Effect of rolling shutter on visual odometry systems suitable for planetary exploration

In planetary exploration space missions, motion measurement of a vehicle on the surface of a planet is usually performed using a visual odometry method with two stereo global shutter cameras. In many technical applications, more favorable and cheaper rolling shutter cameras replace the global shutter ones. In this work, the visual odometry task is performed with rolling shutter cameras, analyzing their effect on the measurement errors. The applied visual odometry method comprises a procedure to compensate the image distortions yielded by the rolling shutter. The errors of the motion measurement are evaluated with and without the distortion compensation. Thus, the experimental tests allow also to verify the effectiveness of the compensation procedure.