Gianni Hodel

Today we're announcing microSLAM, a monocular SLAM system built by our computer vision team in Zürich with ETH Zurich's Computer Vision and Geometry Lab. It ranks first on the LaMaria benchmark for monocular SLAM, and holds up against systems that carry many more cameras and IMUs. Ours runs on a single RGB stream. Robot learning is bottlenecked on data, and the largest untapped source is people going about their work. A camera on someone's head for an afternoon in a plant is a record of how that plant actually operates, including all the parts nobody writes down. That data is only useful if you can recover the geometry, and geometry from one moving camera in a world that will not sit still is the hard version of the problem. Solving it monocular is what makes the data cheap. Rigs do not scale to every worker. Glasses do. microSLAM turns that footage into interactive 3D environments where behavioral foundation models can be trained. One person walks a factory floor. A robot learns to navigate it.