Enhancing Visual Inertial SLAM with Magnetic Measurements

TL;DR

This paper enhances visual inertial SLAM by integrating magnetometer data, improving orientation accuracy and yaw recovery, especially in challenging underwater cave environments where traditional methods struggle.

Contribution

It introduces a tightly-coupled fusion framework for magnetometer data within VIO, calibrated for magnetic distortions, and demonstrates its effectiveness in underwater environments.

Findings

Significant reduction in orientation error.

Improved yaw estimation with respect to magnetic north.

Enhanced robustness in underwater cave environments.

Abstract

This paper presents an extension to visual inertial odometry (VIO) by introducing tightly-coupled fusion of magnetometer measurements. A sliding window of keyframes is optimized by minimizing re-projection errors, relative inertial errors, and relative magnetometer orientation errors. The results of IMU orientation propagation are used to efficiently transform magnetometer measurements between frames producing relative orientation constraints between consecutive frames. The soft and hard iron effects are calibrated using an ellipsoid fitting algorithm. The introduction of magnetometer data results in significant reductions in the orientation error and also in recovery of the true yaw orientation with respect to the magnetic north. The proposed framework operates in all environments with slow-varying magnetic fields, mainly outdoors and underwater. We have focused our work on the underwater domain, especially in underwater caves, as the narrow passage and turbulent flow make it difficult to perform loop closures and reset the localization drift. The underwater caves present challenges to VIO due to the absence of ambient light and the confined nature of the environment, while also being a crucial source of fresh water and providing valuable historical records. Experimental results from underwater caves demonstrate the improvements in accuracy and robustness introduced by the proposed VIO extension.