I've thought about using similar systems to this to do SLAM in my apartment. I want to put some light sources or reflectors on my ceiling and then use camera tracking to solve for movement. Basically mounting a Wiimote or TrackIR sensor to the vehicle.

Hell, I would probably just re-use my VR lighthouse projectors if the sensor solution wasn't so expensive

Is it for an R/C car or something different? I’ve found out that RTAB-MAP works quite nicely, but whether it would be useful for you depends on many factors.

I want to take basically this: https://www.adafruit.com/product/749 (I got a parallax boebot kit when I was younger, before arduino was a thing) and just have it roam around like a robot pet. Mostly to learn and play around and because I think it would be fun.

Never seen that project before, looks cool, but I don't have the hardware required. I DO have ten ultrasonic rangefinders, some gyroscopes and accelerometers and a raspberry Pi camera, and a complete lack of the math knowledge required to implement kalman filters and smart solutions

I thought the sensor for Lighthouse was just a bunch of IR diodes and very precise timing?

The lighthouse beacon box (the thing you mount to your walls) is in fact not a sensor! It has an IR laser (at least I think its "lasers") pattern on a spinning head that is caused to sweep across your play space, and also encodes other data in the flashing of the IR beam. The older V1 Lighthouses were a little simpler but still cool.

The "sensor" is something with like ten IR sensor boards. They know their position on the device being tracked and will watch the patterns projected into the space to find their angle and distance to the 1-many lighthouse projectors you use. They can then get very very precise position deltas by using these measured values and comparing. Valve usually adds some sensor fusion and accelerometers, because I think the lighthouses only update at about 10hz? Valve or some partner actually sells the raw sensor boards for pretty cheap, but the integration is a little complicated and more expensive.

Valve also sells a completed, wireless, lighthouse compatible sensor device that integrates directly with the SteamVR software but it's like $100.

Sorry for over-explaining, sure you knew most of this already