xVIO: A Range-Visual-Inertial Odometry Framework
This is an incremental improvement for robotics navigation, enabling reliable operation in day and night conditions.
The paper presents xVIO, a range-visual-inertial odometry framework for unmanned rotorcraft, achieving closed-loop control with off-the-shelf hardware and supporting both visible-spectrum and thermal infrared cameras.
xVIO is a range-visual-inertial odometry algorithm implemented at JPL. It has been demonstrated with closed-loop controls on-board unmanned rotorcraft equipped with off-the-shelf embedded computers and sensors. It can operate at daytime with visible-spectrum cameras, or at night time using thermal infrared cameras. This report is a complete technical description of xVIO. It includes an overview of the system architecture, the implementation of the navigation filter, along with the derivations of the Jacobian matrices which are not already published in the literature.