DC-VINS: Dynamic Camera Visual Inertial Navigation System with Online Calibration

Visual-inertial (VI) sensor combinations are becoming ubiquitous in a variety of autonomous driving and aerial navigation applications due to their low cost, limited power consumption and complementary sensing capabilities. However, current VI sensor configurations assume a static rigid transformation between the camera and IMU, precluding manipulating the viewpoint of the camera independent of IMU movement which is important in situations with uneven feature distribution and for high-rate dynamic motions. Gimbal stabilized cameras, as seen on most commercially available drones, have seen limited use in SLAM due to the inability to resolve the time-varying extrinsic calibration between the IMU and camera needed in tight sensor fusion. In this paper, we present the online extrinsic calibration between a dynamic camera mounted to an actuated mechanism and an IMU mounted to the body of the vehicle integrated into a Visual Odometry pipeline. In addition, we provide a degeneracy analysis of the calibration parameters leading to a novel parameterization of the actuated mechanism used in the calibration. We build our calibration into the VINS-Fusion package and show that we are able to accurately recover the calibration parameters online while manipulating the viewpoint of the camera to feature rich areas thereby achieving an average RMSE error of 0.26m over an average trajectory length of 340m, 31.45% lower than a traditional visual inertial pipeline with a static camera.