To get around, robots need a little help from maps, just like the rest of us. Just like humans, bots can’t always rely on GPS, especially when they operate indoors. And GPS isn’t sufficiently accurate enough outdoors because precision within a few inches is required to move about safely. Instead they rely on what’s known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM, to discover and map their surroundings.
Using SLAM, robots build their own maps as they go. It lets them know their position by aligning the sensor data they collect with whatever sensor data they’ve already collected to build out a map for navigation. Sounds easy enough, but it’s actually a multi-stage process that includes alignment of sensor data using a variety of algorithms well suited to the parallel processing capabilities of GPUs.
