Tarek Hamel's talk on Deterministic observer design for vision-aided inertial navigation

Time, Date, Location: 11:00, Friday, 19 January, 2024, Brian Anderson Building Seminar Room

Title: Deterministic observer design for vision-aided inertial navigation

Abstract: This talk aims to report results developed over the last three years for state estimation problems arising with unmanned mobile robots equipped with a monocular camera and a 3-axis gyrometer, complemented with either a velocity sensor, a 3-axis accelerometer, or an optical flow sensor. The definition and characterization of uniform observability for linear time-varying systems, followed by an observer design framework exploiting first-order approximations of a class of nonlinear systems, are first recalled. The resulting Riccati observers are locally uniformly exponentially stable when associated uniform observability conditions are satisfied. The framework is subsequently applied, with detailed explanations, to a set of practical problems, namely i) classical PnP camera pose estimation using known source points and bearing measurements, ii) the adaptation of this problem to unknown source points by using epipolar constraints, iii) camera pose and velocity estimation using bearing and IMU measurements, and iv) camera velocity and depth estimation using optical flow and IMU measurements from the observation of a planar target. The observer solutions proposed for these last two problems are validated with experimental data.

Bio: Tarek Hamel is Professor at the University Côte d’Azur since 2003. He received his Ph.D. in Robotics from the University of Technology of Compiègne (UTC), France, in 1996. After two years as a research assistant at the UTC, he joined the Centre d’Etudes de Mécanique d’Ile de France in 1997 as Associate Professor. His research interests include nonlinear control theory, estimation, and vision-based control with applications to Unmanned Robotic Systems. He is an IEEE Fellow and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He was Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics, IEEE Transactions on Control System Technology, and Control Engineering Practice.