Xiongfeng Peng

Xiongfeng Peng, Zhihua Liu, Weiming Li et al.

Recent deep learning based visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods have made significant progress. However, how to make full use of visual information as well as better integrate with inertial measurement unit (IMU) in visual SLAM has potential research value. This paper proposes a novel deep SLAM network with dual visual factors. The basic idea is to integrate both photometric factor and re-projection factor into the end-to-end differentiable structure through multi-factor data association module. We show that the proposed network dynamically learns and adjusts the confidence maps of both visual factors and it can be further extended to include the IMU factors as well. Extensive experiments validate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on several public datasets, including TartanAir, EuRoC and ETH3D-SLAM. Specifically, when dynamically fusing the three factors together, the absolute trajectory error for both monocular and stereo configurations on EuRoC dataset has reduced by 45.3% and 36.2% respectively.

Lu Xu, Jiaqian Yu, Xiongfeng Peng et al.

To meet the growing demand for smarter, faster, and more efficient embodied AI solutions, we introduce a novel Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) method that significantly boosts reasoning and learning efficiency for embodied autonomous systems. General MoE models demand extensive training data and complex optimization, which limits their applicability in embodied AI such as autonomous driving (AD) and robotic manipulation. In this work, we propose a skill-oriented MoE called MoSE, which mimics the human learning and reasoning process skill-by-skill, step-by-step. We introduce a skill-oriented routing mechanism that begins with defining and annotating specific skills, enabling experts to identify the necessary competencies for various scenarios and reasoning tasks, thereby facilitating skill-by-skill learning. To better align with multi-step planning in human reasoning and in end-to-end driving models, we build a hierarchical skill dataset and pretrain the router to encourage the model to think step-by-step. Unlike other multi-round dialogues, MoSE integrates valuable auxiliary tasks (e.g. perception-prediction-planning for AD, and high-level and low-level planning for robots) in one single forward process without introducing any extra computational cost. With less than 3B sparsely activated parameters, our model effectively grows more diverse expertise and outperforms models on both AD corner-case reasoning tasks and robot reasoning tasks with less than 40% of the parameters.

Xiongfeng Peng, Zhihua Liu, Qiang Wang et al.

We propose a novel feature re-identification method for real-time visual-inertial SLAM. The front-end module of the state-of-the-art visual-inertial SLAM methods (e.g. visual feature extraction and matching schemes) relies on feature tracks across image frames, which are easily broken in challenging scenarios, resulting in insufficient visual measurement and accumulated error in pose estimation. In this paper, we propose an efficient drift-less SLAM method by re-identifying existing features from a spatial-temporal sensitive sub-global map. The re-identified features over a long time span serve as augmented visual measurements and are incorporated into the optimization module which can gradually decrease the accumulative error in the long run, and further build a drift-less global map in the system. Extensive experiments show that our feature re-identification method is both effective and efficient. Specifically, when combining the feature re-identification with the state-of-the-art SLAM method [11], our method achieves 67.3% and 87.5% absolute translation error reduction with only a small additional computational cost on two public SLAM benchmark DBs: EuRoC and TUM-VI respectively.