Traditional approaches to stereo visual SLAM rely on point features to estimate the camera trajectory and build a map of the environment. In lowtextured environments, though, it is often difficult to find a sufficient number of reliable point features and, as a consequence, the performance of such algorithms degrades. This paper proposes PL-SLAM, a stereo visual SLAM system that combines both points and line segments to work robustly in a wider variety of scenarios, particularly in those where point features are scarce or not well-distributed in the image. PL-SLAM leverages both points and segments at all the instances of the process: visual odometry, keyframe selection, bundle adjustment, etc. We contribute also with a loop closure procedure through a novel bag-ofwords approach that exploits the combined descriptive power of the two kinds of features. Additionally, the resulting map is richer and more diverse in 3D elements, which can be exploited to infer valuable, highlevel scene structures like planes, empty spaces, ground plane, etc. (not addressed in this work). Our proposal has been tested with several popular datasets (such as KITTI and EuRoC), and is compared to state of the art methods like ORB-SLAM, revealing a more robust performance in most of the experiments, while still running in real-time. An open source version of the PL-SLAM C++ code will be released for the benefit of the community. -ing his PhD he did two research stays, the first one in 2010 at the University of Bristol, and the second one in the University of Lincoln in 2013. His research interests include vision based navigation, telepresence robotics and human-machine interaction.

This article presents a visual–inertial dataset gathered in indoor and outdoor scenarios with a handheld custom sensor rig, for over 80 min in total. The dataset contains hardware-synchronized data from a commercial stereo camera (Bumblebee®2), a custom stereo rig, and an inertial measurement unit. The most distinctive feature of this dataset is the strong presence of low-textured environments and scenes with dynamic illumination, which are recurrent corner cases of visual odometry and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods. The dataset comprises 32 sequences and is provided with ground-truth poses at the beginning and the end of each of the sequences, thus allowing the accumulated drift to be measured in each case. We provide a trial evaluation of five existing state-of-the-art visual and visual–inertial methods on a subset of the dataset. We also make available open-source tools for evaluation purposes, as well as the intrinsic and extrinsic calibration parameters of all sensors in the rig. The dataset is available for download at http://mapir.uma.es/work/uma-visual-inertial-dataset

The fusion of visual and inertial measurements is becoming more and more popular in the robotics community since both sources of information complement well each other. However, in order to perform this fusion, the biases of the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) as well as the direction of gravity must be initialized first. Additionally, in case of a monocular camera, the metric scale is also needed. The most popular visual-inertial initialization approaches rely on accurate vision-only motion estimates to build a non-linear optimization problem that solves for these parameters in an iterative way. In this paper, we rely on the previous work in [1] and propose an analytical solution to estimate the accelerometer bias, the direction of gravity and the scale factor in a maximum-likelihood framework. This formulation results in a very efficient estimation approach and, due to the non-iterative nature of the solution, avoids the intrinsic issues of previous iterative solutions. We present an extensive validation of the proposed IMU initialization approach and a performance comparison against the state-of-theart approach described in [2] with real data from the publicly available EuRoC dataset, achieving comparable accuracy at a fraction of its computational cost and without requiring an initial guess for the scale factor. We also provide a C++ open source reference implementation.

In order to fuse measurements from multiple sensors mounted on a mobile robot, it is needed to express them in a common reference system through their relative spatial transformations. In this paper, we present a method to estimate the full 6DoF extrinsic calibration parameters of multiple heterogeneous sensors (Lidars, Depth and RGB cameras) suitable for automatic execution on a mobile robot. Our method computes the 2D calibration parameters (x, y, yaw) through a motion-based approach, while for the remaining 3 parameters (z, pitch, roll) it requires the observation of the ground plane for a short period of time. What set this proposal apart from others is that: i) all calibration parameters are initialized in closed form, and ii) the scale ambiguity inherent to motion estimation from a monocular camera is explicitly handled, enabling the combination of these sensors and metric ones (Lidars, stereo rigs, etc.) within the same optimization framework. We provide a formal definition of the problem, as well as of the contributed method, for which a C++ implementation has been made publicly available. The suitability of the method has been assessed in simulation an with real data from indoor and outdoor scenarios. Finally, improvements over state-of-the-art motion-based calibration proposals are shown through experimental evaluation.