A Graph Optimization-Based Acoustic SLAM Edge Computing System Offering Centimeter-Level Mapping Services with Reflector Recognition Capability

Robots can use echo signals for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) services in unknown environments where its own camera is not available. In current acoustic SLAM solutions, the time of arrival (TOA) in the room impulse response (RIR) needs to be associated with the corresponding reflected wall, which leads to an echo labelling problem (ELP). The position of the wall can be derived from the TOA associated with the wall, but most of the current solutions ignore the effect of the cumulative error in the robot’s moving state measurement on the wall position estimation. In addition, the estimated room map contains only the shape information of the room and lacks position information such as the positions of doors and windows. To address the above problems, this paper proposes a graph optimization-based acoustic SLAM edge computing system offering centimeter-level mapping services with reflector recognition capability. In this paper, a robot equipped with a sound source and a four-channel microphone array travels around the room, and it can collect the room impulse response at different positions of the room and extract the RIR cepstrum feature from the room impulse response. The ELP is solved by using the RIR cepstrum to identify reflectors with different absorption coefficients. Then, the similarity of the RIR cepstrum vectors is used for closed-loop detection. Finally, this paper proposes a method to eliminate the cumulative error of robot movement by fusing IMU data and acoustic echo data using graph-optimized edge computation. The experiments show that the acoustic SLAM system in this paper can accurately estimate the trajectory of the robot and the position of doors, windows, and so on in the room map. The average self-localization error of the robot is 2.84 cm, and the mapping error is 4.86 cm, which meet the requirement of centimeter-level map service.