Integrated navigation algorithm using velocity incremental vector approach with ORB-SLAM and inertial measurement

In recent years, visual-inertial odometry(VIO) algorithms have been extensively studied for the indoor/urban environments because it is more robust to dynamic scenes and environment changes. In this paper, we propose loosely coupled(LC) VIO algorithm that utilizes the velocity vectors from both visual odometry(VO) and inertial measurement unit(IMU) as a filter measurement of Extended Kalman filter. Our approach improves the estimation performance of a filter without adding extra sensors while maintaining simple integration framework, which treats VO as a black box. For the VO algorithm, we employed a fundamental part of the ORB-SLAM, which uses ORB features. We performed an outdoor experiment using an RGB-D camera to evaluate the accuracy of the presented algorithm. Also, we evaluated our algorithm with the public dataset to compare with other visual navigation systems. © The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers.