Despite the existence of different error metrics for trajectory evaluation in
SLAM, their theoretical justifications and connections are rarely studied, and
few methods handle temporal association properly. In this work, we propose to
formulate the trajectory evaluation problem in a probabilistic, continuous-time
framework. By modeling the groundtruth as random variables, the concepts of
absolute and relative error are generalized to be likelihood. Moreover, the
groundtruth is represented as a piecewise Gaussian Process in continuous-time.
Within this framework, we are able to establish theoretical connections between
relative and absolute error metrics and handle temporal association in a
principled manner.Comment: Accepted at ICRA19 Workshop on Dataset Generation and Benchmarking of
SLAM Algorithms for Robotics and VR/AR. Best paper awar