An embedded visual-inertial navigation system for mobile platforms using an event-based camera

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Evans, James and Ferguson, Andrew and Forman, Shaun and Fraser, Douglas and Kliskey, Samuel and Mohseni, Ehsan and Di Caterina, Gaetano; Hu, Jia and Min, Geyong and Wang, Haozhe and Miao, Wang and Xu, Lexi and Georgalas, Nektarios and Zhao, Zhiwei and Jin, Rui and Pang, Guangyao and Han, Wei and Hao, Fei, eds. (2025) An embedded visual-inertial navigation system for mobile platforms using an event-based camera. In: 2025 IEEE International Conference on Embedded Software and Systems (ICESS). IEEE, GBR, pp. 1162-1169. ISBN 979-8-3315-6874-0 (https://doi.org/10.1109/HPCC67675.2025.00166)

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Abstract

GPS has long been the standard for determining position and navigation across a wide range of applications. However, as this technology cannot be relied on in many scenarios, alternative sensing modalities, such as vision, could provide viable alternatives. This work investigated the use of an event-based camera for navigation, within a mobile embedded system. Event-based cameras generate events when pixels asynchronously detect changes in light intensity, and report these changes as binary spikes. Such sensors can provide very high temporal resolution, wide dynamic range and low power consumption. A ground-based rover was developed, hosting a DAVIS346 event-based camera, to test a navigation system based on a visual-inertial odometry (VIO) approach. Processing and communications were implemented on two microcontrollers (Raspberry Pi 5 and ESP32), both communicating with a base station, which tracked the position of the rover and status of onboard sensors. The event-based processing pipeline showed improved accuracy when using frames augmented with event data, as compared to regular frames only. Due to the scarcity of modular, open source, eventbased VIO systems, this work focused on how the benefits of an event-based camera could be leveraged in OpenVINS, which is a traditional VIO system designed for conventional framebased cameras. To the best of our knowledge this is the first demonstration of a framework that can leverage the benefits of an event-based camera in a traditional VIO system of this style.

ORCID iDs

Evans, James, Ferguson, Andrew, Forman, Shaun, Fraser, Douglas, Kliskey, Samuel, Mohseni, Ehsan ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0819-6592 and Di Caterina, Gaetano ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7256-0897; Hu, Jia, Min, Geyong, Wang, Haozhe, Miao, Wang, Xu, Lexi, Georgalas, Nektarios, Zhao, Zhiwei, Jin, Rui, Pang, Guangyao, Han, Wei and Hao, Fei
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