Homography-based Riccati observer design for camera pose estimation

This paper introduces a novel approach for estimating the relative pose of a mobile robot equipped with an onboard IMU, a velocity sensor complemented with a monocular camera observing a planar scene. The proposed solution relies on the design of a deterministic Riccati observer that exploits the first-order approximations of a class of nonlinear systems. It uses the point-feature correspondences of a sequence of images and exploits the homography constraint to derive the system’s measurement equation. The observability analysis, which highlights the uniform observability condition under which local exponential stability is guaranteed, is performed. Moreover, an extension of the observer to depth estimation is provided. Finally, the proposed observer solution is validated through simulation and experimental results.