31 accepted papers
Achieving efficient and consistent localization with a prior map remains challenging in robotics. Conventional keyframe-based approaches often suffer from sub-optimal viewpoints due to limited field of view (FOV) and/or constrained motion, thus degrading the localization performance. To address this…
Legged robots are emerging, and legged locomotion is in critical need, which requires precise leg-body kinematics to execute control commands or plan motion trajectories. This paper proposes online state estimation to determine legged kinematics of robots with an arbitrary number of legs, which incl…
In monocular visual-inertial navigation systems, it is ideal to initialize as quickly and robustly as possible. State-of-the- art initialization methods typically make linear approximations using the image features and inertial information in order to initialize in closed-form, and then refine t…
State-of-the-art monocular visual-inertial odometry (VIO) approaches rely on sparse point features in part due to their efficiency, robustness, and prevalence, while ignoring high-level structural regularities such as planes that are common to man-made environments and can be exploited to further co…
In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of the application of the First-estimates Jacobian (FEJ) design methodology in nonlinear optimization-based Visual-Inertial Navigation Systems (VINS). The FEJ approach fixes system linearization points to preserve proper observability properties of V…
In this paper, we propose a novel consistent state estimator design for visual-inertial systems. Motivated by first-estimates Jacobian (FEJ) based estimators - which uses the first-ever estimates as linearization points to preserve proper observability properties of the linearized estimator thereby…
We revisit the problem of efficiently leveraging prior map information within a visual-inertial estimation framework. The use of traditional landmark-based maps with 2D-to-3D measurements along with the recently introduced keyframe-based maps with 2D-to-2D measurements are inves-tigated. The full jo…
A navigation system which can output drift-free global trajectory estimation with local consistency holds great potential for autonomous vehicles and mobile devices. We propose a tightly-coupled GNSS-aided visual-inertial navigation system (GAINS) which is able to leverage the complementary sensing…
System modeling and parameter identification of micro aerial vehicles (MAV) are crucial for robust autonomy, especially under highly dynamic motions. Visual-inertial-aided online parameter identification has recently seen research attention due to the demanding of adaptation to platform configuratio…
In this paper we present a consistent and distributed state estimator for multi-robot cooperative localization (CL) which efficiently fuses environmental features and loop-closure constraints across time and robots. In particular, we leverage covariance intersection (CI) to allow each robot to only…
In this work we augment our prior state-of-the-art visual-inertial odometry (VIO) system, OpenVINS [1], to produce accurate dense depth by filling in sparse depth estimates (depth completion) from VIO with image guidance – all while focusing on enabling real-time performance of the full VIO+depth sy…
In this paper, we present an efficient and robust GPS-aided visual inertial odometry (GPS-VIO) system that fuses IMU-camera data with intermittent GPS measurements. To perform sensor fusion, spatiotemporal sensor calibration and initialization of the transform between the sensor reference frames are…
Multi-sensor fusion of multi-modal measurements from commodity inertial, visual and LiDAR sensors to provide robust and accurate 6DOF pose estimation holds great potential in robotics and beyond. In this paper, building upon our prior work (i.e., LIC-Fusion), we develop a sliding-window filter based…
This paper addresses the problem of visual-inertial self-calibration while focusing on the necessity of online IMU intrinsic calibration. To this end, we perform observability analysis for visual-inertial navigation systems (VINS) with four different inertial model variants containing intrinsic par…
In this paper, we present an open platform, termed OpenVINS, for visual-inertial estimation research for both the academic community and practitioners from industry. The open sourced codebase provides a foundation for researchers and engineers to quickly start developing new capabilities for their v…
In this paper we investigate the effect of tightly-coupled estimation on the performance of visual-inertial localization and dynamic object pose tracking. In particular, we show that while a joint estimation system outperforms its decoupled counterpart when given a "proper" model for the target's mo…
Aiming for a lightweight and robust localization solution for low-cost, low-power autonomous robot platforms, such as educational or industrial ground vehicles, under challenging conditions (e.g., poor sensor calibration, low lighting and dynamic objects), we propose a two-stage localization system…
In this paper, we introduce a novel visual-inertial-wheel odometry (VIWO) system for ground vehicles, which efficiently fuses multi-modal visual, inertial and 2D wheel odometry measurements in a sliding-window filtering fashion. As multi-sensor fusion requires both intrinsic and extrinsic (spatiotem…
Enabling real-time visual-inertial navigation in unknown environments while achieving bounded-error performance holds great potentials in robotic applications. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel linear-complexity EKF for visual-inertial localization, which can efficiently utilize loop cl…
It holds great implications for practical applications to enable centimeter-accuracy positioning for mobile and wearable sensor systems. In this paper, we propose a novel, high-precision, efficient visual-inertial (VI)-SLAM algorithm, termed Schmidt-EKF VI-SLAM (SEVIS), which optimally fuses IMU mea…
In this letter, we perform in-depth observability analysis for both spatial and temporal calibration parameters of an aided inertial navigation system (INS) with global and/or local sensing modalities. In particular, we analytically show that both spatial and temporal calibration parameters are obse
This paper presents a tightly-coupled multi-sensor fusion algorithm termed LiDAR-inertial-camera fusion (LIC-Fusion), which efficiently fuses IMU measurements, sparse visual features, and extracted LiDAR points. In particular, the proposed LIC-Fusion performs online spatial and temporal sensor calib…
This paper presents a general multi-camera visual-inertial navigation system (mc-VINS) with online instrinsic and extrinsic calibration, which is able to utilize all the information from an arbitrary number of asynchronous cameras. In particular, within the standard multi-state constraint Kalman Fil…
In this paper, we present a real-time multi-IMU visual-inertial navigation system (mi-VINS) that utilizes the information from multiple inertial measurement units (IMUs) and thus is resilient to IMU sensor failures. In particular, in the proposed mi-VINS formulation, one of the IMUs serves as the “b…
This paper presents a tightly-coupled aided inertial navigation system (INS) with point and plane features, a general sensor fusion framework applicable to any visual and depth sensor (e.g., RGBD, LiDAR) configuration, in which the camera is used for point feature tracking and depth sensor for plane…
In this letter we present a novel method to perform target tracking of a moving rigid body utilizing an inertial measurement unit with cameras. A key contribution is the tightly-coupling of the target motion estimation within a visual-inertial navigation system (VINS), allowing for improved performa
In this letter, we develop a low-cost stereo visual-inertial localization system, which leverages efficient multi-state constraint Kalman filter (MSCKF)-based visual-inertial odometry (VIO) while utilizing an <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/
In this paper, we present a tightly-coupled monocular visual-inertial navigation system (VINS) using points and lines with degenerate motion analysis for 3D line triangulation. Based on line segment measurements from images, we propose two sliding window based 3D line triangulation algorithms and co…
In this paper, we address the problem of optimally fusing multiple heterogeneous and asynchronous sensors for use in 3D mapping and localization of autonomous vehicles. To this end, based on the factor graph-based optimization framework, we design a modular sensor-fusion system that allows for effic…
This paper presents the formalization of the closest point plane representation and an analysis of its incorporation in 3D indoor simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). We present a singularity free plane factor leveraging the closest point plane representation, and demonstrate its fusion wit…
Recent advancements in the performance and affordability of cameras and inertial measurement units (IMUs) have caused demand for efficient, accurate visual-inertial navigation solutions. In this paper, we present a system for the fusion of preintegrated inertial measurements with highly informative…