This article presents a comprehensive review of the Active Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (A-SLAM) research conducted over the past decade. It explores the formulation, applications, and methodologies employed in A-SLAM, particularly in trajectory generation and control-action selection, drawing on concepts from Information Theory (IT) and the Theory of Optimal Experimental Design (TOED). This review includes both qualitative and quantitative analyses of various approaches, deployment scenarios, configurations, path-planning methods, and utility functions within A-SLAM research. Furthermore, this article introduces a novel analysis of Active Collaborative SLAM (AC-SLAM), focusing on collaborative aspects within SLAM systems. It includes a thorough examination of collaborative parameters and approaches, supported by both qualitative and statistical assessments. This study also identifies limitations in the existing literature and suggests potential avenues for future research. This survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers seeking insights into A-SLAM methods and techniques, offering a current overview of A-SLAM formulation.

In the context of virtualized-reality-based telemicromanipulation, this paper presents a visual calibration technique for an optical microscope coupled to a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera. The accuracy and flexibility of the proposed automatic virtual calibration method, based on parallel single-plane properties, are outlined. In contrast to standard approaches, a 3-D virtual calibration pattern is constructed using the micromanipulator tip with subpixel-order localization in the image frame. The proposed procedure leads to a linear system whose solution provides directly both the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of the geometrical model. Computer simulations and real data have been used to test the proposed technique, and promising results have been obtained. Based on the proposed calibration techniques, a 3-D virtual microenvironment of the workspace is reconstructed through the real-time imaging of two perpendicular optical microscopes. Our method provides a flexible, easy-to-use technical alternative to the classical techniques used in micromanipulation systems.

Occlusion is a major challenge for LiDAR-based object detection methods as it renders regions of interest unobservable to the ego vehicle. A proposed solution to this problem comes from collaborative perception via Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, which leverages a diverse perspective thanks to the presence of connected agents (vehicles and intelligent roadside units) at multiple locations to form a complete scene representation. The major challenge of V2X collaboration is the performance-bandwidth tradeoff which presents two questions 1) which information should be exchanged over the V2X network and 2) how the exchanged information is fused. The current state-of-the-art resolves to the mid-collaboration approach where Birds-Eye View (BEV) images of point clouds are communicated to enable a deep interaction among connected agents while reducing bandwidth consumption. While achieving strong performance, the real-world deployment of most mid-collaboration approaches are hindered by their overly complicated architectures and unrealistic assumptions about inter-agent synchronization. In this work, we devise a simple yet effective collaboration method based on exchanging the outputs from each agent that achieves a better bandwidth-performance tradeoff while minimising the required changes to the single-vehicle detection models. Moreover, we relax the assumptions used in existing state-of-the-art approaches about inter-agent synchronization to only require a common time reference among connected agents, which can be achieved in practice using GPS time. Experiments on the V2X-Sim dataset show that our collaboration method reaches 76.72 mean average precision which is 99% the performance of the early collaboration method while consuming as much bandwidth as the late collaboration (0.01 MB on average). The code will be released in https://github.com/quan-dao/practical-collab-perception.