89 accepted papers
Reliable incremental estimation of camera poses and 3D reconstruction is key to enable various applications including robotics, interactive visualization, and augmented reality. However, online SLAM is particularly challenging in dynamic natural environments, where scene dynamics can severely deteri
Localization of autonomous vehicles in existing maps is crucial for reliable navigation. Using previously constructed maps allows vehicles to estimate their pose without the inherent odometry drift. Building such maps involves aligning data recorded at different times and maintaining the map over ti
The perception of moving objects is crucial for autonomous robots performing collision avoidance in dynamic environments. LiDARs and cameras tremendously enhance scene interpretation but do not provide direct motion information and face limitations under adverse weather. Radar sensors overcome these
Abstract— Understanding the surrounding scene geometrically and semantically is a key requirement for autonomously navigating systems. Vision-based 3D panoptic occupancy prediction aims to provide a 3D representation of the surroundingsincluding semantic meaning and identifying individual objectssuc…
Crop yield estimation is a relevant problem in agriculture, because an accurate yield estimate can support farmers’ decisions on harvesting or precision intervention. Robots can help to automate this process. To do so, they need to be able to perceive the surrounding environment to identify target o
As the world population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, our agricultural production system needs to double its productivity despite a decline of human workforce in the agricultural sector. Autonomous robotic systems are one promising pathway to increase productivity by taking over labor-int
Robotics applications often rely on scene reconstructions to enable downstream tasks. In this work, we tackle the challenge of actively building an accurate map of an unknown scene using an RGB-D camera on a mobile platform. We propose a hybrid map representation that combines a Gaussian splatting m
Accurate localization is crucial for the autonomous operation of mobile robots. Specifically for indoor scenarios, localization algorithms typically rely on a previously generated map. However, many real-world sites like warehouses or healthcare environments violate the underlying assumption that th
Most autonomous cars rely on the availability of high-definition (HD) maps. Current research aims to address this constraint by directly predicting HD map elements from onboard sensors and reasoning about the relationships between the predicted map and traffic elements. Despite recent advancements,
Forests are vital to our ecosystems, acting as carbon sinks, climate stabilizers, biodiversity centers, and wood sources. Due to their scale, monitoring and managing forests takes a lot of work. Forestry robotics offers the potential for enabling efficient and sustainable foresting practices through
Odometry is crucial for the navigation of autonomous vehicles in unknown environments. While cameras and LiDARs are commonly used to estimate the ego-motion of a vehicle, these sensors face limitations under bad lighting and severe weather conditions. Automotive radars overcome these challenges, but
Globally localizing a mobile robot in a known map is often a foundation for enabling robots to navigate and operate autonomously. In indoor environments, traditional Monte Carlo localization based on occupancy grid maps is considered the gold standard, but its accuracy is limited by the representati
Robots require high-fidelity reconstructions of their environment for effective operation. Such scene representations should be both, geometrically accurate and photorealistic to support downstream tasks. While this can be achieved by building distance fields from range sensors and radiance fields f…
Simultaneous localization and mapping are essential components for the operation of autonomous vehicles in unknown environments. While localization focuses on estimating the vehicle's pose, mapping captures the surrounding environment to enhance future localization and decision-making. Localization
Semantic scene understanding, including the perception and classification of moving agents, is essential to enabling safe and robust driving behaviours of autonomous vehicles. Cameras and LiDARs are commonly used for semantic scene understanding. However, both sensor modalities face limitations in a
Semantic scene understanding is crucial for autonomous systems and 3D semantic occupancy prediction is a key task since it provides geometric and possibly semantic information of the vehicle's surroundings. Most existing vision-based approaches to occupancy estimation rely on 3D voxel labels or segm
The natural world presents complex organic structures, such as tree canopies, that humans can interpret even when only partially visible.Understanding tree structures is key for forest monitoring, orchard management, and automated harvesting applications.However, reconstructing tree topologies from…
Conventional crop production, which is essential for providing food, feed, fuel, and fiber for our society, relies heavily on harmful herbicides to control weeds. Instead, agricultural robots could remove weeds more sustainably. However, these robots require a generalizable perception system that ca
Building accurate maps is a key building block to enable reliable localization planning and navigation of autonomous vehicles. We propose a novel approach for building accurate 3D maps of dynamic environments utilizing a sequence of LiDAR scans. To this end we propose encoding the 4D scene into a no…
Agricultural production is facing challenges in the next decades induced by climate change and the need for more sustainability by reducing its impact on the environment. Advances in field management through robotic intervention, monitoring of crops by autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) supp…
Robots that operate in agricultural environments need a robust perception system that can deal with occlusions, which are naturally present in agricultural scenarios. In this paper, we address the problem of estimating 3D shapes of fruits when only partial observations are available. Generally speak…
Moving object segmentation (MOS) using a 3D light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensor is crucial for scene understanding and identification of moving objects. Despite the availability of various types of 3D LiDAR sensors in the market, MOS research still predominantly focuses on 3D point clouds fro
The world population is increasing and will, by 2050, nearly double its demand for food, feed, fuel, and fiber. Besides environmental challenges, labor shortage also poses crucial challenges to the agricultural production system. Automation of manual tasks in crop production can potentially increase
Basically all multi-sensor systems must calibrate their sensors to exploit their full potential for state estimation such as mapping and localization. In this letter, we investigate the problem of extrinsic and intrinsic calibration of perception systems. Traditionally, targets in the form of checke
Interpreting camera data is key for autonomously acting systems such as autonomous vehicles. Vision systems that operate in real-world environments must be able to understand their surroundings and need the ability to deal with novel situations. This paper tackles open-world semantic segmentation i.…
A detailed analysis of agricultural fields is key toward reducing the use of agrochemicals to achieve a more sustainable crop production. To this end, agricultural robots equipped with vision-based systems offer the potential to detect individual plants in the field automatically. This capability en
Robots and autonomous vehicles should be aware of what happens in their surroundings. The segmentation and tracking of moving objects are essential for reliable path planning, including collision avoidance. We investigate this estimation task for vehicles using radar sensing. We address moving insta…
Localization is a crucial component for the navigation of autonomous vehicles. It encompasses global localization and place recognition, allowing a system to identify locations that have been mapped or visited before. Place recognition is commonly approached using cameras or LiDARs. However, these s
Computer vision techniques play a central role in the perception stack of autonomous vehicles. Such methods are employed to perceive the vehicle surroundings given sensor data. 3D LiDAR sensors are commonly used to collect sparse 3D point clouds from the scene. However compared to human perception s…
Forests play a crucial role in our ecosystems, functioning as carbon sinks, climate stabilizers, biodiversity hubs, and sources of wood. By the very nature of their scale, monitoring and maintaining forests is a challenging task. Robotics in forestry can have the potential for substantial automation…
Mobile robots that navigate in unknown environments need to be constantly aware of the dynamic objects in their surroundings for mapping, localization, and planning. It is key to reason about moving objects in the current observation and at the same time to also update the internal model of the stat
Object-based maps are relevant for scene under-standing since they integrate geometric and semantic information of the environment, allowing autonomous robots to robustly localize and interact with on objects. In this paper, we address the task of constructing a metric-semantic map for the purpose o…
A map of the environment is an essential component for robotic navigation. In the majority of cases, a map of the static part of the world is the basis for localization, planning, and navigation. However, dynamic objects that are presented in the scenes during mapping leave undesirable traces in the…
Monitoring the traits of plants and fruits is a fundamental task in horticulture. With accurate measurements, farmers can predict the yield of their crops and use this information for making informed management decisions, and breeders can use it for variety selection. Agricultural robotic applicatio…
Scene understanding is crucial for autonomous robots in dynamic environments for making future state predictions, avoiding collisions, and path planning. Camera and LiDAR perception made tremendous progress in recent years, but face limitations under adverse weather conditions. To leverage the full
Plant phenotyping is a central task in agriculture, as it describes plants' growth stage, development, and other relevant quantities. Robots can help automate this process by accurately estimating plant traits such as the number of leaves, leaf area, and the plant size. In this paper, we address the…
Measuring plant traits with high throughput allows breeders to monitor and select the best cultivars for subsequent breeding generations. This can enable farmers to improve yield to produce more food, feed, and fiber. Current breeding practices involve extracting leaf parameters on a small subset of
Determining the state of a mobile robot is an essential building block of robot navigation systems. In this letter, we address the problem of estimating the robot's pose in an indoor environment using 2D LiDAR data and investigate how modern environment models can improve gold standard Monte-Carlo l
Robust and accurate pose estimation of a robotic platform, so-called sensor-based odometry, is an essential part of many robotic applications. While many sensor odometry systems made progress by adding more complexity to the ego-motion estimation process, we move in the opposite direction. By removi
Place recognition plays an important role in robot localization and SLAM. Being able to retrieve the current position in a given map allows, for instance, localizing without relying on GPS reception. In this letter, we address the problem of point cloud-based place recognition, we especially focus o
Mapping an environment is essential for several robotic tasks, particularly for localization. In this letter, we address the problem of mapping the environment using LiDAR point clouds with the goal to obtain a map representation that is well suited for robot localization. To this end, we utilize a
Lifelong localization in a given map is an essential capability for autonomous service robots. In this letter, we consider the task of long-term localization in a changing indoor environment given sparse CAD floor plans. The commonly used pre-built maps from the robot sensors may increase the cost a
Autonomous vehicles need to understand their surroundings geometrically and semantically to plan and act appropriately in the real world. Panoptic segmentation of LiDAR scans provides a description of the surroundings by unifying semantic and instance segmentation. It is usually solved in a bottom-u
Scene understanding is crucial for autonomous systems to reliably navigate in the real world. Panoptic segmentation of 3D LiDAR scans allows us to semantically describe a vehicle's environment by predicting semantic classes for each 3D point and to identify individual instances through different ins
Agricultural robots have the prospect to enable more efficient and sustainable agricultural production of food, feed, and fiber. Perception of crops and weeds is a central component of agricultural robots that aim to monitor fields and assess the plants as well as their growth stage in an automatic…
Monitoring plants and fruits at high resolution play a key role in the future of agriculture. Accurate 3D information can pave the way to a diverse number of robotic applications in agriculture ranging from autonomous harvesting to precise yield estimation. Obtaining such 3D information is non-trivi…
The awareness about moving objects in the surroundings of a self-driving vehicle is essential for safe and reliable autonomous navigation. The interpretation of LiDAR and camera data achieves exceptional results but typically requires to accumulate and process temporal sequences of data in order to…
Perception is crucial for robots that act in real-world environments, as autonomous systems need to see and understand the world around them to act properly. Panoptic segmentation provides an interpretation of the scene by computing a pixelwise semantic label together with instance IDs. In this pape…
Accurate mapping of large-scale environments is an essential building block of most outdoor autonomous systems. Challenges of traditional mapping methods include the balance between memory consumption and mapping accuracy. This paper addresses the problem of achieving large-scale 3D reconstruction u…
Semantic perception is a core building block in autonomous driving, since it provides information about the drivable space and location of other traffic participants. For learning-based perception, often a large amount of diverse training data is necessary to achieve high performance. Data labeling…
Precision farming robots offer the potential to reduce the amount of used agrochemicals through targeted interventions and thus are a promising step towards sustainable agriculture. A prerequisite for such systems is a robust plant classification system that can identify crops and weeds in various a
Agricultural robots have the potential to improve the efficiency and sustainability of existing agricultural practices. Most autonomous agricultural robots rely on machine vision systems. Such systems, however, often perform worse in new fields or when the robotic platforms change. While we can alle
Crops for food, feed, fiber, and fuel are key natural resources for our society. Monitoring plants and measuring their traits is an important task in agriculture often referred to as plant phenotyping. Traditionally, this task is done manually, which is time- and labor-intensive. Robots can automate
A reliable pose estimator robust to environmental disturbances is desirable for mobile robots. To this end, inertial measurement units (IMUs) play an important role because they can perceive the full motion state of the vehicle independently. However, it suffers from accumulative error due to inhere
Understanding the scene is key for autonomously navigating vehicles, and the ability to segment the surroundings online into moving and non-moving objects is a central ingredient of this task. Often, deep learning-based methods are used to perform moving object segmentation (MOS). The performance of
Monitoring plants and fruits is important in modern agriculture, with applications ranging from high-throughput phenotyping to autonomous harvesting. Obtaining highly accurate 3D measurements under real agricultural conditions is a challenging task. In this letter, we address the problem of estimati
Scene understanding is critical for autonomous navigation in dynamic environments. Perception tasks in this domain like segmentation and tracking are usually tackled individually. In this letter, we address the problem of 4D panoptic segmentation using LiDAR scans, which requires to assign to each 3
Reliable and accurate registration of point clouds is a challenging problem in robotics as well as in the domain of autonomous driving. In this article, we address the task of aligning point clouds with low overlap, containing moving objects, and without prior information about the initial guess. We
Ego-motion estimation is a fundamental building block of any autonomous system that needs to navigate in an environment. In large-scale outdoor scenes, 3D LiDARs are often used for this task, as they provide a large number of range measurements at high precision. In this paper, we propose a novel ap
Monitoring of fields and breeding plots is critical for farmers, plant scientists, and breeders. In this process, a key objective is to assess and monitor the growth stages together with the number of individual plants on the field. Traditionally, this in-field assessment is performed manually and t
Mapping systems that turn sensor data into a model of the environment are standard components in mobile robotics. Outdoor robots are often equipped with 3D LiDAR sensors to obtain accurate range measurements at a high frame rate. The price for a robotic LiDAR sensor scales roughly linearly with the
A key challenge for autonomous vehicles is to navigate in unseen dynamic environments. Separating moving objects from static ones is essential for navigation, pose estimation, and understanding how other traffic participants are likely to move in the near future. In this work, we tackle the problem
Most autonomous driving and robotic applications require retrieving map data around the vehicle's current location. Those maps can cover large areas and are often stored in a compressed form to save memory and allow for efficient transmission. In this paper, we address the problem of place recogniti…
Robust localization in a given map is a crucial component of most autonomous robots. In this paper, we address the problem of localizing in an indoor environment that changes and where prominent structures have no correspondence in the map built at a different point in time. To overcome the discrepa…
Semantic scene interpretation is essential for autonomous systems to operate in complex scenarios. While deep learning-based methods excel at this task, they rely on vast amounts of labeled data that is tedious to generate and might not cover all relevant classes sufficiently. Self-supervised repres
Fine-grained scene understanding is essential for autonomous driving. The context around a vehicle can change drastically while navigating, making it hard to identify and understand the different objects that may appear. Although recent efforts on semantic and panoptic segmentation pushed the field
Temporal semantic scene understanding is critical for self-driving cars or robots operating in dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose 4D panoptic LiDAR segmentation to assign a semantic class and a temporally-consistent instance ID to a sequence of 3D points. To this end, we present an appr…
Panoptic segmentation is the recently introduced task that tackles semantic segmentation and instance segmentation jointly [18]. In this paper, we present an extension of SemanticKITTI [1], a large-scale dataset providing dense point-wise semantic labels for all sequences of the KITTI Odometry Bench…
State estimation is a key ingredient in most robotic systems. Often, state estimation is performed using some form of least squares minimization. Basically, all error minimization procedures that work on real-world data use robust kernels as the standard way for dealing with outliers in the data. Th
Many modern robotics applications rely on 3D maps of the environment. Due to the large memory requirements of dense 3D maps, compression techniques are often necessary to store or transmit 3D maps efficiently. In this work, we investigate the problem of compressing dense 3D point cloud maps such as
Knowing the distance to nearby objects is crucial for autonomous cars to navigate safely in everyday traffic. In this paper, we investigate monocular depth estimation, which advanced substantially within the last years and is providing increasingly more accurate results while only requiring a single…
Precision management of agricultural fields as well as plant breeding are central factors for keeping yields high and to provide food, feed, and fiber for our society. A key element in breeding trials but also for targeted management actions is to analyze the growth state of individual plants object
The ability to detect and segment moving objects in a scene is essential for building consistent maps, making future state predictions, avoiding collisions, and planning. In this letter, we address the problem of moving object segmentation from 3D LiDAR scans. We propose a novel approach that pushes
Accurately localizing in and mapping an environment are essential building blocks of most autonomous systems. In this paper, we present a novel approach for LiDAR odometry and mapping, focusing on improving the mapping quality and at the same time estimating the pose of the vehicle. Our approach per…
Robust and accurate, map-based localization is crucial for autonomous mobile systems. In this paper, we exploit range images generated from 3D LiDAR scans to address the problem of localizing mobile robots or autonomous cars in a map of a large-scale outdoor environment represented by a triangular m…
Exploiting past 3D LiDAR scans to predict future point clouds is a promising method for autonomous mobile systems to realize foresighted state estimation, collision avoidance, and planning. In this paper, we address the problem of predicting future 3D LiDAR point clouds given a sequence of past LiDA…
In modern agriculture, measuring phenotypic traits helps breeders monitor plant growth, increase yield, and provide food, feed, and fiber. Traditional phenotyping requires intensive manual work, partially being intrusive. In this paper, we investigate the challenge of measuring phenotypic traits in…
Inferring semantic information towards an understanding of the surrounding environment is crucial for autonomous vehicles to drive safely. Deep learning-based segmentation methods can infer semantic information directly from laser range data, even in the absence of other sensor modalities such as ca…
Localization is a crucial capability for mobile robots and autonomous cars. In this paper, we address learning an observation model for Monte-Carlo localization using 3D LiDAR data. We propose a novel, neural network-based observation model that computes the expected overlap of two 3D LiDAR scans. T…
Truly autonomous driving without the need for human intervention can only be attained when self-driving cars fully understand their surroundings. Most of these vehicles rely on a suite of active and passive sensors. LiDAR sensors are a cornerstone in most of these hardware stacks, and leveraging the…
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a fundamental capability required by most autonomous systems. In this paper, we address the problem of loop closing for SLAM based on 3D laser scans recorded by autonomous cars. Our approach utilizes a deep neural network exploiting different cues gene…
Perception in autonomous vehicles is often carried out through a suite of different sensing modalities. Given the massive amount of openly available labeled RGB data and the advent of high-quality deep learning algorithms for image-based recognition, high-level semantic perception tasks are pre-domi…
Mapping and localization are essential capabilities of robotic systems. Although the majority of mapping systems focus on static environments, the deployment in real-world situations requires them to handle dynamic objects. In this paper, we propose an approach for an RGB-D sensor that is able to co…
Semantic scene understanding is important for various applications. In particular, self-driving cars need a fine-grained understanding of the surfaces and objects in their vicinity. Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) provides precise geometric information about the environment and is thus a part of…
Reliable and accurate localization and mapping are key components of most autonomous systems. Besides geometric information about the mapped environment, the semantics plays an important role to enable intelligent navigation behaviors. In most realistic environments, this task is particularly compli…
Accurate and reliable localization and mapping is a fundamental building block for most autonomous robots. For this purpose, we propose a novel, dense approach to laser-based mapping that operates on three-dimensional point clouds obtained from rotating laser sensors. We construct a surfel-based map…
Reducing the use of agrochemicals is an important component toward sustainable agriculture. Robots that can perform targeted weed control offer the potential to contribute to this goal, for example, through specialized weeding actions such as selective spraying or mechanical weed removal. A prerequi
Applying agrochemicals is the default procedure for conventional weed control in crop production, but has negative impacts on the environment. Robots have the potential to treat every plant in the field individually and thus can reduce the required use of such chemicals. To achieve that, robots need…
Finding all neighbors of a point inside a given radius is an integral part in many approaches using three-dimensional laser range data. We present novel insights to significantly improve the runtime performance of radius neighbor search using octrees. Our contributions are as follows: (1) We propose…