BotanicGarden: A high-quality and large-scale robot navigation dataset in challenging natural environments

The rapid developments of mobile robotics and autonomous navigation over the years are largely empowered by public datasets for testing and upgrading, such as SLAM and localization tasks. Impressive demos and benchmark results have arisen, indicating the establishment of a mature technical framework. However, from the view point of real-world deployments, there are still critical defects of robustness in challenging environments, especially in large-scale, GNSS-denied, textural-monotonous, and unstructured scenarios. To meet the pressing validation demands in such scope, we build a novel challenging robot navigation dataset in a large botanic garden of more than 48000m2. Comprehensive sensors are employed, including high-res/rate stereo Gray&RGB cameras, rotational and forward 3D LiDARs, and low-cost and industrial-grade IMUs, all of which are well calibrated and accurately hardware-synchronized. An all-terrain wheeled robot is configured to mount the sensor suite and provide odometry data. A total of 32 long and short sequences of 2.3 million images are collected, covering scenes of thick woods, riversides, narrow paths, bridges, and grasslands that rarely appeared in previous resources. Excitedly, both highly-accurate ego-motions and 3D map ground truth are provided, along with fine-annotated vision semantics. Our goal is to contribute a high-quality dataset to advance robot navigation and sensor fusion research to a higher level.

Datasets and Evaluation for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Related Problems: A Comprehensive Survey

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) has found an increasing utilization lately, such as self-driving cars, robot navigation, 3D mapping, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), etc., empowering both industry and daily life. Although the state-of-the-art algorithms where developers have spared no effort are source of intelligence, it is the datasets that dedicate behind and raise us higher. The employment of datasets is essentially a kind of simulation but profits many aspects - capacity of drilling algorithm hourly, exemption of costly hardware and ground truth system, and equitable benchmark for evaluation. However, as a branch of great significance, still the datasets have not drawn wide attention nor been reviewed thoroughly. Hence in this article, we strive to give a comprehensive and open access review of SLAM related datasets and evaluation, which are scarcely surveyed while highly demanded by researchers and engineers, looking forward to serving as not only a dictionary but also a development proposal. The paper starts with the methodology of dataset collection, and a taxonomy of SLAM related tasks. Then followed with the main portion - comprehensively survey the existing SLAM related datasets by category with our considerate introductions and insights. Furthermore, we talk about the evaluation criteria, which are necessary to quantify the algorithm performance on the dataset and inspect the defects. At the end, we summarize the weakness of datasets and evaluation - which could well result in the weakness of topical algorithms - to promote bridging the gap fundamentally.