28 accepted papers
Autonomous mobile robots increasingly rely on LiDAR–IMU odometry for navigation and mapping, yet horizontally mounted LiDARs (e.g., MID360) capture limited near-ground returns, reducing terrain awareness and degrading performance in feature-scarce environments. Prior solutions, such as static tilt, …
3D mapping is vital for a broad range of applications that rely on a consistent and accurate representation of the environment. Change is an ever-persistent force in our world and with the evolution of a scene its 3D map becomes outdated. Thus, a mapping framework that can adapt and refine the 3D ma
3D mapping is vital for a broad range of applications that rely on a consistent and accurate representation of the environment. Change is an ever-persistent force in our world and with the evolution of a scene its 3D map becomes outdated. Thus, a mapping framework that can adapt and refine the 3D ma…
Commercial UAVs are an emerging security threat as they are capable of carrying hazardous payloads or disrupting air traffic. To counter UAVs, we introduce an autonomous 3D target encirclement and interception strategy. Unlike traditional ground-guided systems, this strategy employs autonomous drone
Gaussian Splatting SLAM (GS-SLAM) offers a notable improvement over traditional SLAM methods, in enabling photorealistic 3D reconstruction that conventional approaches often struggle to achieve. However, existing GS-SLAM systems perform poorly under persistent and severe motion blur commonly encount
Helmet-mounted wearable positioning systems are crucial for enhancing safety and facilitating coordination in industrial, construction, and emergency rescue environments. These systems, including LiDAR-Inertial Odometry (LIO) and Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO), often face challenges in localization
Ultra-wideband (UWB) is gaining popularity with devices like AirTags for precise home item localization but faces significant challenges when scaled to large environments like seaports. The main challenges are calibration and localization under obstructed conditions, which are common in logistics en
Loop closure is an important task in robot navigation. However, existing methods mostly rely on some implicit or heuristic features of the environment, which can still fail to work in common environments such as corridors, tunnels, and warehouses. Indeed, navigating in such featureless, degenerative
While UWB-based methods can achieve high localization accuracy in small-scale areas, their accuracy and reliability are significantly challenged in large-scale environments. In this paper, we propose a learning-based framework named ULOC for Ultra-Wideband (UWB) based localization in such complex, l
In this paper, we propose a continuous-time lidar-inertial odometry (CT-LIO) system named SLICT2, which promotes two main insights. One, contrary to conventional wisdom, CT-LIO algorithm can be optimized by linear solvers in only a few iterations, which is more efficient than commonly used nonlinear
LiDAR odometry is a pivotal technology in the fields of autonomous driving and autonomous mobile robotics. However, most of the current works focus on nonlinear optimization methods, and still existing many challenges in using the traditional Iterative Extended Kalman Filter (IEKF) framework to tack…
Perception plays a crucial role in various robot applications. However existing well-annotated datasets are biased towards autonomous driving scenarios while unlabelled SLAM datasets are quickly over-fitted and often lack environment and domain variations. To expand the frontier of these fields we i…
In response to the evolving challenges posed by small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which possess the potential to transport harmful payloads or independently cause damage, we introduce MMAUD: a comprehensive Multi-Modal Anti-UAV Dataset. MMAUD addresses a critical gap in contemporary threat dete…
One-shot LiDAR localization refers to the ability to estimate the robot pose from one single point cloud, which yields significant advantages in initialization and relocalization processes. In the point cloud domain, the topic has been extensively studied as a global descriptor retrieval (i.e., loop…
Accurate and consistent construction of point clouds from LiDAR scanning data is fundamental for 3D modeling applications. Current solutions, such as multiview point cloud registration and LiDAR bundle adjustment, predominantly depend on the local plane assumption, which may be inadequate in complex…
While feature association to a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">global map</i> has significant benefits, to keep the computations from growing exponentially, most lidar-based odometry and mapping methods opt to associate features with
In multi-robot systems, two important research problems are relative localization between the robots and global localization of all robots in a common frame. Traditional methods rely on detecting inter and intra-robot loop closures, which can be restrictive operation-wise since the robot must form l
In recent years, thanks to the continuously reduced cost and weight of 3D lidar, the applications of this type of sensor in the community have become increasingly popular. Despite many progresses, estimation drift and tracking loss are still prevalent concerns associated with these systems. However,…
In this letter we investigate a tightly coupled Lidar-Inertia Odometry and Mapping (LIOM) scheme, with the capability to incorporate multiple lidars with complementary field of view (FOV). In essence, we devise a time-synchronized scheme to combine extracted features from separate lidars into a sing
In this work, we present a tightly-coupled fusion scheme of a monocular camera, a 6-DoF IMU, and a single unknown Ultra-wideband (UWB) anchor to achieve accurate and drift-reduced localization. Specifically, this letter focuses on incorporating the UWB sensor into an existing state-of-the-art visual
In this work, we propose a tightly-coupled odometry framework, which combines monocular visual feature observations with distance measurements provided by a single ultra-wideband (UWB) anchor with an initial guess for its location. Firstly, the scale factor and the anchor position in the vision fram…
In multi-robot systems, the capability of each robot to relatively localize its neighbors is a crucial requirement, which needs to be resolved as a prerequisite for almost any distributed scheme of operation. Notably, this problem proves to be quite challenging in GPS-denied environments. In this le
Though vision-based techniques have become quite popular for autonomous docking of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), due to limited field of view (FOV), the UAV must rely on other methods to detect and approach the target before vision can be used. In this paper we propose a method combining Ultra-wi…
In this paper we study the distance-based docking problem of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by using a single landmark placed at an arbitrarily unknown position. To solve the problem, we propose an integrated estimation-control scheme to simultaneously achieve the relative localization and navigati…
Robust velocity and position estimation is crucial for autonomous robot navigation. The optical flow based methods for autonomous navigation have been receiving increasing attentions in tandem with the development of micro unmanned aerial vehicles. This paper proposes a kernel cross-correlator (KCC)…
In this paper we propose a method to achieve relative positioning and tracking of a target by a quadcopter using Ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging sensors, which are strategically installed to help retrieve both relative position and bearing between the quadcopter and target. To achieve robust localizati…
This paper proposes an ultra-wideband (UWB) aided localization and mapping system that leverages on inertial sensor and depth camera. Inspired by the fact that visual odometry (VO) system, regardless of its accuracy in the short term, still faces challenges with accumulated errors in the long run or…