English

FastCal: Robust Online Self-Calibration for Robotic Systems

Robotics 2019-02-28 v1

Abstract

We propose a solution for sensor extrinsic self-calibration with very low time complexity, competitive accuracy and graceful handling of often-avoided corner cases: drift in calibration parameters and unobservable directions in the parameter space. It consists of three main parts: 1) information-theoretic based segment selection for constant-time estimation; 2) observability-aware parameter update through a rank-revealing decomposition of the Fisher information matrix; 3) drift-correcting self-calibration through the time-decay of segments. At the core of our FastCal algorithm is the loosely-coupled formulation for sensor extrinsics calibration and efficient selection of measurements. FastCal runs up to an order of magnitude faster than similar self-calibration algorithms (camera-to-camera extrinsics, excluding feature-matching and image pre-processing on all comparisons), making FastCal ideal for integration into existing, resource-constrained, robotics systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.10585,
  title  = {FastCal: Robust Online Self-Calibration for Robotic Systems},
  author = {Fernando Nobre and Christoffer Heckman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.10585},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

14 pages, 7 figures, originally presented at International Symposium on Experimental Robotics 2018 in Buenos Aires, Argentina

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:53:07.388Z