Accurate state estimation is a fundamental module for various intelligent applications, such as robot navigation, autonomous driving, virtual and augmented reality. Visual and inertial fusion is a popular technology for 6-DOF state estimation in recent years. Time instants at which different sensors' measurements are recorded are of crucial importance to the system's robustness and accuracy. In practice, timestamps of each sensor typically suffer from triggering and transmission delays, leading to temporal misalignment (time offsets) among different sensors. Such temporal offset dramatically influences the performance of sensor fusion. To this end, we propose an online approach for calibrating temporal offset between visual and inertial measurements. Our approach achieves temporal offset calibration by jointly optimizing time offset, camera and IMU states, as well as feature locations in a SLAM system. Furthermore, the approach is a general model, which can be easily employed in several feature-based optimization frameworks. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the high accuracy of our calibration approach even compared with other state-of-art offline tools. The VIO comparison against other methods proves that the online temporal calibration significantly benefits visual-inertial systems. The source code of temporal calibration is integrated into our public project, VINS-Mono.
Over the past few decades, there have been tremendous researches in visual-inertial odometry techniques, which aimed to compute camera motion and environment structure with high accuracy. The popular techniques are either filter-based framework @cite_11 @cite_27 @cite_30 @cite_10 @cite_22 , or batch optimization @cite_4 @cite_32 @cite_33 @cite_20 @cite_18 . Most of visual-inertial algorithms process image by extracting robust sparse features instead of operating on the dense image. Among these works, @cite_11 @cite_27 @cite_19 used structure-less vision factor, which eliminated features by projecting visual residual onto null space. They focus more on estimating camera or IMU motion instead of feature positions. @cite_4 @cite_32 @cite_28 selectively kept keyframes and features in a bundle, which optimized camera motion and feature together. All of these methods assumed IMU and camera are precisely synchronized without temporal misalignment.
@cite_30 @cite_18 @cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_33 @cite_28 @cite_32 @cite_19 @cite_27 @cite_10 @cite_20 @cite_11
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In this paper, we present a monocular visual-inertial odometry algorithm which, by directly using pixel intensity errors of image patches, achieves accurate tracking performance while exhibiting a very high level of robustness. After detection, the tracking of the multilevel patch features is closely coupled to the underlying extended Kalman filter (EKF) by directly using the intensity errors as innovation term during the update step. We follow a purely robocentric approach where the location of 3D landmarks are always estimated with respect to the current camera pose. Furthermore, we decompose landmark positions into a bearing vector and a distance parametrization whereby we employ a minimal representation of differences on a corresponding σ-Algebra in order to achieve better consistency and to improve the computational performance. Due to the robocentric, inverse-distance landmark parametrization, the framework does not require any initialization procedure, leading to a truly power-up-and-go state estimation system. The presented approach is successfully evaluated in a set of highly dynamic hand-held experiments as well as directly employed in the control loop of a multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Recent results in monocular visual-inertial navigation (VIN) have shown that optimization-based approaches outperform filtering methods in terms of accuracy due to their capability to relinearize past states. However, the improvement comes at the cost of increased computational complexity. In this paper, we address this issue by preintegrating inertial measurements between selected keyframes. The preintegration allows us to accurately summarize hundreds of inertial measurements into a single relative motion constraint. Our first contribution is a preintegration theory that properly addresses the manifold structure of the rotation group and carefully deals with uncertainty propagation. The measurements are integrated in a local frame, which eliminates the need to repeat the integration when the linearization point changes while leaving the opportunity for belated bias corrections. The second contribution is to show that the preintegrated IMU model can be seamlessly integrated in a visual-inertial pipeline under the unifying framework of factor graphs. This enables the use of a structureless model for visual measurements, further accelerating the computation. The third contribution is an extensive evaluation of our monocular VIN pipeline: experimental results confirm that our system is very fast and demonstrates superior accuracy with respect to competitive state-of-the-art filtering and optimization algorithms, including off-the-shelf systems such as Google Tango 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 visual-inertial 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 visual-inertial 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 visual-inertial odometry. While our approach declaredly demands more computation, we show its superior performance in terms of accuracy. In recent years there have been excellent results in visual-inertial odometry techniques, which aim to compute the incremental motion of the sensor with high accuracy and robustness. However, these approaches lack the capability to close loops and trajectory estimation accumulates drift even if the sensor is continually revisiting the same place. In this letter, we present a novel tightly coupled visual-inertial simultaneous localization and mapping system that is able to close loops and reuse its map to achieve zero-drift localization in already mapped areas. While our approach can be applied to any camera configuration, we address here the most general problem of a monocular camera, with its well-known scale ambiguity. We also propose a novel IMU initialization method, which computes the scale, the gravity direction, the velocity, and gyroscope and accelerometer biases, in a few seconds with high accuracy. We test our system in the 11 sequences of a recent micro-aerial vehicle public dataset achieving a typical scale factor error of 1 and centimeter precision. We compare to the state-of-the-art in visual-inertial odometry in sequences with revisiting, proving the better accuracy of our method due to map reuse and no drift accumulation. It has been long known that fusing information from multiple sensors for robot navigation results in increased robustness and accuracy. However, accurate calibration of the sensor ensemble prior to deployment in the field as well as coping with sensor outages, different measurement rates and delays, render multi-sensor fusion a challenge. As a result, most often, systems do not exploit all the sensor information available in exchange for simplicity. For example, on a mission requiring transition of the robot from indoors to outdoors, it is the norm to ignore the Global Positioning System (GPS) signals which become freely available once outdoors and instead, rely only on sensor feeds (e.g., vision and laser) continuously available throughout the mission. Naturally, this comes at the expense of robustness and accuracy in real deployment. This paper presents a generic framework, dubbed MultiSensor-Fusion Extended Kalman Filter (MSF-EKF), able to process delayed, relative and absolute measurements from a theoretically unlimited number of different sensors and sensor types, while allowing self-calibration of the sensor-suite online. The modularity of MSF-EKF allows seamless handling of additional lost sensor signals during operation while employing a state buffering scheme augmented with Iterated EKF (IEKF) updates to allow for efficient re-linearization of the prediction to get near optimal linearization points for both absolute and relative state updates. We demonstrate our approach in outdoor navigation experiments using a Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) equipped with a GPS receiver as well as visual, inertial, and pressure sensors. Current approaches for visual--inertial odometry (VIO) are able to attain highly accurate state estimation via nonlinear optimization. However, real-time optimization quickly becomes infeasible as the trajectory grows over time; this problem is further emphasized by the fact that inertial measurements come at high rate, hence, leading to the fast growth of the number of variables in the optimization. In this paper, we address this issue by preintegrating inertial measurements between selected keyframes into single relative motion constraints. Our first contribution is a preintegration theory that properly addresses the manifold structure of the rotation group. We formally discuss the generative measurement model as well as the nature of the rotation noise and derive the expression for the maximum a posteriori state estimator. Our theoretical development enables the computation of all necessary Jacobians for the optimization and a posteriori bias correction in analytic form. The second contribution is to show that the preintegrated inertial measurement unit model can be seamlessly integrated into a visual--inertial pipeline under the unifying framework of factor graphs. This enables the application of incremental-smoothing algorithms and the use of a structureless model for visual measurements, which avoids optimizing over the 3-D points, further accelerating the computation. We perform an extensive evaluation of our monocular VIO pipeline on real and simulated datasets. The results confirm that our modeling effort leads to an accurate state estimation in real time, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches.