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Nikhil Varma Keetha

9 accepted papers

2026

RAVEN: Resilient Aerial Navigation Via Open-Set Semantic Memory and Behavior Adaptation

ICRA 2026poster

Aerial outdoor semantic navigation requires robots to explore large, unstructured environments to locate target objects. Recent advances in semantic navigation have demonstrated open-set object-goal navigation in indoor settings, but these methods remain limited by constrained spatial ranges and str…

2025

Demonstrating ViSafe: Vision-enabled Safety for High-speed Detect and Avoid

RSS 2025poster

Maintaining visual separation is crucial to achieving safe and seamless high-density operation of airborne vehicles in shared airspace, where pilots currently shoulder this responsibility. To automate this, we present ViSafe, a high-speed airborne vision-only collision avoidance system. Designed un…

Cited by 0PDFScholar
2025

RayFronts: Open-Set Semantic Ray Frontiers for Online Scene Understanding and Exploration

IROS 2025

Open-set semantic mapping is crucial for openworld robots. Current mapping approaches either are limited by the depth range or only map beyond-range entities in constrained settings, where overall they fail to combine within-range and beyond-range observations. Furthermore, these methods make a trad

Cited by 22SourceScholar
2025

UFM: A Simple Path towards Unified Dense Correspondence with Flow

NeurIPS 2025poster

Dense image correspondence is central to many applications, such as visual odometry, 3D reconstruction, object association, and re-identification. Historically, dense correspondence has been tackled separately for wide-baseline scenarios and optical flow estimation, despite the common goal of matchi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

AnyLoc: Towards Universal Visual Place Recognition

RA-L 2024

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is vital for robot localization. To date, the most performant VPR approaches are <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">environment- and task-specific:</i> while they exhibit strong performance in structured en

Cited by 253SourcecodeScholar
2024

Map It Anywhere: Empowering BEV Map Prediction using Large-scale Public Datasets

NeurIPS 2024poster

Top-down Bird's Eye View (BEV) maps are a popular perception representation for ground robot navigation due to their richness and flexibility for downstream tasks. While recent methods have shown promise for predicting BEV maps from First-Person View (FPV) images, their generalizability is limited t…

2023

ConceptFusion: Open-set multimodal 3D mapping

RSS 2023poster

Building 3D maps of the environment is central to robot navigation, planning, and interaction with objects in a scene. Most existing approaches that integrate semantic concepts with 3D maps largely remain confined to the closed-set setting: they can only reason about a finite set of concepts, pre-de…

2022

AirObject: A Temporally Evolving Graph Embedding for Object Identification

CVPR 2022poster

Object encoding and identification are vital for robotic tasks such as autonomous exploration, semantic scene understanding, and re-localization. Previous approaches have attempted to either track objects or generate descriptors for object identification. However, such systems are limited to a "fixe…

Cited by 6PDFcodeScholar
2021

A Hierarchical Dual Model of Environment- and Place-Specific Utility for Visual Place Recognition

RA-L 2021

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) approaches have typically attempted to match places by identifying visual cues, image regions or landmarks that have high “utility” in identifying a specific place. But this concept of utility is not singular - rather it can take a range of forms. In this letter, we pr

Cited by 30SourcecodeScholar