GeoFlow-SLAM: A Robust Tightly-Coupled RGBD-Inertial and Legged Odometry Fusion SLAM for Dynamic Legged Robotics

Abstract

This paper presents GeoFlow-SLAM, a robust and effective Tightly-Coupled RGBD-Inertial and Legged Odometry Fusion SLAM for legged robotics undergoing aggressive and high-frequency motions. By integrating geometric consistency, legged odometry constraints, and dual-stream optical flow (GeoFlow), our method addresses three critical challenges: feature matching and pose initialization failures during fast locomotion and visual feature scarcity in texture-less scenes. Specifically, in rapid motion scenarios, feature matching is notably enhanced by leveraging dual-stream optical flow, which combines prior map points and poses. Additionally, we propose a robust pose initialization method for fast locomotion and IMU error in legged robots, integrating IMU/Legged odometry, inter-frame Perspective-n-Point (PnP), and Generalized Iterative Closest Point (GICP). Furthermore, a novel optimization framework that tightly couples depth-to-map and GICP geometric constraints is first introduced to improve the robustness and accuracy in long-duration, visually texture-less environments. The proposed algorithms achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) on collected legged robots and open-source datasets. To further promote research and development, the open-source datasets and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/HorizonRobotics/GeoFlowSlam.