Integration of Absolute Orientation Measurements in the KinectFusion Reconstruction pipeline

In this paper, we show how absolute orientation measurements provided by low-cost but high-fidelity IMU sensors can be integrated into the KinectFusion pipeline. We show that integration improves both runtime, robustness and quality of the 3D reconstruction. In particular, we use this orientation data to seed and regularize the ICP registration technique. We also present a technique to filter the pairs of 3D matched points based on the distribution of their distances. This filter is implemented efficiently on the GPU. Estimating the distribution of the distances helps control the number of iterations necessary for the convergence of the ICP algorithm. Finally, we show experimental results that highlight improvements in robustness, a speed-up of almost 12%, and a gain in tracking quality of 53% for the ATE metric on the Freiburg benchmark.Comment: CVPR Workshop on Visual Odometry and Computer Vision Applications Based on Location Clues 201

Active Collaborative Localization in Heterogeneous Robot Teams

Accurate and robust state estimation is critical for autonomous navigation of robot teams. This task is especially challenging for large groups of size, weight, and power (SWAP) constrained aerial robots operating in perceptually-degraded GPS-denied environments. We can, however, actively increase the amount of perceptual information available to such robots by augmenting them with a small number of more expensive, but less resource-constrained, agents. Specifically, the latter can serve as sources of perceptual information themselves. In this paper, we study the problem of optimally positioning (and potentially navigating) a small number of more capable agents to enhance the perceptual environment for their lightweight,inexpensive, teammates that only need to rely on cameras and IMUs. We propose a numerically robust, computationally efficient approach to solve this problem via nonlinear optimization. Our method outperforms the standard approach based on the greedy algorithm, while matching the accuracy of a heuristic evolutionary scheme for global optimization at a fraction of its running time. Ultimately, we validate our solution in both photorealistic simulations and real-world experiments. In these experiments, we use lidar-based autonomous ground vehicles as the more capable agents, and vision-based aerial robots as their SWAP-constrained teammates. Our method is able to reduce drift in visual-inertial odometry by as much as 90%, and it outperforms random positioning of lidar-equipped agents by a significant margin. Furthermore, our method can be generalized to different types of robot teams with heterogeneous perception capabilities. It has a wide range of applications, such as surveying and mapping challenging dynamic environments, and enabling resilience to large-scale perturbations that can be caused by earthquakes or storms.Comment: To appear in Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 202

Dense RGB-D-Inertial SLAM with Map Deformations

While dense visual SLAM methods are capable of estimating dense reconstructions of the environment, they suffer from a lack of robustness in their tracking step, especially when the optimisation is poorly initialised. Sparse visual SLAM systems have attained high levels of accuracy and robustness through the inclusion of inertial measurements in a tightly-coupled fusion. Inspired by this performance, we propose the first tightly-coupled dense RGB-D-inertial SLAM system. Our system has real-time capability while running on a GPU. It jointly optimises for the camera pose, velocity, IMU biases and gravity direction while building up a globally consistent, fully dense surfel-based 3D reconstruction of the environment. Through a series of experiments on both synthetic and real world datasets, we show that our dense visual-inertial SLAM system is more robust to fast motions and periods of low texture and low geometric variation than a related RGB-D-only SLAM system.Comment: Accepted at IROS 2017; supplementary video available at https://youtu.be/-gUdQ0cxDh