Various types of SLAM technology find widescale applications in the military, mining, commercial, automotive, household appliances, agriculture and forestry, and manufacturing and logistics industries. Key application areas of SLAM technologies are robotics, autonomous vehicle, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), reef monitoring, AR/virtual reality (VR), and terrain mapping.
At present, these technologies are mostly used in robotics applications due to the surging deployment of SLAM-enabled autonomous robots for accurate indoor and outdoor location mapping for manufacturing, transport, surgery, assembly and packing, weaponry, earth and space exploration, and laboratory research.
The type segment of the SLAM technology market is categorized into fast, graph-based, extended kalman filter (EKF), and others, such as large scale direct (LSD) SLAM, ORB-SLAM, ORB-SLAM2, and stereo parallel tracking and mapping (S-PTAM). Among these, the fast category is expected to showcase the fastest growth during the forecast period, because FAST SLAM can factorize full posterior distribution into a product of a vehicle path distribution and landmark distributions, which leads to accurate location mapping.
Moreover, the burgeoning demand for 3D environment mapping will also fuel the growth of this category in the coming years. According to P&S Intelligence, North America accounted for the largest share in the SLAM technology market in 2019, due to the mounting investments that were made in the robotics industry, increasing AR applications, and surging adoption of automated household appliances, such as lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners, owing to the escalating disposable income of people in the region.
Whereas, Asia-Pacific (APAC) is expected to demonstrate the fastest growth throughout the forecast period, owing to the growing penetration of UAVs, accelerating digitalization rate, and soaring household expenditure on advanced technologies in the region. Therefore, the burgeoning demand for autonomous vehicles and increasing use of AR technology will boost the adoption of SLAM technology in the forthcoming years.