Minimalist Visual Inertial Odometry
arXiv:2605.19990v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 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
Overview
arXiv:2605.19990v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 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 from the four photodiode measurements. Pairing these estimates with an IMU's angular speed yields a continuous planar trajectory. We validate our approach with a prototype sensor mounted on a differential drive robot. Across diverse indoor and outdoor terrains, our system closely tracks the reference trajectories without any real-world fine-tuning. Our work shows that minimalist sensing enables efficient and accurate planar odometry.
Source
Originally published at arxiv.org.
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Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19990
