If SLAM is a new term for you and you want to know more about it, you are on the right page. SLAM is a new technology used to enable a vehicle-based mobile robot to detect the surrounding environment. The idea is to locate your position on the map. Primarily, this technology is associated with robotics, but it can also be employed in many other devices and machines such as drones, automated aerial vehicles, automated forklifts, and robotic cleaners to name a few. Let’s get a deeper insight into this technology.

The advent of SLAM

In 1995, SLAM was presented for the first time at the International Symposium on Robotics Research. In 1986, a mathematical definition was presented at the IEEE Automation and Robotics Conference. After the conference, studies were carried out to find out more about navigational devices and statistical theories.

After more than a decade, experts have introduced a method to implement a camera to achieve the same goal instead of using multiple sensors. As a result, these efforts led to the creation of vision-based SLAM. This system used cameras to obtain a three-dimensional position.

Without a doubt, this was a great achievement of that time. Since then, we have seen the application of these systems in various areas.

The core, mapping and localization of SLAM

Now, let’s find out more about mapping, localization and the core of SLAM systems. This will help you learn more about this technology and have a better understanding of how it has been shown to be beneficial.

Location

Location can help you know where you are. Basically, SLAM gives you a location estimate based on visual information. It’s like when you meet a strange place for the first time.

As humans do not have a clear sense of defense and distance, we can get lost. The best thing about SLAM based robots is that they can easily figure out the direction with respect to the surrounding environment. However, it is important that the map is highly capable of detecting your location.

Mapping

Mapping refers to a process that helps analyze the information collected by the robot through a sensor. In general, vision-based systems use cameras as sensitive sensors. After the creation of sufficient motion parallax, in between two-dimensional locations, triangulation techniques are implemented to obtain a three-dimensional location.

The beauty of augmented reality is that it can help you get information from virtual images in a real environment. However, augmented reality requires certain technologies to recognize the surrounding environment and detect the relative position of the cameras.

So you can see that SLAM plays a very important role in several areas like location interaction, interface, graphics, visualization and tracking.

In a nutshell, this was an introduction to the technology behind SLAM and the various areas where it is implemented.