# GeoFlow-SLAM: A Robust Tightly-Coupled RGBD-Inertial and Legged Odometry Fusion SLAM for Dynamic Legged Robotics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14247 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14247/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [NICE-SLAM: Neural Implicit Scalable Encoding for SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12130/) (2021)
- [SplaTAM: Splat, Track & Map 3D Gaussians for Dense RGB-D SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02126/) (2023)
- [LIO-SAM: Tightly-coupled Lidar Inertial Odometry via Smoothing and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00258/) (2020)
- [DS-SLAM: A Semantic Visual SLAM towards Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08379/) (2018)
- [RTAB-Map as an Open-Source Lidar and Visual SLAM Library for Large-Scale and Long-Term Online Operation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06341/) (2024)
- [R3LIVE: A Robust, Real-time, RGB-colored, LiDAR-Inertial-Visual tightly-coupled state Estimation and mapping package](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07982/) (2021)
- [A General Optimization-based Framework for Global Pose Estimation with Multiple Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03642/) (2019)
- [FAST-LIVO2: Fast, Direct LiDAR-Inertial-Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14035/) (2024)
- [FAST-LIVO: Fast and Tightly-coupled Sparse-Direct LiDAR-Inertial-Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00893/) (2022)
- [Structure PLP-SLAM: Efficient Sparse Mapping and Localization using Point, Line and Plane for Monocular, RGB-D and Stereo Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06058/) (2022)
- [Lightweight 3-D Localization and Mapping for Solid-State LiDAR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03800/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [IGGT4D: Streaming 4D Instance-Grounded Geometry Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19228/) (2026)
- [HoloAgent-0: A Unified Embodied Agent Framework with 3D Spatial Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23565/) (2026)
- [Fauna Sprout: A lightweight, approachable, developer-ready humanoid robot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18963/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents GeoFlow-SLAM, a robust and effective Tightly-Coupled RGBD-inertial SLAM for legged robotics undergoing aggressive and high-frequency motions.By integrating geometric consistency, legged odometry constraints, and dual-stream optical flow (GeoFlow), our method addresses three critical challenges:feature matching and pose initialization failures during fast locomotion and visual feature scarcity in texture-less scenes.Specifically, in rapid motion scenarios, feature matching is notably enhanced by leveraging dual-stream optical flow, which combines prior map points and poses. Additionally, we propose a robust pose initialization method for fast locomotion and IMU error in legged robots, integrating IMU/Legged odometry, inter-frame Perspective-n-Point (PnP), and Generalized Iterative Closest Point (GICP). Furthermore, a novel optimization framework that tightly couples depth-to-map and GICP geometric constraints is first introduced to improve the robustness and accuracy in long-duration, visually texture-less environments. The proposed algorithms achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) on collected legged robots and open-source datasets. To further promote research and development, the open-source datasets and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/HorizonRobotics/GeoFlowSlam