Improving S-MSCKF With Variational Bayesian Adaptive Nonlinear Filter

In recent years, multi-sensor fusion has been paid a great attention and is widely applied to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), e.g. Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO). However, in the most of previous works the observation noise of sensor is assumed to be Gaussian with invariant constant mean and covariance, which is not the case actually. In this paper, a variational Bayesian adaptive algorithm is proposed to improve the performance of visual-inertial odometry, where covariance of observation noise is modeled as inverse-Wishart distribution with harmonic mean so that observation noise is non-Gaussian. Besides, unscented transformation is utilized to handle the nonlinear system problem. The proposed algorithm is applied to the framework of stereo multi-state constraint Kalman filter system (S-MSCKF), which is a state-of-the-art VIO system with low computational cost and good robustness. Extensive experiments are performed on simulation data and open source datasets. The results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm is more robust and accurate compared with S-MSCKF.