1,043 research outputs found
Keyframe-based visualāinertial odometry using nonlinear optimization
Combining visual and inertial measurements has become popular in mobile robotics, since the two sensing modalities offer complementary characteristics that make them the ideal choice for accurate visualāinertial odometry or simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). While historically the problem has been addressed with filtering, advancements in visual estimation suggest that nonlinear optimization offers superior accuracy, while still tractable in complexity thanks to the sparsity of the underlying problem. Taking inspiration from these findings, we formulate a rigorously probabilistic cost function that combines reprojection errors of landmarks and inertial terms. The problem is kept tractable and thus ensuring real-time operation by limiting the optimization to a bounded window of keyframes through marginalization. Keyframes may be spaced in time by arbitrary intervals, while still related by linearized inertial terms. We present evaluation results on complementary datasets recorded with our custom-built stereo visualāinertial hardware that accurately synchronizes accelerometer and gyroscope measurements with imagery. A comparison of both a stereo and monocular version of our algorithm with and without online extrinsics estimation is shown with respect to ground truth. Furthermore, we compare the performance to an implementation of a state-of-the-art stochastic cloning sliding-window filter. This competitive reference implementation performs tightly coupled filtering-based visualāinertial odometry. While our approach declaredly demands more computation, we show its superior performance in terms of accuracy
Fast, Accurate Thin-Structure Obstacle Detection for Autonomous Mobile Robots
Safety is paramount for mobile robotic platforms such as self-driving cars
and unmanned aerial vehicles. This work is devoted to a task that is
indispensable for safety yet was largely overlooked in the past -- detecting
obstacles that are of very thin structures, such as wires, cables and tree
branches. This is a challenging problem, as thin objects can be problematic for
active sensors such as lidar and sonar and even for stereo cameras. In this
work, we propose to use video sequences for thin obstacle detection. We
represent obstacles with edges in the video frames, and reconstruct them in 3D
using efficient edge-based visual odometry techniques. We provide both a
monocular camera solution and a stereo camera solution. The former incorporates
Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data to solve scale ambiguity, while the latter
enjoys a novel, purely vision-based solution. Experiments demonstrated that the
proposed methods are fast and able to detect thin obstacles robustly and
accurately under various conditions.Comment: Appeared at IEEE CVPR 2017 Workshop on Embedded Visio
Non-iterative RGB-D-inertial Odometry
This paper presents a non-iterative solution to RGB-D-inertial odometry
system. Traditional odometry methods resort to iterative algorithms which are
usually computationally expensive or require well-designed initialization. To
overcome this problem, this paper proposes to combine a non-iterative front-end
(odometry) with an iterative back-end (loop closure) for the RGB-D-inertial
SLAM system. The main contribution lies in the novel non-iterative front-end,
which leverages on inertial fusion and kernel cross-correlators (KCC) to match
point clouds in frequency domain. Dominated by the fast Fourier transform
(FFT), our method is only of complexity , where is
the number of points. Map fusion is conducted by element-wise operations, so
that both time and space complexity are further reduced. Extensive experiments
show that, due to the lightweight of the proposed front-end, the framework is
able to run at a much faster speed yet still with comparable accuracy with the
state-of-the-arts
PIEKF-VIWO: Visual-Inertial-Wheel Odometry using Partial Invariant Extended Kalman Filter
Invariant Extended Kalman Filter (IEKF) has been successfully applied in
Visual-inertial Odometry (VIO) as an advanced achievement of Kalman filter,
showing great potential in sensor fusion. In this paper, we propose partial
IEKF (PIEKF), which only incorporates rotation-velocity state into the Lie
group structure and apply it for Visual-Inertial-Wheel Odometry (VIWO) to
improve positioning accuracy and consistency. Specifically, we derive the
rotation-velocity measurement model, which combines wheel measurements with
kinematic constraints. The model circumvents the wheel odometer's 3D
integration and covariance propagation, which is essential for filter
consistency. And a plane constraint is also introduced to enhance the position
accuracy. A dynamic outlier detection method is adopted, leveraging the
velocity state output. Through the simulation and real-world test, we validate
the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms the standard Multi-State
Constraint Kalman Filter (MSCKF) based VIWO in consistency and accuracy
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