Six DoF Decentralised SLAM

This paper presents a decentralised multivehicle application of simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The UAVs are equipped with inertial measurement units (IMU), to determine the vehicles position, velocity and attitude, and vision cameras to detect features in the environment. This paper describes an algorithm that enables multiple vehicles to acquire a joint 3D map which can cope with arbitrary latency. The key idea behind this application is to represent the maps in information form (negative log-likelihood) for communication. Experimental results are provided using computer simulation to illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.