KO-fusion: Dense visual SLAM with tightly-coupled kinematic and odometric tracking

Charlie Houseago, Michael Bloesch, Stefan Leutenegger

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

Dense visual SLAM methods are able to estimate the 3D structure of an environment and locate the observer within them. They estimate the motion of a camera by matching visual information between consecutive frames, and are thus prone to failure under extreme motion conditions or when observing texture-poor regions. The integration of additional sensor modalities has shown great promise in improving the robustness and accuracy of such SLAM systems. In contrast to the popular use of inertial measurements we propose to tightly-couple a dense RGB-D SLAM system with kinematic and odometry measurements from a wheeled robot equipped with a manipulator. The system has real-time capability while running on GPU. It optimizes the camera pose by considering the geometric alignment of the map as well as kinematic and odometric data from the robot. Through experimentation in the real-world, we show that the system is more robust to challenging trajectories featuring fast and loopy motion than the equivalent system without the additional kinematic and odometric knowledge, whilst retaining comparable performance to the equivalent RGB-D only system on easy trajectories.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2019
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages4054-4060
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781538660263
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2019 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: 20 May 201924 May 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
ISSN (Print)1050-4729

Conference

Conference2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2019
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period20/05/1924/05/19

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