Uploaded May 2018 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
ICRA 2018 Spotlight Video
Interactive Session Tue PM Pod O.6
Authors: Glover, Arren; Vasco, Valentina; Bartolozzi, Chiara
Title: A Controlled-delay Event Camera Framework for On-line Robotics
Abstract:
Event cameras offer many advantages for dynamic robotics due to their low latency response to motion, high dynamic range, and inherent compression of the visual signal. Many algorithms easily achieve real-time performance when testing on off-line datasets, however with an increase in camera resolution and applications on fast-moving robots, latency-free operation is not guaranteed. The event-rate is not constant, but is proportional to the amount of movement in the scene, or the velocity of the camera itself. Recently, algorithms have instead reported a maximum event-rate that can be achieved in real-time. In this paper we present the event-driven framework used on the iCub robot, which closes the loop between algorithm processing rate and the actual event-rate of the camera in order to smoothly control and limit the latency, while allowing the algorithm to degrade gracefully when large bursts of events occur. We show two algorithms that process events differently from each other and demonstrate the trade-off between latency and algorithm performance that the framework provides.
ICRA 2018 Spotlight Video
Interactive Session Tue PM Pod O.6
Authors: Glover, Arren; Vasco, Valentina; Bartolozzi, Chiara
Title: A Controlled-delay Event Camera Framework for On-line Robotics
Abstract:
Event cameras offer many advantages for dynamic robotics due to their low latency response to motion, high dynamic range, and inherent compression of the visual signal. Many algorithms easily achieve real-time performance when testing on off-line datasets, however with an increase in camera resolution and applications on fast-moving robots, latency-free operation is not guaranteed. The event-rate is not constant, but is proportional to the amount of movement in the scene, or the velocity of the camera itself. Recently, algorithms have instead reported a maximum event-rate that can be achieved in real-time. In this paper we present the event-driven framework used on the iCub robot, which closes the loop between algorithm processing rate and the actual event-rate of the camera in order to smoothly control and limit the latency, while allowing the algorithm to degrade gracefully when large bursts of events occur. We show two algorithms that process events differently from each other and demonstrate the trade-off between latency and algorithm performance that the framework provides.







![Real-Time CPU-Based Large-Scale 3D Mesh Reconstruction
ICRA 2018 Spotlight Video
Interactive Session Thu AM Pod R.1
Authors: Piazza, Enrico; Romanoni, Andrea; Matteucci, Matteo
Title: Real-Time CPU-Based Large-Scale 3D Mesh Reconstruction
Abstract:
In Robotics, especially in this era of autonomous driving, mapping is one key ability of a robot to be able to navigate through an environment, localize on it and analyze its traversability.To allow for real-time execution on constrained hardware, the map usually estimated by feature-based or semi-dense SLAM algorithms is a sparse point cloud; a richer and more complete representation of the environment is desirable. Existing dense mapping algorithms require extensive use of GPU computing and they hardly scale to large environments; incremental algorithms from sparse points still represent an effective solution when light computational effort is needed and big sequences have to be processed in real-time. In this paper we improved and extended the state of the art incremental manifold mesh algorithm proposed in [1] and extended in [2]. While these algorithms do not achieve real-time and they embed points from SLAM or Structure from Motion only when their position is fixed, in this paper we propose the first incremental algorithm able to reconstruct a manifold mesh in real-time through single core CPU processing which is also able to modify the mesh according to 3D points updates from the underlying SLAM algorithm. We tested our algorithm against two state of the art incremental mesh mapping systems on the KITTI dataset, and we showed that, while accuracy is comparable, our approach is able to reach real-time performances thanks to an order of magnitude speed-up. Real-Time CPU-Based Large-Scale 3D Mesh Reconstruction](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VaLx6Klz13Y/mqdefault.jpg)


