Nonlinear Observers Design for Vision-Aided Inertial Navigation Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a nonlinear observer for vision-aided inertial navigation that guarantees almost global stability and effectively handles intermittent measurements, demonstrated through simulations and experiments.

Contribution

It presents a novel nonlinear observer on SO(3)×R^{15} with stability guarantees and a hybrid version for practical measurement intermittency.

Findings

Guarantees almost global asymptotic stability.

Provides a hybrid observer for intermittent measurements.

Validated through simulations and real experiments.

Abstract

This paper deals with the simultaneous estimation of the attitude, position and linear velocity for vision-aided inertial navigation systems. We propose a nonlinear observer on $SO(3)\times \mathbb{R}^{15}$ relying on body-frame acceleration, angular velocity and (stereo or monocular) bearing measurements of some landmarks that are constant and known in the inertial frame. Unlike the existing local Kalman-type observers, our proposed nonlinear observer guarantees almost global asymptotic stability and local exponential stability. A detailed uniform observability analysis has been conducted and sufficient conditions are derived. Moreover, a hybrid version of the proposed observer is provided to handle the intermittent nature of the measurements in practical applications. Simulation and experimental results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed state observer.