Patent ID: 9709404
Date: 2017-07-18
CPC Classifications: G01C,G06K,G06T

Claim:
1. A vision-aided inertial navigation system comprising: at least one image source to produce image data along a trajectory of the vision-aided inertial navigation system (VINS) within an environment, wherein the image data contains a plurality of features observed within the environment at a plurality of poses of the VINS along the trajectory; an inertial measurement unit (IMU) to produce IMU data indicative of motion of the vision-aided inertial navigation system; and a hardware-based processing unit comprising an estimator that computes, based on the image data and the IMU data, a sliding window of state estimates for at least a position and orientation of the vision-aided inertial navigation system for a plurality of poses of the VINS along the trajectory and respective covariances for each of the state estimates, each of the respective covariances representing an amount of uncertainty in the corresponding state estimate, and wherein the estimator computes the state estimates by: