arXiv:2609.30459v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Perception in robotics and XR fundamentally relies on good state estimation. Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping...
The paper introduces a minimalist visual-inertial odometry system that uses only four downward-facing photodiodes with optical Gabor masks and an IMU to estimate motion for differential-drive robots. By jointly optimizing mask parameters and a Temporal Convolutional Network in a physically-grounded simulator, the model decodes speed from the photodiode signals and combines it with IMU angular speed to produce a continuous planar trajectory. Experiments on a prototype robot across indoor and outdoor terrains show that the system closely follows reference trajectories without real-world fine-tuning.
arXiv:2608.23290v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate visual localization on robotic and wearable platforms remains challenging in dense urban environments. Existing methodologies typically rely o...
arXiv:2608.24544v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many feature-based visual-inertial odometry (VIO) systems rely on sparse feature tracking, whose accuracy and robustness directly affect state estimati...
arXiv:2609.23974v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation models are endowing autonomous systems with greater intelligence, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of the environment through vis...
arXiv:2607. 11686v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-cost unmanned ground vehicles are often used in indoor places like warehouses, inspection corridors, and farm rows, where painted floor lines guide the robot.
Foundation models are endowing autonomous systems with greater intelligence, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of the environment through visual perception. A representative example is Human...
AMB3R‑SLAM is a real‑time monocular SLAM system that can reconstruct kilometer‑scale trajectories over 10,000 frames on a single consumer‑grade GPU. It combines a lightweight front‑end for low‑latency tracking with a hierarchical backend that enforces local, mid‑level, and global consistency, avoiding bundle adjustment and thus handling dynamic scenes naturally. The system also supports stereo, RGB‑D, and LiDAR inputs, achieving strong camera tracking performance and reducing absolute trajectory error by over 70% on several datasets, with sub‑meter accuracy when LiDAR is added.
DAVIO is a dense monocular‑inertial SLAM system that leverages a single multi‑view depth model (Depth Anything 3) for both initialization and mapping. It starts up quickly by solving a feature‑free linear system from a five‑image window and IMU pre‑integration, then uses a VIO filter whose metric poses condition the depth model during tracking. The system corrects residual scale along viewing rays, preserves metric baselines, and refines the map with a gravity‑preserving sub‑map graph, achieving earlier start‑up, lower localization error, and more accurate dense maps than state‑of‑the‑art feed‑forward mappers on both EuRoC and building‑scale ORI datasets.
DAPEVO is a learned visual odometry system that independently estimates image and event correspondences at shared patch locations and fuses their correlation evidence before motion refinement. It maintains image and event descriptors for each tracked patch, using a learned scalar gate to combine modality-specific correlation embeddings for each patch–frame edge, followed by a shared recurrent refinement and bundle‑adjustment update. The method supports event‑only observations and modality‑aware keyframe culling, achieving low trajectory error even when RGB frames are sparse or degraded, outperforming DPVO, RAMP‑VO, and event‑only DEVO on UZH‑FPV and TartanEvent datasets.
The paper introduces CalfVO, a monocular visual odometry system that operates without camera intrinsics, test‑time optimization, bundle adjustment, or loop closure. Using a transformer, it predicts relative poses with separate rotation and translation confidences over overlapping image windows, then aggregates these predictions via a confidence‑weighted module to produce a single trajectory. CalfVO achieves the highest accuracy among calibration‑free methods across five benchmarks and runs at 53 FPS, outperforming all baselines.
Autonomous navigation of quadrupedal robots in diverse environments fundamentally relies on resilient Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). While visual-inertial SLAM has matured across wheeled, handheld, and aerial platforms, a critical evaluation gap remains regarding how hardware-level sensor configurations affect performance under the aggressive dynamics of legged locomotion.