Rovins: Robust Omnidirectional Visual Inertial Navigation System

Visual odometry is an essential component in robot navigation and autonomous driving; however, visual sensors are vulnerable in fast motion or sudden illumination changes. This weakness can be compensated with inertial measurement units (IMUs), which maintain the short-term motion when visual sensing becomes unstable and enhance the quality of estimated motion with inertial information. An omnidirectional multi-view visual odometry (ROVO) has recently demonstrated superior performance and stability with the unceasing feature observation of the omnidirectional setup; however, the shortcomings of visual odometry remain. This letter introduced an omnidirectional visual-inertial odometry system (ROVINS) that could seamlessly integrate the inertial information into the omnidirectional visual odometer algorithm: (a) The soft relative pose constraints from the inertial measurement are first added to the pose optimization formulation, which enables blind motion estimation when all visual features are lost; (b) Using the prediction results from the estimated velocity, the visual features in tracking are initialized, resulting in feature tracking that is more robust to visual disturbances. The experimental results showed that the proposed ROVINS algorithm outperforms the vision-only algorithm by a significant margin.