Evaluation of RGB-D SLAM in Large Indoor Environments

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is one of the key components of a control system that aims to ensure autonomous navigation of a mobile robot in unknown environments. In a variety of practical cases a robot might need to travel long distances in order to accomplish its mission. This requires long-term work of SLAM methods and building large maps. Consequently the computational burden (including high memory consumption for map storage) becomes a bottleneck. Indeed, state-of-the-art SLAM algorithms include specific techniques and optimizations to tackle this challenge, still their performance in long-term scenarios needs proper assessment. To this end, we perform an empirical evaluation of two widespread state-of-the-art RGB-D SLAM methods, suitable for long-term navigation, i.e. RTAB-Map and Voxgraph. We evaluate them in a large simulated indoor environment, consisting of corridors and halls, while varying the odometer noise for a more realistic setup. We provide both qualitative and quantitative analysis of both methods uncovering their strengths and weaknesses. We find that both methods build a high-quality map with low odometry noise but tend to fail with high odometry noise. Voxgraph has lower relative trajectory estimation error and memory consumption than RTAB-Map, while its absolute error is higher.