43 accepted papers
Curb following is a critical technology for autonomous road sweeping vehicles. However, existing solutions face two primary challenges: unreliable curb detection and inefficient motion generation. Unreliable curb detection stems from the wide variability in curb dimensions and types, as well as inte…
Multi-object tracking (MOT) plays a critical role in applications such as autonomous driving and surveillance. Camera-based approaches offer rich texture features for object association, while LiDAR-based methods provide accurate geometric information for spatial reasoning. Although each modality ad…
Recent work has shown that 3D Gaussian-based SLAM enables high-quality reconstruction, accurate pose estimation, and real-time rendering of scenes. However, these approaches are built on a tremendous number of redundant 3D Gaussian ellipsoids, leading to high memory and storage costs and slow traini
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is crucial for autonomous vehicles, as it enables their identification of previously visited locations. Compared with conventional single-frame retrieval, leveraging sequences of frames to depict places has been proven effective in alleviating perceptual aliasing. Howe
As delivery robots are increasingly integrated into our daily lives, their ability to navigate through crowded spaces demands swift and accurate prediction of pedestrian trajectories, which is crucial for autonomous functionality. However, existing methods face challenges of unstable accuracy and in
Formulating a multi-robot obstacle avoidance policy is essential for enabling safe and efficient navigation in multi-robot environments, forming a critical component of the effective operation of multi-robot systems. Recently, reinforcement learning has been applied to improve the performance of dec
Multi-object tracking (MOT) plays a critical role in applications such as autonomous driving and surveillance. Camera-based approaches offer rich texture features for object association, while LiDAR-based methods provide accurate geometric information for spatial reasoning. Although each modality ad
Global localization is an essential ingredient for autonomous mobile robots. However, existing global localization systems primarily rely on Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), infrastructures, or visual/LiDAR-based place recognition, which suffer from enclosed/semi-enclosed GNSS-denied envir
Accurate Six Degrees of Freedom (6-DoF) pose estimation of Ship-To-Shore (STS) quay crane spreaders is crucial for ensuring safe and efficient container handling in port automation. However, existing pose estimation techniques face significant challenges, as camera-based systems either rely on marke
Neural implicit scene representations have recently shown promising results in dense visual SLAM. However, existing implicit SLAM algorithms are constrained to single-agent scenarios, and fall difficulty in large indoor scenes and long sequences. Existing multi-agent SLAM frameworks cannot meet the…
Accurate Relative Pose Estimation (RPE) is critical for effective collaboration of multi-robot systems. Traditional methods using cameras or LiDARs heavily rely on overlapping Fields of View (FoV) between robots, which is highly demanding in practical applications and may hinder collaboration effici
Video streaming based teleoperation often faces a trade-off between bandwidth consumption and the need for high-fidelity telepresence. Higher image resolution or a wider field of view (FOV) substantially increases bandwidth requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel telepresence model for teleo
This study presents a system, TripletLoc, for fast and robust global registration of a single LiDAR scan to a large-scale reference map. In contrast to conventional methods using place recognition and point cloud registration, TripletLoc directly generates correspondences on lightweight semantics, w
Vision-assisted container loading of Rubber Tyred Gantry (RTG) cranes are facing two primary challenges. Firstly, the uncertainty inherent in Covolutional Neural Network (CNN) based detection hinders its direct application in the safety-critical operation of such heavy-duty machinery. Secondly, sens…
Navigating robots through dynamic multi-robot environments, avoiding collisions with both other robots and obstacles, has emerged as a central challenge in robotics. The existing approaches fall short in allowing the policy network to effectively capture spatial-temporal reciprocal collision avoidan…
Generalizing visual reinforcement learning is fundamental to robot visual navigation, involving the acquisition of a policy from interactions with source environments to facilitate adaptation to analogous, yet unfamiliar target environments. Recent advancements capitalize on data augmentation techni…
In recent years, infrastructure-based localization methods have achieved significant progress thanks to their reliable and drift-free localization capability. However, the preinstalled infrastructures suffer from inflexibilities and high maintenance costs. This poses an interesting problem of how to…
As a new sensor, 4D radar (x, y, z, velocity) has great potential for V2X, due to its 3D point cloud, direct doppler velocity output, long distance ranging, low-cost, and more importantly, robust perception in all weathers. However, the extrinsic calibration of multiple long baseline 4D radars is ra…
Collaborative mapping aids agents in achieving an efficient and comprehensive understanding of their environment. Recently, there has been growing interest in using neural networks as maps to represent functions that implicitly define the geometric features of a scene. However, existing implicit map
Multi-session mapping serves as the pre-requisite for autonomous robots to fulfill various long-term tasks (e.g., map updating, navigation, collaboration). However, it is challenging to implement multi-session mapping in enclosed or partially enclosed ambiguous environments (e.g., long corridors, in…
Neural implicit scene representations have recently shown encouraging results in dense visual SLAM. However existing methods produce low-quality scene reconstruction and low-accuracy localization performance when scaling up to large indoor scenes and long sequences. These limitations are mainly due…
Curb following is a key technology for autonomous road sweeping vehicles. Currently, existing implementations primarily involve pre-recording waypoints during human driving and subsequently retracing them autonomously. Moreover, existing research related to this topic predominately focuses on curb d…
Traditional teleoperation technologies based on video streaming are facing several challenges in practical applications, including limited bandwidth, constrained spatial awareness, and sensitivity to illumination. Existing studies have not adequately addressed these issues. This paper presents a nov
Place Recognition is crucial for unmanned vehicles in terms of localization and mapping. Recent years have witnessed numerous explorations in the field where 2D cameras and 3D LiDARs are mostly employed. Despite their admirable performance they may encounter challenges in adverse weather such as rai…
LiDAR-based SLAM may easily fail in adverse weathers (e.g., rain, snow, smoke, fog), while mmWave Radar remains unaffected. However, current researches are primarily focused on 2D (x,y)(x,y) or 3D (x, yx, y, doppler) Radar and 3D LiDAR, while limited work can be found for 4D Radar (x, y, zx, y, z, d…
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is essential for autonomous robots and unmanned vehicles, as an accurate identification of visited places can trigger a loop closure to optimize the built map. The most prevalent methods tackle VPR as a single-frame retrieval task, which uses a CNN-based encoder to des…
Robust visual place recognition (VPR) against significant appearance changes is crucial for the life-long operation of mobile robots. Focusing on this task, we propose a Co-Attentive Hierarchical Image Representations (CAHIR) framework for VPR, which unifies attention-sharing global and local descri…
Accurate global localization is an essential ingredient for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) operating in enclosed or partially enclosed repetitive environments (e.g., office corridors, industrial warehouses, transportation centers). In such environments, the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)…
In V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything), one important work is to extrinsically calibrate multiple 3D LiDARs, which are mounted with a long baseline and large viewpoint-difference at the road-side. Current solutions either require a specific target being set up (e.g., a sphere), or require specific features…
Last-mile delivery robots are usually required to navigate on the sidewalk through a fixed route. The current solutions heavily rely on the image-based perception and GPS localization to successfully complete delivery tasks. However, it is prone to fail and become unreliable when the robot runs in c…
Collaborative heterogeneous robots are expected to perform comprehensive perception, mapping and coordination in search and rescue scenarios. The challenge of collaboration between heterogeneous robots lies in their huge differences in perception, mobility and processing capabilities. In this paper,…
Robots that are supposed to interact with or manipulate objects in the world must be able to track the poses of objects in their sensor data. Thus, Detecting and tracking the 6-DoF poses of targeted objects is important for aerial manipulation and is still in the early stage due to the high dynamics…
Multi-LiDAR system is an important part of V2X (Vehicle to Everything) to enhance the perception information for unmanned vehicles. To fuse the information from multiple 3D LiDARs, accurate extrinsic calibration between the LiDARs is essential. However, the existing multi-LiDAR calibration methods m…
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) has become an indispensable capacity for mobile robots to operate in large-scale environments. Existing methods in this field mostly focus on exploring high-performance encoding strategies, while few attempts are devoted to lightweight models that balance per-formance…
Autonomous robots are often required to acquire high-level prior knowledge by continuously reconstructing the semantics and geometry of the surrounding scene, which is the basis of exploration and planning. Most existing continuous semantic mapping algorithms cannot distinguish potential differences…
Place recognition is seen as a crucial factor to correct cumulative errors in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) applications. Most existing studies focus on visual place recognition, which is inherently sensitive to environmental changes such as illumination, weather and seasons. Consider…
The core of visual place recognition (VPR) lies in how to identify task-relevant visual cues and embed them into discriminative representations. Focusing on these two points, we propose a novel encoding strategy named Attentional Pyramid Pooling of Salient Visual Residuals (APPSVR). It incorporates…
Symmetric environment is one of the most intractable and challenging scenarios for mobile robots to accomplish global localization tasks, due to the highly similar geometrical structures and insufficient distinctive features. Existing localization solutions in such scenarios either depend on pre-dep…
Large-scale visual place recognition (VPR) is inherently challenging because not all visual cues in the image are beneficial to the task. In order to highlight the task-relevant visual cues in the feature embedding, the existing attention mechanisms are either based on artificial rules or trained in…
In unstructured and unknown environments, heterogeneous robots must be able to perceive the environment, coordinate with each other and complete tasks collaboratively with onboard sensors. In this paper, a tightly-coupled perception and navigation framework is proposed for heterogeneous land-air rob…
Performing collaborative semantic mapping is a critical challenge for cooperative robots to maintain a comprehensive contextual understanding of the surroundings. Most of the existing work either focus on single robot semantic mapping or collaborative geometry mapping. In this paper, a novel hierarc…
In order to enable a team of robots to operate successfully, retrieving accurate relative transformation between robots is the fundamental requirement. So far, most research on relative localization mainly focus on geometry features such as points, lines and planes. To address this problem, collabor…
Enabling long-term operation during day and night for collaborative robots requires a comprehensive understanding of the unstructured environment. Besides, in the dynamic environment, robots must be able to recognize dynamic objects and collaboratively build a global map. This paper proposes a novel…