Visual Inertial Odometry using Focal Plane Binary Features (BIT-VIO)

Focal-Plane Sensor-Processor Arrays (FPSP)s are an emerging technology that can execute vision algorithms directly on the image sensor. Unlike conventional cameras, FPSPs perform computation on the image plane -- at individual pixels -- enabling high frame rate image processing while consuming low power, making them ideal for mobile robotics. FPSPs, such as the SCAMP-5, use parallel processing and are based on the Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) paradigm. In this paper, we present BIT-VIO, the first Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) which utilises SCAMP-5.BIT-VIO is a loosely-coupled iterated Extended Kalman Filter (iEKF) which fuses together the visual odometry running fast at 300 FPS with predictions from 400 Hz IMU measurements to provide accurate and smooth trajectories.

Di-NeRF: Distributed NeRF for Collaborative Learning with Unknown Relative Poses

Collaborative mapping of unknown environments can be done faster and more robustly than a single robot. However, a collaborative approach requires a distributed paradigm to be scalable and deal with communication issues. This work presents a fully distributed algorithm enabling a group of robots to collectively optimize the parameters of a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF). The algorithm involves the communication of each robot's trained NeRF parameters over a mesh network, where each robot trains its NeRF and has access to its own visual data only. Additionally, the relative poses of all robots are jointly optimized alongside the model parameters, enabling mapping with unknown relative camera poses. We show that multi-robot systems can benefit from differentiable and robust 3D reconstruction optimized from multiple NeRFs. Experiments on real-world and synthetic data demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. See the website of the project for videos of the experiments and supplementary material(https://sites.google.com/view/di-nerf/home).

Deep Direct Visual Servoing of Tendon-Driven Continuum Robots

Vision-based control has found a key place in the research to tackle the requirement of the state feedback when controlling a continuum robot under physical sensing limitations. Traditional visual servoing requires feature extraction and tracking while the imaging device captures the images, which limits the controller's efficiency. We hypothesize that employing deep learning models and implementing direct visual servoing can effectively resolve the issue by eliminating the tracking requirement and controlling the continuum robot without requiring an exact system model. In this paper, we control a single-section tendon-driven continuum robot utilizing a modified VGG-16 deep learning network and an eye-in-hand direct visual servoing approach. The proposed algorithm is first developed in Blender using only one input image of the target and then implemented on a real robot. The convergence and accuracy of the results in normal, shadowed, and occluded scenes reflected by the sum of absolute difference between the normalized target and captured images prove the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed controller.