Vision and IMU Data Fusion: Closed-Form Determination of the Absolute Scale, Speed and Attitude

Agostino Martinelli (1) , Roland Y. Siegwart (2)

1 E-MOTION - Geometry and Probability for Motion and Action
2 ASL - Autonomous Systems Lab

This chapter describes an algorithm for determining the speed and the attitude of a sensor assembling constituted by a monocular camera and inertial sensors (three orthogonal accelerometers and three orthogonal gyroscopes). The system moves in a 3D unknown environment. The algorithm inputs are the visual and inertial measurements during a very short time interval. The outputs are: the speed and attitude, the absolute scale and the bias affecting the inertial measurements. The determination of these outputs is obtained by a simple closed form solution which analytically expresses the previous physical quantities in terms of the sensor measurements. This closed form determination allows performing the overall estimation in a very short time interval and without the need of any initialization or prior knowledge. This is a key advantage since allows eliminating the drift on the absolute scale and on the orientation. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated with real experiments.

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]; Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]

Agostino Martinelli, Roland Y. Siegwart. Vision and IMU Data Fusion: Closed-Form Determination of the Absolute Scale, Speed and Attitude. Azim Eskandarian. Handbook of Intelligent Vehicles, Springer, 2012. ⟨hal-00779460⟩