Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications, and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees, active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and Is SLAM solved

Reversible GANs for Memory-efficient Image-to-Image Translation

The Pix2pix and CycleGAN losses have vastly improved the qualitative and quantitative visual quality of results in image-to-image translation tasks. We extend this framework by exploring approximately invertible architectures which are well suited to these losses. These architectures are approximately invertible by design and thus partially satisfy cycle-consistency before training even begins. Furthermore, since invertible architectures have constant memory complexity in depth, these models can be built arbitrarily deep. We are able to demonstrate superior quantitative output on the Cityscapes and Maps datasets at near constant memory budget