Code: COVINS
COVINS: A Framework for Collaborative Visual-Inertial SLAM and Multi-Agent 3D Mapping
COVINS is an accurate, scalable, and versatile visual-inertial collaborative SLAM system, that enables a group of robotic agents (e.g. small drones) equipped with visual and inertial sensing, to simultaneously co-localize and jointly map an environment. In this framework, each agent runs a Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) algorithm onboard, sharing newly acquired map information with the server through the COVINS communication interface. The centralized server back-end accumulates and maintains the data contributed by all agents, and joins any overlapping map data into a shared global SLAM estimate online during the mission. The COVINS server back-end can run on a local PC or a remote cloud server, and provides a communication module that allows agents to dynamically join the collaborative SLAM estimation process, and to interface custom keyframe-based VIO systems with COVINS to generate collaborative estimates.
The COVINS software is publicly available and can be accessed via external pagethis linkcall_made.
Users of this software are asked to cite the following article, where it was introduced:
Patrik Schmuck, Thomas Ziegler, Marco Karrer, Jonathan Perraudin and Margarita Chli, "COVINS: Visual-Inertial SLAM for Centralized Collaboration" in Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), 2021.
[Research Collection]
The video below shows example experiments presented in this work.