Elevator-VIGS: Separating Elevator Motion from Robot Motion in Visual-Inertial Gaussian Splatting SLAM

We present Elevator-VIGS, a visual-inertial 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM system that keeps tracking and mapping through elevator rides. Inside a moving elevator, the two sensors are in conflict. The camera sees only the robot's motion relative to the elevator, while the IMU senses that motion plus the elevator's motion relative to the world. This conflict is challenging for existing visual-inertial estimators. If vision dominates, the estimator tracks only the robot's motion within the elevator and misses the elevator's rise, and if the conflict remains, the estimator diverges. We observe that the conflict comes from forcing both observations into a single coordinate frame. We instead estimate the robot's pose in the elevator's coordinate frame, and the elevator's motion relative to the world as a per-keyframe transport state, the elevator's rise and vertical velocity, within dense visual-inertial bundle adjustment. Elevator-VIGS detects rides zero-shot with a vision-language model and a depth network, and constrains the transport state at the departure and the arrival. We record real-world and simulated elevator sequences. On these sequences, Elevator-VIGS achieves state-of-the-art tracking and rendering performance. On four elevator-free public benchmarks it keeps the state-of-the-art performance of VIGS-SLAM. Code and datasets will be made public.