GeVI-SLAM: Gravity-Enhanced Stereo Visua Inertial SLAM for Underwater Robots

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shen, Yuan, Hong, Yuze, Zeng, Guangyang, Zhang, Tengfei, Chui, Pui Yi, Hong, Ziyang, Wu, Junfeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Shen, Yuan
Hong, Yuze
Zeng, Guangyang
Zhang, Tengfei
Chui, Pui Yi
Hong, Ziyang
Wu, Junfeng
author_facet Shen, Yuan
Hong, Yuze
Zeng, Guangyang
Zhang, Tengfei
Chui, Pui Yi
Hong, Ziyang
Wu, Junfeng
contents Accurate visual inertial simultaneous localization and mapping (VI SLAM) for underwater robots remains a significant challenge due to frequent visual degeneracy and insufficient inertial measurement unit (IMU) motion excitation. In this paper, we present GeVI-SLAM, a gravity-enhanced stereo VI SLAM system designed to address these issues. By leveraging the stereo camera's direct depth estimation ability, we eliminate the need to estimate scale during IMU initialization, enabling stable operation even under low acceleration dynamics. With precise gravity initialization, we decouple the pitch and roll from the pose estimation and solve a 4 degrees of freedom (DOF) Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem for pose tracking. This allows the use of a minimal 3-point solver, which significantly reduces computational time to reject outliers within a Random Sample Consensus framework. We further propose a bias-eliminated 4-DOF PnP estimator with provable consistency, ensuring the relative pose converges to the true value as the feature number increases. To handle dynamic motion, we refine the full 6-DOF pose while jointly estimating the IMU covariance, enabling adaptive weighting of the gravity prior. Extensive experiments on simulated and real-world data demonstrate that GeVI-SLAM achieves higher accuracy and greater stability compared to state-of-the-art methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_24533
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GeVI-SLAM: Gravity-Enhanced Stereo Visua Inertial SLAM for Underwater Robots
Shen, Yuan
Hong, Yuze
Zeng, Guangyang
Zhang, Tengfei
Chui, Pui Yi
Hong, Ziyang
Wu, Junfeng
Robotics
Accurate visual inertial simultaneous localization and mapping (VI SLAM) for underwater robots remains a significant challenge due to frequent visual degeneracy and insufficient inertial measurement unit (IMU) motion excitation. In this paper, we present GeVI-SLAM, a gravity-enhanced stereo VI SLAM system designed to address these issues. By leveraging the stereo camera's direct depth estimation ability, we eliminate the need to estimate scale during IMU initialization, enabling stable operation even under low acceleration dynamics. With precise gravity initialization, we decouple the pitch and roll from the pose estimation and solve a 4 degrees of freedom (DOF) Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem for pose tracking. This allows the use of a minimal 3-point solver, which significantly reduces computational time to reject outliers within a Random Sample Consensus framework. We further propose a bias-eliminated 4-DOF PnP estimator with provable consistency, ensuring the relative pose converges to the true value as the feature number increases. To handle dynamic motion, we refine the full 6-DOF pose while jointly estimating the IMU covariance, enabling adaptive weighting of the gravity prior. Extensive experiments on simulated and real-world data demonstrate that GeVI-SLAM achieves higher accuracy and greater stability compared to state-of-the-art methods.
title GeVI-SLAM: Gravity-Enhanced Stereo Visua Inertial SLAM for Underwater Robots
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24533