Unscented Dual Quaternion Particle Filter for SE(3) Estimation

Kailai Li, Florian Pfaff, Uwe D. Hanebeck

Abstract: We present a novel dual quaternion filter for recursive estimation of rigid body motions. Based on the sequential Monte Carlo scheme, particles are deployed on the manifold of unit dual quaternions. This allows non-parametric modeling of arbitrary distributions underlying on the SE(3) group. The proposal distribution for importance sampling is estimated particle-wise by a novel dual quaternion unscented Kalman filter (DQ-UKF). It is adapted to the manifold geometric structure and drives the prior particles towards high-likelihood regions on the manifold. The resultant unscented dual quaternion particle filter (U-DQPF) incorporates the most recently observed evidence, raising the particle efficiency considerably for nonlinear pose estimation tasks. Compared with ordinary particle filters and other parametric model-based dual quaternion filtering schemes, the proposed U-DQPF shows superior performance in nonlinear SE(3) estimation.