Dual Pose-Graph Semantic Localization for Vision-Based Autonomous Drone Racing

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Perez-Saura, David, Fernandez-Cortizas, Miguel, Gaona, Alvaro J., Campoy, Pascual
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Perez-Saura, David
Fernandez-Cortizas, Miguel
Gaona, Alvaro J.
Campoy, Pascual
author_facet Perez-Saura, David
Fernandez-Cortizas, Miguel
Gaona, Alvaro J.
Campoy, Pascual
contents Autonomous drone racing demands robust real-time localization under extreme conditions: high-speed flight, aggressive maneuvers, and payload-constrained platforms that often rely on a single camera for perception. Existing visual SLAM systems, while effective in general scenarios, struggle with motion blur and feature instability inherent to racing dynamics, and do not exploit the structured nature of racing environments. In this work, we present a dual pose-graph architecture that fuses odometry with semantic detections for robust localization. A temporary graph accumulates multiple gate observations between keyframes and optimizes them into a single refined constraint per landmark, which is then promoted to a persistent main graph. This design preserves the information richness of frequent detections while preventing graph growth from degrading real-time performance. The system is designed to be sensor-agnostic, although in this work we validate it using monocular visual-inertial odometry and visual gate detections. Experimental evaluation on the TII-RATM dataset shows a 56% to 74% reduction in ATE compared to standalone VIO, while an ablation study confirms that the dual-graph architecture achieves 10% to 12% higher accuracy than a single-graph baseline at identical computational cost. Deployment in the A2RL competition demonstrated that the system performs real-time onboard localization during flight, reducing the drift of the odometry baseline by up to 4.2 m per lap.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_15168
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Dual Pose-Graph Semantic Localization for Vision-Based Autonomous Drone Racing
Perez-Saura, David
Fernandez-Cortizas, Miguel
Gaona, Alvaro J.
Campoy, Pascual
Robotics
Autonomous drone racing demands robust real-time localization under extreme conditions: high-speed flight, aggressive maneuvers, and payload-constrained platforms that often rely on a single camera for perception. Existing visual SLAM systems, while effective in general scenarios, struggle with motion blur and feature instability inherent to racing dynamics, and do not exploit the structured nature of racing environments. In this work, we present a dual pose-graph architecture that fuses odometry with semantic detections for robust localization. A temporary graph accumulates multiple gate observations between keyframes and optimizes them into a single refined constraint per landmark, which is then promoted to a persistent main graph. This design preserves the information richness of frequent detections while preventing graph growth from degrading real-time performance. The system is designed to be sensor-agnostic, although in this work we validate it using monocular visual-inertial odometry and visual gate detections. Experimental evaluation on the TII-RATM dataset shows a 56% to 74% reduction in ATE compared to standalone VIO, while an ablation study confirms that the dual-graph architecture achieves 10% to 12% higher accuracy than a single-graph baseline at identical computational cost. Deployment in the A2RL competition demonstrated that the system performs real-time onboard localization during flight, reducing the drift of the odometry baseline by up to 4.2 m per lap.
title Dual Pose-Graph Semantic Localization for Vision-Based Autonomous Drone Racing
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.15168