A study on tackling visual odometry by a transformer architecture

This dissertation describes a deepening study about Visual Odometry problem tackled with transformer architectures. The existing VO algorithms are based on heavily hand-crafted features and are not able to generalize well to new environments. To train them, we need carefully fine-tune the hyper-parameters and the network architecture. We propose to tackle the VO problem with transformer because it is a general-purpose architecture and because it was designed to transformer sequences of data from a domain to another one, which is the case of the VO problem. Our first goal is to create synthetic dataset using BlenderProc2 framework to mitigate the problem of the dataset scarcity. The second goal is to tackle the VO problem by using different versions of the transformer architecture, which will be pre-trained on the synthetic dataset and fine-tuned on the real dataset, KITTI dataset. Our approach is defined as follows: we use a feature-extractor to extract features embeddings from a sequence of images, then we feed this sequence of embeddings to the transformer architecture, finally, an MLP is used to predict the sequence of camera poses.

Unibo-BP: an innovative free software implementation of Bundle Protocol Version 7 (RFC 9171)

The BP (Bundle Protocol) version 7 has been recently standardized by IETF in RFC 9171, but it is the whole DTN (Delay-/Disruption-Tolerant Networking) architecture, of which BP is the core, that is gaining a renewed interest, thanks to its planned adoption in future space missions. This is obviously positive, but at the same time it seems to make space agencies more interested in deployment than in research, with new BP implementations that may challenge the central role played until now by the historical BP reference implementations, such as ION and DTNME. To make Unibo research on DTN independent of space agency decisions, the development of an internal BP implementation was in order. This is the goal of this thesis, which deals with the design and implementation of Unibo-BP: a novel, research-driven BP implementation, to be released as Free Software. Unibo-BP is fully compliant with RFC 9171, as demonstrated by a series of interoperability tests with ION and DTNME, and presents a few innovations, such as the ability to manage remote DTN nodes by means of the BP itself. Unibo-BP is compatible with pre-existing Unibo implementations of CGR (Contact Graph Routing) and LTP (Licklider Transmission Protocol) thanks to interfaces designed during the thesis. The thesis project also includes an implementation of TCPCLv3 (TCP Convergence Layer version 3, RFC 7242), which can be used as an alternative to LTPCL to connect with proximate nodes, especially in terrestrial networks. Summarizing, Unibo-BP is at the heart of a larger project, Unibo-DTN, which aims to implement the main components of a complete DTN stack (BP, TCPCL, LTP, CGR). Moreover, Unibo-BP is compatible with all DTNsuite applications, thanks to an extension of the Unified API library on which DTNsuite applications are based. The hope is that Unibo-BP and all the ancillary programs developed during this thesis will contribute to the growth of DTN popularity in academia and among space agencies.