Ground Plane-Aided Extrinsic Calibration of Inertial and RGB-D Sensors for Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles

Accurate extrinsic calibration of inertial sensors, such as Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) and cameras is crucial for trajectory estimation of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). While numerous calibration methods have been proposed, these techniques often rely on specialized equipment, planar targets, and an initial estimate of the calibration parameters. In this research, we propose a targetless calibration method designed for UAVs equipped with IMUs and RGB-Depth (RGB-D) cameras. Our approach leverages deep-learning-based floor-segmentation to extract ground points from the depth channel of RGB-D images. Subsequently, the normal vector to these points is estimated. The known orientation of the normal to the floor segment and the gravity vector sensed in the accelerometer’s frame are utilized in a robust estimation approach to estimate the extrinsic calibration parameters. We illustrate that the developed method outperforms MATLAB’s Toolboxes and exhibits similar performance to Kalibr without the use of specialized checkerboard targets.