eVO: A realtime embedded stereo odometry for MAV applications

The navigation of a miniature aerial vehicle (MAV) in GPS-denied environments requires a robust embedded visual localization method. In this paper, we describe a simple but efficient stereo visual odometry algorithm, called eVO, running onboard our quadricopter MAV at video-rate. The proposed eVO algorithm relies on a keyframe scheme which allows to decrease the estimation drift and to reduce the computational cost. We study quantitatively the influence of the main parameters of the algorithm and tune them for optimal performance on various datasets. The eVO algorithm has been submitted to the KITTI odometry benchmark [1] where it ranks first at the date of submission, with an average translational drift of 1.93% and an average angular drift of less than 0.076 degres/m. Besides, we have made several experiments with our MAV with egolocalization given by eVO, for instance for autonomous 3D environment modeling.