simultaneous localization and mapping

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a computational problem and the family of algorithms that address it — a mobile robot or autonomous vehicle simultaneously constructing a map of an unknown environment and determining its own position within that map, without access to prior knowledge of the environment or to external positioning systems such as GPS; SLAM is fundamental to autonomous navigation because a robot cannot localise itself without a map, and cannot build a map without knowing where it is — a chicken-and-egg problem that SLAM algorithms solve jointly; sensor modalities for SLAM include lidar, cameras (visual SLAM or vSLAM), sonar, and IMUs; probabilistic SLAM frameworks including particle filters, extended Kalman filters, and graph-based optimisation methods propagate uncertainty over both the robot's pose and the map; SLAM is used in vacuum robots, autonomous vehicles, search and rescue robots, and augmented reality systems

Examples

• The autonomous floor-cleaning robot uses SLAM to navigate a home it has never seen, building a map as it cleans.
• Visual SLAM using a stereo camera enables low-cost autonomous navigation without the lidar sensors used in early self-driving vehicles.

Synonyms: SLAM