A Comprehensive Study of Systems Challenges in Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Systems

Visual SLAM systems are concurrent, performance-critical systems that respond to real-time environmental conditions and are frequently deployed on resource-constrained hardware. Previous work has identified three interconnected systems challenges to building consistent, accurate, and robust SLAM systems - timeliness, concurrency, and context awareness. In this article, we analyze three popular, state-of-the-art frameworks with varying system designs and optimization techniques, and we quantify the extent to which they are affected by the aforementioned system challenges. We find that all SLAM systems must balance the interconnected nature of timeliness and accuracy, and different system designs and optimization techniques uniquely address this tension. Global-map-based SLAM systems typically achieve the best performance but suffer in resource-constrained scenarios with increased concurrency. Across all SLAM systems, incorporating context awareness into decision-making would mitigate the impact of timeliness and concurrency on accuracy in resource-constrained scenarios.