Session Summary

Abstract

At the meeting, someone said that it was “a meeting taken over by a technique.” They meant that SLAM was everywhere. In fact, almost twenty-five percent of the talks were directly or indirectly related to SLAM. Plus, the SLAM session illustrated how widely applicable the technique can be. The presentations described applications involving uninhabited air vehicles (UAVs), autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and force-sensing manipulators; The sensors included inertial navigation systems (INSs), a range-bearing-elevation sensor, synthetic aperture sonars (SAS), SICK laser scanners, and video cameras; And the techniques explored “indirect,” hierarchical, local-global, and lazy approaches for keeping the computations manageable.