Feasibility of using Monocular Visual SLAM with ROS for robot navigation in warehouses

Abstract

In recent years, the use of robots in industrial facilities has become widespread. Particularly, the logistics and inventory management industry has benefited from technological advances, however, the high costs of these technologies prevent many companies from adopting this degree of automation. In this research, we propose the feasibility of using monocular Visual SLAM as an alternative to reduce costs in the localization hardware used for robot navigation in warehouses. For that, we study open source implementations, especially those based on ORB-SLAM2, ROS and Ubuntu. Then, we propose a testing environment compose by a Turtle Bot 2 robot and a location that ensembles some of the characteristics of warehouses. Our analysis shows that it is possible to use monocular Visual SLAM in warehouses, however, we mention some elements in the software and hardware that should be fixed or improved in current implementations in order to robustly and safely operate robots in an indoor storage environment.