Event-Based Visual SLAM : An Explorative Approach

Abstract: Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) is an important topic within the field of roboticsaiming to localize an agent in a unknown or partially known environment while simultaneouslymapping the environment. The ability to perform robust SLAM is especially important inhazardous environments such as natural disasters, firefighting and space exploration wherehuman exploration may be too dangerous or impractical. In recent years, neuromorphiccameras have been made commercially available. This new type of sensor does not outputconventional frames but instead an asynchronous signal of events at a microsecond resolutionand is capable of capturing details in complex lightning scenarios where a standard camerawould be either under- or overexposed, making neuromorphic cameras a promising solution insituations where standard cameras struggle. This thesis explores a set of different approachesto virtual frames, a frame-based representation of events, in the context of SLAM.UltimateSLAM, a project fusing events, gray scale and IMU data, is investigated using virtualframes of fixed and varying frame rate both with and without motion compensation. Theresulting trajectories are compared to the trajectories produced when using gray scale framesand the number of detected and tracked features are compared. We also use a traditional visualSLAM project, ORB-SLAM, to investigate the Gaussian weighted virtual frames and gray scaleframes reconstructed from the event stream using a recurrent network model. While virtualframes can be used for SLAM, the event camera is not a plug and play sensor and requires agood choice of parameters when constructing virtual frames, relying on pre-existing knowledgeof the scene.