Design of a Real-time Asynchronous Monocular Odometry for Planetary Exploration
This work addresses the need for high-speed, robust visual odometry in resource-constrained planetary exploration rovers operating in HDR environments.
The authors propose a real-time asynchronous event-based monocular odometry system for planetary rovers, using an Error-State Kalman Filter with an event-based feature tracker to estimate camera ego-motion under computational and lighting constraints.
We describe our preliminary design of a real-time asynchronous event-based monocular odometry for planetary exploration. Operating under strict computational constraints, planetary rovers frequently encounter complex, unpredictable environments that demand high-speed sensing and robustness to high dynamic range (HDR) lighting. Event cameras address these needs by reporting asynchronous, pixel-wise brightness changes with microsecond resolution, significantly reducing data bandwidth while maintaining robustness in extreme lighting conditions. We propose an approach based on an Error-State Kalman Filter (ESKF) that leverages this asynchronous event stream to continuously estimate camera ego-motion. The camera state is updated with every tracked position output generated by RATE, a real-time asynchronous feature tracker.