EqVIO: An Equivariant Filter for Visual Inertial Odometry

Understand

Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) is the problem of estimating a robot's trajectory by combining information from an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a camera, and is of great interest to the robotics community.

• This paper develops a novel Lie group symmetry for the VIO problem and applies the recently proposed equivariant filter.
• The proposed symmetry is compatible with the invariance of the VIO reference frame, leading to improved filter consistency.
• The bias-free IMU dynamics are group-affine, ensuring that filter linearisation errors depend only on the bias estimation error and measurement noise.