ICRA21 Workshop on Visual-Inertial Navigation Systems

Updates

• (5/29) The workshop will be Live Streaming on YouTube.

• (5/23) Note: 6/2 Phyiscal Onsite Luncheon location changed: 西安锦江国际酒店国际会议中心(5层)

• (5/10) The workshop program tentatively scheduled.

• (5/9) We are excited to hold a complimentary Phyiscal Onsite Luncheon on June 2, 2021, sponsored by Meituan UAV.

• (5/1) Six papers were accepted to the workshop.

• (3/23) The submission deadline is extended to April 20, 2021.

• (2/20) We are pleased to announce that Meituan UAV will sponsor the physical workshop.

• (2/15) ICRA 2021 VINS Workshop site is up online!

Online Program: 9am-7pm EDT (GMT-4, New York Time), May 31, 2021

Papers

Overview

As cameras and IMUs are becoming ubiquitous, visual-inertial navigation systems (VINS) that provide high-precision 3D motion estimation, hold great potentials in a wide range of applications from augmented reality (AR) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to autonomous driving, in part because of the complementary sensing capabilities and the decreasing costs and size of these sensors. While visual-inertial navigation, alongside with SLAM, has witnessed tremendous progress in the past decade, yet certain critical aspects in the design of visual-inertial systems remain poorly explored, greatly hindering the widespread deployment of these systems in practice. For example, many VINS algorithms are yet not robust to high dynamics and poor lighting conditions; they are yet not accurate enough for long-term, large-scale operations, in particular, in life-critical scenarios; and yet they are unable to provide semantic and cognitive understandings to support high-level decision making. This workshop brings together researchers in robotics, computer vision and AI, from both academia and industry, to share their insights and thoughts on the R&D of VINS. The goal of this workshop is to bring forward the latest breakthroughs and cutting-edge research on visual-inertial navigation and beyond, to open discussions about technical challenges and future research directions for the community, and to identify new applications of this emerging technology.

Call for Contributions

We welcome submissions of papers describing VINS-related work in progress, preliminary results, novel concepts, and industry experiences. All submitted papers will be reviewed by at least two experts (see Program Committee below) on the basis of technical quality, relevance, significance, and clarity. Topics of interest to this workshop include, but are not necessarily limited to:

• Visual-inertial odometry

• Visual SLAM

• Aided inertial navigation (e.g., GNSS-INS)

• Sensor calibration

• Visual-inertial estimation and perception for aerial vehicles

• Deep learning for visual SLAM

• Cooperative visual-inertial localization

• Multi-sensor fusion

• Co-design of hardware and software of VINS

• Simulations and benchmarking of visual-inertial navigation

• Visual perception in challenging environments

• Human motion modeling

• Visual navigation

• Drones or UAVs

• AR/VR

We accept the following forms of contributions:

• Research papers (up to 6 pages, not including references)

• Field reports (2-4 pages, not including references)

All accepted papers will appear on the workshop website. Note that the authors retain all the intellectual properties of their contributions to the workshop. We will also be exploring the possibility of a journal special issue for the best contributions at the workshop.

Important Dates

• April 20, 2021: Deadline of paper submission

  • Please submit your papers/reports via email: vins-workshop@udel.edu

• May 1, 2021: Notification of acceptance

• May 10, 2021: Submission of final version

• May 31, 2021: Workshop at ICRA 2021

Organizers

• Guoquan (Paul) Huang, University of Delaware / Meituan

• Shaojie Shen, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• Michael Kaess, CMU

• Stergios Roumeliotis, Apple / University of Minnesota

• John Leonard, MIT / Toyota Research Institute

Invited Speakers

• Luca Carlone, MIT

• Maurice Fallon, Oxford University

• Jonathan Kelly, University of Toronto

• Stefan Leutenegger, TU Munich / Imperial College London

• Giuseppe Loianno, New York University

• Patrick Geneva, University of Delaware

• Ping Tan, Alibaba

• Chao Guo, Google

• Kejian Wu, NReal

• Abraham Bachrach, Skydio

Program Committee

• Gang Chen, Meituan UAV

• Kevin Eckenhoff, Facebook

• Fei Gao, Zhejiang University

• Yue Wang, Zhejiang University

• Shoudong Huang, University of Technology Sydney

• Yulong Huang, Harbin Engineering University

• Yasir Latif, University of Adelaide

• Mingyang Li, Alibaba

• Yong Liu, Zhejiang University

• Ziyang Meng, Tsinghua University

• Yulin Yang, University of Delaware

• Bo Zang, Meituan UAV