Robust visual pose estimation is at the core of many computer vision applications, being fundamental for Visual SLAM and Visual Odometry problems. During the last decades, many approaches have been proposed to solve these problems, being RANSAC one of the most accepted and used. However, with the arrival of new challenges, such as large driving scenarios for autonomous vehicles, along with the improvements in the data gathering frameworks, new issues must be considered. One of these issues is the capability of a technique to deal with very large amounts of data while meeting the realtime constraint. With this purpose in mind, we present a novel technique for the problem of robust camera-pose estimation that is more suitable for dealing with large amount of data, which additionally, helps improving the results. The method is based on a combination of a very fast coarse-evaluation function and a robust l1-averaging procedure. Such scheme leads to high-quality results while taking considerably less time than RANSAC. Experimental results on the challenging KITTI Vision Benchmark Suite are provided, showing the validity of the proposed approach.

We present a novel technique for estimating initial 3D poses in the context of localization and Visual SLAM problems. The presented approach can deal with noise, outliers and a large amount of input data and still performs in real time in a standard CPU. Our method produces solutions with an accuracy comparable to those produced by RANSAC but can be much faster when the percentage of outliers is high or for large amounts of input data. On the current work we propose to formulate the pose estimation as an optimization problem on Lie groups, considering their manifold structure as well as their associated Lie algebras. This allows us to perform a fast and simple optimization at the same time that conserve all the constraints imposed by the Lie group SE(3). Additionally, we present several key design concepts related with the cost function and its Jacobian; aspects that are critical for the good performance of the algorithm.

We have developed an underwater vehicle that offers significant performance improvements over existing sub sea elevators. Our Vertical Glider Robot falls under its own weight to a precise location on the seafloor, employing streamlining, active steering, and basic navigation instrumentation. We examine typical at-sea mission requirements, mention several key governing parameters, and outline our design approach. We then describe a prototype device, and present results from model-scale experiments.