AQUA-SLAM: tightly-coupled underwater acoustic-visual-Inertial SLAM with sensor calibration
File(s)AQUA_SLAM.pdf (14.58 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Xu, Shida
Zhang, Kaicheng
Wang, Sen
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Underwater environments pose significant challenges for visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems due to limited visibility, inadequate illumination, and sporadic loss of structural features in images. Addressing these challenges, this article introduces a novel, tightly coupled acoustic-visual-inertial SLAM approach, termed AQUA-SLAM, to fuse a Doppler velocity log (DVL), a stereo camera, and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) within a graph optimization framework. Moreover, we propose an efficient sensor calibration technique, encompassing the multisensor extrinsic calibration (among the DVL, camera, and IMU) and the DVL transducer misalignment calibration, with a fast linear approximation procedure for real-time online execution. The proposed methods are extensively evaluated in a tank environment with ground truth, and validated for offshore applications in the North Sea. The results demonstrate that our method surpasses current state-of-the-art underwater and visual-inertial SLAM systems in terms of localization accuracy and robustness. The proposed system will be made open-source for the community.
Date Issued
2025-04-21
Date Acceptance
2025-02-25
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2025, 41, pp.2785-2803
ISSN
1552-3098
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Start Page
2785
End Page
2803
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Volume
41
Copyright Statement
Copyright © 2025 IEEE. This is the author’s accepted manuscript made available under a CC-BY licence in accordance with Imperial’s Research Publications Open Access policy (www.imperial.ac.uk/oa-policy)
License URL
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2025-03-24