The main advantage with such linear fusion is that
it is a relatively computationally cheap process, that
unlocks the potential for crowd-sourced data acquisi-
tion without compromising map quality. In our case,
for the simulated dataset with 60 % errors, to per-
form a bundle adjustment on all 50 maps and merge
them took 47 minutes, whereas the full bundle ad-
justment took 1.5 days on the same machine for all
400 iterations. This can be seen further in Figure
6, with an appropriate number of maps. Although
the computational time reduction can be seen, it is
not as large as the one mentioned for the simulated
dataset with 60 % errors. This may be due to the
the RANSAC initialization, this step produces a ro-
bust and close initialization which reduces the time
needed of our method to converge to the optimal so-
lution. In the case for the simulated data used in ex-
periment 3, since all the maps are viable (no outliers)
then many more maps are initialized with the value
1, hence the computational time is less affected. The
proposed method bridges memory requirement issues
and offers the ability to select the best datasets. In
addition to this, the method would also work for dif-
ferent media type, such as bluetooth, multiple WiFi
frequencies and optical SLAM. Provided that the po-
sitions of the anchor points are the same for each me-
dia.
For future work, the study of a collaborative data
management scheme would be highly advantageous.
In doing so, would give an autonomous way of choos-
ing which parts of the dataset to fuse in order to dis-
card unnecessary data and keep only the required data
to improve a map. For instance, if an office building
were to be mapped using crowd-sourced data, there
would exist areas that would be oversampled, such as
the main entrance and corridors. Whereas a storage
room would be sampled infrequently, therefore an au-
tomatic scheme that would discard the oversampled
areas would be advantageous to data management.
In summary, this would be a way of determining the
uniqueness of a given map.
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