SPINS: Structure Priors aided Inertial Navigation System

Although Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) has been an active research topic for decades, current state-of-the-art methods still suffer from instability or inaccuracy due to feature insufficiency or its inherent estimation drift, in many civilian environments. To resolve these issues, we propose a navigation system combing the SLAM and prior-map-based localization. Specifically, we consider additional integration of line and plane features, which are ubiquitous and more structurally salient in civilian environments, into the SLAM to ensure feature sufficiency and localization robustness. More importantly, we incorporate general prior map information into the SLAM to restrain its drift and improve the accuracy. To avoid rigorous association between prior information and local observations, we parameterize the prior knowledge as low dimensional structural priors defined as relative distances/angles between different geometric primitives. The localization is formulated as a graph-based optimization problem that contains sliding-window-based variables and factors, including IMU, heterogeneous features, and structure priors. We also derive the analytical expressions of Jacobians of different factors to avoid the automatic differentiation overhead. To further alleviate the computation burden of incorporating structural prior factors, a selection mechanism is adopted based on the so-called information gain to incorporate only the most effective structure priors in the graph optimization. Finally, the proposed framework is extensively tested on synthetic data, public datasets, and, more importantly, on the real UAV flight data obtained from a building inspection task. The results show that the proposed scheme can effectively improve the accuracy and robustness of localization for autonomous robots in civilian applications.Comment: 14 pages, 14 figure

Systematic Handling of Heterogeneous Geometric Primitives in Graph-SLAM Optimization

In this letter, we propose a pose-landmark graph optimization back-end that supports maps consisting of points, lines, or planes. Our back-end allows representing both homogeneous ( point–point , line–line , plane–plane ) and heterogeneous measurements ( point-on-line , point-on-plane , line-on-plane ). Rather than treating all cases independently, we use a unified formulation that leads to both a compact derivation and a concise implementation. The additional geometric information, deriving from the use of higher dimension primitives and constraints, yields to increased robustness and widens the convergence basin of our method. We evaluate the proposed formulation both on synthetic and raw data. Finally, we made available an open-source implementation to replicate the experiments