Ultra-Wideband assisted Visual-Inertial Localization Correction System with Position-Unknown UWB Anchors

Abstract

Given the fact that visual-inertial odometry (VIO) is faced with the challenges of localization drift in the long run, we utilize drift-free Ultra-Wideband (UWB) measurements to eliminate accumulated errors in VIO. Existing UWB-VIO fusion methods are mostly constrained by the accuracy of prior UWB anchor positions. However, in large-scale localization scenarios, the precise locations of UWB anchors are difficult to obtain, and the offline calibration process is complex, significantly limiting flexibility. In this paper, we firstly design a lightweight initialization method based on a dual sliding window structure, which can rapidly obtain initial guesses for the UWB anchor coordinates. After that, we further propose a joint estimation system to refine the anchor coordinates while estimating the correction for VIO. The system combines filter-based and optimization-based methods, which mainly consists of an initialization module and a nonlinear estimator module. The filter in the initialization module provides optimization initial values and covariances, and mutually, the optimization results from the nonlinear estimator provide priors for the filter. Finally, the performance of our proposed approach is verified through both public datasets and real-world experiment. Our project, along with our dataset, has been open-sourced in the form of ROS package and ROS bag.