PIRVS: An Advanced Visual-Inertial SLAM System with Flexible Sensor Fusion and Hardware Co-Design

TL;DR

PIRVS is a versatile visual-inertial SLAM system combining advanced hardware and flexible sensor fusion, achieving real-time performance and high accuracy on multiple datasets.

Contribution

The paper introduces PIRVS, a novel hardware-software system with flexible sensor fusion capabilities and optimized hardware design for real-time visual-inertial SLAM.

Findings

Achieves comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art algorithms on PC

Demonstrates efficiency and real-time performance on dedicated hardware

Supports multiple sensor modalities with flexible fusion strategies

Abstract

In this paper, we present the PerceptIn Robotics Vision System (PIRVS) system, a visual-inertial computing hardware with embedded simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm. The PIRVS hardware is equipped with a multi-core processor, a global-shutter stereo camera, and an IMU with precise hardware synchronization. The PIRVS software features a novel and flexible sensor fusion approach to not only tightly integrate visual measurements with inertial measurements and also to loosely couple with additional sensor modalities. It runs in real-time on both PC and the PIRVS hardware. We perform a thorough evaluation of the proposed system using multiple public visual-inertial datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our system reaches comparable accuracy of state-of-the-art visual-inertial algorithms on PC, while being more efficient on the PIRVS hardware.