RAGNAROK: Radar-Aided Gravity-Normalized Alignment for Robust Open Keyframe-Based Radar-Visual-Kinematic-Inertial SLAM

Abstract

Legged robots offer superior mobility in unstructured environments, but reliable operation in such conditions requires robust state estimation. To address the vulnerability of proprioceptive estimators in rough terrain, recent methods have incorporated radar to provide velocity measurements. However, their limited yaw observability still leads to drift, and failure-aware fusion for adverse environments remains underexplored. In this letter, we present RAGNAROK, the first radar-visual-kinematic-inertial SLAM designed for robust operation in challenging environments. It integrates slip- and rolling-contact-aware leg velocity estimation, a kinematics-aware radar factor, and degradation-aware image enhancement. We further incorporate a B-spline-based radar-aided proprioceptive backbone, adaptive weighting, and online extrinsic calibration. Extensive experiments on public and self-collected datasets demonstrate that RAGNAROK achieves robust performance under challenging conditions and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.