State Estimation in Visual Inertial Autonomous Helicopter Landing Using Optimisation on Manifold
This work addresses precise state estimation for autonomous helicopter landing, which is an incremental improvement in a domain-specific robotics application.
The paper tackles the problem of autonomous helicopter landing by developing a state estimation algorithm that fuses IMU and monocular camera data, achieving good accuracy and computational feasibility as confirmed through numerical simulations.
Autonomous helicopter landing is a challenging task that requires precise information about the aircraft states regarding the helicopters position, attitude, as well as position of the helipad. To this end, we propose a solution that fuses data from an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and a monocular camera which is capable of detecting helipads position in the image plane. The algorithm utilises manifold based nonlinear optimisation over preintegrated IMU measurements and reprojection error in temporally uniformly distributed keyframes, exhibiting good performance in terms of accuracy and being computationally feasible. Our contributions of this paper are the formal address of the landmarks Jacobian expressions and the adaptation of equality constrained Gauss-Newton method to this specific problem. Numerical simulations on MATLAB/Simulink confirm the validity of given claims.