Paper presented at International Conference on Robotics and Automation

The University of Luxembourg team in collaboration with researchers from the University of Cordoba has presented a technical paper at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) held in London, United Kingdom. The paper titled: Hierarchical Visual SLAM based on Fiducial Markers addresses fiducial markers that can encode rich information about the environment and aid Visual SLAM (VSLAM) approaches in reconstructing maps with practical semantic information. Current marker-based VSLAM approaches mainly utilize markers for improving feature detection in low-feature environments and/or incorporating loop closure constraints, generating only low-level geometric maps of the environment prone to inaccuracies in complex environments. To bridge this gap, this paper presents a VSLAM approach utilizing a monocular camera and fiducial markers to generate hierarchical representations of the environment while improving the camera pose estimate. The proposed approach detects semantic entities from the surroundings, including walls, corridors, and rooms encoded within markers, and appropriately adds topological constraints among them. Experimental results on a real-world dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms a traditional marker-based VSLAM baseline in terms of accuracy, despite adding new constraints while creating enhanced map representations.