunsong Wang, Gim Hee Lee

School of Computing, National University of Singapore

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping3D Gaussian Splatting3DGS SLAMDynamic Scene ReconstructionVisual SLAM
AskPDF
Apr 23, 2026

SNGR: Selective Non-Gaussian Refinement for Ambiguous SLAM Factor Graphs

We present Selective Non-Gaussian Refinement (SNGR), a SLAM framework that augments iSAM2 with targeted nested sampling on windows where Gaussian approximations are likely to fail. We detect such regions using the condition number of joint marginal covariances and selectively refine them using the full nonlinear factor graph likelihood, with a gating mechanism to avoid degradation in multimodal cases. Experiments on range-only SLAM with wrong data association show that SNGR achieves high-precision failure detection and consistent local likelihood improvements while reducing computational cost relative to exhaustive non-Gaussian inference. These results highlight both the promise and the limitations of selective refinement for approximate SLAM posteriors.

Anushka Kulkarni, Sarthak Dubey

Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

Simultaneous Localization and MappingFactor Graph OptimizationBayesian FilteringRobot Localization
AskPDF
Apr 23, 2026

SLAM as a Stochastic Control Problem with Partial Information: Optimal Solutions and Rigorous Approximations

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a foundational state estimation problem in robotics in which a robot accurately constructs a map of its environment while also localizing itself within this construction. We study the active SLAM problem through the lens of optimal stochastic control, thereby recasting it as a decision-making problem under partial information. After reviewing several commonly studied models, we present a general stochastic control formulation of active SLAM together with a rigorous treatment of motion, sensing, and map representation. We introduce a new exploration stage cost that encodes the geometry of the state when evaluating information-gathering actions. This formulation, constructed as a nonstandard partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), is then analyzed to derive rigorously justified approximate solutions that are near-optimal. To enable this analysis, the associated regularity conditions are studied under general assumptions that apply to a wide range of robotics applications. For a particular case, we conduct an extensive numerical study in which standard learning algorithms are used to learn near-optimal policies.

Ilir Gusija, Fady Alajaji, Serdar Yüksel

Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada

Simultaneous Localization and MappingStochastic Optimal ControlPartially Observable Markov Decision ProcessesOptimal Control
AskPDF
Apr 21, 2026

SL(C)AMma: Simultaneous Localisation, (Calibration) and Mapping With a Magnetometer Array

Indoor localisation techniques suffer from attenuated Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals and from the accumulation of unbounded drift by integration of proprioceptive sensors. Magnetic field-based Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) reduces drift through loop closures by revisiting previously seen locations, but extended exploration of unseen areas remains challenging. Recently, magnetometer arrays have demonstrated significant benefits over single magnetometers, as they can directly estimate the odometry. However, inconsistencies between magnetometer measurements negatively affect odometry estimates and complicate loop closure detection. We propose two filtering algorithms: The first focuses on magnetic field-based SLAM using a magnetometer array (SLAMma). The second extends this to jointly estimate the magnetometer calibration parameters (SLCAMma). We demonstrate, using Monte Carlo simulations, that the calibration parameters can be accurately estimated when there is sufficient orientation excitation, and that magnetometers achieve inter-sensor measurement consistency regardless of the type of motion. Experimental validation on ten datasets confirms these results, and we demonstrate that in cases where single magnetometer SLAM fails, SLAMma and SLCAMma provide good trajectory estimates with, more than 80% drift reduction compared to integration of proprioceptive sensors.

Thomas Edridge, Manon Kok

1DCSC, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands.

Simultaneous Localization and MappingRobot State Estimation
AskPDF
Apr 21, 2026

Localization-Guided Foreground Augmentation in Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving systems often degrade under adverse visibility conditions-such as rain, nighttime, or snow-where online scene geometry (e.g., lane dividers, road boundaries, and pedestrian crossings) becomes sparse or fragmented. While high-definition (HD) maps can provide missing structural context, they are costly to construct and maintain at scale. We propose Localization-Guided Foreground Augmentation (LG-FA), a lightweight and plug-and-play inference module that enhances foreground perception by enriching geometric context online. LG-FA: (i) incrementally constructs a sparse global vector layer from per-frame Bird's-Eye View (BEV) predictions; (ii) estimates ego pose via class-constrained geometric alignment, jointly improving localization and completing missing local topology; and (iii) reprojects the augmented foreground into a unified global frame to improve per-frame predictions. Experiments on challenging nuScenes sequences demonstrate that LG-FA improves the geometric completeness and temporal stability of BEV representations, reduces localization error, and produces globally consistent lane and topology reconstructions. The module can be seamlessly integrated into existing BEV-based perception systems without backbone modification. By providing a reliable geometric context prior, LG-FA enhances temporal consistency and supplies stable structural support for downstream modules such as tracking and decision-making.

Jiawei Yong, Deyuan Qu, Qi Chen +2

Toyota Motor Corporation, Japan · Toyota Motor North America, USA

Simultaneous Localization and MappingAutonomous Driving PerceptionBird's-Eye-View Representation
AskPDF
Apr 17, 2026

Environment-Adaptive Solid-State LiDAR-Inertial Odometry

Solid-state LiDAR-inertial SLAM has attracted significant attention due to its advantages in speed and robustness. However, achieving accurate mapping in extreme environments remains challenging due to severe geometric degeneracy and unreliable observations, which often lead to ill-conditioned optimization and map inconsistencies. To address these challenges, we propose an environment-adaptive solid-state LiDAR-inertial odometry that integrates local normal-vector constraints with degeneracy-aware map maintenance to enhance localization accuracy. Specifically, we introduce local normal-vector constraints to improve the stability of state estimation, effectively suppressing localization drift in degenerate scenarios. Furthermore, we design a degeneration-guided map update strategy to improve map precision. Benefiting from the refined map representation, localization accuracy is further enhanced in subsequent estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior mapping accuracy and robustness in extreme and perceptually degraded environments, with an average RMSE reduction of up to 12.8% compared to the baseline method.

Zhi Zhang, Chalermchon Satirapod, Bingtao Ma +1

School of Automation Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications Chongqing, China · Department of Survey Engineering, Faculty of Engineering Chulalongkorn University Bangkok, Thailand · School of Cyberspace Security Hangzhou Dianzi University Hangzhou, China

Simultaneous Localization and MappingLiDAR Odometry
AskPDF
Apr 16, 2026

CAVERS: Multimodal SLAM Data from a Natural Karstic Cave with Ground Truth Motion Capture

Autonomous robots operating in natural karstic caves face perception and navigation challenges that are qualitatively distinct from those encountered in mines or tunnels: irregular geometry, reflective wet surfaces, near-zero ambient light, and complex branching passages. Yet publicly available datasets targeting this environment remain scarce and offer limited sensing modalities and environmental diversity. We present CAVERS, a multimodal dataset acquired in two structurally distinct rooms of Cueva de la Victoria, Málaga, Spain, comprising 24 sequences totaling approximately 335 GB of recorded data. The sensor suite combines an Intel RealSense D435i RGB-D-I camera, an Optris PI640i near-IR thermal camera, and a Velodyne VLP-16 LiDAR, operated both handheld and mounted on a wheeled rover under full darkness and artificial illumination. For most of the sequences, mm-accurate 6-DoF ground truth pose and velocity at 120 Hz are provided by an Optirack motion capture system installed directly inside the cave. We benchmark seven state-of-the-art SLAM and odometry algorithms spanning visual, visual-inertial, thermal-inertial, and LiDAR-based pipelines, as well as a 3D reconstruction pipeline, demonstrating the dataset's usability. %The dataset and all supplementary material are publicly available at: https://github.com/spaceuma/cavers.

Giacomo Franchini, David Rodríguez-Martínez, Alfonso Martínez-Petersen +2

Polytechnic of Turin Interdepartmental Centre for Service Robotics (PIC4SeR), Corso Francesco Ferrucci 112, 10141 Turin, Italy · Systems Engineering and Automation Department, Universidad de M´alaga, Ortiz Ramos s/n, 29010, M´alaga, Spain

Simultaneous Localization and MappingVisual SLAMRobotic Perception
AskPDF
Apr 16, 2026

Keep It CALM: Toward Calibration-Free Kilometer-Level SLAM with Visual Geometry Foundation Models via an Assistant Eye

Visual Geometry Foundation Models (VGFMs) demonstrate remarkable zero-shot capabilities in local reconstruction. However, deploying them for kilometer-level Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) remains challenging. In such scenarios, current approaches mainly rely on linear transforms (e.g., Sim3 and SL4) for sub-map alignment, while we argue that a single linear transform is fundamentally insufficient to model the complex, non-linear geometric distortions inherent in VGFM outputs. Forcing such rigid alignment leads to the rapid accumulation of uncorrected residuals, eventually resulting in significant trajectory drift and map divergence. To address these limitations, we present CAL2M (Calibration-free Assistant-eye based Large-scale Localization and Mapping), a plug-and-play framework compatible with arbitrary VGFMs. Distinct from traditional systems, CAL2M introduces an "assistant eye" solely to leverage the prior of constant physical spacing, effectively eliminating scale ambiguity without any temporal or spatial pre-calibration. Furthermore, leveraging the assumption of accurate feature matching, we propose an epipolar-guided intrinsic and pose correction model. Supported by an online intrinsic search module, it can effectively rectify rotation and translation errors caused by inaccurate intrinsics through fundamental matrix decomposition. Finally, to ensure accurate mapping, we introduce a globally consistent mapping strategy based on anchor propagation. By constructing and fusing anchors across the trajectory, we establish a direct local-to-global mapping relationship. This enables the application of nonlinear transformations to elastically align sub-maps, effectively eliminating geometric misalignments and ensuring a globally consistent reconstruction. The source code of CAL2M will be publicly available at https://github.com/IRMVLab/CALM.

Tianjun Zhang, Fengyi Zhang, Tianchen Deng +2

School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, and Shanghai Key Laboratory of Navigation and Location Based Services, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China · School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Queensland, Brisbane 4067, Australia · School of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China

Simultaneous Localization and MappingCamera Pose EstimationVisual SLAMCamera Calibration
AskPDF
Apr 15, 2026

UMI-3D: Extending Universal Manipulation Interface from Vision-Limited to 3D Spatial Perception

We present UMI-3D, a multimodal extension of the Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) for robust and scalable data collection in embodied manipulation. While UMI enables portable, wrist-mounted data acquisition, its reliance on monocular visual SLAM makes it vulnerable to occlusions, dynamic scenes, and tracking failures, limiting its applicability in real-world environments. UMI-3D addresses these limitations by introducing a lightweight and low-cost LiDAR sensor tightly integrated into the wrist-mounted interface, enabling LiDAR-centric SLAM with accurate metric-scale pose estimation under challenging conditions. We further develop a hardware-synchronized multimodal sensing pipeline and a unified spatiotemporal calibration framework that aligns visual observations with LiDAR point clouds, producing consistent 3D representations of demonstrations. Despite maintaining the original 2D visuomotor policy formulation, UMI-3D significantly improves the quality and reliability of collected data, which directly translates into enhanced policy performance. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that UMI-3D not only achieves high success rates on standard manipulation tasks, but also enables learning of tasks that are challenging or infeasible for the original vision-only UMI setup, including large deformable object manipulation and articulated object operation. The system supports an end-to-end pipeline for data acquisition, alignment, training, and deployment, while preserving the portability and accessibility of the original UMI. All hardware and software components are open-sourced to facilitate large-scale data collection and accelerate research in embodied intelligence: https://umi-3d.github.io.

Ziming Wang

HKU · USTC

Robotic Data CollectionRobotic ManipulationSimultaneous Localization and MappingCamera-LiDAR Fusion
AskPDF
Apr 15, 2026

RadarSplat-RIO: Indoor Radar-Inertial Odometry with Gaussian Splatting-Based Radar Bundle Adjustment

Radar is more resilient to adverse weather and lighting conditions than visual and Lidar simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). However, most radar SLAM pipelines still rely heavily on frame-to-frame odometry, which leads to substantial drift. While loop closure can correct long-term errors, it requires revisiting places and relies on robust place recognition. In contrast, visual odometry methods typically leverage bundle adjustment (BA) to jointly optimize poses and map within a local window. However, an equivalent BA formulation for radar has remained largely unexplored. We present the first radar BA framework enabled by Gaussian Splatting (GS), a dense and differentiable scene representation. Our method jointly optimizes radar sensor poses and scene geometry using full range-azimuth-Doppler data, bringing the benefits of multi-frame BA to radar for the first time. When integrated with an existing radar-inertial odometry frontend, our approach significantly reduces pose drift and improves robustness. Across multiple indoor scenes, our radar BA achieves substantial gains over the prior radar-inertial odometry, reducing average absolute translational and rotational errors by 90% and 80%, respectively.

Pou-Chun Kung, Yuan Tian, Zhengqin Li +4

Meta Reality Labs, Redmond, WA 98052 · Department of Robotics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Simultaneous Localization and MappingRadar-Inertial Odometry
AskPDF
Apr 14, 2026

RMGS-SLAM: Real-time Multi-sensor Gaussian Splatting SLAM

Achieving real-time Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) based on 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) in large-scale real-world environments remains challenging, as existing methods still struggle to jointly achieve low-latency pose estimation, continuous 3D Gaussian reconstruction, and long-term global consistency. In this paper, we present a tightly coupled LiDAR-Inertial-Visual 3DGS-based SLAM framework for real-time pose estimation and photorealistic mapping in large-scale real-world scenes. The system executes state estimation and 3D Gaussian primitive initialization in parallel with global Gaussian optimization, enabling continuous dense mapping. To improve Gaussian initialization quality and accelerate optimization convergence, we introduce a cascaded strategy that combines feed-forward predictions with geometric priors derived from voxel-based principal component analysis. To enhance global consistency, we perform loop closure directly on the optimized global Gaussian map by estimating loop constraints through Gaussian-based Generalized Iterative Closest Point registration, followed by pose-graph optimization. We also collect challenging large-scale looped outdoor sequences with hardware-synchronized LiDAR-camera-IMU and ground-truth trajectories for realistic evaluation. Extensive experiments on both public datasets and our dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a state of the art among real-time efficiency, localization accuracy, and rendering quality across diverse real-world scenes.

Dongen Li, Yi Liu, Junqi Liu +8

Dongen Li, Yi Liu, Zewen Sun, Zefan Huang, Chengran Yuan, Francis E.H. Tay, and Marcelo H. Ang Jr. are with the Advanced Robotics Centre, National University of Singapore. · Junqi Liu and Hongliang Guo are with the College of Computer Science, Sichuan University. · Shuo Sun is with Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. +1

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping3DGS SLAM3DGS Acceleration
AskPDF
Apr 14, 2026

D-BDM: A Direct and Efficient Boundary-Based Occupancy Grid Mapping Framework for LiDARs

Efficient and scalable 3D occupancy mapping is essential for autonomous robot applications in unknown environments. However, traditional occupancy grid representations suffer from two fundamental limitations. First, explicitly storing all voxels in three-dimensional space leads to prohibitive memory consumption. Second, exhaustive ray casting incurs high update latency. A recent representation alleviate memory demands by maintaining only the voxels on the two-dimensional boundary, yet they still rely on full ray casting updates. This work advances the boundary-based framework with a highly efficient update scheme. We introduce a truncated ray casting strategy that restricts voxel traversal to the exterior of the boundary, which dramatically reduces the number of updated voxels. In addition, we propose a direct boundary update mechanism that removes the need for an auxiliary local 3D occupancy grid, further reducing memory usage and simplifying the map update pipeline. We name our framework as D-BDM. Extensive evaluations on public datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves significantly lower update time and reduced memory consumption compared with the baseline methods, as well as the prior boundary-based approach.

Benxu Tang, Yixi Cai, Fanze Kong +2

Mechatronics and Robotic Systems (MaRS) Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong · Department of Robotics, Perception, and Learning, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Occupancy Grid MappingSimultaneous Localization and Mapping
AskPDF
Apr 13, 2026

ReefMapGS: Enabling Large-Scale Underwater Reconstruction by Closing the Loop Between Multimodal SLAM and Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting is a powerful visual representation, providing high-quality and efficient 3D scene reconstruction, but it is crucially dependent on accurate camera poses typically obtained from computationally intensive processes like structure-from-motion that are unsuitable for field robot applications. However, in these domains, multimodal sensor data from acoustic, inertial, pressure, and visual sensors are available and suitable for pose-graph optimization-based SLAM methods that can estimate the vehicle's trajectory and thus our needed camera poses while providing uncertainty. We propose a 3DGS-based incremental reconstruction framework, ReefMapGS, that builds an initial model from a high certainty region and progressively expands to incorporate the whole scene. We reconstruct the scene incrementally by interleaving local tracking of new image observations with optimization of the underlying 3DGS scene. These refined poses are integrated back into the pose-graph to globally optimize the whole trajectory. We show COLMAP-free 3D reconstruction of two underwater reef sites with complex geometry as well as more accurate global pose estimation of our AUV over survey trajectories spanning up to 700 m.

Daniel Yang, Jungseok Hong, John J. Leonard +1

Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Underwater 3D Reconstruction3DGS SLAMSimultaneous Localization and Mapping
AskPDF
Apr 13, 2026

MR.ScaleMaster: Scale-Consistent Collaborative Mapping from Crowd-Sourced Monocular Videos

Crowd-sourced cooperative mapping combines monocular sessions from different front-ends, each an independently reconstructed keyframe sequence. Each session has its own local coordinate frame and may follow an incompatible scale convention. We present MR.ScaleMaster, a backend that accepts image, Sim(3) pose, and point-map packets without requiring a common reconstruction model, camera intrinsics, or front-end-provided metric scale. Our Cross-Front-End Loop Factor (CFL) uses a shared matcher for image correspondences but retrieves matched 3D points from the input point maps, so its scale estimates the inter-session ratio. Scale Preconditioning (SPC) initializes session scales for a Sim(3) anchor-node graph, which then corrects residual scale and drift. For front-ends exposing an incremental scale trajectory, an agent-side Scale Collapse Alarm (SCA) rejects or rolls back false intra-session loops that would otherwise collapse the session scale. We evaluate seven front-ends on KITTI and five on CODa. Based on ground-truth path lengths, session scales in our heterogeneous KITTI setting differ by 57-103x. CFL reduces mean ATE by 37% and inter-session scale error by 60% relative to loop factors from independent pairwise reconstructions. Adding SPC raises the reductions to 74% and 77%, respectively. On CODa, five-session fusion improves mean ATE over single-session runs for all five front-ends, while joint fusion registers 15 sessions from three different front-ends in a single map. Code will be released.

Hyoseok Ju, Giseop Kim

Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering, DGIST, Daegu, Republic of Korea.

Simultaneous Localization and MappingMonocular 3D ReconstructionLoop Closure Detection
AskPDF
Apr 13, 2026

A Survey of Spatial Memory Representations for Efficient Robot Navigation

As vision-based robots navigate larger environments, their spatial memory grows without bound, eventually exhausting computational resources, particularly on embedded platforms (8-16GB shared memory, <<30W) where adding hardware is not an option. This survey examines the spatial memory efficiency problem across 88 references spanning 52 systems (1989-2025), from occupancy grids to neural implicit representations. We introduce the α=Mpeak/Mmapα= M_{\text{peak}} / M_{\text{map}}, the ratio of peak runtime memory (the total RAM or GPU memory consumed during operation) to saved map size (the persistent checkpoint written to disk), exposing the gap between published map sizes and actual deployment cost. Independent profiling on an NVIDIA A100 GPU reveals that αα spans two orders of magnitude within neural methods alone, ranging from 2.3 (Point-SLAM) to 215 (NICE-SLAM, whose 47,MB map requires 10GB at runtime), showing that memory architecture, not paradigm label, determines deployment feasibility. We propose a standardized evaluation protocol comprising memory growth rate, query latency, memory-completeness curves, and throughput degradation, none of which current benchmarks capture. Through a Pareto frontier analysis with explicit benchmark separation, we show that no single paradigm dominates within its evaluation regime: 3DGS methods achieve the best absolute accuracy at 90-254,MB map size on Replica, while scene graphs provide semantic abstraction at predictable cost. We provide the first independently measured αα reference values and an αα-aware budgeting algorithm enabling practitioners to assess deployment feasibility on target hardware prior to implementation.

Ma. Madecheen S. Pangaliman, Steven S. Sison, Erwin P. Quilloy +1

University of the Philippines Diliman · University of Santo Tomas

Robotic Spatial MemoryRobot NavigationSimultaneous Localization and Mapping
AskPDF
Apr 8, 2026

An RTK-SLAM Dataset for Absolute Accuracy Evaluation in GNSS-Degraded Environments

RTK-SLAM systems integrate simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) with real-time kinematic (RTK) GNSS positioning, promising both relative consistency and globally referenced coordinates for efficient georeferenced surveying. A critical and underappreciated issue is that the standard evaluation metric, Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE), first fits an optimal rigid-body transformation between the estimated trajectory and reference before computing errors. This so-called SE(3) alignment absorbs global drift and systematic errors, making trajectories appear more accurate than they are in practice, and is unsuitable for evaluating the global accuracy of RTK-SLAM. We present a geodetically referenced dataset and evaluation methodology that expose this gap. A key design principle is that the RTK receiver is used solely as a system input, while ground truth is established independently via a geodetic total station. This separation is absent from all existing datasets, where GNSS typically serves as (part of) the ground truth. The dataset is collected with a handheld RTK-SLAM device, comprising two scenes. We evaluate LiDAR-inertial, visual-inertial, and LiDAR-visual-inertial RTK-SLAM systems alongside standalone RTK, reporting direct global accuracy and SE(3)-aligned relative accuracy to make the gap explicit. Results show that SE(3) alignment can underestimate absolute positioning error by up to 76%. RTK-SLAM achieves centimeter-level absolute accuracy in open-sky conditions and maintains decimeter-level global accuracy indoors, where standalone RTK degrades to tens of meters. The dataset, calibration files, and evaluation scripts are publicly available at https://rtk-slam-dataset.github.io/.

Wei Zhang, Vincent Ress, David Skuddis +2

Institute for Photogrammetry and Geoinformatics, University of Stuttgart, Germany

Simultaneous Localization and MappingWireless Localization
AskPDF
Apr 6, 2026

Synchronous Observer Design for Landmark-Inertial SLAM with Magnetometer and Intermittent GNSS Measurements

In Landmark-Inertial Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (LI-SLAM), the positions of landmarks in the environment and the robot's pose relative to these landmarks are estimated using landmark position measurements, and measurements from the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). However, the robot and landmark positions in the inertial frame, and the yaw of the robot, are not observable in LI-SLAM. This paper proposes a nonlinear observer for LI-SLAM that overcomes the observability constraints with the addition of intermittent GNSS position and magnetometer measurements. The full-state error dynamics of the proposed observer is shown to be both almost-globally asymptotically stable and locally exponentially stable, and this is validated using simulations.

Arkadeep Saha, Pieter van Goor, Ravi Banavar

Centre for Systems and Control, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai-400076, India. · School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering (AMME), Faculty of Engineering, University of Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia.

Simultaneous Localization and MappingMultimodal Sensor Fusion
AskPDF
Apr 4, 2026

CT-VoxelMap: Efficient Continuous-Time LiDAR-Inertial Odometry with Probabilistic Adaptive Voxel Mapping

Maintaining stable and accurate localization during fast motion or on rough terrain remains highly challenging for mobile robots with onboard resources. Currently, multi-sensor fusion methods based on continuous-time representation offer a potential and effective solution to this challenge. Among these, spline-based methods provide an efficient and intuitive approach for continuous-time representation. Previous continuous-time odometry works based on B-splines either treat control points as variables to be estimated or perform estimation in quaternion space, which introduces complexity in deriving analytical Jacobians and often overlooks the fitting error between the spline and the true trajectory over time. To address these issues, we first propose representing the increments of control points on matrix Lie groups as variables to be estimated. Leveraging the feature of the cumulative form of B-splines, we derive a more compact formulation that yields simpler analytical Jacobians without requiring additional boundary condition considerations. Second, we utilize forward propagation information from IMU measurements to estimate fitting errors online and further introduce a hybrid feature-based voxel map management strategy, enhancing system accuracy and robustness. Finally, we propose a re-estimation policy that significantly improves system computational efficiency and robustness. The proposed method is evaluated on multiple challenging public datasets, demonstrating superior performance on most sequences. Detailed ablation studies are conducted to analyze the impact of each module on the overall pose estimation system.

Lei Zhao, Xingyi Li, Tianchen Deng +3

B-Spline Trajectory RepresentationAdaptive Lidar-Inertial OdometryLiDAR OdometryRobot State EstimationSimultaneous Localization and Mapping
AskPDF
Apr 3, 2026

Geometrically-Constrained Radar-Inertial Odometry via Continuous Point-Pose Uncertainty Modeling

Radar odometry is crucial for robust localization in challenging environments; however, the sparsity of reliable returns and distinctive noise characteristics impede its performance. This paper introduces geometrically-constrained radar-inertial odometry and mapping that jointly consolidates point and pose uncertainty. We employ the continuous trajectory model to estimate the pose uncertainty at any arbitrary timestamp by propagating uncertainties of the control points. These pose uncertainties are continuously integrated with heteroscedastic measurement uncertainty during point projection, thereby enabling dynamic evaluation of observation confidence and adaptive down-weighting of uninformative radar points. By leveraging quantified uncertainties in radar mapping, we construct a high-fidelity map that improves odometry accuracy under imprecise radar measurements. Moreover, we reveal the effectiveness of explicit geometrical constraints in radar-inertial odometry when incorporated with the proposed uncertainty-aware mapping framework. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method, yielding substantial performance improvements in both accuracy and efficiency compared to existing baselines. We release our open-source implementation at https://github.com/wooseongY/GeoRIO.

Wooseong Yang, Dongjae Lee, Minwoo Jung +1

Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, SNU, Seoul, S. Korea

Simultaneous Localization and MappingInertial OdometryUncertainty QuantificationRadar-Inertial OdometryRobot State Estimation
AskPDF
Apr 3, 2026

VBGS-SLAM: Variational Bayesian Gaussian Splatting Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown promising results for 3D scene modeling using mixtures of Gaussians, yet its existing simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) variants typically rely on direct, deterministic pose optimization against the splat map, making them sensitive to initialization and susceptible to catastrophic forgetting as map evolves. We propose Variational Bayesian Gaussian Splatting SLAM (VBGS-SLAM), a novel framework that couples the splat map refinement and camera pose tracking in a generative probabilistic form. By leveraging conjugate properties of multivariate Gaussians and variational inference, our method admits efficient closed-form updates and explicitly maintains posterior uncertainty over both poses and scene parameters. This uncertainty-aware method mitigates drift and enhances robustness in challenging conditions, while preserving the efficiency and rendering quality of existing 3DGS. Our experiments demonstrate superior tracking performance and robustness in long sequence prediction, alongside efficient, high-quality novel view synthesis across diverse synthetic and real-world scenes.

Yuhan Zhu, Yanyu Zhang, Jie Xu +1

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Riverside, CA, 92521, USA.

3DGS SLAMSimultaneous Localization and Mapping3D Gaussian Splatting
AskPDF
Apr 2, 2026

Hi-LOAM: Hierarchical Implicit Neural Fields for LiDAR Odometry and Mapping

LiDAR Odometry and Mapping (LOAM) is a pivotal technique for embodied-AI applications such as autonomous driving and robot navigation. Most existing LOAM frameworks are either contingent on the supervision signal, or lack of the reconstruction fidelity, which are deficient in depicting details of large-scale complex scenes. To overcome these limitations, we propose a multi-scale implicit neural localization and mapping framework using LiDAR sensor, called Hi-LOAM. Hi-LOAM receives LiDAR point cloud as the input data modality, learns and stores hierarchical latent features in multiple levels of hash tables based on an octree structure, then these multi-scale latent features are decoded into signed distance value through shallow Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) in the mapping procedure. For pose estimation procedure, we rely on a correspondence-free, scan-to-implicit matching paradigm to estimate optimal pose and register current scan into the submap. The entire training process is conducted in a self-supervised manner, which waives the model pre-training and manifests its generalizability when applied to diverse environments. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superior performance, in terms of the effectiveness and generalization capabilities, of our Hi-LOAM compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Zhiliu Yang, Jianyuan Zhang, Lianhui Zhao +2

School of Information Science and Engineering, Yunnan University, Kunming, Yunnan 650500, China. · Yunnan Key Laboratory of Intelligent Systems and Computing, Yunnan University, Kunming, Yunnan 650500, China. · School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China.

Simultaneous Localization and MappingLiDAR OdometryImplicit Neural Representations
AskPDF