coVoxSLAM: GPU Accelerated Globally Consistent Dense SLAM

A dense SLAM system is essential for mobile robots, as it provides localization and allows navigation, path planning, obstacle avoidance, and decision-making in unstructured environments. Due to increasing computational demands the use of GPUs in dense SLAM is expanding. In this work, we present coVoxSLAM, a novel GPU-accelerated volumetric SLAM system that takes full advantage of the parallel processing power of the GPU to build globally consistent maps even in large-scale environments. It was deployed on different platforms (discrete and embedded GPU) and compared with the state of the art. The results obtained using public datasets show that coVoxSLAM delivers a significant performance improvement considering execution times while maintaining accurate localization. The presented system is available as open-source on GitHub https://github.com/lrse-uba/coVoxSLAM.

Training point-based deep learning networks for forest segmentation with synthetic data

Remote sensing through unmanned aerial systems (UAS) has been increasing in forestry in recent years, along with using machine learning for data processing. Deep learning architectures, extensively applied in natural language and image processing, have recently been extended to the point cloud domain. However, the availability of point cloud datasets for training and testing remains limited. Creating forested environment point cloud datasets is expensive, requires high-precision sensors, and is time-consuming as manual point classification is required. Moreover, forest areas could be inaccessible or dangerous for humans, further complicating data collection. Then, a question arises whether it is possible to use synthetic data to train deep learning networks without the need to rely on large volumes of real forest data. To answer this question, we developed a realistic simulator that procedurally generates synthetic forest scenes. Thanks to this, we have conducted a comparative study of different state-of-the-art point-based deep learning networks for forest segmentation. Using created datasets, we determined the feasibility of using synthetic data to train deep learning networks to classify point clouds from real forest datasets. Both the simulator and the datasets are released as part of this work.