Varun Murali — accepted AI-conference papers

2026

Air-Ground Collaboration for Language-Specified Missions in Unknown Environments (I)

Fernando Cladera, Zachary Ravichandran, Jason Hughes, Varun Murali, Carlos Nieto-Granda, M. Ani Hsieh +3

ICRA 2026poster

As autonomous robotic systems become increasingly mature, users will want to specify missions at the level of intent rather than in low-level detail. Language is an expressive and intuitive medium for such mission specification. However, realizing language-guided robotic teams requires overcoming si…

Cited by 0 Scholar ↗

2026

RT-GuIDE: Real-Time Gaussian Splatting for Information-Driven Exploration

Yuezhan Tao, Dexter Ong, Varun Murali, Igor Spasojevic, Pratik Chaudhari, Vijay Kumar

ICRA 2026poster

We propose a framework for active mapping and exploration that leverages Gaussian splatting for constructing dense maps. Further, we develop a GPU-accelerated motion planning algorithm that can exploit the Gaussian map for real-time navigation. The Gaussian map constructed onboard the robot is optim…

Cited by 0 Source ↗PDF ↗Scholar ↗

2026

Real-Time Glass Detection and Reprojection Using Sensor Fusion Onboard Aerial Robots

Malakhi Hopkins, Varun Murali, Vijay Kumar, Camillo Jose Taylor

ICRA 2026poster

Autonomous aerial robots are increasingly being deployed in real-world scenarios, where transparent obstacles present significant challenges to reliable navigation and mapping. These materials pose a unique problem for traditional perception systems because they lack discernible features and can cau…

Cited by 0 Source ↗PDF ↗Scholar ↗

2025

RT-GuIDE: Real-Time Gaussian Splatting for Information-Driven Exploration

Yuezhan Tao, Dexter Ong, Varun Murali, Igor Spasojevic, Pratik Chaudhari, Vijay Kumar

RA-L 2025

Cited by 14 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2025

SPINE: Online Semantic Planning for Missions with Incomplete Natural Language Specifications in Unstructured Environments

Zachary Ravichandran, Varun Murali, Mariliza Tzes, George J. Pappas, Vijay Kumar

ICRA 2025

As robots become increasingly capable, users will want to describe high-level missions and have robots infer the relevant details. Because pre-built maps are difficult to obtain in many realistic settings, accomplishing such missions will require the robot to map and plan online. While many semantic

Cited by 25 Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗

2024

Learning autonomous driving from aerial imagery

Varun Murali, Rosman Guy, Karaman Sertac, Daniela Rus

IROS 2024poster

In this work, we consider the problem of learning end to end perception to control for ground vehicles solely from aerial imagery. Photogrammetric simulators allow the synthesis of novel views through the transformation of pre-generated assets into novel views. However, they have a large setup cost,…

Cited by 1 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2022

A Planted Clique Perspective on Hypothesis Pruning

Muyuan Lin, Varun Murali, Sertac Karaman

RA-L 2022

Hypothesis pruning is an important prerequisite while working with outlier-contaminated data in many computer vision problems. However, the underlying random data structures are barely explored in the literature, limiting designing efficient algorithms. To this end, we provide a novel graph-theoreti

Cited by 8 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2021

6D Object Pose Estimation with Pairwise Compatible Geometric Features

Muyuan Lin, Varun Murali, Sertac Karaman

ICRA 2021poster

This work addresses the problem of 6-DoF pose estimation under heavy occlusion. While previous work demonstrates reasonable results in unoccluded situations, robust and efficient pose estimation is still challenging in heavily occluded and low-texture scenarios which are ubiquitous in many applicati…

Cited by 5 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2020

Joint Feature Selection and Time Optimal Path Parametrization for High Speed Vision-Aided Navigation

Igor Spasojevic, Varun Murali, Sertac Karaman

IROS 2020poster

We study a problem in vision-aided navigation in which an autonomous agent has to traverse a specified path in minimal time while ensuring extraction of a steady stream of visual percepts with low latency. Vision-aided robots extract motion estimates from the sequence of images of their on-board cam…

Cited by 9 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2020

Perception-aware time optimal path parameterization for quadrotors

Igor Spasojevic, Varun Murali, Sertac Karaman

ICRA 2020poster

The increasing popularity of quadrotors has given rise to a class of predominantly vision-driven vehicles. This paper addresses the problem of perception-aware time optimal path parametrization for quadrotors. Although many different choices of perceptual modalities are available, the low weight and…

Cited by 46 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2019

FlightGoggles: Photorealistic Sensor Simulation for Perception-driven Robotics using Photogrammetry and Virtual Reality

Winter Guerra, Ezra Tal, Varun Murali, Gilhyun Ryou, Sertac Karaman

IROS 2019poster

FlightGoggles is a photorealistic sensor simulator for perception-driven robotic vehicles. The key contributions of FlightGoggles are twofold. First, FlightGoggles provides photorealistic exteroceptive sensor simulation using graphics assets generated with photogrammetry. Second, it provides the abi…

Cited by 166 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2016

Active planning based extrinsic calibration of exteroceptive sensors in unknown environments

Varun Murali, Carlos Nieto, Siddharth Choudhary, Henrik I. Christensen

IROS 2016poster

Existing Simultaneous Localization and Mapping systems require an extensive manual pre-calibration process. Non-manual calibration procedures use manipulators to create known patterns in order to estimate the unknown calibration. Calibration is often time-consuming and involves humans performing rep…

Cited by 3 Source ↗Scholar ↗