SOL-SLAM: Inverse Compositional Gauss-Newton Direct Registration for Fast Sonar-Only Local SLAM

2026-09-16

AI Summary

本文提出了一种密集直接配准方法SOL-SLAM，利用前视声呐进行局部SLAM，通过逆合成高斯-牛顿优化策略实现实时执行，提高平移误差精度。

Abstract

Autonomous underwater navigation typically relies on complex and expensive multi-modal sensor suites designed to prioritize global Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) accuracy. However, local reactive behaviors such as coarse navigation and obstacle avoidance require only local consistency---a capability that should be feasible using only a Forward-Looking Sonar (FLS), yet remains largely unaddressed, leaving a critical gap in FLS-only local SLAM. Moreover, existing acoustic SLAM frameworks predominantly rely on sparse feature extraction methods that discard substantial portions of the already information-sparse acoustic returns. To overcome these limitations, this work introduces a dense direct registration approach that aligns full acoustic intensity scans to a recursively updated local map. Real-time execution is achieved via an Inverse Compositional Gauss-Newton optimization strategy that minimizes computational overhead. Experimental evaluations show that this dense method yields significant improvements on translation error compared to sparse keypoint baselines, maintaining stable sub-meter tracking precision over wide displacement gaps. Moreover, this approach delivers odometry performance comparable to multi-sensor fusion pipelines (FLS, DVL, and IMU), bypassing expensive payload dependencies in feature-rich environments. We validate real-world applicability through AUV field trials, running the full local SLAM approach onboard an embedded, resource-constrained computer.

Problem

• Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)
• Forward-Looking Sonar (FLS)
• local consistency
• sparse feature extraction
• acoustic SLAM

Innovation

• dense direct registration
• Inverse Compositional Gauss-Newton
• sonar-only local SLAM