85 accepted papers
Multi-modal 3D object detection is important for reliable perception in robotics and autonomous driving.However, its effectiveness remains limited under adverse weather conditions due to weather-induced distortions and misalignment between different data modalities. In this work, we propose DiffFusi
Tactile and kinesthetic perceptions are crucial for human dexterous manipulation, enabling reliable grasping of objects via proprioceptive sensorimotor integration. For robotic hands, even though acquiring such tactile and kinesthetic feedback is feasible, establishing a direct mapping from this sen…
Reconstructing large-scale RGB point clouds is an important task in robotics, supporting perception, navigation, and scene understanding. Despite advances in LiDAR inertial visual odometry (LIVO), its performance remains highly sensitive to extrinsic calibration. Meanwhile, 3D vision foundation mode
Place recognition (PR) is a key component of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in autonomous vehicles and robotics. By efficiently matching descriptors generated from the current scene with a prebuilt reference database, existing PR methods enable accurate vehicle re-localization. However
Place recognition is the foundation for autonomous systems to achieve independent decision-making and secure operation. It is also crucial in tasks such as loop closure detection and global localization in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technology. Existing LiDAR-based place recognitio…
LiDAR-based place recognition (LPR) is a key component of visual localization and autonomous driving. Although LiDAR data are usually preprocessed by motion undistortion, which can greatly reduce scene distortion caused by sensor motion, 3-dimensional (3D) point clouds in complex scenes still show i
Robust cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) remains challenging despite the surge in recent progress. Existing methods still rely on field-of-view (FoV)-specific training paradigms, where models are optimized under a fixed FoV but collapse when tested on unseen FoVs and unknown orientations. This limi
Tracking any point (TAP) is a fundamental yet challenging task in computer vision, requiring high precision and long-term motion reasoning. Recent attempts to combine RGB frames and event streams have shown promise, yet they typically rely on synchronous or non-adaptive fusion, leading to temporal m
Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have enabled RGB-only SLAM systems to achieve high-fidelity scene representation. However, the heavy reliance of existing systems on photometric rendering loss for camera tracking undermines their robustness, especially in unbounded outdoor environment
Semantic segmentation and stereo matching, respectively analogous to the ventral and dorsal streams in our human brain, are two key components of autonomous driving perception systems. Addressing these two tasks with separate networks is no longer the mainstream direction in developing computer visi…
Text-to-point-cloud (T2P) localization aims to infer precise spatial positions within 3D point cloud maps from natural language descriptions, reflecting how humans perceive and communicate spatial layouts through language. However, existing methods largely rely on shallow text-point cloud correspond
Semantic segmentation is a key technique that enables mobile robots to understand and navigate surrounding environments autonomously. However, most existing works focus on segmenting known objects, overlooking the identification of unknown classes, which is common in real-world applications. In this
LiDAR-based SLAM is an essential technology for autonomous robots, benefited from its high accuracy and scale invariance. Interestingly, researchers have been increasingly focusing on establishing simple, efficient, but effective LiDAR SLAM systems recently. In this paper, we propose a novel and com
Localization is one of the core parts of modern robotics. Classic localization methods typically follow the retrieve-then-register paradigm, achieving remarkable success. Recently, the emergence of end-to-end localization approaches has offered distinct advantages, including a streamlined system arc
Articulated tracked robots face significant challenges in maintaining stable locomotion over uneven terrain due to unknown contact points between tracks and ground, which are critical for dynamic control. Unlike legged robots, where contact locations can be predicted, tracked systems require real-ti
Understanding how humans would behave during hand-object interaction (HOI) is vital for applications in service robot manipulation and extended reality. To achieve this, some recent works simultaneously forecast hand trajectories and object affordances on human egocentric videos. The joint predictio
Ground penetrating radar (GPR) based localization has gained significant recognition in robotics due to its ability to detect stable subsurface features, offering advantages in environments where traditional sensors like cameras and LiDAR may struggle. However, existing methods are primarily focused…
Point cloud prediction (PCP) aims to forecast future 3D point clouds of scenes by leveraging sequential historical LiDAR scans, offering a promising avenue to enhance the perceptual capabilities of autonomous systems. However, existing methods mostly adopt an end-to-end approach without explicitly m
Multimodal 3D object detectors leverage the strengths of both geometry-aware LiDAR point clouds and semantically rich RGB images to enhance detection performance. However, the inherent heterogeneity between these modalities, including unbalanced convergence and modal misalignment, poses significant
Place recognition is an important component for autonomous robot navigation. Many existing LiDAR-based place recognition methods encode the structural information of 3D LiDAR data into 2D image representations. However, most of these intermediates only exploit the projection in a single view, ignori
In this paper, we introduce a novel image-goal navigation approach, named RFSG. Our focus lies in leveraging the fine-grained connections between goals, observations, and the environment within limited image data, all the while keeping the navigation architecture simple and lightweight. To this end,
Forecasting how human hands would move around target objects on egocentric videos can provide prior knowledge to enhance the path planning capabilities of service robots and assistive wearable devices. During the hand-object interaction process, head movements always occur concurrently to provide ob
Place recognition is an important technique for autonomous mobile robotic applications. While single-modal sensor-based approaches have shown satisfactory performance, cross-modal place recognition remains underexplored due to the challenge of bridging the cross-modal heterogeneity gap. In this work
Accurate and robust simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is crucial for autonomous mobile systems, typically achieved by leveraging the geometric features of the environment. Incorporating semantics provides a richer scene representation that not only enhances localization accuracy in SLAM b
As lunar exploration missions grow increasingly complex, ensuring safe and autonomous rover-based surface exploration has become one of the key challenges in lunar exploration tasks. In this work, we have developed a lunar surface simulation system called the Lunar Exploration Simulator System (LESS
Place recognition is a fundamental technology of high relevance for autonomous robot navigation. Existing methods encounter significant challenges arising from scene variations (e.g., illumination changes, dynamic objects), view-point shifts, and difficulties in data fusion and alignment. These fact
Vision-based ego-velocity estimation is a fundamental problem in robot state estimation. However, the constraints of frame-based cameras, including motion blur and insufficient frame rates in dynamic settings, readily lead to the failure of conventional velocity estimation techniques. Mammals exhibi
Predicting hand motion is critical for understanding human intentions and bridging the action space between human movements and robot manipulations. Existing hand trajectory prediction (HTP) methods forecast the future hand waypoints in 3D space conditioned on past egocentric observations. However,
Place recognition is the foundation for autonomous systems to achieve independent decision-making and secure operation. It is also crucial in tasks such as loop closure detection and global localization in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technology. Existing LiDAR-based place recognitio
The robustness of correspondence-based point cloud registration relies on transformation invariance and intrinsic distinctiveness of the descriptors computed for registration. However, for challenging scenarios with different objects having similar local geometry and low point cloud overlap, existin
While millimeter-wave radars are widely used in robotics and autonomous driving, extrinsic calibration with other sensors remains challenging due to the sparsity and uncertainty of radar point clouds. In this paper, we propose a novel deep feature-matching-based online extrinsic calibration approach
LiDAR-based place recognition (LPR) is a key component for autonomous driving, and its resilience to environmental corruption is critical for safety in high-stakes applications. While state-of-the-art (SOTA) LPR methods perform well in clean weather, they still struggle with weather-induced corrupti
Inspired by how humans perceive, remember, and understand the world, semantic graphs have become an efficient solution for place representation and location. However, many current graph-based LiDAR loop closing methods focus on extracting adjacency matrices or semantic histograms to describe the sce
Scene flow estimation (SFE) and motion segmentation (MOS) using 4D radar are emerging yet challenging tasks in robotics and autonomous driving applications. Existing LiDAR- or RGB-D-based point cloud processing methods often deliver suboptimal performance on radar data due to radar signals' highly s
The task of occupancy forecasting (OCF) involves utilizing past and present perception data to predict future occupancy states of autonomous vehicle surrounding environments, which is critical for downstream tasks such as obstacle avoidance and path planning. Existing 3D OCF approaches struggle to p…
Visual place recognition (VPR) is crucial for robots to identify previously visited locations, playing an important role in autonomous navigation in both indoor and outdoor environments. However, most existing VPR datasets are limited to single-viewpoint scenarios, leading to reduced recognition acc
Understanding how the surrounding environment changes is crucial for performing downstream tasks safely and reliably in autonomous driving applications. Recent occupancy estimation techniques using only camera images as input can provide dense occupancy representations of large-scale scenes based on…
Image-to-point cloud (I2P) registration is a fundamental task for robots and autonomous vehicles to achieve cross-modality data fusion and localization. Current I2P registration methods primarily focus on estimating correspondences at the point or pixel level, often neglecting global alignment. As a
The millimeter-wave radar sensor maintains stable performance under adverse environmental conditions, making it a promising solution for all-weather perception tasks, such as outdoor mobile robotics. However, the radar point clouds are relatively sparse and contain massive ghost points, which greatl…
Fusion-based place recognition is an emerging technique jointly utilizing multi-modal perception data, to recognize previously visited places in GPS-denied scenarios for robots and autonomous vehicles. Recent fusion-based place recognition methods combine multi-modal features in implicit manners. Wh…
This letter introduces a novel method for object-level relocalization of robotic systems. It determines the pose of a camera sensor by robustly associating the object detections in the current frame with 3D objects in a lightweight object-level map. Object graphs, considering semantic uncertainties,
Feature extraction and matching are the basic parts of many robotic vision tasks, such as 2D or 3D object detection, recognition, and registration. As is known, 2D feature extraction and matching have already achieved great success. Unfortunately, in the field of 3D, the current methods may fail to
Moving object segmentation (MOS) provides a reliable solution for detecting traffic participants and thus is of great interest in the autonomous driving field. Dynamic capture is always critical in the MOS problem. Previous methods capture motion features from the range images directly. Differently,…
Precise and rapid delineation of sharp boundaries and robust semantics is essential for numerous downstream robotic tasks, such as robot grasping and manipulation, real-time semantic mapping, and online sensor calibration performed on edge computing units. Although boundary detection and semantic se
Place recognition is an important task for robots and autonomous cars to localize themselves and close loops in pre-built maps. While single-modal sensor-based methods have shown satisfactory performance, cross-modal place recognition that retrieving images from a point-cloud database remains a chal…
Moving object segmentation (MOS) and Ego velocity estimation (EVE) are vital capabilities for mobile systems to achieve full autonomy. Several approaches have attempted to achieve MOSEVE using a LiDAR sensor. However, LiDAR sensors are typically expensive and susceptible to adverse weather condition…
Loop closing is a crucial component in SLAM that helps eliminate accumulated errors through two main steps: loop detection and loop pose correction. The first step determines whether loop closing should be performed, while the second estimates the 6-DoF pose to correct odometry drift. Current method
High-definition (HD) semantic map generation of the environment is an essential component of autonomous driving. Existing methods have achieved good performance in this task by fusing different sensor modalities, such as LiDAR and camera. However, current works are based on raw data or network featu…
The reliance on accurate camera poses is a significant barrier to the widespread deployment of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) models for 3D reconstruction and SLAM tasks. The existing method introduces monocular depth priors to jointly optimize the camera poses and NeRF, which fails to fully exploit…
Visual place recognition (VPR) plays a pivotal role in autonomous exploration and navigation of mobile robots within complex outdoor environments. While cost-effective and easily deployed, camera sensors are sensitive to lighting and weather changes, and even slight image alterations can greatly aff…
In recent years, object-oriented simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has attracted increasing attention due to its ability to provide high-level semantic information while maintaining computational efficiency. Some researchers have attempted to enhance localization accuracy by integrating t…
Loop closing is a fundamental part of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for autonomous mobile systems. In the field of visual SLAM, bag of words (BoW) has achieved great success in loop closure. The BoW features for loop searching can also be used in the subsequent 6-DoF loop correction.
Mobile robots that navigate in unknown environments need to be constantly aware of the dynamic objects in their surroundings for mapping, localization, and planning. It is key to reason about moving objects in the current observation and at the same time to also update the internal model of the stat
Place recognition is an essential and challenging task in loop closing and global localization for robotics and autonomous driving applications. Benefiting from the recent advances in deep learning techniques, the performance of LiDAR place recognition (LPR) has been greatly improved. However, curre
A map of the environment is an essential component for robotic navigation. In the majority of cases, a map of the static part of the world is the basis for localization, planning, and navigation. However, dynamic objects that are presented in the scenes during mapping leave undesirable traces in the…
Open-world Instance Segmentation (OIS) is a challenging task that aims to accurately segment every object instance appearing in the current observation, regardless of whether these instances have been labeled in the training set. This is important for safety-critical applications such as robust auto…
Fast and accurate path planning is important for ground robots to achieve safe and efficient autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments. However, most existing methods exploiting either 2D or 2.5D maps struggle to balance the efficiency and safety for ground robots navigating in such…
Determining the state of a mobile robot is an essential building block of robot navigation systems. In this letter, we address the problem of estimating the robot's pose in an indoor environment using 2D LiDAR data and investigate how modern environment models can improve gold standard Monte-Carlo l
Identifying moving objects is a crucial capability for autonomous navigation, consistent map generation, and future trajectory prediction of objects. In this paper, we propose a novel network that addresses the challenge of segmenting moving objects in 3D LiDAR scans. Our approach not only predicts…
A distinctive representation of image patches in form of features is a key component of many computer vision and robotics tasks, such as image matching, image retrieval, and visual localization. State-of-the-art descriptors, from hand-crafted descriptors such as SIFT to learned ones such as HardNet,…
Lifelong localization in a given map is an essential capability for autonomous service robots. In this letter, we consider the task of long-term localization in a changing indoor environment given sparse CAD floor plans. The commonly used pre-built maps from the robot sensors may increase the cost a
Simultaneously odometry and mapping using LiDAR data is an important task for mobile systems to achieve full autonomy in large-scale environments. However, most existing LiDAR-based methods prioritize tracking quality over reconstruction quality. Although the recently developed neural radiance field…
Autonomous robotic tasks require actively perceiving the environment to achieve application-specific goals. In this paper, we address the problem of positioning an RGB camera to collect the most informative images to represent an unknown scene, given a limited measurement budget. We propose a novel…
Accurately perceiving instances and predicting their future motion are key tasks for autonomous vehicles, enabling them to navigate safely in complex urban traffic. While bird’s-eye view (BEV) representations are commonplace in perception for autonomous driving, their potential in a motion predictio…
Semantic perception is a core building block in autonomous driving, since it provides information about the drivable space and location of other traffic participants. For learning-based perception, often a large amount of diverse training data is necessary to achieve high performance. Data labeling…
Understanding the scene is key for autonomously navigating vehicles, and the ability to segment the surroundings online into moving and non-moving objects is a central ingredient of this task. Often, deep learning-based methods are used to perform moving object segmentation (MOS). The performance of
Accurate moving object segmentation is an es-sential task for autonomous driving. It can provide effective information for many downstream tasks, such as collision avoidance, path planning, and static map construction. How to effectively exploit the spatial-temporal information is a critical questio…
Ego-motion estimation is a fundamental building block of any autonomous system that needs to navigate in an environment. In large-scale outdoor scenes, 3D LiDARs are often used for this task, as they provide a large number of range measurements at high precision. In this paper, we propose a novel ap
Robots that are supposed to interact with or manipulate objects in the world must be able to track the poses of objects in their sensor data. Thus, Detecting and tracking the 6-DoF poses of targeted objects is important for aerial manipulation and is still in the early stage due to the high dynamics…
Real-time semantic segmentation of LiDAR data is crucial for autonomously driving vehicles and robots, which are usually equipped with an embedded platform and have limited computational resources. Approaches that operate directly on the point cloud use complex spatial aggregation operations, which
Place recognition is an important capability for autonomously navigating vehicles operating in complex environments and under changing conditions. It is a key component for tasks such as loop closing in SLAM or global localization. In this letter, we address the problem of place recognition based on
A key challenge for autonomous vehicles is to navigate in unseen dynamic environments. Separating moving objects from static ones is essential for navigation, pose estimation, and understanding how other traffic participants are likely to move in the near future. In this work, we tackle the problem
Semantic scene interpretation is essential for autonomous systems to operate in complex scenarios. While deep learning-based methods excel at this task, they rely on vast amounts of labeled data that is tedious to generate and might not cover all relevant classes sufficiently. Self-supervised repres
Fine-grained scene understanding is essential for autonomous driving. The context around a vehicle can change drastically while navigating, making it hard to identify and understand the different objects that may appear. Although recent efforts on semantic and panoptic segmentation pushed the field
Many modern robotics applications rely on 3D maps of the environment. Due to the large memory requirements of dense 3D maps, compression techniques are often necessary to store or transmit 3D maps efficiently. In this work, we investigate the problem of compressing dense 3D point cloud maps such as
The ability to localise is key for robot navigation. We describe an efficient method for vision-based localisation, which combines sequential Monte Carlo tracking with matching ground-level images to 2-D cartographic maps such as OpenStreetMaps. The matching is based on a learned embedded space repr…
The registration of point clouds is a key ingredient of LiDAR-based SLAM systems and mapping approaches. A challenging task in this context is finding the right data association between 3D points. This paper proposes a novel and flexible graph network architecture to tackle the keypoint matching pro
The ability to detect and segment moving objects in a scene is essential for building consistent maps, making future state predictions, avoiding collisions, and planning. In this letter, we address the problem of moving object segmentation from 3D LiDAR scans. We propose a novel approach that pushes
Accurately localizing in and mapping an environment are essential building blocks of most autonomous systems. In this paper, we present a novel approach for LiDAR odometry and mapping, focusing on improving the mapping quality and at the same time estimating the pose of the vehicle. Our approach per…
Robust and accurate, map-based localization is crucial for autonomous mobile systems. In this paper, we exploit range images generated from 3D LiDAR scans to address the problem of localizing mobile robots or autonomous cars in a map of a large-scale outdoor environment represented by a triangular m…
Exploiting past 3D LiDAR scans to predict future point clouds is a promising method for autonomous mobile systems to realize foresighted state estimation, collision avoidance, and planning. In this paper, we address the problem of predicting future 3D LiDAR point clouds given a sequence of past LiDA…
Robust and reliable ego-motion is a key component of most autonomous mobile systems. Many odometry estimation methods have been developed using different sensors such as cameras or LiDARs. In this work, we present a resilient approach that exploits the redundancy of multiple odometry algorithms usin…
Localization is a crucial capability for mobile robots and autonomous cars. In this paper, we address learning an observation model for Monte-Carlo localization using 3D LiDAR data. We propose a novel, neural network-based observation model that computes the expected overlap of two 3D LiDAR scans. T…
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a fundamental capability required by most autonomous systems. In this paper, we address the problem of loop closing for SLAM based on 3D laser scans recorded by autonomous cars. Our approach utilizes a deep neural network exploiting different cues gene…
Reliable and accurate localization and mapping are key components of most autonomous systems. Besides geometric information about the mapped environment, the semantics plays an important role to enable intelligent navigation behaviors. In most realistic environments, this task is particularly compli…