PIRVS: An Advanced Visual-Inertial SLAM System with Flexible Sensor Fusion and Hardware Co-Design
This addresses SLAM for robotics and autonomous systems, offering an incremental improvement in efficiency through hardware co-design.
The paper tackles the problem of visual-inertial SLAM by presenting PIRVS, a hardware-software system with flexible sensor fusion, achieving comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art algorithms on PC and improved efficiency on custom hardware.
In this paper, we present the PerceptIn Robotics Vision System (PIRVS) system, a visual-inertial computing hardware with embedded simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm. The PIRVS hardware is equipped with a multi-core processor, a global-shutter stereo camera, and an IMU with precise hardware synchronization. The PIRVS software features a novel and flexible sensor fusion approach to not only tightly integrate visual measurements with inertial measurements and also to loosely couple with additional sensor modalities. It runs in real-time on both PC and the PIRVS hardware. We perform a thorough evaluation of the proposed system using multiple public visual-inertial datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our system reaches comparable accuracy of state-of-the-art visual-inertial algorithms on PC, while being more efficient on the PIRVS hardware.