SLAM for hobbyist robots - it's time.

On 02/13/2010 01:08 PM, John Nagle wrote:

As I understand it, the SLAM systems in many commercial mobile robots
aren't overly robust.  Many rely on a 2D or 3D sick laser or the like.
  So its not surprising this hasn't infiltrated hobby systems.

The best resource I know of is
http://openslam.org/
but its been a year or two since I last looked very hard.

- Daniel

John Nagle wrote:

At the last HBRC (Home Brew Robotics Club meeting, somebody
(alas I'm not good at names), showed up with a robot that
was going to do camera vision based SLAM.

One of our members showed up with a pre production version of
the Neato floor cleaning robot, which uses a laser range
finder (not Lidar) to perform SLAM.  The environment at CMU-SV
(Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley) was pretty hostile, so it
lots of problems with chairs everybody was sitting in.
The chairs have 4 thin chrome plated steel legs, so they
behave like small cylindrical mirrors at visual wave lengths.
The Neato does have a bump sensor, so it did not totally fail.

What is enabling all of this is the deployment of low
cost and low power 32-bit platforms that can be placed
on the robot.  OpenCV (originally from Intel, not maintained
by Willow Garage) is getting a lot of traction these days.

I keep hoping that one of the low cost 32-bit platforms
out there will get some traction like the Arduino did.
32-bit CPU, Linux, Wi-Fi, some USB ports, and some lower
level stuff like Serial, I2C, SPI, some A/DC, should be
less than $50 these days.

-Wayne

waynegramlich wrote:

    The Willow Garage people have cleaned up OpenCV. See
"http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/software/opencv" .  A few years ago,
I tried OpenCV's stereo code, and it was awful.  For example, about 10% of the
time, the camera calibration program would produce total garbage. The
stereo algorithm never worked very well.  The LK tracker was good, though.

    Willow Garage has been doing a lot of work on "astereomatching.cpp".
It's worth looking at that again.

                John Nagle

John Nagle wrote:

I meant to say "now maintained" rather than "not maintained".


We have two or three people in the club having some level of success
with OpenCV these days.


-Wayne

is there any psuedo code showing how SLAM works?  I'd like to code it
in 6502 assembly language

u,mmmm   how about starting this project and revive this group?

maybe we can flood it with REAL hobbyist and professional posts
and ignore the spammers?