SLAM, Core technology of AR, What is it?
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Newly Updated: http://slam.maxst.com/
SLAM is a technology to detect a surrounding environment by a mobile robot or a vehicle that can control its own operation to create a virtual map, and to estimate its position within the map.
It is mainly related to robotics and can be used in robot cleaners, unmanned vehicles, automatic forklifts, unmanned aerial vehicles, drones and so on.
The birth of SLAM
SLAM was first introduced at the International Symposium on Robotics Research in 1995. After a mathematical definition was made at the IEEE Robotics and Automation Conference in 1986, studies using statistical theory and navigation devices have been carried out.
In 1998, at the European Conference on Computer Vision, Davison and others presented a method of using only camera without any other sensors. This has led to the development of vision-based SLAM that uses camera as a three-dimensional position detector.
About SLAM’s core, Localization & Mapping
Localization
Figure out where I am. SLAM estimates location based on visual information that comes into view (image frame), just like someone who sees a strange place for the first time.
People do not have an absolute sense of distance or defense so they can be lost on the road. The robot also calculates the direction and path of its movement relative to the surrounding environment. Therefore, the map must be well-trained to know exactly where you are.
Mapping
A process of analyzing the information that the robot collects by a sensor and answering ‘how the world looks like’.
Vision-based SLAM that is using cameras as sensors collects feature points from various viewpoints through feature detections and matching. Once sufficient Motion Parallax has created between the two dimensional feature point locations, the three dimensional location of the feature points are inferred by triangulation techniques.
Role of SLAM in AR
Augmented Reality blends a virtual image or information in real space. For AR, the specific technologies are required to recognize the surrounding environment, to figure out the relative position of the camera, and to place the virtual content where appropriate.
Hence, SLAM plays an important role in many areas such as location recognition, location tracking, display, graphics, interface, and interaction.
Got a little understanding of SLAM technology?
In the following article, we will discuss how the SLAM technology is evolving, introduction to MAXST’s Visual SLAM, and practical examples using SLAM technology.
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