Invariant Kalman filtering for extended pose estimation in multi-IMU articulated rigid-body systems
Accurate extended pose estimation (orientation, velocity, and position) for IMU-instrumented articulated rigid-body systems is a key challenge in robotics and human motion analysis. The invariant extended Kalman filter (IEKF) addresses this problem for a single rigid body with convergence guarantees and consistency under unobservability, but extending these properties to articulated systems is nontrivial: inter-body pose coupling prevents a direct application, and incorporating joint kinematic constraints within the invariant framework remains an open problem. To address this gap, we introduce the relative L-extended pose, a Lie group representation for kinematic-tree systems based on relative poses between bodies. With one IMU per body, it yields group-affine dynamics and allows joint constraints to be expressed in invariant form. We incorporate these constraints as noise-free pseudo-measurements within an iterated IEKF (IterIEKF), thereby preserving the convergence and consistency guarantees of invariant filtering. The absolute pose of each body is then recovered by chaining the relative blocks along the kinematic tree. Validated on both a UR5e robot and a human leg, the proposed IterIEKF outperforms all EKF, IterEKF, and absolute-pose IterIEKF baselines. It converges faster, exhibits lower run-to-run variability, and consistently achieves the lowest RMSE, with reductions of at least 50% compared to the second-best filter across all scenarios considered in this work.