RAMEN: Real-time Asynchronous Multi-agent Neural Implicit Mapping

Hongrui Zhao, Boris Ivanovic, Negar Mehr,
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
NVIDIA Research
University of California Berkeley
Code arXiv

In a challenging real-world experiment with limited communication (agents can only exchange information every 30seconds), our method RAMEN enables each turtlebot to successfully map the full scene while only physically visiting half of the scene (explored areas and trajectories are colored accordingly). Our method achieves accuracy comparable to the ground truth while the baseline method (DiNNO) fails to converge.

Abstract

Multi-agent neural implicit mapping allows robots to collaboratively capture and reconstruct complex environments with high fidelity. However, existing approaches often rely on synchronous communication, which is impractical in real-world scenarios with limited bandwidth and potential communication interruptions. This paper introduces RAMEN: Real-time Asynchronous Multi-agEnt Neural implicit mapping, a novel approach designed to address this challenge. RAMEN employs an uncertainty-weighted multi-agent consensus optimization algorithm that accounts for communication disruptions. When communication is lost between a pair of agents, each agent retains only an outdated copy of its neighbor's map, with the uncertainty of this copy increasing over time since the last communication. Using gradient update information, we quantify the uncertainty associated with each parameter of the neural network map. Neural network maps from different agents are brought to consensus on the basis of their levels of uncertainty, with consensus biased towards network parameters with lower uncertainty. To achieve this, we derive a weighted variant of the decentralized consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (C-ADMM) algorithm, facilitating robust collaboration among agents with varying communication and update frequencies. Through extensive evaluations on real-world datasets and robot hardware experiments, we demonstrate RAMEN's superior mapping performance under challenging communication conditions.