A Real-Time Sliding-Window-Based Visual-Inertial Odometry for MAVs

This article presents a sliding widow-based visual-inertial odometry to deal with the micro air vehicle (MAV) pose estimation problem. Errors caused by inertial measurement unit (IMU) preintegration, visual landmarks reprojection, and marginalization, are unified into a nonlinear residual minimization framework. Furthermore, a dual-step marginalization method has been proposed to increase the computational efficiency. Experiments have been conducted on publicly available datasets, as well as customized handheld and MAV platform, where state-of-the-art approaches have served as the baselines for comparison. According to the results, the proposed method has a comparative accuracy, which can run in real-time on an onboard minicomputer.