A Coupled Visual and Inertial Measurement Units Method for Locating and Mapping in Coal Mine Tunnel

Mobile robots moving fast or in scenes with poor lighting conditions often cause the loss of visual feature tracking. In coal mine tunnels, the ground is often bumpy and the lighting is uneven. During the movement of the mobile robot in this scene, there will be violent bumps. The localization technology through visual features is greatly affected by the illumination and the speed of the camera movement. To solve the localization and mapping problem in an environment similar to underground coal mine tunnels, we improve a localization and mapping algorithm based on a monocular camera and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). A feature-matching method that combines point and line features is designed to improve the robustness of the algorithm in the presence of degraded scene structure and insufficient illumination. The tightly coupled method is used to establish visual feature constraints and IMU pre-integration constraints. A keyframe nonlinear optimization algorithm based on sliding windows is used to accomplish state estimation. Extensive simulations and practical environment verification show that the improved simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system with a monocular camera and IMU fusion can achieve accurate autonomous localization and map construction in scenes with insufficient light such as coal mine tunnels.