Iphone 14 RTAB-Map is crazy good!!

[Genozen]

Hello, first of thank you so much for developing rtabmap and maintaining them! They are wonderful and by far the easiest slam to build in my opinion.

I tried out the RTAB-Map on IPhone 14 and it is super good! It was able to map the stairs pretty well and robust enough with shaking and jitters or even running. (I’m very curious what’s the secret sauce!?)?

Is there any recommendations to use other cameras to achieve similar results? (Mapping stairs and robust)? I’ve tried using D435i RealSense with Infra enabled but it’s just so subject to drifts and Odometry would flash red… have red literatures about L515, Zed2i, but none of the results seemed robust enough compared to IPhone 14…

Am I just not tuning it enough?

[matlabbe]

With the iOS version, we use ARKit's VIO approach, which is more robust than VO approaches inside RTAB-Map library. It is also similar in performance than Google Tango's VIO. Using rtabmap_ros, you may find an Open Source VIO approach that could be fed to rtabmap node, to produce similar results. For iOS, it is just so convenient to have already state of the art VIO with synchronized LiDAR sensor, powerful computer, screen and battery that you can hold with one hand.

With other cameras, there are ways to make it close to ARKit, but careful configurations should be done. For example, with D435i, use IR+Depth mode with IR emitter disabled. Note also that stereo cameras cannot give as accurate point clouds than the TOF (LiDAR) camera on iPhone.

With cameras like L515 or Kinect Azure (having TOF camera), you can do ICP odometry, which in some cases is pretty accurate.

cheers,
Mathieu

[Genozen]

Thank you, Mathieu. I appreciate it a lot for the detailed thoughts and guidance!!