INDOOR POSITIONING BY VISUAL-INERTIAL ODOMETRY

Indoor positioning is a fundamental requirement of many indoor location-based services and applications. In this paper, we explore the potential of low-cost and widely available visual and inertial sensors for indoor positioning. We describe the Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) approach and propose a measurement model for omnidirectional visual-inertial odometry (OVIO). The results of experiments in two simulated indoor environments show that the OVIO approach outperforms VIO and achieves a positioning accuracy of 1.1 % of the trajectory length

VINS-mono Optimized: A Monocular Visual-inertial State Estimator with Improved Initialization

State estimation is one of the key areas in robotics. It touches a variety of applications in practice such as, aerial vehicle navigation, autonomous driving, augmented reality, and virtual reality. A monocular visual-inertial system (VINS) is one of the popular trends in solving state estimation. By fusing a monocular camera and IMU properly, the system is capable of providing the position and orientation of a vehicle and recovering the scale. One of the challenges for a monocular VINS is estimator initialization due to the inadequacy of direct distance measurement. Based on the work of Hong Kong University of Technology on monocular VINS, a checkerboard pattern is introduced to improve the original initialization process. The checkerboard parameters are used along with the calculated 3D coordinates to replace the original initialization process, leading to higher accuracy. The results demonstrated lowered cross track error and final drift, compared with the original approach

Incremental Visual-Inertial 3D Mesh Generation with Structural Regularities

Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) algorithms typically rely on a point cloud representation of the scene that does not model the topology of the environment. A 3D mesh instead offers a richer, yet lightweight, model. Nevertheless, building a 3D mesh out of the sparse and noisy 3D landmarks triangulated by a VIO algorithm often results in a mesh that does not fit the real scene. In order to regularize the mesh, previous approaches decouple state estimation from the 3D mesh regularization step, and either limit the 3D mesh to the current frame or let the mesh grow indefinitely. We propose instead to tightly couple mesh regularization and state estimation by detecting and enforcing structural regularities in a novel factor-graph formulation. We also propose to incrementally build the mesh by restricting its extent to the time-horizon of the VIO optimization; the resulting 3D mesh covers a larger portion of the scene than a per-frame approach while its memory usage and computational complexity remain bounded. We show that our approach successfully regularizes the mesh, while improving localization accuracy, when structural regularities are present, and remains operational in scenes without regularities.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, ICRA accepte