Visual-Inertial Odometry of Aerial Robots
This work tackles state estimation for aerial robots, but it appears incremental as it focuses on established VIO techniques without introducing new methods or results.
The paper addresses the problem of estimating the state (pose and velocity) of aerial robots using visual-inertial odometry (VIO), which is presented as a cost-effective alternative to GPS and lidar-based methods, leveraging ubiquitous and cheap sensors like cameras and IMUs.
Visual-Inertial odometry (VIO) is the process of estimating the state (pose and velocity) of an agent (e.g., an aerial robot) by using only the input of one or more cameras plus one or more Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) attached to it. VIO is the only viable alternative to GPS and lidar-based odometry to achieve accurate state estimation. Since both cameras and IMUs are very cheap, these sensor types are ubiquitous in all today's aerial robots.