Tightly coupled robust positioning of visual-inertial-wheel encoders in visually challenging environments

Abstract

Purpose

Wheeled robots have been widely used in People’s Daily life. Accurate positioning is the premise of autonomous navigation. In this paper, an optimization-based visual-inertial-wheel odometer tightly coupled system is proposed, which solves the problem of failure of visual inertia initialization due to unobservable scale.The aim of this paper is to achieve robust localization of visually challenging scenes.

Design/methodology/approach

During system initialization, the wheel odometer measurement and visual-inertial odometry (VIO) fusion are initialized using maximum a posteriori (MAP). Aiming at the visual challenge scene, a fusion method of wheel odometer and inertial measurement unit (IMU) measurement is proposed, which can still be robust initialization in the scene without visual features. To solve the problem of low track accuracy caused by cumulative errors of VIO, the local and global positioning accuracy is improved by integrating wheel odometer data. The system is validated on a public data set.

Findings

The results show that our system performs well in visual challenge scenarios, can achieve robust initialization with high efficiency and improves the state estimation accuracy of wheeled robots.

Originality/value

To realize robust initialization of wheeled robot, wheel odometer measurement and vision-inertia fusion are initialized using MAP. Aiming at the visual challenge scene, a fusion method of wheel odometer and IMU measurement is proposed. To improve the accuracy of state estimation of wheeled robot, wheel encoder measurement and plane constraint information are added to local and global BA, so as to achieve refined scale estimation.

Citation

Zhang, Y., Li, A., Li, H., Chen, F. and Shen, R. (2025), "Tightly coupled robust positioning of visual-inertial-wheel encoders in visually challenging environments", Sensor Review, Vol. 45 No. 1, pp. 99-107. https://doi.org/10.1108/SR-08-2024-0711