title: Enhanced monocular visual odometry integrated with laser distance meter for astronaut navigation.
abstract: Visual odometry provides astronauts with accurate knowledge of their position and orientation. Wearable astronaut navigation systems should be simple and compact. Therefore, monocular vision methods are preferred over stereo vision systems, commonly used in mobile robots. However, the projective nature of monocular visual odometry causes a scale ambiguity problem. In this paper, we focus on the integration of a monocular camera with a laser distance meter to solve this problem. The most remarkable advantage of the system is its ability to recover a global trajectory for monocular image sequences by incorporating direct distance measurements. First, we propose a robust and easy-to-use extrinsic calibration method between camera and laser distance meter. Second, we present a navigation scheme that fuses distance measurements with monocular sequences to correct the scale drift. In particular, we explain in detail how to match the projection of the invisible laser pointer on other frames. Our proposed integration architecture is examined using a live dataset collected in a simulated lunar surface environment. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100000, China. wukai@radi.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Kai
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100000, China. dikc@radi.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Kaichang
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Di
authors.affiliation: Computer and Information Engineering College, Henan University, Kaifeng 475000, China. sunxun2012@163.com.
authors.forename: Xun
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100000, China. wanwh@radi.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Wenhui
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Wan
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100000, China. liuzq@radi.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Zhaoqin
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D018480:Astronauts; D002138:Calibration; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D007834:Lasers; D055096:Optical Devices; D009949:Orientation; D015349:Vision, Monocular