Multirotor dynamics based online scale estimation for monocular SLAM

This paper proposes a novel method to estimate the scale online for monocular SLAM. Unlike conventional scale estimation methods that require a metric sensor such as an IMU and apriori knowledge of its biases, this approach estimates the scale online by solely using the monocular camera and multirotor dynamics model in an extended Kalman Filter framework. Further, we discuss the observability of scale and theoretically show that the scale becomes observable when multirotor dynamics model and monocular vision are used in conjunction. We validate our proposition with extensive experimentation on the local as well as on the standard datasets and compare the same with other state of the art methods.