EROAM: Event-based Camera Rotational Odometry and Mapping in Real-time

This paper presents EROAM, a novel event-based rotational odometry and mapping system that achieves real-time, accurate camera rotation estimation. Unlike existing approaches that rely on event generation models or contrast maximization, EROAM employs a spherical event representation by projecting events onto a unit sphere and introduces Event Spherical Iterative Closest Point (ES-ICP), a novel geometric optimization framework designed specifically for event camera data. The spherical representation simplifies rotational motion formulation while enabling continuous mapping for enhanced spatial resolution. Combined with parallel point-to-line optimization, EROAM achieves efficient computation without compromising accuracy. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that EROAM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency. Our method maintains consistent performance under challenging conditions, including high angular velocities and extended sequences, where other methods often fail or show significant drift. Additionally, EROAM produces high-quality panoramic reconstructions with preserved fine structural details.

NeurIT: Pushing the Limit of Neural Inertial Tracking for Indoor Robotic IoT

Inertial tracking is vital for robotic IoT and has gained popularity thanks to the ubiquity of low-cost Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) and deep learning-powered tracking algorithms. Existing works, however, have not fully utilized IMU measurements, particularly magnetometers, nor maximized the potential of deep learning to achieve the desired accuracy. To enhance the tracking accuracy for indoor robotic applications, we introduce NeurIT, a sequence-to-sequence framework that elevates tracking accuracy to a new level. NeurIT employs a Time-Frequency Block-recurrent Transformer (TF-BRT) at its core, combining the power of recurrent neural network (RNN) and Transformer to learn representative features in both time and frequency domains. To fully utilize IMU information, we strategically employ body-frame differentiation of the magnetometer, which considerably reduces the tracking error. NeurIT is implemented on a customized robotic platform and evaluated in various indoor environments. Experimental results demonstrate that NeurIT achieves a mere 1-meter tracking error over a 300-meter distance. Notably, it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 48.21% on unseen data. NeurIT also performs comparably to the visual-inertial approach (Tango Phone) in vision-favored conditions and surpasses it in plain environments. We believe NeurIT takes an important step forward toward practical neural inertial tracking for ubiquitous and scalable tracking of robotic things. NeurIT, including the source code and the dataset, is open-sourced here: https://github.com/NeurIT-Project/NeurIT.