In this paper we present ProSLAM, a lightweight stereo visual SLAM system
designed with simplicity in mind. Our work stems from the experience gathered
by the authors while teaching SLAM to students and aims at providing a highly
modular system that can be easily implemented and understood. Rather than
focusing on the well known mathematical aspects of Stereo Visual SLAM, in this
work we highlight the data structures and the algorithmic aspects that one
needs to tackle during the design of such a system. We implemented ProSLAM
using the C++ programming language in combination with a minimal set of well
known used external libraries. In addition to an open source implementation, we
provide several code snippets that address the core aspects of our approach
directly in this paper. The results of a thorough validation performed on
standard benchmark datasets show that our approach achieves accuracy comparable
to state of the art methods, while requiring substantially less computational
resources.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure