Long-term visual localization in outdoor environment is a challenging problem, especially faced with the cross-seasonal, bi-directional tasks and changing environment. In this paper we propose a novel visual inertial localization framework that localizes against the LiDAR-built map. Based on the geometry information of the laser map, a hybrid bundle adjustment framework is proposed, which estimates the poses of the cameras with respect to the prior laser map as well as optimizes the state variables of the online visual inertial odometry system simultaneously. For more accurate cross-modal data association, the laser map is optimized using multi-session laser and visual data to extract the salient and stable subset for visual localization. To validate the efficiency of the proposed method, we collect data in south part of our campus in different seasons, along the same and opposite-direction route. In all sessions of localization data, our proposed method gives satisfactory results, and shows the superiority of the hybrid bundle adjustment and map optimization11https: www.youtube.com watch?v=vHAZtv2sBC4.
VINS provides precise and high-frequency relative pose estimation along the robot trajectory. Generally, there are two classes of methods in the area, one is to estimate the pose using a nonlinear filter, which is very efficient and light-weighted, thus is preferable in the mobile platform with limited computational resources @cite_21 @cite_25 . Another class of methods is based on local keyframe-based non-linear optimization, i.e. local bundle adjustment @cite_22 @cite_16 . The optimization based methods can achieve higher performance compared with the filter based solution, but the computational power is relatively higher. The main obstacle preventing VINS from a localization solution is that, VINS has drift in long term, since the accumulated error cannot be eliminated by itself. Therefore, in localization system, VINS is usually employed as a dead reckoning front end to support other back end.
@cite_22 @cite_21 @cite_25 @cite_16
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In this paper, we propose a novel robocentric formulation of the visual-inertial navigation system (VINS) within a sliding-window filtering framework and design an efficient, lightweight, robocentric visual-inertial odometry (R-VIO) algorithm for consistent motion tracking even in challenging environments using only a monocular camera and a 6-axis IMU. The key idea is to deliberately reformulate the VINS with respect to a moving local frame, rather than a fixed global frame of reference as in the standard world-centric VINS, in order to obtain relative motion estimates of higher accuracy for updating global poses. As an immediate advantage of this robocentric formulation, the proposed R-VIO can start from an arbitrary pose, without the need to align the initial orientation with the global gravitational direction. More importantly, we analytically show that the linearized robocentric VINS does not undergo the observability mismatch issue as in the standard world-centric counterpart which was identified in the literature as the main cause of estimation inconsistency. Additionally, we investigate in-depth the special motions that degrade the performance in the world-centric formulation and show that such degenerate cases can be easily compensated in the proposed robocentric formulation, without resorting to additional sensors as in the world-centric formulation, thus leading to better robustness. The proposed R-VIO algorithm has been extensively tested through both Monte Carlo simulations and real-world experiments with different sensor platforms navigating in different environments, and shown to achieve better (or competitive at least) performance than the state-of-the-art VINS, in terms of consistency, accuracy and efficiency. One camera and one low-cost inertial measurement unit (IMU) form a monocular visual-inertial system (VINS), which is the minimum sensor suite (in size, weight, and power) for the metric six degrees-of-freedom (DOF) state estimation. In this paper, we present VINS-Mono: a robust and versatile monocular visual-inertial state estimator. Our approach starts with a robust procedure for estimator initialization. A tightly coupled, nonlinear optimization-based method is used to obtain highly accurate visual-inertial odometry by fusing preintegrated IMU measurements and feature observations. A loop detection module, in combination with our tightly coupled formulation, enables relocalization with minimum computation. We additionally perform 4-DOF pose graph optimization to enforce the global consistency. Furthermore, the proposed system can reuse a map by saving and loading it in an efficient way. The current and previous maps can be merged together by the global pose graph optimization. We validate the performance of our system on public datasets and real-world experiments and compare against other state-of-the-art algorithms. We also perform an onboard closed-loop autonomous flight on the microaerial-vehicle platform and port the algorithm to an iOS-based demonstration. We highlight that the proposed work is a reliable, complete, and versatile system that is applicable for different applications that require high accuracy in localization. We open source our implementations for both PCs ( https: github.com HKUST-Aerial-Robotics VINS-Mono ) and iOS mobile devices ( https: github.com HKUST-Aerial-Robotics VINS-Mobile ). Accurately estimating a robot's pose relative to a global scene model and precisely tracking the pose in real-time is a fundamental problem for navigation and obstacle avoidance tasks. Due to the computational complexity of localization against a large map and the memory consumed by the model, state-of-the-art approaches are either limited to small workspaces or rely on a server-side system to query the global model while tracking the pose locally. The latter approaches face the problem of smoothly integrating the server's pose estimates into the trajectory computed locally to avoid temporal discontinuities. In this paper, we demonstrate that large-scale, real-time pose estimation and tracking can be performed on mobile platforms with limited resources without the use of an external server. This is achieved by employing map and descriptor compression schemes as well as efficient search algorithms from computer vision. We derive a formulation for integrating the global pose information into a local state estimator that produces much smoother trajectories than current approaches. Through detailed experiments, we evaluate each of our design choices individually and document its impact on the overall system performance, demonstrating that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for localization at scale. Real-time and reliable localization is a prerequisite for autonomously performing high-level tasks with micro aerial vehicles(MAVs). Nowadays, most existing methods use vision system for 6DoF pose estimation, which can not work in degraded visual environments. This paper presents an onboard 6DoF pose estimation method for an indoor MAV in challenging GPS-denied degraded visual environments by using a RGB-D camera. In our system, depth images are mainly used for odometry estimation and localization. First, a fast and robust relative pose estimation (6DoF Odometry) method is proposed, which uses the range rate constraint equation and photometric error metric to get the frame-to-frame transform. Then, an absolute pose estimation (6DoF Localization) method is proposed to locate the MAV in a given 3D global map by using a particle filter. The whole localization system can run in real-time on an embedded computer with low CPU usage. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in extensive real environments on a customized MAV platform. The experimental results show that our localization system can robustly and accurately locate the robot in various practical challenging environments.