# ViTa-SLAM: A Bio-inspired Visuo-Tactile SLAM for Navigation while Interacting with Aliased Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.06422 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06422/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jun 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [LatentSLAM: unsupervised multi-sensor representation learning for localization and mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03265/) (2021)
- [Surformer v1: Transformer-Based Surface Classification Using Tactile and Vision Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06566/) (2025)
- [Visibility-Inspired Models of Touch Sensors for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04751/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

RatSLAM is a rat hippocampus-inspired visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) framework capable of generating semi-metric topological representations of indoor and outdoor environments. Whisker-RatSLAM is a 6D extension of the RatSLAM and primarily focuses on object recognition by generating point clouds of objects based on whisking information. This paper introduces a novel extension to both former works that is referred to as ViTa-SLAM that harnesses both vision and tactile information for performing SLAM. This not only allows the robot to perform natural interaction with the environment whilst navigating, as is normally seen in nature, but also provides a mechanism to fuse non-unique tactile and unique visual data. Compared to the former works, our approach can handle ambiguous scenes in which one sensor alone is not capable of identifying false-positive loop-closures.