Navigation & SLAM
Visual Odometry
Visual odometry (VO) is the estimation of a camera's egomotion by tracking visual features or intensity patterns across consecutive frames and integrating the resulting incremental pose changes. Monocular VO recovers trajectory up to scale, while stereo and visual-inertial variants (VIO) resolve scale and improve robustness by fusing IMU measurements. Like all dead reckoning, it accumulates drift, which SLAM systems correct through loop closure.
Why it matters for physical AI
Drift-bounded egomotion from cheap cameras is foundational for drones, legged robots, and mobile manipulators operating where GPS fails, and VIO is the de facto state estimation layer beneath most autonomous navigation stacks.
Build physical AI
Put these concepts to work on real hardware
Axol is a dual-arm robot built for physical AI — teleoperate it, collect demonstrations, and deploy learned policies out of the box.