21 accepted papers
This paper introduces SLIM-VDB, a new lightweight semantic mapping system with probabilistic semantic fusion for closed-set or open-set dictionaries. Advances in data structures from the computer graphics community, such as OpenVDB, have demonstrated significantly improved computational and memory e
Safe motion planning algorithms are necessary for deploying autonomous robots in unstructured environments to prevent harm to humans and avoid damage to nearby objects. Generating these motion plans in real-time is also important to ensure that the robot can adapt to sudden changes in its environmen
Photorealistic 3D scene reconstruction plays an important role in autonomous driving, enabling the generation of novel data from existing datasets to simulate safety-critical scenarios and expand training data without additional acquisition costs. Gaussian Splatting (GS) facilitates real-time, photo
Underwater simulators offer support for building robust underwater perception solutions. Significant work has recently been done to develop new simulators and to advance the performance of existing underwater simulators. Still, there remains room for improvement on physics-based underwater sensor mo
When navigating and interacting in challenging environments where sensory information is imperfect and incomplete, robots must make decisions that account for these shortcomings. We propose a novel method for quantifying and representing such perceptual uncertainty in 3D reconstruction through occup
High-fidelity 3D scene reconstruction plays a crucial role in autonomous driving by enabling novel data generation from existing datasets. This allows simulating safety-critical scenarios and augmenting training datasets without incurring further data collection costs. While recent advances in radia…
In this paper, we present SonarSplat, a novel Gaussian splatting framework for imaging sonar that demonstrates realistic novel view synthesis and models acoustic streaking phenomena. Our method represents the scene as a set of 3D Gaussians with acoustic reflectance and saturation properties. We deve
Mobile robots operating indoors must be prepared to navigate challenging scenes that contain transparent surfaces. This paper proposes a novel method for the fusion of acoustic and visual sensing modalities through implicit neural representations to enable dense reconstruction of transparent surface
In the field of 3D object detection for autonomous driving LiDAR-Camera (LC) fusion is the top-performing sensor configuration. Still LiDAR is relatively high cost which hinders adoption of this technology for consumer automobiles. Alternatively camera and radar are commonly deployed on vehicles alr…
Autonomous underwater vehicles often perform surveys that capture multiple views of targets in order to provide more information for human operators or automatic target recognition algorithms. In this work, we address the problem of choosing the most informative views that minimize survey time while…
We propose LiRaFusion to tackle LiDAR-radar fusion for 3D object detection to fill the performance gap of existing LiDAR-radar detectors. To improve the feature extraction capabilities from these two modalities, we design an early fusion module for joint voxel feature encoding, and a middle fusion m…
Recognizing places from an opposing viewpoint during a return trip is a common experience for human drivers. However, the analogous robotics capability, visual place recognition (VPR) with limited field of view cameras under 180 degree rotations, has proven to be challenging to achieve. To address t…
Significant work has been done on advancing localization and mapping in underwater environments. Still, state-of-the-art methods are challenged by low-texture environments, which is common for underwater settings. This makes it difficult to use existing methods in diverse, real-world scenes. In this…
Recent advances in neural radiance fields (NeRFs) achieve state-of-the-art novel view synthesis and facilitate dense estimation of scene properties. However, NeRFs often fail for outdoor, unbounded scenes that are captured under very sparse views with the scene content concentrated far away from the
This letter proposes <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">LONER</i> , the first real-time LiDAR SLAM algorithm that uses a neural implicit scene representation. Existing implicit mapping methods for LiDAR show promising results in large-sc
Recent work has shown that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be applied successfully in disparity estimation, but these methods still suffer from errors in regions of low texture, occlusions, and reflections. Concurrently, deep learning for semantic segmentation has shown great progress in re
Performance on benchmark datasets has drastically improved with advances in deep learning. Still, cross-dataset generalization performance remains relatively low due to the domain shift that can occur between two different datasets. This domain shift is especially exaggerated between synthetic and r
Stereo cameras are widely used for sensing and navigation of underwater robotic systems. They can provide high resolution color views of a scene; the constrained camera geometry enables metrically accurate depth estimation; they are also relatively cost-effective. Traditional stereo vision algorithm…
This letter reports on WaterGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) for generating realistic underwater images from in-air image and depth pairings in an unsupervised pipeline used for color correction of monocular underwater images. Cameras onboard autonomous and remotely operated vehicles can
Mapping of underwater environments is a critical task for a range of activities from monitoring coral reef habitats to surveying submerged archaeological sites. While recent advances in methods for terrestrial mapping can achieve dense 3D reconstructions of scenes in real-time, there remains the cha…
Achieving real-time perception is critical to developing a fully autonomous system that can sense, navigate, and interact with its environment. Perception tasks such as online 3D reconstruction and mapping have been intensely studied for terrestrial robotics applications. However, characteristics of…