Robust Tightly-Coupled Filter-Based Monocular Visual-Inertial State Estimation and Graph-Based Evaluation for Autonomous Drone Racing
Autonomous drone racing (ADR) demands state estimation that is simultaneously computationally efficient and resilient to the perceptual degradation experienced during extreme velocity and maneuvers. Traditional frameworks typically rely on conventional visual-inertial pipelines with loosely-coupled gate-based Perspective-n-Points (PnP) corrections that suffer from a rigid requirement for four visible features and information loss in intermediate steps. Furthermore, the absence of GNSS and Motion Capture systems in uninstrumented, competitive racing environments makes the objective evaluation of such systems remarkably difficult. To address these limitations, we propose ADR-VINS, a robust, monocular visual-inertial state estimation framework based on an Error-State Kalman Filter (ESKF) tailored for autonomous drone racing. Our approach integrates direct pixel reprojection errors from gate corners features as innovation terms within the filter. By bypassing intermediate PnP solvers, ADR-VINS maintains valid state updates with as few as two visible corners and utilizes robust reweighting instead of RANSAC-based schemes to handle outliers, enhancing computational efficiency. Furthermore, we introduce ADR-FGO, an offline Factor-Graph Optimization framework to generate high-fidelity reference trajectories that facilitate post-flight performance evaluation and analysis on uninstrumented, GNSS-denied environments. The proposed system is validated using TII-RATM dataset, where ADR-VINS achieves an average RMS translation error of 0.143 m, while ADR-FGO yields 0.060 m as a smoothing-based reference. Finally, ADR-VINS was successfully deployed in the A2RL Drone Championship Season 2, maintaining stable and robust estimation despite noisy detections during high-agility flight at top speeds of 20.9 m/s. We further utilize ADR-FGO for post-flight evaluation in uninstrumented racing environments.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Computational EfficiencySimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Formula Derivation and Analysis of the VINS-Mono
The VINS-Mono is a monocular visual-inertial 6 DOF state estimator proposed by Aerial Robotics Group of HKUST in 2017. It can be performed on MAVs, smartphones and many other intelligent platforms. Because of the excelle…
Tightly-Coupled, Speed-aided Monocular Visual-Inertial Localization in Topological Map
This paper proposes a novel algorithm for vehicle speed-aided monocular visual-inertial localization using a topological map. The proposed system aims to address the limitations of existing methods that rely heavily on e…
Pose EstimationTCB-VIO: Tightly-Coupled Focal-Plane Binary-Enhanced Visual Inertial Odometry
Vision algorithms can be executed directly on the image sensor when implemented on the next-generation sensors known as focal-plane sensor-processor arrays (FPSP)s, where every pixel has a processor. FPSPs greatly improv…
Pose EstimationLow-Cost Inertial Aiding for Deep-Urban Tightly-Coupled Multi-Antenna Precise GNSS
A vehicular pose estimation technique is presented that tightly couples multi-antenna carrier-phase differential GNSS (CDGNSS) with a low-cost MEMS inertial sensor and vehicle dynamics constraints. This work is the first…
Pose EstimationVisual-Inertial Monocular SLAM with Map Reuse
In recent years there have been excellent results in Visual-Inertial Odometry techniques, which aim to compute the incremental motion of the sensor with high accuracy and robustness. However these approaches lack the cap…
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping