Sunday, January 26, 2025

PolyMap: Introduction

PolyMap:
PolyMap is an experimental platform designed to explore Robotic Swarm–based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) strategies across both simulated and real-world environments. By combining lightweight simulation, MQTT-based communications, and emerging visualization techniques, PolyMap aims to offer an accessible yet robust toolkit in multi-robot collaboration and global mapping challenges.

Recent Progress: Building a Simple SLAM Simulator
I am pleased to share the latest milestones in developing a simple SLAM simulator under PolyMap. Over the past few weeks, I have laid the foundation for simulating robot behavior, visualizing real-time maps, and merging local maps into a unified global view. This work is an important step toward creating a versatile environment where multiple robots can collaboratively build and refine shared maps.

An early achievement in this release has been leveraging MQTT for robot-to-visualization communication. Each simulated robot transmits map updates through MQTT, which our visualization layer consolidates into a cohesive global map. I have also made headway on a basic search feature, an early step toward more sophisticated swarm coordination. Concurrently, I have improved the simulation architecture to ensure that incoming data and visualization processes run smoothly without blocking each other.

On the infrastructure side, I have established a basic development structure—not full CI/CD yet, but enough to keep things organized and maintain momentum. I have also incorporated early concurrency and event-handling mechanisms so that data flow and visual updates can occur in parallel. While there’s still much, much more to do, these accomplishments underline PolyMap’s potential to evolve into a compelling cooperative robotics exploration platform.

Next Steps and Future Directions
Looking ahead, I plan to explore using gaming engines to enhance our visualization capabilities, offering a more immersive and high-performance environment for simulating robot movements and interactions. Additionally, as the simulated framework matures, we’re setting our sights on integrating physical robots into the pipeline—bridging the gap between virtual testing and real-world application. By supporting both simulated and physical robot platforms, we hope to make PolyMap a flexible tool for multi-robot SLAM challenges. Stay tuned for more updates as the platform continues to evolve!

Here is a much more realistic screen capture of the actual 'early' simple simulation. ;)

Simple SLAM simulation

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