An observability-constrained sliding window filter for SLAM

A sliding window filter (SWF) is an appealing smoothing algorithm for nonlinear estimation problems such as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), since it is resource-adaptive by controlling the size of the sliding window, and can better address the nonlinearity of the problem by relinearizing available measurements. However, due to the marginalization employed to discard old states from the sliding window, the standard SWF has different parameter observability properties from the optimal batch maximum-a-posterior (MAP) estimator. Specifically, the nullspace of the Fisher information matrix (or Hessian) has lower dimension than that of the batch MAP estimator. This implies that the standard SWF acquires spurious information, which can lead to inconsistency. To address this problem, we propose an observability-constrained (OC)-SWF where the linearization points are selected so as to ensure the correct dimension of the nullspace of the Hessian, as well as minimize the linearization errors. We present both Monte Carlo simulations and real-world experimental results which show that the OC-SWF's performance is superior to the standard SWF, in terms of both accuracy and consistency.