Fusing Monocular Images and Sparse IMU Signals for Real-time Human Motion Capture

Either RGB images or inertial signals have been used for the task of motion capture (mocap), but combining them together is a new and interesting topic. We believe that the combination is complementary and able to solve the inherent difficulties of using one modality input, including occlusions, extreme lighting/texture, and out-of-view for visual mocap and global drifts for inertial mocap. To this end, we propose a method that fuses monocular images and sparse IMUs for real-time human motion capture. Our method contains a dual coordinate strategy to fully explore the IMU signals with different goals in motion capture. To be specific, besides one branch transforming the IMU signals to the camera coordinate system to combine with the image information, there is another branch to learn from the IMU signals in the body root coordinate system to better estimate body poses. Furthermore, a hidden state feedback mechanism is proposed for both two branches to compensate for their own drawbacks in extreme input cases. Thus our method can easily switch between the two kinds of signals or combine them in different cases to achieve a robust mocap. %The two divided parts can help each other for better mocap results under different conditions. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that by delicately designing the fusion method, our technique significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art vision, IMU, and combined methods on both global orientation and local pose estimation. Our codes are available for research at https://shaohua-pan.github.io/robustcap-page/.Comment: Accepted by SIGGRAPH ASIA 2023. Project page: https://shaohua-pan.github.io/robustcap-page

A Promising Conductive Lubricant for Space Sliding Electrical Contact: NbSe₂-Ti Film

Vacuum-sliding electrical contacts find extensive application in aerospace components, yet they face limitations related to inadequate lubrication performance. In this study, we analyzed the design of an emerging conductive lubricant material, NbSe2. A series of NbSe2-Ti films with varying doped Ti contents were prepared through magnetron sputtering technology. We investigated the correlation between the sputtering current and composition, microstructure, mechanical properties, and current-carrying tribological properties of the films. The results indicate that under vacuum and current-carrying conditions, the NbSe2-Ti films demonstrate significant advantages over existing electrical-contact lubrication materials. Compared with electroplated gold films, the NbSe2-Ti films reduced the coefficient of friction from 0.25 to 0.015, thereby improving the wear life by more than six times. This result demonstrates that magnetron-sputtered NbSe2 film can be used as a lubricant for space current-carrying sliding contacts