Initialization of Monocular Visual Navigation for Autonomous Agents Using Modified Structure from Small Motion
This work addresses visual estimation challenges for autonomous space robots in spacecraft inspection, but it appears incremental as it extends an existing method to a specific domain.
The authors tackled the problem of initializing monocular visual SLAM for autonomous space robots during spacecraft inspection, where they addressed challenges like weak-perspective projection and dynamic illumination. They demonstrated their method's effectiveness on simulated satellite inspection sequences with a tumbling spacecraft.
We propose a standalone monocular visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM) initialization pipeline for autonomous space robots. Our method, a state-of-the-art factor graph optimization pipeline, extends Structure from Small Motion (SfSM) to robustly initialize a monocular agent in spacecraft inspection trajectories, addressing visual estimation challenges such as weak-perspective projection and center-pointing motion, which exacerbates the bas-relief ambiguity, dominant planar geometry, which causes motion estimation degeneracies in classical Structure from Motion, and dynamic illumination conditions, which reduce the survivability of visual information. We validate our approach on realistic, simulated satellite inspection image sequences with a tumbling spacecraft and demonstrate the method's effectiveness over existing monocular initialization procedures.