Understanding Sensor Vulnerabilities in Industrial XR Tracking

Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) is a core capability for autonomous operation in GPS-denied subterranean environments, yet its reliability can degrade sharply under sensor drift, calibration errors, and dynamic occlusion. Existing evaluations mainly emphasize nominal-condition accuracy, offering limited insight into when practical deployment failures occur. In this work, we present a failure-centric stress-test benchmark for VIO in underground environments using the CERBERUS dataset. We systematically evaluate four representative VIO systems spanning filtering-, optimization-, and learning-based paradigms under nine practical perturbation settings, including IMU bias and noise variation, camera intrinsic and extrinsic drift, and dynamic scene occlusion. Beyond conventional trajectory error, we analyze robustness limits through coverage ratio and failure thresholds, revealing breakdown behaviors that are not captured by nominal-condition performance alone. Our study shows distinct vulnerability patterns across VIO paradigms: some methods are more sensitive to inertial degradation, while others are more affected by geometric miscalibration or dynamic interference. These results provide deployment-oriented guidance for VIO selection, calibration prioritization, and reliable operation in challenging underground scenarios. To support reproducible evaluation and future extensions, we will release the full benchmark scripts and evaluation pipeline.

Perception in robotics and XR fundamentally relies on good state estimation. Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (VI-SLAM) are proven ways of achieving this goal in a cost-effective and accurate manner. Efficiency in these systems allows for smaller, cooler, and lighter devices. GPU acceleration is a natural approach for reducing latency, thanks to their wide availability in platforms like embedded computers, mobile phones, and XR headsets. However, previous works in the literature have limited themselves to the use of CUDA for this task, significantly reducing deployment options to a single vendor. We instead leverage the vendor-agnostic Vulkan API, originally designed for the strict performance requirements of 3D graphics applications. In this work, we present VkVIO, the first, to the best of our knowledge, cross-platform GPU-accelerated VIO method. We provide state-of-the-art accuracy with causal estimates required for real-time operation. We deploy VkVIO on a diverse range of devices spanning a workstation, a laptop, and an extremely inexpensive single-board computer, while outperforming CUDA-based systems on the same hardware. VkVIO enables possibilities for low-latency, low-power, and low-cost VIO in robotics and XR.

Deformable scenes violate the rigidity assumptions underpinning classical visual--inertial odometry (VIO), often leading to over-fitting to local non-rigid motion or to severe camera pose drift when deformation dominates visual parallax. In this paper, we introduce DefVINS, the first visual-inertial odometry pipeline designed to operate in deformable environments. Our approach models the odometry state by decomposing it into a rigid, IMU-anchored component and a non-rigid scene warp represented by an embedded deformation graph. As a second contribution, we present VIMandala, the first benchmark containing real images and ground-truth camera poses for visual-inertial odometry in deformable scenes. In addition, we augment the synthetic Drunkard's benchmark with simulated inertial measurements to further evaluate our pipeline under controlled conditions. We also provide an observability analysis of the visual-inertial deformable odometry problem, characterizing how inertial measurements constrain camera motion and render otherwise unobservable modes identifiable in the presence of deformation. This analysis motivates the use of IMU anchoring and leads to a conditioning-based activation strategy that avoids ill-posed updates under poor excitation. Experimental results on both the synthetic Drunkard's and our real VIMandala benchmarks show that DefVINS outperforms rigid visual--inertial and non-rigid visual odometry baselines. Our source code and data will be released upon acceptance.