A Quantitative Analysis of System Bottlenecks in Visual SLAM

Abstract

Visual SLAM systems are concurrent, performance-critical systems that respond to real-time environmental conditions and are frequently deployed on resource-constrained hardware. Previous SLAM frameworks have primarily focused on algorithmic advances and their systems core has largely remained unchanged. In turn, SLAM systems suffer from performance problems that could be alleviated with improved systems design. In this paper, we present a quantitative analysis of the systems challenges to building consistent, accurate, and robust SLAM systems in the face of concurrency, variable environmental conditions, and resource-constrained hardware. We identify three interconnected challenges on systems design - - timeliness, concurrency, and context awareness - - and clarify their effects on performance.