DRE-SLAM: Dynamic RGB-D Encoder SLAM for a Differential-Drive Robot

<jats:p>The state-of-the-art visual simultaneous localization and mapping (V-SLAM) systems have high accuracy localization capabilities and impressive mapping effects. However, most of these systems assume that the operating environment is static, thereby limiting their application in the real dynamic world. In this paper, by fusing the information of an RGB-D camera and two encoders that are mounted on a differential-drive robot, we aim to estimate the motion of the robot and construct a static background OctoMap in both dynamic and static environments. A tightly coupled feature-based method is proposed to fuse the two types of information based on the optimization. Dynamic pixels occupied by dynamic objects are detected and culled to cope with dynamic environments. The ability to identify the dynamic pixels on both predefined and undefined dynamic objects is available, which is attributed to the combination of the CPU-based object detection method and a multiview constraint-based approach. We first construct local sub-OctoMaps by using the keyframes and then fuse the sub-OctoMaps into a full OctoMap. This submap-based approach gives the OctoMap the ability to deform, and significantly reduces the map updating time and memory costs. We evaluated the proposed system in various dynamic and static scenes. The results show that our system possesses competitive pose accuracy and high robustness, as well as the ability to construct a clean static OctoMap in dynamic scenes.</jats:p>