Ultra-Wideband Aided Fast Localization and Mapping System

TL;DR

This paper introduces a UWB-assisted localization and mapping system that combines visual-inertial odometry with UWB ranging to achieve real-time, dense, drift-free maps in challenging environments, even on low-power devices.

Contribution

It develops a novel framework integrating UWB and visual-inertial data with a new pose graph optimization method for robust mapping.

Findings

Creates dense, drift-free maps in real-time

Operates effectively on ultra-low power processors

Performs well in featureless environments

Abstract

This paper proposes an ultra-wideband (UWB) aided localization and mapping system that leverages on inertial sensor and depth camera. Inspired by the fact that visual odometry (VO) system, regardless of its accuracy in the short term, still faces challenges with accumulated errors in the long run or under unfavourable environments, the UWB ranging measurements are fused to remove the visual drift and improve the robustness. A general framework is developed which consists of three parallel threads, two of which carry out the visual-inertial odometry (VIO) and UWB localization respectively. The other mapping thread integrates visual tracking constraints into a pose graph with the proposed smooth and virtual range constraints, such that an optimization is performed to provide robust trajectory estimation. Experiments show that the proposed system is able to create dense drift-free maps in real-time even running on an ultra-low power processor in featureless environments.