SCREP: Scene Coordinate Regression and Evidential Learning-based Perception-Aware Trajectory Generation

Abstract: Autonomous flight in GPS denied indoor spaces requires trajectories that keep visual localization error tightly bounded across varied missions. Whereas visual inertial odometry (VIO) accumulates drift over time, scene coordinate regression (SCR) yields drift-free, high accuracy absolute pose estimation. We present a perception-aware framework that couples an evidential learning-based SCR pose estimator with a receding horizon trajectory optimizer. The optimizer steers the onboard camera toward pixels whose uncertainty predicts reliable scene coordinates, while a fixed-lag smoother fuses the low rate SCR stream with high rate IMU data to close the perception control loop in real time. In simulation, our planner reduces translation (rotation) mean error by 54% / 15% (40% / 31%) relative to yaw fixed and forward-looking baselines, respectively. Moreover, hardware in the loop experiment validates the feasibility of our proposed framework.