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Event Cameras for High-Speed Drone State Estimation

IRI (CSIC-UPC, Barcelona) · 2023

6-DOF pose estimation · >5g flight regime

State Estimation Visual-Inertial Odometry Sensor Fusion Event Cameras Deep Learning PyTorch ROS C++
Event Cameras for High-Speed Drone State Estimation

Problem

Conventional frame-based cameras suffer motion blur at high angular and linear velocity, causing standard visual-inertial odometry (VIO) to diverge during aggressive quadrotor maneuvers exceeding 5g acceleration.

Built

A PyTorch fusion architecture combining neuromorphic event-camera streams (asynchronous per-pixel brightness changes, microsecond resolution) with IMU data for continuous 6-DOF pose estimation — event-stream tensor representations, a recurrent temporal-fusion network trained on high-speed flight datasets with motion-capture ground truth, optimized for onboard ROS-integrated inference.

Why hard

Event cameras eliminate motion blur but require fundamentally different processing than standard frame-based VIO pipelines.

What happened

The system maintained accurate pose tracking through maneuvers exceeding 5g acceleration — the regime where conventional frame cameras and standard VIO diverge.