We propose a novel initialization and online spatial-temporal calibration method for visual-inertial odometry (VIO), which decouples rotation and translation estimation to achieve higher accuracy and better robustness. Existing initialization methods suffer from limited accuracy or robustness (e.g., in scenarios with small translational motion) and rarely integrate simultaneous spatial-temporal calibration during initialization, despite its considerable practical value. Our proposed method leverages rotation-translation decoupling constraints to enable simultaneous estimation of gyroscope bias, extrinsic rotation, and camera-IMU time offset-even under pure rotational motion. Moreover, we are the first to conduct observability analysis on rotational constraints in rotation-translation decoupling methods, experimentally identifying the unobservable state-space directions under three degenerate motions within our approach. We also perform extensive experiments to delineate practical parameter solution boundaries for our method, with both efforts substantially enhancing the overall practical applicability of decoupling-based methods. Extensive experiments on simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in accuracy and robustness while maintaining computational efficiency. Furthermore, experiments verify that it significantly improves convergence in VIO systems.

We propose a novel visual-inertial odometry (VIO) initialization method, which decouples rotation and translation estimation, and achieves higher efficiency and better robustness. Existing loosely-coupled VIO-initialization methods suffer from poor stability of visual structure-from-motion (SfM), whereas those tightly-coupled methods often ignore the gyroscope bias in the closed-form solution, resulting in limited accuracy. Moreover, the aforementioned two classes of methods are computationally expensive, because 3D point clouds need to be reconstructed simultaneously. In contrast, our new method fully combines inertial and visual measurements for both rotational and translational initialization. First, a rotation-only solution is designed for gyroscope bias estimation, which tightly couples the gyroscope and camera observations. Second, the initial velocity and gravity vector are solved with linear translation constraints in a globally optimal fashion and without reconstructing 3D point clouds. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our method is 8 ~ 72 times faster (w.r.t. a 10-frame set) than the state-of-the-art methods, and also presents significantly higher robustness and accuracy. The source code is available at https://github.com/boxuLibrary/drt-vio-init.

Monocular vision sensors are often affected by the rapid direction change in load platform and violent illumination change when the mobile device moves autonomously with high maneuverability. The images collected by the visual sensor will also have a lot of dynamic blur, which together with the weak texture environment reduces the continuity and accuracy of the visual autonomous navigation system. To enhance the stability of the system, in the letter, we propose a vision-led multisource data fusion navigation algorithm. The system combines the visual information for trajectory estimation, adds the inertial measurement unit (IMU) measurement information to the sliding window for optimization, and finally uses the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) data as a reconstraint condition through factor graph optimization to further optimize the trajectory accuracy. Experiments on the public datasets containing a variety of different scene categories show that the trajectory tracking results generated by our algorithm are more complete and stable and can better meet the system’s autonomous navigation requirements.