Robust PnP on a Neuromorphic Processor for Object Pose Estimation

Neuromorphic computing is gaining attention in robotic perception due to its higher energy efficiency. While neural network-based methods can more readily exploit the distributed and parallelized structure of neuromorphic computers, crafting neuromorphic solutions for non-learning tasks is less straightforward. This hampers the usage of neuromorphic computing for perception pipelines that depend on both learning and non-learning components, such as object pose estimation (OPE) where state-of-the-art methods use a deep network to predict 2D landmarks and nonlinear optimization to solve perspective-n-point (PnP). In this paper, we propose a novel neuromorphic-deployable formulation for robust PnP, where given outlier-prone 2D-3D correspondences, the object pose with the largest number of inliers is determined. Underpinning our method is a distributed algorithm for robust least squares estimation of rigid body pose that can be executed on a neuromorphic processor. We also design a spiking neural network (SNN) to predict 2D landmarks from event data, where the main layers of the SNN were designed according to the principles of spiking neurons. Overall, our work enables neuromorphic treatment of the major stages of an OPE pipeline, from event sensing and learned landmark prediction, to geometric optimization for robust PnP. Results on neuromophic hardware (Intel Loihi 2) indicate the higher energy efficiency our neuromorphic robust PnP, while achieving competitive accuracy.