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In robot localisation and mapping, outliers are unavoidable when loop-closure measurements are taken into account. A single false-positive loop-closure can have a very negative impact on SLAM problems causing an inferior trajectory to be produced or even for the optimisation to fail entirely. To address this issue, popular existing approaches define a hard switch for each loop-closure constraint. This paper presents AEROS, a novel approach to adaptively solve a robust least-squares minimisation problem by adding just a single extra latent parameter. It can be used in the back-end component of the SLAM problem to enable generalised robust cost minimisation by simultaneously estimating the continuous latent parameter along with the set of sensor poses in a single joint optimisation. This leads to a very closely curve fitting on the distribution of the residuals, thereby reducing the effect of outliers. Additionally, we formulate the robust optimisation problem using standard Gaussian factors so that it can be solved by direct application of popular incremental estimation approaches such as iSAM. Experimental results on publicly available synthetic datasets and real LiDAR-SLAM datasets collected from the 2D and 3D LiDAR systems show the competitiveness of our approach with the state-of-the-art techniques and its superiority on real world scenarios., 13

Active inference is a general framework for decision-making prominent neuroscience that utilizes variational inference. Recent work in robotics adopted this framework for control and state-estimation; however, these approaches provide a form of ‘reactive’ control which fails to track fast-moving reference trajectories. In this work, we present a variational inference predictive controller. Given a reference trajectory, the controller uses its forward dynamic model to predict future states and chooses appropriate actions. Furthermore, we highlight the limitation of the reactive controller such as the dependency between estimation and control.