Visual-Inertial Odometry of Aerial Robots

TL;DR

This paper discusses visual-inertial odometry (VIO) as a cost-effective method for aerial robots to estimate their position and velocity using cameras and IMUs, serving as an alternative to GPS and lidar.

Contribution

It highlights the importance of VIO for aerial robots and emphasizes its ubiquity and practicality due to low-cost sensors.

Findings

VIO provides a viable GPS/lidar alternative for aerial robots.

Cameras and IMUs are widely used due to their low cost.

VIO enables accurate state estimation in GPS-denied environments.

Abstract

Visual-Inertial odometry (VIO) is the process of estimating the state (pose and velocity) of an agent (e.g., an aerial robot) by using only the input of one or more cameras plus one or more Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) attached to it. VIO is the only viable alternative to GPS and lidar-based odometry to achieve accurate state estimation. Since both cameras and IMUs are very cheap, these sensor types are ubiquitous in all today's aerial robots.