The main contribution of this paper is an invariant extended Kalman filter (EKF) for visual inertial navigation systems (VINS). It is demonstrated that the conventional EKF based VINS is not invariant under the stochastic unobservable transformation, associated with translations and a rotation about the gravitational direction. This can lead to inconsistent state estimates as the estimator does not obey a fundamental property of the physical system. To address this issue, we use a novel uncertainty representation to derive a Right Invariant error extended Kalman filter (RIEKF-VINS) that preserves this invariance property. RIEKF-VINS is then adapted to the multistate constraint Kalman filter framework to obtain a consistent state estimator. Both Monte Carlo simulations and real-world experiments are used to validate the proposed method.
@article{arxiv.1702.07920,
title = {An Invariant-EKF VINS Algorithm for Improving Consistency},
author = {Teng Zhang and Kanzhi Wu and Daobilige Su and Shoudong Huang and Gamini Dissanayake},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.07920},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
submitted to The 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017)