A Benchmark Comparison of Four Off-the-Shelf Proprietary Visual–Inertial Odometry Systems

Abstract

Commercial visual–inertial odometry (VIO) systems have been gaining attention as cost-effective, off-the-shelf, six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) ego-motion-tracking sensors for estimating accurate and consistent camera pose data, in addition to their ability to operate without external localization from motion capture or global positioning systems. It is unclear from existing results, however, which commercial VIO platforms are the most stable, consistent, and accurate in terms of state estimation for indoor and outdoor robotic applications. We assessed four popular proprietary VIO systems (Apple ARKit, Google ARCore, Intel RealSense T265, and Stereolabs ZED 2) through a series of both indoor and outdoor experiments in which we showed their positioning stability, consistency, and accuracy. After evaluating four popular VIO sensors in challenging real-world indoor and outdoor scenarios, Apple ARKit showed the most stable and high accuracy/consistency, and the relative pose error was a drift error of about 0.02 m per second. We present our complete results as a benchmark comparison for the research community.