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Erdal Kayacan

21 accepted papers

2026

3D Gaussian Splatting for Reconstructing Large Sparse Environments (Student Abstract)

AAAI 2026technical

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has recently demonstrated significant potential in computer vision, enabling high-fidelity 3D scene reconstruction with real-time rendering and fast training times. However, existing methods struggle in large, visually sparse, geometric self-similarity environments due t

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Edged USLAM: Edge-Aware Event-Based SLAM with Learning-Based Depth Priors

ICRA 2026poster

Conventional visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms often fail under rapid motion, low illumination, or abrupt lighting transitions due to motion blur and limited dynamic range. Event cameras mitigate these issues with high temporal resolution and high dynamic range (HDR), bu…

2026

REACT: Real-Time Entanglement-Aware Coverage Path Planning for Tethered Underwater Vehicles

ICRA 2026poster

Inspection of underwater structures with tethered underwater vehicles is often hindered by the risk of tether entanglement. We propose REACT (real-time entanglement- aware coverage path planning for tethered underwater ve- hicles), a framework designed to overcome this limitation. REACT comprises a …

2026

VDS-Nav: Volumetric Depth-Based Safe Navigation for Aerial Robots–Bridging the Sim-To-Real Gap

ICRA 2026poster

End-to-end navigation via deep reinforcement learning has become a key approach for vision-based tasks. However, the sim-to-real gap remains a challenge, especially for aerial robots, where policies trained in simulation often fail in real-world environments. In this work, we propose a novel navigat…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

GIANT - Global Path Integration and Attentive Graph Networks for Multi-Agent Trajectory Planning

IROS 2025

This paper presents a novel approach to multi-robot collision avoidance that integrates global path planning with local navigation strategies, utilizing attentive graph neural networks to manage dynamic interactions among agents. We introduce a local navigation model that leverages pre-planned globa

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

CAMETA: Conflict-Aware Multi-Agent Estimated Time of Arrival Prediction for Mobile Robots

IROS 2023poster

This study presents the conflict-aware multi-agent estimated time of arrival (CAMETA) framework, a novel approach for predicting the arrival times of multiple agents in unstructured environments without predefined road infrastructure. The CAMETA framework consists of three components: a path plannin…

Cited by 1SourceScholar
2023

MIMIR-UW: A Multipurpose Synthetic Dataset for Underwater Navigation and Inspection

IROS 2023poster

This paper presents MIMIR-UW, a multipurpose underwater synthetic dataset for SLAM, depth estimation, and object segmentation to bridge the gap between theory and application in underwater environments. MIMIR-UW integrates three camera sensors, inertial measurements, and ground truth for robot pose,…

Cited by 14SourcecodeScholar
2022

PencilNet: Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Transfer Learning for Robust Gate Perception in Autonomous Drone Racing

RA-L 2022

In autonomous and mobile robotics, one of the main challenges is the robust on-the-fly perception of the environment, which is often unknown and dynamic, like in autonomous drone racing. In this work, we propose a novel deep neural network-based perception method for racing gate detection – PencilNe

Cited by 22SourcecodeScholar
2021

GateNet: An Efficient Deep Neural Network Architecture for Gate Perception Using Fish-Eye Camera in Autonomous Drone Racing

IROS 2021poster

Fast and robust gate perception is of great importance in autonomous drone racing. We propose a convolutional neural network-based gate detector (GateNet1) that concurrently detects gate’s center, distance, and orientation with respect to the drone using only images from a single fish-eye RGB camera…

Cited by 12SourceScholar
2021

GridNet: Image-Agnostic Conditional Anomaly Detection for Indoor Surveillance

RA-L 2021

We present a deep autoencoder-based anomaly detection method (GridNet) for indoor surveillance. Unlike similar studies, GridNet is image-agnostic by taking a specific representation of a scene as inputs instead of the raw image itself. Its input is grid representations of scene images, which indicat

Cited by 22SourcecodeScholar
2021

Online Recommendation-based Convolutional Features for Scale-Aware Visual Tracking

ICRA 2021poster

In this paper, we develop an online learning-based visual tracking framework that can optimize the target model and estimate the scale variation for object tracking. We propose a recommender-based tracker, which is capable of selecting the representative convolutional neural network (CNN) layers and…

Cited by 5SourceScholar
2021

Real-Time Volumetric-Semantic Exploration and Mapping: An Uncertainty-Aware Approach

IROS 2021poster

In this work we propose a holistic framework for autonomous aerial inspection tasks, using semantically-aware, yet, computationally efficient planning and mapping algorithms. The system leverages state-of-the-art receding horizon exploration techniques for next-best-view (NBV) planning with geometri…

Cited by 23SourceScholar
2020

AU-AIR: A Multi-modal Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Dataset for Low Altitude Traffic Surveillance

ICRA 2020poster

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with mounted cameras have the advantage of capturing aerial (bird-view) images. The availability of aerial visual data and the recent advances in object detection algorithms led the computer vision community to focus on object detection tasks on aerial images. As a re…

Cited by 210SourcecodeScholar
2020

UAV-AdNet: Unsupervised Anomaly Detection using Deep Neural Networks for Aerial Surveillance

IROS 2020poster

Anomaly detection is a key goal of autonomous surveillance systems that should be able to alert unusual observations. In this paper, we propose a holistic anomaly detection system using deep neural networks for surveillance of critical infrastructures (e.g., airports, harbors, warehouses) using an u…

Cited by 38SourcecodeScholar
2019

Can a Robot Become a Movie Director? Learning Artistic Principles for Aerial Cinematography

IROS 2019poster

Aerial filming is constantly gaining importance due to the recent advances in drone technology. It invites many intriguing, unsolved problems at the intersection of aesthetical and scientific challenges. In this work, we propose a deep reinforcement learning agent which supervises motion planning of…

Cited by 72SourceScholar
2019

Online Deep Learning for Improved Trajectory Tracking of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Expert Knowledge

ICRA 2019poster

This work presents an online learning-based control method for improved trajectory tracking of unmanned aerial vehicles using both deep learning and expert knowledge. The proposed method does not require the exact model of the system to be controlled, and it is robust against variations in system dy…

Cited by 24SourceScholar
2018

Automated Tuning of Nonlinear Model Predictive Controller by Reinforcement Learning

IROS 2018poster

One of the major challenges of model predictive control (MPC) for robotic applications is the non-trivial weight tuning process while crafting the objective function. This process is often executed using the trial-and-error method by the user. Consequently, the optimality of the weights and the time…

Cited by 57SourceScholar
2017

A novel building post-construction quality assessment robot: Design and prototyping

IROS 2017poster

This paper describes the design and development of an automated construction quality assessment robot system (QuicaBot) for hollowness, crack, evenness, alignments and inclination problems. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to pave the way towards a fully autonomous roboti…

Cited by 9SourceScholar
2016

Recoverable recommended keypoint-aware visual tracking using coupled-layer appearance modelling

IROS 2016poster

Object tracking over image sequences plays an remarkably crucial role in several computer vision applications, interalia, automated video surveillance, unmanned aerial vehicles and 3D reconstruction. In this paper, a novel, accurate, robust and recoverable real-time feature-based tracking framework…

Cited by 3SourceScholar