We present Lambda Twist; a novel P3P solver which is accurate, fast and robust. Current state-of-the-art P3P solvers find all roots to a quartic and discard geometrically invalid and duplicate solutions in a post-processing step. Instead of solving a quartic, the proposed P3P solver exploits the underlying elliptic equations which can be solved by a fast and numerically accurate diagonalization. This diagonalization requires a single real root of a cubic which is then used to find the, up to four, P3P solutions. Unlike the direct quartic solvers our method never computes geometrically invalid or duplicate solutions. Extensive evaluation on synthetic data shows that the new solver has better numerical accuracy and is faster compared to the state-of-the-art P3P implementations. Implementation and benchmark are available on github.

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Mobile manipulation robots have high potential to support rescue forces in disaster-response missions. Despite the difficulties imposed by real-world scenarios, robots are promising to perform mission tasks from a safe distance. In the CENTAURO project, we developed a disaster-response system which consists of the highly flexible Centauro robot and suitable control interfaces including an immersive telepresence suit and support-operator controls on different levels of autonomy.In this article, we give an overview of the final CENTAURO system. In particular, we explain several highlevel design decisions and how those were derived from requirements and extensive experience of Kerntechnische Hilfsdienst GmbH, Karlsruhe, Germany (KHG) 1 . We focus on components which were recently integrated and report about a systematic evaluation which demonstrated system capabilities and revealed valuable insights.

Panorama stitching of sparsely structured scenes is an open research problem. In this setting, feature-based image alignment methods often fail due to shortage of distinct image features. Instead, direct image alignment methods, such as those based on phase correlation, can be applied. In this paper we investigate correlation-based image alignment techniques for panorama stitching of sparsely structured scenes. We propose a novel image alignment approach based on discriminative correlation filters (DCF), which has recently been successfully applied to visual tracking. Two versions of the proposed DCF-based approach are evaluated on two real and one synthetic panorama dataset of sparsely structured indoor environments. All three datasets consist of images taken on a tripod rotating 360 degrees around the vertical axis through the optical center. We show that the proposed DCF-based methods outperform phase correlation based approaches on these datasets.

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