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Timothy Chen

9 accepted papers

2026

GRAD-NAV++: Vision-Language Model Enabled Visual Drone Navigation With Gaussian Radiance Fields and Differentiable Dynamics

RA-L 2026

Autonomous drones capable of interpreting and executing high-level language instructions in unstructured environments remain a long-standing goal. Yet existing approaches are constrained by their dependence on hand-crafted skills, extensive parameter tuning, or computationally intensive models unsui

Cited by 12SourcecodeScholar
2026

VISTA: Open-Vocabulary, Task-Relevant Robot Exploration With Online Semantic Gaussian Splatting

RA-L 2026

We present VISTA (Viewpoint-based Image selection with Semantic Task Awareness), an active exploration method for robots to plan informative trajectories that improve 3D map quality in areas most relevant for task completion. Given an open-vocabulary search instruction (e.g., “find a person”), VISTA

Cited by 4SourcecodeScholar
2026

VISTA: Open-Vocabulary, Task-Relevant Robot Exploration with Online Semantic Gaussian Splatting

ICRA 2026poster

We present VISTA (Viewpoint-based Image selection with Semantic Task Awareness), an active exploration method for robots to plan informative trajectories that improve 3D map quality in areas most relevant for task completion. Given an open-vocabulary search instruction (e.g., "find a person"), VISTA…

2025

A Control Barrier Function for Safe Navigation with Online Gaussian Splatting Maps

ICRA 2025

SAFER-Splat (Simultaneous Action Filtering and Environment Reconstruction) is a real-time, scalable, and minimally invasive safety filter, based on control barrier functions, for safe robotic navigation in a detailed map constructed at runtime using Gaussian Splatting (GSplat). We propose a novel Co

Cited by 17SourcecodeScholar
2025

GRaD-Nav: Efficiently Learning Visual Drone Navigation with Gaussian Radiance Fields and Differentiable Dynamics

IROS 2025

Autonomous visual navigation is an essential element in robot autonomy. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising policy training paradigm. However, existing RL methods suffer from high sample complexity, poor sim-to-real transfer, and limited runtime adaptability. These problems are particular

Cited by 7SourcecodeScholar
2024

Splat-MOVER: Multi-Stage, Open-Vocabulary Robotic Manipulation via Editable Gaussian Splatting

CoRL 2024poster

We present Splat-MOVER, a modular robotics stack for open-vocabulary robotic manipulation, which leverages the editability of Gaussian Splatting (GSplat) scene representations to enable multi-stage manipulation tasks. Splat-MOVER consists of: (i) ASK-Splat, a GSplat representation that distills sema…

Cited by 23SourcecodeScholar
2022

Vision-Only Robot Navigation in a Neural Radiance World

RA-L 2022

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for the representation of natural, complex 3D scenes. NeRFs represent continuous volumetric density and RGB values in a neural network, and generate photo-realistic images from unseen camera viewpoints through ray tracing. W

Cited by 290SourcecodeScholar