Real-time monocular dense mapping on aerial robots using visual-inertial fusion

Abstract

In this work, we present a solution to real-time monocular dense mapping. A tightly-coupled visual-inertial localization module is designed to provide metric and high-accuracy odometry. A motion stereo algorithm is proposed to take the video input from one camera to produce local depth measurements with semi-global regularization. The local measurements are then integrated into a global map for noise filtering and map refinement. The global map obtained is able to support navigation and obstacle avoidance for aerial robots through our indoor and outdoor experimental verification. Our system runs at 10Hz on an Nvidia Jetson TX1 by properly distributing computation to CPU and GPU. Through onboard experiments, we demonstrate its ability to close the perception-action loop for autonomous aerial robots. We release our implementation as open-source software <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .