Inertial-kinect fusion for outdoor 3D Navigation

The lightweight and low-cost 3D sensing device, such as Microsoft Kinect, has gained much at- tention in computer vision and robotics com- munity. Although quite promising and success- ful for indoor applications, its outdoor usage has been significantly hampered by its short de- tection range (around 4 meters) coupled with ambient infrared interference. This paper ad- dresses the theoretical and practical develop- ment of an Inertial-Kinect fused SLAM frame- work that can handle the 3D to 2D degenera- tion in Kinect sensing, called a depth dropout problem. The vision node is designed to pro- vide either full 6DOF or partial 5DOF vehi- cle pose measurements depending on the depth availability, whilst the low-cost inertial system designed in house (less than $40AUD) enables continuous metric mapping and navigation. In- door and outdoor experiment results are pro- vided, demonstrating the robustness of the pro- posed approach in a challenging environmental conditions.