Odometry/SLAM with external IMU

[marlu]

Hi,
I would like to improve the odometry/SLAM performance by substituting OAK camera's internal IMU with high-end Xsens IMU. In terms of implementation, both camera and IMU are USB connected to the same PC. Does such a replacement require hardware data sync, or is it sufficient to just adjust rtabmap's imu_topic to subscribe to the right data?

[matlabbe]

You can just remap the right topic to rtabmap/odometry node.

You have to make sure that the orientation (TF) between the frame of the camera and the one of the imu is correctly calibrated. I think you can use Kalibr to find the transform between them. Otherwise you may compare the imu of the oak against the xsense to find their relative orientation.