Minimalist Visual Inertial Odometry

Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO), which is critical to mobile robot navigation, uses cameras with a large number of pixels. Capturing and processing camera images requires significant resources. This work presents a minimalist approach to planar odometry, showing that just four visual sensors (pixels) and an IMU provide robust motion estimation for differential-drive robots. Our key insight is that four downward-facing photodiodes that sense the world through optical Gabor masks produce signals that encode speed. Based on this, we jointly optimize the mask parameters alongside a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) using a physically-grounded simulator. The resulting model decodes speed fro...

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