Marginalizing and Conditioning Gaussians onto Linear Approximations of Smooth Manifolds with Applications in Robotics

Abstract

We present closed-form expressions for marginalizing and conditioning Gaussians onto linear manifolds, and demonstrate how to apply these expressions to smooth nonlinear manifolds through linearization. Although marginalization and conditioning onto axis-aligned manifolds are well-established procedures, doing so onto non-axis-aligned manifolds is not as well understood. We demonstrate the utility of our expressions through three applications: 1) approximation of the projected normal distribution, where the quality of our linearized approximation increases as problem nonlinearity decreases; 2) covariance extraction in Koopman SLAM, where our covariances are shown to be consistent on a real-world dataset; and 3) covariance extraction in constrained GTSAM, where our covariances are shown to be consistent in simulation.

arXiv commentFinal version in IEEE ICRA 2025 (winner of the Best Conference Paper Award)