Robust initialization of monocular visual-inertial estimation on aerial robots

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a robust on-the-fly estimator initialization algorithm to provide high-quality initial states for monocular visual-inertial systems (VINS). Due to the non-linearity of VINS, a poor initialization can severely impact the performance of either filtering-based or graph-based methods. Our approach starts with a vision-only structure from motion (SfM) to build the up-to-scale structure of camera poses and feature positions. By loosely aligning this structure with pre-integrated IMU measurements, our approach recovers the metric scale, velocity, gravity vector, and gyroscope bias, which are treated as initial values to bootstrap the nonlinear tightly-coupled optimization framework. We highlight that our approach can perform on-the-fly initialization in various scenarios without using any prior information about system states and movement. The performance of the proposed approach is verified through the public UAV dataset and real-time onboard experiment. We make our implementation open source, which is the initialization part integrated in the VINS-Mono1.