Detection and compensation of degeneracy cases for IMU-kinect integrated continuous SLAM with plane features

In a group of general geometric primitives, plane-based features are widely used for indoor localization because of their robustness against noises. However, a lack of linearly independent planes may lead to a non-trivial estimation. This in return can cause a degenerate state from which all states cannot be estimated. To solve this problem, this paper first proposed a degeneracy detection method. A compensation method that could fix orientations by projecting an inertial measurement unit’s (IMU) information was then explained. Experiments were conducted using an IMU-Kinect v2 integrated sensor system prone to fall into degenerate cases owing to its narrow field-of-view. Results showed that the proposed framework could enhance map accuracy by successful detection and compensation of degenerated orientations.