AstroLoc: An Efficient and Robust Localizer for a Free-flying Robot

We present AstroLoc, an efficient and robust
monocular visual-inertial graph-based localization system used
by the Astrobee free-flying robots onboard the International
Space Station (ISS). We provide a novel localization system
that limits the traditionally higher computation times for graph-based
localization systems and enables the resource constrained
Astrobee robots to benefit from their increased accuracy. We
also introduce methods for handling cheirality issues for visual
odometry and localization factors that further increase localization
robustness. We evaluate the performance of AstroLoc on a
dataset of ISS activities and show that it greatly improves pose,
velocity, and IMU bias estimation accuracy while efficiently
running in a limited computation environment. The source code
for AstroLoc is released to the public.