Absolute humanoid localization and mapping based on IMU Lie group and fiducial markers

Current locomotion algorithms in structured (in-door) 3D environments require an accurate localization. The several and diverse sensors typically embedded on legged robots (IMU, coders, vision and/or LIDARS) should make it possible if properly fused. Yet this is a difficult task due to the heterogeneity of these sensors and the real-time requirement of the control. While previous works were using staggered approaches (odometry at high frequency, sparsely corrected from vision and LIDAR localization), the recent progress in optimal estimation, in particular in visual-inertial localization, is paving the way to a holistic fusion. This paper is a contribution in this direction. We propose to quantify how a visual-inertial navigation system can accurately localize a humanoid robot in a 3D indoor environment tagged with fiducial markers. We introduce a theoretical contribution strengthening the formulation of Forster's IMU pre-integration, a practical contribution to avoid possible ambiguity raised by pose estimation of fiducial markers, and an experimental contribution on a humanoid dataset with ground truth. Our system is able to localize the robot with less than 2 cm errors once the environment is properly mapped. This would naturally extend to additional measurements corresponding to leg odometry (kinematic factors) thanks to the genericity of the proposed pre-integration algebra.