Rey, Thomas (ONERA), Moras, Julien (ONERA), Eudes, Alexandre (ONERA), Manzanera, Antoine (ENSTA ParisTech)

Real-time visual pose estimation: from BOP objects to custom drone — A journey

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "Cooperative Multi-Robot Control" (WeCT4), Wednesday, July 16, 2025, 16:30−16:50, Room 108

Joint 10th IFAC Symposium on Mechatronic Systems and 14th Symposium on Robotics, July 15-18, 2025, Paris, France

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on July 16, 2025

Abstract

Pose estimation plays a crucial role in robotics for prehension tasks or in augmented-reality application, yet its application on real-world far-range estimation has not been thoroughly studied. This study aims to evaluate pose estimators on a custom drone at distances from 0.5 m to 10 m, which is beyond the scope of existing datasets, that only contain objects close to less than 2 m. We created synthetic and real databases specific to our drone and compared various RGB pose estimators, evaluating their performance across different distances. PViT-6D, being one of the SoTA methods on the classic [0,2] m interval, also outperforms others estimators at greater distances, and proves robust with respect to detection inaccuracy. The results demonstrate the potential of PViT-6D to be used on a real time application embedded in the drone platform. This work aims to evaluate the potential of pose estimators for mutual perception and communication within a drone swarm.