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ROVTIO: RObust Visual Thermal Inertial Odometry

This repo contains ROVTIO, an algorithm for odometry estimation using both a visual camera, an infrared camera and an IMU. To extend visual inertial odometry to dark environments one can instead of a standard visual camera use a thermal camera. However, thermal cameras struggle in thermal flat environments, i.e. environments where everything have the same temperature and the emissivity is similar. To get the best of both modalities ROVTIO use both a thermal camera and a visual camera. Due to the differences between the modalities does it not rely on stereo correspondences and it can both initialize and track if only one of the camera streams is available.

This work is based on ROVIO, which it inheriths some properties from. Same as ROVIO, ROVTIO is a direct, robocentric filter-based method. The filter ROVTIO use is the same iterated extended kalman filter that ROVIO use. These traits also allow ROVTIO to initialize the map at a high uncertainty and let it converge during operation, removing the need for an explicit initialization procedure.

ROVTIO was developed as a part of the work for the authors master thesis. The master thesis contains analysis of the benefit of using both thermal and visual compared to using only one of them.

The data used for analysis in the master thesis is provided here. It is collected by Mihir Kulkarni at Autonomous Robots lab the University of Nevada.

Install

ROVTIO requires no additional dependencies from the ones ROVIO requires. See the ROVIO install directions below.

Note that it is recomended to install kindr using catkin.

Setup and running

  1. Install the dependencies for ROVIO
  2. Configure the rovtio.info file and the .launch file. Examples are in cfg/rovtio.

Running ROVTIO on the datsets considered in the master thesis

This is using the catkin tools to build the ros package. You can also build it with catkin_make.

  1. Download the desired dataset from here.
  2. Unzip the zipfile.
  3. Build ROVTIO catkin build rovtio --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DMAKE_SCENE=OFF -DROVIO_NCAM=2 -DROVIO_NMAXFEATURE=25
  4. Run ROVTIO roslaunch rovtio rovtio.launch
  5. Play the bags. Enter the dataset folder and rosbag play *.bag
  6. Optional: Open rviz and monitor /rovtio/odometry. You can compare it to the near ground truth result from LOAM at the topic/aft_mapped_to_init_CORRECTED.

Using more cameras

ROVTIO can use several cameras out of the box, but needs to be configured accordingly. They can be either thermal or visual cameras, but the related parameters in the .info file should be chosen accordingly.

  1. Edit the launch file: You need to add a camera_topicX where the each camera needs to be designated an id X which is numbers starting at 0 and increasing by 1. If the timing offset between the camera and the IMU is known, you can specify it with the camX_offset where X is the camera ID.
  2. Edit the .info file: There is several parameters which needs to be specified per camera. This is because you typically want different parameters for thermal cameras and visual cameras. Look in the example file and duplicate all the parameters that ends with a number(eg. minSTScoreForModalitySelectionX) and change the number X To the camera ID.
  3. Rebuild with the new number of cameras in the -DROVIO_NCAM build option.

The camera streams does not have to be synchronized and ROVTIO will align the m if they arrive out of order.

License

This repo inherits the license from ROVIO. For details see LICENSE.

Orignal ROVIO README

This repository contains the ROVIO (Robust Visual Inertial Odometry) framework. The code is open-source (BSD License). Please remember that it is strongly coupled to on-going research and thus some parts are not fully mature yet. Furthermore, the code will also be subject to changes in the future which could include greater re-factoring of some parts.

Video: https://youtu.be/ZMAISVy-6ao

Papers:

Please also have a look at the wiki: https://github.com/ethz-asl/rovio/wiki

Install without opengl scene

Dependencies:

#!command

catkin build rovio --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

Install with opengl scene

Additional dependencies: opengl, glut, glew (sudo apt-get install freeglut3-dev, sudo apt-get install libglew-dev)

#!command

catkin build rovio --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DMAKE_SCENE=ON

Euroc Datasets

The rovio_node.launch file loads parameters such that ROVIO runs properly on the Euroc datasets. The datasets are available under: http://projects.asl.ethz.ch/datasets/doku.php?id=kmavvisualinertialdatasets

Further notes

  • Camera matrix and distortion parameters should be provided by a yaml file or loaded through rosparam
  • The cfg/rovio.info provides most parameters for rovio. The camera extrinsics qCM (quaternion from IMU to camera frame, Hamilton-convention) and MrMC (Translation between IMU and Camera expressed in the IMU frame) should also be set there. They are being estimated during runtime so only a rough guess should be sufficient.
  • Especially for application with little motion fixing the IMU-camera extrinsics can be beneficial. This can be done by setting the parameter doVECalibration to false. Please be carefull that the overall robustness and accuracy can be very sensitive to bad extrinsic calibrations.