38 accepted papers
We present Gaussian Splatting Anisotropic Visibility Field (GAVIS), a novel framework for uncertainty quantification and active mapping in 3DGS. Our key insight is that regions unseen from the training views yield unreliable predictions from the 3DGS. To address this, we introduce a principled and e
We propose a new metric for robot state estimation based on the recently introduced SE2(3) Lie group definition. Our metric is related to prior metrics for SLAM but explicitly takes into account the linear velocity of the state estimate, improving over current pose-based trajectory analysis. This ha…
Robot art presents an opportunity to both showcase and advance state-of-the-art robotics through the challenging task of creating art. Creating large-scale artworks in particular engages the public in a way that small-scale works cannot, and the distinct qualities of brush strokes contribute to an o…
Trajectory retiming is the task of computing a feasible time parameterization to traverse a path. It is commonly used in the decoupled approach to trajectory optimization whereby a path is first found, then a retiming algorithm computes a speed profile that satisfies kino-dynamic and other constrain…
This paper presents Neural Visibility Field (NVF) a novel uncertainty quantification method for Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) applied to active mapping. Our key insight is that regions not visible in the training views lead to inherently unreliable color predictions by NeRF at this region resulting…
We propose a novel hybrid cable-based robot with manipulator and camera for high-accuracy, medium-throughput plant monitoring in a vertical hydroponic farm and, as an example application, demonstrate non-destructive plant mass estimation. Plant monitoring with high temporal and spatial resolution is…
We propose a manifold optimization approach for solving constrained inference and planning problems. The approach employs a framework that transforms an arbitrary nonlinear equality constrained optimization problem into an unconstrained manifold optimization problem. The core of the transformation p…
Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) is one of the most established state estimation methods for mobile platforms. However, when visual tracking fails, VIO algorithms quickly diverge due to rapid error accumulation during inertial data integration. This error is typically modeled as a combination of addit
We present a manifold optimization approach to solve inference and planning problems with range constraints. The core of our approach is the definition of a manifold that represents points or poses with range constraints. We discover that the manifold of range-constrained points is homogeneous under…
We present GTGraffiti, a graffiti painting system from Georgia Tech that tackles challenges in art, hardware, and human-robot collaboration. The problem of painting graffiti in a human style is particularly challenging and requires a system-level approach because the robotics and art must be designe…
In this work, we investigate the problem of incre-mentally solving constrained non-linear optimization problems formulated as factor graphs. Prior incremental solvers were either restricted to the unconstrained case or required periodic batch relinearizations of the objective and constraints which a…
We present a locally optimal tracking controller for Cable Driven Parallel Robot (CDPR) control based on a time-varying Linear Quadratic Gaussian (TV-LQG) controller. In contrast to many methods which use fixed feedback gains, our time-varying controller computes the optimal gains depending on the l…
We present PanopticNeRF, an object-aware neural scene representation that decomposes a scene into a set of objects (things) and background (stuff). Each object is represented by a separate MLP that takes a position, direction, and time and outputs density and radiance. The background is represented…
"We propose a new system for automatic 2D floorplan reconstruction that is enabled by SALVe, our novel pairwise learned alignment verifier. The inputs to our system are sparsely located 360 deg. panoramas, whose semantic features (windows, doors, and openings) are inferred and used to hypothesize pa…
We propose factor graph optimization for simultaneous planning, control, and trajectory estimation for collision-free navigation of autonomous systems in environments with moving objects. The proposed online probabilistic motion planning and trajectory estimation navigation technique generates optim…
We present a novel continuous time trajectory representation based on a Chebyshev polynomial basis, which when governed by known dynamics models, allows for full trajectory and robot dynamics estimation, particularly useful for high-performance robotics applications such as unmanned aerial vehicles.…
This paper presents a novel factor graph-based approach to solve the discrete-time finite-horizon Linear Quadratic Regulator problem subject to auxiliary linear equality constraints within and across time steps. We represent such optimal control problems using constrained factor graphs and optimize…
Roboticists have increasingly sought to incorporate mechanical compliance into legged robots to realize a range of potential benefits, from improved agility to resilience in complex environments. A promising approach for building compliance into robot legs is to utilize the pneumatic artificial musc…
This paper introduces a novel proprioceptive state estimator for legged robots based on a learned displacement measurement from IMU data. Recent research in pedestrian tracking has shown that motion can be inferred from inertial data using convolutional neural networks. A learned inertial displaceme…
We present multi-robot iSAM2 (MR-iSAM2), an efficient incremental smoothing and mapping (iSAM) algorithm to solve multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) inference problems. MR-iSAM2 is based on a novel data structure multi-root Bayes tree (MRBT), which packs multiple Bayes trees wi…
Chinese calligraphy is a unique art form with great artistic value but difficult to master. In this paper, we formulate the calligraphy writing problem as a trajectory optimization problem, and propose an improved virtual brush model for simulating the real writing process. Our approach is inspired…
Shonan Rotation Averaging is a fast, simple, and elegant rotation averaging algorithm that is guaranteed to recover globally optimal solutions under mild assumptions on the measurement noise. Our method employs semidefinite relaxation in order to recover provably globally optimal solutions of the ro…
In this paper, we provide a modern synthesis of the classic inverse compositional algorithm for dense image alignment. We first discuss the assumptions made by this well-established technique, and subsequently propose to relax these assumptions by incorporating data-driven priors into this model. Mo…
Continuous-time trajectories are useful for reasoning about robot motion in a wide range of tasks. Sparse Gaussian processes (GPs) can be used as a non-parametric representation for trajectory distributions that enables fast trajectory optimization by sparse GP regression. However, most previous app…
Autonomous crop monitoring at high spatial and temporal resolution is a critical problem in precision agriculture. While Structure from Motion and Multi-View Stereo algorithms can finely reconstruct the 3D structure of a field with low-cost image sensors, these algorithms fail to capture the dynamic…
We provide a unified probabilistic framework for trajectory estimation and planning. The key idea is to view these two problems, usually considered separately, as a single problem. At each time-step the robot is tasked with finding the complete continuous-time trajectory from start to goal. This can…
We propose a distributed algorithm to estimate the 3D trajectories of multiple cooperative robots from relative pose measurements. Our approach leverages recent results [1] which show that the maximum likelihood trajectory is well approximated by a sequence of two quadratic subproblems. The main con
With the increased use of high degree-of-freedom robots that must perform tasks in real-time, there is a need for fast algorithms for motion planning. In this work, we view motion planning from a probabilistic perspective. We consider smooth continuous-time trajectories as samples from a Gaussian pr…
As the amount of visual data increases, so does the need for summarization tools that can be used to explore large image collections and to quickly get familiar with their content. In this paper, we propose dataset fingerprints, a new and powerful method based on data mining that extracts meaningful…
This paper studies an optimization-based approach for solving optimal estimation and optimal control problems through a unified computational formulation. The goal is to perform trajectory estimation over extended past horizons and model-predictive control over future horizons by enforcing the same…
We demonstrate distributed, online, and real-time cooperative localization and mapping between multiple robots operating throughout an unknown environment using indirect measurements. We present a novel Expectation Maximization (EM) based approach to efficiently identify inlier multi-robot loop clos…
While iterative optimization techniques for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) are now very efficient and widely used, none of them can guarantee global convergence to the maximum likelihood estimate. Local convergence usually implies artifacts in map reconstruction and large localization…
Large-scale SLAM demands for scalable techniques in which the computational burden and the memory consumption is shared among many processing units. While recent literature offers competitive approaches for scalable mapping, these usually involve approximations to preserve sparsity of the resulting…
Recent results in monocular visual-inertial navigation (VIN) have shown that optimization-based approaches outperform filtering methods in terms of accuracy due to their capability to relinearize past states. However, the improvement comes at the cost of increased computational complexity. In this p…
In this paper, we present an information-based approach to select a reduced number of landmarks and poses for a robot to localize itself and simultaneously build an accurate map. We develop an information theoretic algorithm to efficiently reduce the number of landmarks and poses in a SLAM estimate…
Pose graph optimization is the non-convex optimization problem underlying pose-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). If robot orientations were known, pose graph optimization would be a linear least-squares problem, whose solution can be computed efficiently and reliably. Since rotatio…
State-of-the-art techniques for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) employ iterative nonlinear optimization methods to compute an estimate for robot poses. While these techniques often work well in practice, they do not provide guarantees on the quality of the estimate. This paper shows tha…
We propose a method of monocular camera-inertial based navigation for computationally limited micro air vehicles (MAVs). Our approach is derived from the recent development of parallel tracking and mapping algorithms, but unlike previous results, we show how the tracking and mapping processes operat…