Vision-Aided Inertial Navigation : low computational complexity algorithms with applications to Micro Aerial Vehicles. (Navigation inertielle assistée par vision : algorithmes à faible complexité avec applications aux micro-véhicules aériens)

Accurate egomotion estimation is of utmost importance for any navigation system.Nowadays di_erent sensors are adopted to localize and navigate in unknownenvironments such as GPS, range sensors, cameras, magnetic field sensors, inertialsensors (IMU). In order to have a robust egomotion estimation, the information ofmultiple sensors is fused. Although the improvements of technology in providingmore accurate sensors, and the efforts of the mobile robotics community in thedevelopment of more performant navigation algorithms, there are still openchallenges. Furthermore, the growing interest of the robotics community in microrobots and swarm of robots pushes towards the employment of low weight, low costsensors and low computational complexity algorithms. In this context inertial sensorsand monocular cameras, thanks to their complementary characteristics, low weight,low cost and widespread use, represent an interesting sensor suite.This dissertation represents a contribution in the framework of vision-aided inertialnavigation and tackles the problems of data association and pose estimation aimingfor low computational complexity algorithms applied to MAVs.For what concerns the data association, a novel method to estimate the relative motionbetween two consecutive camera views is proposed. It only requires the observationof a single feature in the scene and the knowledge of the angular rates from an IMU,under the assumption that the local camera motion lies in a plane perpendicular to thegravity vector. Two very efficient algorithms to remove the outliers of the featurematchingprocess are provided under the abovementioned motion assumption. Inorder to generalize the approach to a 6DoF motion, two feature correspondences andgyroscopic data from IMU measurements are necessary. In this case, two algorithmsare provided to remove wrong data associations in the feature-matching process. Inthe case of a monocular camera mounted on a quadrotor vehicle, motion priors fromIMU are used to discard wrong estimations.For what concerns the pose estimation problem, this thesis provides a closed formsolution which gives the system pose from three natural features observed in a singlecamera image, once the roll and the pitch angles are obtained by the inertialmeasurements under the planar ground assumption.In order to tackle the pose estimation problem in dark or featureless environments, asystem equipped with a monocular camera, inertial sensors and a laser pointer isconsidered. The system moves in the surrounding of a planar surface and the laserpointer produces a laser spot on the abovementioned surface. The laser spot isobserved by the monocular camera and represents the only point feature considered.Through an observability analysis it is demonstrated that the physical quantities whichcan be determined by exploiting the measurements provided by the aforementionedsensor suite during a short time interval are: the distance of the system from the planarsurface; the component of the system speed that is orthogonal to the planar surface;the relative orientation of the system with respect to the planar surface; the orientationof the planar surface with respect to the gravity. A simple recursive method toperform the estimation of all the aforementioned observable quantities is provided.All the contributions of this thesis are validated through experimental results usingboth simulated and real data. Thanks to their low computational complexity, theproposed algorithms are very suitable for real time implementation on systems withlimited on-board computation resources. The considered sensor suite is mounted on aquadrotor vehicle but the contributions of this dissertations can be applied to anymobile device.