remote 3d slam with limited sensing and bandwidth

edit

We only have about 10Kbps of bandwidth, so image frequency is measured in minutes not hertz. The upside is that the robot is traversing on the order of mm/s, so we will likely only be moving several cm between photos, but very slowly. Odometry on the robot would be ideal, but hopefully unnecessary.

Just another idea, having lower resolution images may also help to save some bandwidth at the cost of less good odometry.

oh yeah that's the plan for sure. Even at 240p black/white images, it's something like 1-2 minutes per frame at 10kbps. I might be sending point clouds too. I'm mostly worried about even being able to configure RTABMAP to update when I get a frame, rather than at a fixed rate.

We might abandon actual SLAM and rely on standard point cloud registration without loop closure. The mission goal is to map a relatively featureless outdoor environment with several known landmarks, but the bandwidth limitations are very restrictive. We're limited to small embedded devices too.

If you could segment out the 'known landmarks' and identify them (ie: without using a slam approach, sort of like a virtual tag or beacon), perhaps the fiducials pkg could be interesting.