Simultaneous localization and mapping

In navigation, robotic mapping and odometry for virtual reality or augmented reality, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the computational problem of constructing or updating a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously keeping track of an agent's location within it. While this initially appears to be a chicken-and-egg problem there are several algorithms known for solving it, at least approximately, in tractable time for certain environments. Popular approximate solution methods include the particle filter, extended Kalman filter, Covariance intersection, and GraphSLAM. In navigation, robotic mapping and odometry for virtual reality or augmented reality, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the computational problem of constructing or updating a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously keeping track of an agent's location within it. While this initially appears to be a chicken-and-egg problem there are several algorithms known for solving it, at least approximately, in tractable time for certain environments. Popular approximate solution methods include the particle filter, extended Kalman filter, Covariance intersection, and GraphSLAM. SLAM algorithms are tailored to the available resources, hence not aimed at perfection, but at operational compliance. Published approaches are employed in self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous underwater vehicles, planetary rovers, newer domestic robots and even inside the human body. Given a series of controls u t {displaystyle u_{t}} and sensor observations o t {displaystyle o_{t}} over discrete time steps t {displaystyle t} , the SLAM problem is to compute an estimate of the agent's location x t {displaystyle x_{t}} and a map of the environment m t {displaystyle m_{t}} . All quantities are usually probabilistic, so the objective is to compute: Applying Bayes' rule gives a framework for sequentially updating the location posteriors, given a map and a transition function P ( x t | x t − 1 ) {displaystyle P(x_{t}|x_{t-1})} ,