Title: Ultra-Wideband Aided Fast Localization and Mapping System,
Abstract: This paper proposes an ultra-wideband (UWB) aided localization and mapping
system that leverages on inertial sensor and depth camera. Inspired by the fact
that visual odometry (VO) system, regardless of its accuracy in the short term,
still faces challenges with accumulated errors in the long run or under
unfavourable environments, the UWB ranging measurements are fused to remove the
visual drift and improve the robustness. A general framework is developed which
consists of three parallel threads, two of which carry out the visual-inertial
odometry (VIO) and UWB localization respectively. The other mapping thread
integrates visual tracking constraints into a pose graph with the proposed
smooth and virtual range constraints, such that an optimization is performed to
provide robust trajectory estimation. Experiments show that the proposed system
is able to create dense drift-free maps in real-time even running on an
ultra-low power processor in featureless environments.