Vision-Depth Landmarks and Inertial Fusion for Navigation in Degraded Visual Environments
This addresses navigation challenges for robots in degraded visual environments, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing fusion methods.
The paper tackles robotic navigation in GPS-denied, poorly lit, and texture-less environments by fusing visual, depth, and inertial data, achieving reliable performance in hand-held and Micro Aerial Vehicle experiments with a lightweight, low-cost sensor setup.
This paper proposes a method for tight fusion of visual, depth and inertial data in order to extend robotic capabilities for navigation in GPS-denied, poorly illuminated, and texture-less environments. Visual and depth information are fused at the feature detection and descriptor extraction levels to augment one sensing modality with the other. These multimodal features are then further integrated with inertial sensor cues using an extended Kalman filter to estimate the robot pose, sensor bias terms, and landmark positions simultaneously as part of the filter state. As demonstrated through a set of hand-held and Micro Aerial Vehicle experiments, the proposed algorithm is shown to perform reliably in challenging visually-degraded environments using RGB-D information from a lightweight and low-cost sensor and data from an IMU.