https://embodied-ai-radar.com/topics/perception.xml 2026-11-10T00:00:00ZEmbodied AI Radar https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12526 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Multi-sensor state estimation requires accurate spatial and temporal calibration between heterogeneous sensors. Existing spatiotemporal calibration methods typically represent sensor extrinsic parameters as a rigid-body transformation together with a scalar temporal offset, causing the spatial and temporal parameters to enter the estimation problem through separate mechanisms. While the spatial transformation composes directly with the robot pose, accounting for the temporal offset requires evaluating the trajectory at a shifted time, typically through motion compensation, interpolation, or a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12452 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

To address unreliable cross-view association in long-sequence feed-forward dense SLAM, this letter presents V3DSAM, an open-vocabulary semantic dense SLAM system that establishes physical correspondences at both the scene and object levels. The system combines feed-forward geometric estimates from VGGT-SLAM 2.0 with open-vocabulary semantic observations from SAM3. We introduce semantic-geometric dual-scale loop verification, which identifies false loop closures using pixel-level bidirectional reprojection and object-level 3D spatial correspondences, without accessing backbone-internal …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12038 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

This paper presents DPGS-SLAM (Diffusion-Prior and Provenance-Aware Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM) for dense mapping in environments containing dynamic objects. Dynamic observations can contaminate camera tracking and scene reconstruction in visual SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). Although 3DGS (3D Gaussian splatting) enables efficient dense mapping, existing 3DGS-SLAM systems may exhibit instability when dynamic objects violate their underlying static-scene assumption. Excluding dynamic observations can reduce their influence on tracking and mapping, but may leave occluded …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11940 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Underwater leader-follower formation control requires continuous relative-pose estimation despite degraded sensing conditions and limited onboard computation. This paper presents a reliability-adaptive multimodal perception framework for six-degree-of-freedom relative-pose tracking between two moving underwater robots. The framework integrates complementary visual, acoustic-ranging, and hydrodynamic measurements while accounting for their distinct physical characteristics and time-varying reliability. It adaptively weights modality contributions and models temporal dependencies with linear …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11934 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

The wide field of view of fisheye cameras and the simplicity of a monocular setup make monocular fisheye visual odometry (VO) attractive for robotic localization and mapping. Nevertheless, scale drift remains a major challenge over long trajectories. Unsupervised depth learning can help to mitigate this issue, but the pronounced distortion of fisheye images poses challenges for accurate depth estimation. This article presents S$^2$D-FVO, a monocular fisheye VO framework integrating spherical bundle adjustment (SBA)-guided unsupervised depth learning to improve scale consistency and depth …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11131 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

High-fidelity LiDAR simulation remains a bottleneck for scalable development and validation of autonomous systems. Existing generators can synthesize realistic scans, but they are typically constrained to a single sensor configuration, offer limited control over structure and geometry, and drift in long-horizon 4D generation. We present CrossLiDAR, a unified transformer-based framework capable of generating controllable and spatio-temporally consistent multi-sensor LiDAR sequences. Our approach leverages a rectified flow objective with a Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT) backbone, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10699 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is typically optimized from images only, many robotics and mapping applications provide both camera and high-definition LiDAR data, combining rich visual appearance with accurate geometric structure. We introduce PLS-GS, a probabilistic LiDAR scaffold for Gaussian Splatting that exploits this complementary sensing setting to construct a compact 3DGS representation aligned to the measured surface. PLS-GS fits a Hierarchical Gaussian Mixture Model jointly over position and color, yielding a continuous and adaptive scaffold that eliminates the need for discrete …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10566 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

LiDAR-based localization and mapping systems produce registered point clouds that serve as geometric measurements for downstream estimation and navigation. Registration errors introduce duplicated surfaces and structural deformation into these measurements. In the absence of an independent reference, online assessment relies on geometry accumulated from earlier measurements. Such assessment requires tolerance to sampling variation and an accumulation process in which observations enter the history only after evaluation. We therefore formulate a recursive Bayesian comparison that couples …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10547 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

In real homes, assistive robots must repeatedly locate targets from large furniture to tiny tabletop items, as people move objects between household surfaces. Uniformly instantiating detections at different scales as 3D objects can be brittle for small on-surface items; without explicit object-state validation, stale entries may persist after scene changes. Our key insight is to separate persistent 3D furniture entities from revisable surface-object hypotheses, retaining their visual evidence without requiring independent object geometry. We formalize this design as the Hypothesis Scene Graph …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10241 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Feed-forward 3D reconstruction turns an uncalibrated monocular stream into a dense point cloud in a single inference pass, orders of magnitude faster than classical structure-from-motion (e.g., COLMAP), and reliable on the weakly textured, repetitive surfaces where keypoint matching fails outright. However, raw point clouds lack the object identity, physical properties, and watertight volume required for robot learning. This gap widens under robot-native capture. A camera mounted on a robot constrained to a few degrees of freedom sees each object only partially, and the repetitive, weakly …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10239 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Geometric foundation models estimate dense geometry and camera parameters from monocular images, but reliable SLAM also requires consistent scale and accurate data association across successive reconstructions. We present DASH-SLAM, a monocular SLAM system that integrates metric depth predictions from pretrained Depth Anything 3 into a shared-keyframe pose graph without task-specific fine-tuning. DASH-SLAM derives scale corrections from depth ratios at shared anchor images and accumulates them across reconstructions, with a damping factor controlling their influence. These corrections rescale …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09584 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Inertial odometry is a compelling approach to state estimation for agile quadrotor flight due to its affordability, low weight, and robustness to perceptual degradation. However, relying only on integrated inertial measurements is impractical, as sensor errors and time-varying biases lead to significant pose drift. Although recent advances have enabled inertial odometry for drone racing, existing approaches show limited generalization to trajectories not seen during training. This work improves generalization by adopting a body-frame representation and incorporating body-frame torque dynamics …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09561 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Autonomous 3D exploration with UAVs requires efficient target selection under limited flight time and onboard computation. In conventional Euclidean-distance-based frontier pipelines, geometric distance may poorly represent the actual collision-free travel cost in cluttered environments, leading to inefficient frontier choices. This paper presents a lightweight path-aware frontier re-ranking method for LiDAR-based UAV exploration. The method first retains a small top-N set of promising frontier candidates using a lightweight utility function and then applies time-bounded RRT* planning to …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09045 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Building information models (BIM) can provide a global geometric reference for robot localization with LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO). However, as-built deviations from the as-designed model mean that a disagreement between a scan and the BIM may arise from a pose error, an offset wall surface (an as-built deviation or an unmodeled object in front of the wall), or a shifted room, and in some geometries these explanations produce identical observations. In this paper, we formalize this attribution problem as fault identification over three fault classes and derive a geometric criterion for when …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08920 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Human videos contain abundant object-manipulation demonstrations, but they do not directly provide motion cues that a robot can follow. We present HOC2R, a Hand-Object Contact trajectory extractor for Robot motion that combines frozen DINOv3 and SAM 2.1 features with learned heads for hand-object association and contact localization. HOC2R supports two modes: count-aware automation that detects, counts, and localizes visible contacts in untrimmed videos, and fixed-two localization for two-finger grippers when contact frames are known. On a 30-task point-annotated benchmark, count-aware …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08863 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Assistive robots and search-and-rescue platforms require reliable human state sensing in smoke, darkness, and privacy-sensitive environments, where cameras and LiDAR may be unreliable Millimeter-wave radar offers an alternative that works without ambient light, penetrates smoke, and does not capture visual appearance. However, the compact arrays that fit robot size, power, and cost budgets have limited apertures, producing joint-localization errors on the order of decimeters at a few meters, large enough to compromise the safety margins and tracking accuracy a robot depends on. Existing …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08361 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Cooperative localization uses odometry and inter-robot measurements to estimate the motion of a robot team. These measurements describe only relative geometry, but the team's estimated position and orientation can drift together over time, i.e., gauge drift. In this work, we study correction of this gauge drift using a radio attenuation map registered in the same world coordinate frame used for robot poses. Specifically, we propose Radio-to-Pose Information (RPI), an interface that converts power residuals and their pose derivatives into a Gaussian information matrix and vector pair. RPI …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08100 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Vision-based rover autonomy requires integrating perception, localization, planning and platform-specific control under limited sensing and computing resources. We present an open-source ROS 2 stack for following directional arrows, reaching a terminal cone and returning autonomously to the start. It connects YOLOv8n detection and geometric direction, range and bearing estimation with RGB-D SLAM, wheel-inertial state estimation, kinematics-aware planning, behavior-tree mission management and STM32 actuation. Standard interfaces separate reusable autonomy from the hardware layer; a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07687 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) can degrade during aerial inspection in repetitive or poorly textured environments. We propose an active environment-modification framework for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) relying on cameras and an inertial measurement unit only, without prior maps or additional localization sensors. Inspired by the fairy tale of Tom Thumb, the UAV creates visual features on demand by releasing ground markers or marking walls through physical contact. An information-based indicator triggers interventions using temporal confirmation and hysteresis. Evaluation includes three …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07630 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Event cameras are neuromorphic vision sensors with pixels that independently and asynchronously respond to brightness changes at microsecond resolution, supporting state estimation under rapid motion, motion blur, and high dynamic range (HDR) illumination. This also enables capture of high-frequency blinking patterns from light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Based on this, we propose a real-time event-based framework for LED tracking and six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) relative pose estimation using pulse-width modulation (PWM)-encoded LED markers. Multiple LEDs share a common blinking frequency and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07517 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

To serve a request in a human environment, a robot system must find an object that satisfies a functional requirement and a robot that can feasibly reach it. Scene graphs record which objects exist and where, but they often omit capabilities documented only in product manuals. Retrieval-augmented generation methods can read such manuals, yet they rarely reason jointly over object capabilities, physical instances, robot states, and dynamic connectivity. We introduce E2W-Bench, the Exists-to-Works Benchmark, which links dynamic hybrid scene graphs with real product manuals to evaluate …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07463 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

LiDAR-Inertial-Visual Odometry (LIVO) integrates complementary LiDAR, camera, and IMU measurements to achieve robust state estimation. However, most existing methods assume a fixed relative pose and accurate time synchronization between sensors. Toward modular and heterogeneous robotic systems, this paper presents FREE-LIVO, a tightly coupled odometry method that requires neither a rigid LiDAR-camera rig nor LiDAR-camera time synchronization. The proposed method uses a pretrained image feature matcher to establish correspondences between a camera image and a dense LiDAR intensity image …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06588 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Ground robots operating in temperate forests suffer from systematic LiDAR occlusions caused by tree trunks, creating persistent blind regions that degrade traversability estimation. In this paper, we propose FOSCo-Net, a self-supervised voxel completion framework that learns to reconstruct occluded geometry from a single scan using temporally accumulated observations as automatic supervision, and we evaluate cylindrical and Cartesian ego-centric grids with multiple decoder designs. FOSCo-Net consistently improves reconstruction quality and traversal safety, with a gated skip decoder achieving …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06378 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Loop closure detection conventionally cascades separate models for global retrieval, geometric verification, and relative pose estimation, leading to redundant computation and disconnected visual representations. We propose UniLoop, a unified framework that reuses the hierarchical representations of the pretrained geometric foundation model throughout this pipeline. A shared image encoder produces features for compact global descriptors; the same features are passed to the cross-view decoder for pairwise verification; and the original geometric predictions provide relative camera constraints …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06308 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Feed-forward geometric foundation models enable dense monocular reconstruction without requiring camera calibration, but independently reconstructed submaps can accumulate scale drift, and even a valid revisit can yield an inconsistent cross-submap measurement. We extend VGGT-SLAM 2.0 with fixed-root scale anchoring and short-sequence-assisted direct loop connections. SALAD selects an image pair between the initial submap and each eligible new submap; joint VGGT inference then uses learned implicit semantic-geometric cues to supply a scale-only anchor while preserving the original overlap …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06121 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Projector-based augmented reality enables natural interaction between users and devices by overlaying digital information onto the physical world through projected imagery. A key technical requirement of such systems is accurate positional alignment between the projector and the devices. Pixel-level Visible Light Communication (PVLC) achieves this alignment without external sensing infrastructure by embedding invisible spatial codes into each projected pixel through high-speed brightness modulation that preserves image quality. However, the information that PVLC transmits is inherently …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05938 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Visual-inertial odometry relies on visual features that correspond to 3D points with consistent projections across sequential frames. In reflective indoor-floor environments, however, specular floor patterns can be detected and triangulated as virtual features below the physical ground plane, producing unreliable feature associations and inconsistent visual residuals. This paper proposes a lightweight reflection-aware front-end for feature-based stereo VIO. Rather than suppressing all floor-region features, the proposed method estimates the ground height in real time and rejects only feature …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05361 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Reliable evaluation of visual 3D reconstruction and depth estimation in vegetation-rich outdoor environments is limited by the scarcity of geometric ground-truth data and the cost of complete scanner surveys. We present a LiDARbased reference-generation pipeline for evaluating the zero-shot performance of feed-forward visual-geometry models alongside conventional structure-from-motion (SfM) methods. The pipeline reuses camera images, LiDAR scans, and reference poses from existing multi-sensor localization datasets to generate per-view depth maps and visible reference point clouds. To address …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05172 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

We propose PadLoc, a training-free localization back-end that places a moving sensor within a known floor plan. Floor plans are cheap, persistent, and robust to appearance change, but recent learned-depth methods localize against them by filtering per-frame depth through dense $(x,y,\theta)$ pose grids. PadLoc keeps the swappable depth front-end and replaces the dense grid back-end with sparse geometric matching: dominant wall orientations define a small pose-candidate set, masked normalized cross-correlation scores observed free space against the plan, and a moving-pose Gaussian-mixture …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05119 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Dexterous manipulation involves not only moving objects, but also arranging the hand around them to maintain useful contacts and enable subsequent actions. Yet many learning-based systems specify goals primarily through object poses or trajectories, leaving hand-object configurations to emerge implicitly. We introduce DexHOT, which formulates dexterous manipulation as hand-object configuration transfer: moving between feasible configurations that jointly specify hand articulation and object pose relative to the wrist. DexHOT learns a reusable relation-conditioned transfer primitive from …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05084 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Repeated robotic monitoring requires localization across visits to the same environment, even if the environment changes. Such changes can substantially reduce persistent visual content, and repetitive structures can lead to incorrect cross-session correspondences. In this paper, we address visual multi-session registration of a new data recording (the query session) to a previously reconstructed reference map. Under substantial visual and structural changes, cross-session localization may be possible only for parts of the trajectory. In our approach, we therefore rely on a sparse set of …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03940 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

We describe our approach to the V2X-Real track of the UrbanTwin Sim2Real LiDAR Challenge, in which a 3D object detector must be trained exclusively on synthetic data and evaluated on unseen real roadside LiDAR from an Ouster OS1-64 unit, while the synthetic point clouds are simultaneously scored for distributional realism. Our final entry scores 0.7457 combined, from a detection mAP of 0.4382 and a realism score of 0.9251. Three findings account for most of our result, and all three were diagnostic rather than architectural. First, a coordinate frame mismatch between our predictions and the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03936 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

We describe our approach to the LUMPI track of the UrbanTwin Sim2Real LiDAR Challenge, in which a 3D object detector must be trained exclusively on synthetic data and evaluated on unseen real roadside LiDAR, while the synthetic point clouds are simultaneously scored for distributional realism. Our final entry scores 0.4793 combined, from a detection mAP of 0.1333 and a realism score of 0.9126. Our contribution is not a new architecture. Working from a PointPillars baseline, we obtained most of our gains from three sources. First, a diagnosis that small object failure in roadside LiDAR is a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03932 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Feature matching underpins many robotic perception tasks, including visual localization, mapping, SLAM, and autonomous navigation. Existing semi-dense matchers predict confidence on fixed grids, limiting correspondences to predefined locations and requiring costly high-resolution grids for precise localization. We present CoReMatch (Coordinate Refinement Match), a recurrent framework that refines correspondences directly in continuous coordinate space rather than predicting discrete confidence maps. CoReMatch progressively improves correspondence estimates by propagating information across …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03588 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Robust 3D point-cloud recognition is critical for robotics, mapping, and urban sensing, yet point-cloud classifiers often suffer performance drops under domain shifts caused by sensor changes, environmental variation, and acquisition artifacts. Many existing adaptation methods are difficult to deploy in practice because they require access to source data or the internal parameters of the source model, which may be restricted by privacy, licensing, or security constraints. We present 3D-BBDA, a backpropagation-free black-box domain adaptation framework that adapts a source-trained predictor to …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03189 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Estimating the metric 3D position of people from a monocular camera is important for robot navigation and motion prediction. Lightweight pose-based localizers are attractive for robotic hardware with limited computational resources because they operate on compact 2D keypoints. However, they typically discard the richer visual representations computed by the pose estimator. We introduce MoSoLoco, a per-frame monocular 3D human localizer that combines the pose detector's internal visual features with the detected 2D skeleton, without requiring an additional RGB or depth encoder. MoSoLoco can …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03106 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Field robots operating in mines, tunnels, and disaster areas require reliable localization despite GNSS denial and degraded camera and LiDAR measurements caused by dust, smoke, or poor illumination. Missions involving both ground and aerial robots further motivate complementary sensing modalities that do not depend on visibility, preinstalled infrastructure, or wheel contact. This letter presents MISLAM, a tightly coupled magnetic-inertial simultaneous localization and mapping system using an IMU and a nine-magnetometer array, without relying on external odometry or platform-specific motion …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02968 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Contact transitions allow humanoid robots to redistribute object support across the whole body, enabling manipulation beyond hand-only grasps. Human videos provide a scalable source of such transitions for robots to learn from. However, body occlusion disrupts object pose tracking and corrupts retargeted motion. Moreover, accurately reproducing the object trajectory does not ensure that the robot applies stabilizing forces at the intended contacts, risking slips or drops in later phases. To address these challenges, we propose ReContact, which reconstructs and retargets human-object …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02537 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Purpose: Blended augmented reality (AR) overlays can provide ambiguous depth cues in which subsurface anatomy floats above the tissue surface. We investigate whether an interactive 3D cutaway visualization can improve robot-assisted target localization. Methods: We propose Virtual Box, an interactive 3D cutaway interface that allows users to independently manipulate the viewing perspective to inspect subsurface targets. In a controlled, counterbalanced within-subject tissue phantom study, 15 engineering students used Virtual Box and a depth-enhanced blended AR overlay to position a da Vinci …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02171 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Dexterous in-hand manipulation is commonly formulated around explicit object pose estimation, yet reliable pose tracking is challenging under severe hand-object occlusions and often requires object-specific supervision. This dependence creates a bottleneck between perception and control that can limit robustness and scalability. We present an end-to-end visuomotor framework for dexterous in-hand reorientation that operates on RGB observations and proprioception without intermediate pose estimation. Our approach jointly learns visual representations and control policies through behavior …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01759 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

This paper presents a teleoperation system for service robots that integrates human pose estimation with virtual reality (VR) to enable intuitive remote control. By using the Mediapipe framework for 2D pose detection and extending it with RGB-D data from the Intel RealSense D455 camera, a comprehensive 3D human pose estimation is achieved. This data is then mapped to the robot's kinematics, allowing the operator to control the robot's movements naturally. A VR interface was developed to provide an immersive perspective, enhancing the operator's situational awareness. Real-world experiments …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00756 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Streaming 3D reconstruction models keep past video frames in a recurrent state, fast weights from test-time training, or a key-value (KV) cache. Each written frame shifts the coordinate frame of later cameras or occupies GPU memory. Training-free rules decide what to write from a signal of the current frame. How much they write accounts for their mean accuracy: spending the update budget of a gate at uniformly spaced frames, with no signal, matches nine published gates, and the budget bounds the drift of the state wherever the writes fall. We propose SceneBound, a training-free rule that …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00482 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

The absolute trajectory error (ATE) is the standard measure of camera-motion accuracy, from SLAM to feed-forward 3D reconstruction. On the common Sintel protocol, a constant-velocity straight line using no images has a lower mean ATE than 10 of 11 recent models re-run with official code. Two properties of ATE's alignment explain this. First, it maps any constant-velocity prediction onto the best-fitting line through the true path, so the line scores the path's regression residual. A residual signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) criterion predicts when moving a prediction towards its constant-velocity …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41833 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Camera localization methods are mostly multi-stage pipelines relying on dedicated and complex maps that are costly to construct, store, and maintain over time. Alternatively, well-structured maps that organize scenes with compact yet expressive primitives are often readily available, providing rich structural and semantic cues that humans can interpret. However, their potential for direct camera localization remains largely unexplored due to the significant modality gap between map primitives and visual observations. This motivates a new concept for localization, which estimates camera poses …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41768 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Recent years have seen multiple impressive results in visual-inertial odometry (VIO) techniques, by which accurate state estimation can be achieved via the extended Kalman filter (EKF) or nonlinear optimization. However, these approaches are rarely open source, and they tend to fail in real experiments due to the temporary lack of feature points and fast motion. Therefore, in this study, we used encoders to overcome the temporary failure of purely vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Here, we propose a generative measurement model for encoders and derive an expression …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41671 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) is a fundamental topic in robotics research. Beyond research, VIO has been adopted in a wide range of products. In this manuscript, we present OpenVIO, an open-source VIO system for research and practical applications. It is released under the MIT license. OpenVIO supports pinhole and fisheye cameras and extends this support to stitched 360{\deg} images. We describe each part of the system together with its design considerations. We also report benchmark results with other open-source VIO systems on public datasets. OpenVIO is available as open source at …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41602 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

RGB-D SLAM requires accurate online tracking, high-quality rendering, and geometrically consistent reconstruction. Existing Gaussian SLAM methods mainly optimize Gaussian primitives with photometric, depth, or local frame-to-model constraints, which are often insufficient in indoor scenes with weak textures, large planar structures, noisy depth, and long trajectories. The resulting maps may suffer from pose drift, surface thickness artifacts, noisy normals, and blurred structural boundaries. We propose DrawSplat, an Atlanta World-guided implicit Gaussian SLAM framework for indoor …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41352 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Camera--LiDAR perception on mobile robots and intelligent vehicles depends on reliable sensor geometry throughout deployment. Installation variations create uncertainty in the initial extrinsics, while changing observation quality makes frame-wise estimates fluctuate during operation. This paper presents CalibSwitch, an observation-driven framework that separates absolute extrinsic recovery from selective state maintenance. A cross-modal absolute extrinsic generator (CAEG) combines projection-free bidirectional feature interaction with geometry-regularized learning to recover complete SE(3) …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41235 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Centralized multi-agent path planning with cooperative localization in GPS-denied environments is generally computationally intractable when formulated in full belief space due to tightly coupled uncertainty dynamics. Prior work typically approximates belief dynamics or restricts inter-agent coupling. This work examines a multi-agent planning problem in which a primary agent must reach a goal in minimum time subject to a chance-constrained collision-avoidance requirement and a terminal bound on localization uncertainty. We obtain a tractable surrogate of the underlying belief-space problem by …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41190 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Monocular depth estimation is a fundamental capability for 3D spatial perception in robotic and intelligent systems. While data-driven discriminative methods have achieved compelling performance for monocular depth estimation, generative approaches can reconstruct fine structural details with stronger generalization. However, most existing generative diffusion models suffer from low inference efficiency caused by multi-step sampling, whereas single-step diffusion models struggle to recover high-fidelity depth maps. To mitigate these drawbacks, this paper presents FlowMoDE, a coarse-to-fine …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40429 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

This paper studies UAV path planning in areas where GPS signals are not present. Because these drones can easily get lost when they don't have GPS, they must rely on dead reckoning and occasionally pass near cellular towers, which act as landmarks to reset and fix their position. The goal is to find the shortest path from a start to a goal location while keeping the estimation uncertainty within a given bound. To solve this problem, we propose a localization-constrained A* planner that treats uncertainty as a hard constraint during search. The robot state and covariance are propagated using …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40050 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Efficient crowd navigation requires anticipating dynamic collision-free space without relying on fragile object tracking. We propose the Don't Risk It Planner (DRIP), an end-to-end LiDAR-only planning framework that couples occupancy forecasting with trajectory-conditioned clearance and uncertainty estimation. Operating directly on LiDAR-derived occupancy grid histories, DRIP predicts a distribution over minimum robot-obstacle clearance for candidate control sequences to evaluate collision risk. The model is trained using a risk cost that grounds predictive uncertainty directly in empirical …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39708 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Localization is an essential capability of intelligent robots. However, in real-world constrained environments, robots often cannot rely on external localization systems. Therefore, this paper proposes an online particle-filter localization method based on Monte Carlo sampling. The method is applied to the localization of a mobile robot in a maze environment and requires only four range sensors mounted on the front, rear, left, and right sides of the vehicle, without the need for any heading information. Simulation experiments demonstrate that even in a maze where local regions are highly …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39691 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Smartphone indoor localization requires low-cost, robust positioning across scene transitions and phone-use variations. Pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) enables infrastructure-free deployment but accumulates errors from heading drift, structural transitions, and carrying-mode changes. Existing methods often treat contextual cues as a single event stream or local correction signal, limiting their ability to address distinct localization errors. This paper presents a framework enhanced by hierarchical multi-sensor context recognition. A jointly data- and model-driven recognition model predicts …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39005 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Radio-frequency (RF) sensing enables robot ego-motion estimation in darkness, smoke, and fog, yet RF odometry remains challenging because multipath and moving reflectors make cross-frame matching highly ambiguous. Existing methods often rely on auxiliary inertial sensors or ground-truth pose supervision. We present RFWalk, a self-supervised, RF-only odometry framework that models dense correspondences across range-azimuth frames as random walks on a space-time graph and learns them from unlabeled sequences through temporal cycle consistency. To rule out correspondences that are …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38141 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Future planetary exploration missions require teams of robots to collaboratively map unknown environments under severe communication limits, constrained onboard computation, and no central infrastructure. In this field report, we present SKiD-SLAM, a distributed multi-robot LiDAR simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system for such environments, and report its deployment across two mission concepts: cave exploration and scientific surface exploration. We survey the communication and computation budgets of actual planetary missions and select modules that fit these budgets for …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38080 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Recent advances in monocular depth estimation have demonstrated highly accurate 3D reconstructions within in-distribution terrestrial domains. This study investigates the efficacy of several state-of-the-art approaches to reconstruct out-of-distribution lunar environments using the NASA Ames Polar Optical Lunar Analog Reconstruction (POLAR) stereo dataset and Apollo 17 surface imagery. By leveraging these datasets, we establish a robust analog-to-field validation pipeline that evaluates quantitative performance against ground-truth physical analogs and qualitative performance against …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37929 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Radar systems can recover scene geometry and recognize predefined categories, but these outputs do not provide a persistent spatial representation for open-ended language queries. Such queries require linking observations from different viewpoints to the same physical locations. We present TextRadar, a framework that constructs a scene-level 3D occupancy-language field from panoramic radar observations. The field combines occupancy with scale-dependent language features at surface locations, allowing the reconstructed scene to be queried with new descriptions. A single-frame radar …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37818 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Robots, autonomous vehicles, and consumer 360{\deg} cameras use fisheye lenses for wide fields of view (FoVs). Simulation-ready digital twins require photorealistic rendering across the full FoV and an aligned collision mesh. However, prior fisheye Gaussian Splatting methods only rasterize up to 180{\deg} and do not produce meshes, while Gaussian surface reconstruction methods assume pinhole training images. We present GOFish, the first 3D Gaussian Splatting surface reconstruction method to train directly on fisheye images, rasterize FoVs beyond 180{\deg}, and extract an aligned mesh from the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37652 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Dexterous manipulation with multi-fingered hands is the next frontier of robotics, yet learned hand skills remain limited to simple grasps or basic repeated motions, such as rotating an object. As robots attempt more demanding in-hand maneuvers, safety, such as not dropping the object, becomes critical, yet it is rarely measured. We study in-hand object pose reaching, a task that demands diverse and difficult grasps: moving an object to almost any position and orientation within reach of the fingers, at any wrist orientation, through long sequences of consecutive goals. We present a recipe …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37602 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

We present RESPLE2, a recursive multi-sensor state estimation framework using non-uniform B-splines for 6-DoF motion representation. By exploiting the knot-clamping boundary property, we propose a theoretically grounded mechanism for exact control-point prediction directly informed by inertial kinematics along the trajectory, with knot placement adapted to motion and measurement availability. Within an iterated extended Kalman filter, we perform this prediction using a subset of inertial measurements. A subsequent reset step preserves trajectory consistency as the knots extend. The update …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37350 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Accurate camera-LiDAR calibration is an essential prerequisite for robust multi-modal perception in robotics. Recent target-less methods based on learned pixel-point correspondences achieve high extrinsic calibration accuracy and generalize across environments. However, they operate on rectified images with known camera intrinsics, restricting their applicability to systems whose cameras have already been individually calibrated. We present a fully automatic, target-less framework that jointly estimates camera intrinsics, radial-tangential distortion, and camera-LiDAR extrinsics from raw …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37111 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Active simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) addresses the problem of planning robot motion to build complete and accurate maps of unknown environments through efficient exploration while maintaining high localization accuracy. This raises a dilemma between exploring unknown spaces to expand coverage and exploiting visited regions to perform active loop closures. Despite numerous prior works on ground robots, aerial robots with high agility and constrained sensor suites face more significant localization drift and thereby demand dedicated active SLAM planning. Moreover, a unified …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36816 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

This study develops an integrated, reproducible design assessment for a four-wheel educational rover intended for the high-school remote-control division of the 2027 NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge. The architecture combines commercial differential drive control, independently sprung wheel carriers, separate drive and task batteries, and a Raspberry Pi-based subsystem that executes received imaging and ranging commands. The analysis reconciles component lists with dimensioned computer-aided design views, derives mobility and electrical constraints, and connects sensor geometry to …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36625 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Sparse event responses produce uneven keypoint errors whose effects on spacecraft pose depend on correspondence geometry and the reliability of successive observations. We present a reliability-aware framework connecting polarity--time localization, geometric recovery, event--CAD refinement, and trajectory optimization. A three-branch representation combines positive events, negative events, and recent-event timing through cross-branch attention and gating, followed by spatiotemporal aggregation. An ordered semantic-point head estimates relative correspondence precision for geometrically …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36599 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Quadruped robots are increasingly deployed in hazardous environments such as disaster response and facility inspection, where external-camera monitoring is essential for safe operation. This setting is challenging because quadrupeds are articulated systems with time-varying leg joints, leg symmetry, and frequent self-occlusions, which make keypoint correspondence ambiguous. Moreover, no public benchmark exists, making quantitative comparison difficult. To address these challenges, we propose QuadPose, which estimates the full-body 18-DoF pose (6-DoF base pose + 12-DoF joint angles) from …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36598 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Handheld data-collection interfaces such as the Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) allow manipulation demonstrations to be gathered in the wild without a robot in the loop, but the quality of the resulting action labels is bounded by the accuracy of vision-based localization. Existing systems recover end-effector pose from monocular visual-inertial odometry, which is subject to scale ambiguity and drift, or delegate tracking to closed-source modules and external infrastructure that reintroduce cost and setup burden. We present OpenJaws, a fully open hardware and software framework for …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36312 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Monocular outdoor navigation requires robust camera motion estimation and a dense, navigable map, where 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM serves this task through an explicit differentiable parameterization and closed-form projection. However, typically, the geometry is recovered by associating 2D pixels with 3D points, so a modular SLAM system absorbs tracking error into the map, leading to cascading degradation. To address these gaps, we present SG^2SLAM, which couples streaming spatial geometry with a ray-conditioned 3DGS kernel. Streaming spatial geometry replaces the per- frame …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35642 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is an important means for loop closure detection in visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). While state-of-the-art VPR and SLAM approaches excel in urban and feature-rich natural environments, the vast and feature-poor environments of extraterrestrial surfaces like on the Moon or Mars pose severe challenges for existing approaches. This paper presents a novel benchmark, VPR-Space, to evaluate VPR capabilities on extraterrestrial surfaces. There are three contributions: (1) We collected sixteen VPR database-query datasets based on existing data from …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35626 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Efficient robotic data collection remains a major bottleneck for vision-language-action (VLA) policy learning, especially for tasks requiring accurate end-effector positioning and camera-action alignment. This challenge is particularly severe in electronic-waste disassembly, where robots operate in cluttered assemblies of densely packed, visually similar components. Full digital-twin simulation is difficult because many parts are thin, reflective, or mechanically complex, making accurate object-level meshes and contact models difficult to obtain. In this work, we focus on pre-contact reaching …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35363 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Accurate localization in GPS-denied and visually degraded environments affected by smoke, dust, or fog remains a critical challenge for autonomous systems. While LiDAR provides high-resolution spatial perception, its performance deteriorates under particulate occlusion. In contrast, frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar offers robustness under such conditions but suffers from sparse measurements and outliers. This article presents a resilient decentralized LiDAR Radar Inertial Odometry (LRIO) framework that fuses the complementary strengths of LiDAR, radar, and inertial sensing to …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35092 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

For safety of the intended functionality (SOTIF) analysis according to ISO 21448, a machine learning object detector for light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point clouds can meet a performance target, a limit on the mean per-frame share of wrong detections among accepted detections, by rejecting detections above an uncertainty threshold. A threshold selected on data of one condition carries a statistical guarantee only for data distributed like its selection data, whereas SOTIF analysis covers every triggering condition. This paper presents an uncertainty evaluation in which the threshold is …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34873 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

This paper studies UAV swarm search in GNSS-denied maritime environments, where inter-UAV ranging drives cooperative localization and uncertainty propagates along the multi-hop reference chain, affecting connectivity, collision avoidance, and search effectiveness. We propose an uncertainty-aware control barrier function (CBF) framework approximating cascading localization covariance through Fisher information matrices. First, the cascading covariance model captures how ranging noise and neighbor uncertainty accumulate along the localization chain. Second, uncertainty-tightened CBFs …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34745 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Visual captures provide detailed scene appearance, but converting them into interactive simulation environments requires object reconstruction, physical modeling, and correction of intermediate errors. We present SceneAgent, an agentic pipeline that coordinates these steps through simulator-based visual inspection and repair. The pipeline processes 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), photogrammetry, LiDAR captures, AI-generated 3DGS scenes, and 4D videos of dynamic scenes, and combines object segmentation, physical parameter estimation, part decomposition, articulation, and deformable simulation. …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34393 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

This report investigates an acoustic surveillance framework for localizing and tracking narrowband adversarial acoustic sources that threaten offshore data centers. Unlike conventional sound source localization (SSL) methods that rely on broadband signals and compact receiver arrays, the considered scenario involves narrowband emissions and sparse sensors. In such scenarios, the observed time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) measurements are aliased and produce an ambiguous solution space, rendering conventional localization methods ineffective. To address this challenge, we integrate a mobile …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34271 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

We propose a novel method for robust point cloud registration with only one tunable parameter. Our method, dubbed TLP, uses truncated $L_p$ functions with different values of $p$ to assign priority scores to correspondences, select the hypothesis, and refine the final model. By leveraging the robustness of truncated functions, TLP effectively handles the high outlier rates commonly encountered in real-world 3D feature matching. We also exploit GPU parallelization to evaluate hypotheses efficiently, enabling registration from thousands of correspondences in under a second on average. With only …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34060 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Construction robots operating near workers require navigation that can anticipate human motion while remaining robust to dynamic and unstructured site conditions. However, existing social navigation methods depend on hand-crafted interaction rules, labeled demonstrations, or robot-specific control policies, limiting their scalability and transferability in construction environments. We propose a real-time, LiDAR-only framework that learns interaction-aware path corrections from unlabeled demonstrations. Constant-velocity extrapolation generates residual learning targets, while a GNN models …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34041 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Dynamic and continuously evolving environments present significant challenges for robotic mapping and scene understanding, particularly on construction sites where moving agents, temporary obstacles, and persistent structural changes coexist. While dynamic and long-term SLAM methods can detect motion and environmental changes, their outputs are predominantly metric representations that provide limited structure for higher-level spatial and temporal reasoning. This paper presents a LiDAR-based real-time temporal construction scene graph (T-ConSG) that jointly represents free-space regions, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33735 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Floor traction influences wheel-slip behavior, dead-reckoning accuracy, and the navigation performance of wheeled mobile robots that rely on wheel odometry. As these robots become increasingly common in GNSS-denied indoor environments, including automated manufacturing and retail facilities, their onboard measurements could also be used to characterize floor conditions and improve localization. In this study, a skid-steer robot was driven over five floor surfaces with distinct traction characteristics using commanded velocity profiles designed to induce wheel slip through repeated …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33338 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

High-performance optical flow networks are difficult to deploy on resource-constrained edge accelerators because their iterative refinement warps features by the current flow, which relies on flow-dependent resampling and data-dependent memory access. We present TinyFlow, a 1.26M-parameter warp-free optical flow network that preserves iterative coarse-to-fine refinement by replacing the warp with a fixed-window correlation over constant offsets, so the whole network compiles as a single static INT8 graph. Quantization-aware fine-tuning, warp-teacher distillation, and model souping reduce the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33174 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Rapid illumination transitions can disturb Visual SLAM (VSLAM) by saturating images before the Automatic Exposure (AE) policy adapts, removing the visual correspondences needed to maintain tracking. Our proposed methods mitigate this disturbance at two levels: B-Adapt acquires adaptive exposure brackets to cover the scene dynamic range while promoting photometric overlap, and BVSLAM directly uses the multi-exposure sequence as constraints in a factor graph state estimator without relying on High Dynamic Range (HDR) merging. We evaluate both methods against state-of-the-art approaches in …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32645 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

Indoor UAV localization with minimal onboard sensing remains challenging, particularly in dynamic environments. We propose augmented filtered Monte Carlo localization (AF-MCL) for 2D localization using only four single-point range sensors and measured heading. AF-MCL rejects range measurements inconsistent with the known static map and adaptively injects particles to recover from localization divergence and kidnapping. Beam classification is performed only at the previous position estimate, making its ray-casting cost independent of the particle count. The particle distribution additionally …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31476 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Open-vocabulary 3D semantic maps have emerged as a key spatial memory representation for long-horizon robot autonomy, enabling robots to reason about objects, their spatial relationships, and past observations across time. However, existing object-centric semantic maps are primarily designed for static environments and rely on an append-only point integration strategy, where newly observed points are accumulated but previously integrated points are rarely reevaluated. Consequently, perception errors accumulate over time, and outdated points persist after objects move or disappear. Although …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31334 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Vision and touch provide complementary cues for object pose and local contact geometry, but external cameras are often occluded at the contact site. We present GelSlim 5.0, a fingertip sensor that acquires visual and tactile observations with one fixed camera and a continuous UV-responsive contact layer. By switching illumination, the camera sequentially acquires through-membrane visual images and contact-sensitive tactile images from a shared viewpoint, avoiding inter-camera extrinsic calibration. To combine these observations, we introduce VisTacFusion, a multimodal transformer with …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31221 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Multi-robot SLAM allows robots to improve their estimates by exchanging map information, but repeated exchanges create unknown correlations between local estimators. Covariance intersection (CI) can fuse estimates without tracking these correlations. In right-invariant extended Kalman filter (RI-EKF) SLAM, however, point features obtain their invariant errors through the robot rotation, so a neighbor's map estimate is expressed in its own error coordinates and is correlated with its pose, and cannot be fused by CI directly. This paper presents Joint-CI, a unified fusion method for distributed …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31121 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Generated robot videos can look convincing while depicting the wrong interac- tion: a different object is moved, a grasp disappears, or a placement ends out- side its destination. We introduce RGraph-Eval, a reference-based framework that makes these discrepancies explicit through task-grounded temporal scene graphs. Unlike approaches that construct separate evidence representations for different evaluation dimensions, we organize task entities, interactions, and motion within a unified, interpretable scene graph representation. A foundation-model pipeline identifies manipulation roles, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29845 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Autonomous mobile robots operating in dense crowds and cluttered sites require $360^\circ$ perception to react to surrounding hazards. While panoramic LiDAR offers full-surround coverage, learning representations within reinforcement learning (RL) is sample-inefficient under sparse rewards, and existing 3D pretrained point-cloud encoders are too memory-heavy for massively parallel RL simulation. We present RangeNav, a compact (183k parameters) LiDAR range-image encoder pretrained entirely on synthetic data. RangeNav uses anisotropic convolutions and circular padding to handle the extreme …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29647 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Many robotic construction applications, such as progress tracking, require registering a sensor trajectory to a prior 2D floor plan. Visual capture is attractive for its low cost and availability, but aligning a visual simultaneous localization and mapping (VSLAM) map to a floor plan is difficult; VSLAM recovers geometry only up to an unknown similarity transform, the sparse point cloud is cross-modal to the symbolic floor plan, sites are only partially built during capture, and construction sites are visually repetitive, degrading map quality while removing distinctive features. Existing …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29438 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Recently, multi-node inertial measurement unit (multi-IMU) systems have shown promise for robust odometry in legged robots. Multi-IMU fusion can improve legged robot odometry but requires accurate spatiotemporal calibration among the sensors. Existing multi-IMU calibration methods, designed for aerial or handheld platforms, face challenges on legged robots because routine locomotion may provide insufficient excitation, while foot slips, impacts, and vibrations introduce measurement disturbances. To address these challenges, we propose A2I-Calib++, a kinematics-driven anti-noise active …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29374 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Robots deployed in human-centered environments need maps that support both geometric navigation and open-vocabulary semantic queries beyond a fixed label set. A key challenge is enriching such maps with semantic information without relying on manually annotated segmentation masks or closed-set semantic categories. Existing geometry-driven active mapping maximizes coverage but treats semantics as a passive by-product of the collected trajectory, whereas active semantic mapping typically depends on supervised semantic segmentation. We present AOV-GS, an active 3D Gaussian mapping system that …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28962 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Accurate 6-DoF object pose tracking is essential for robotic interaction, yet conventional monocular pipelines frequently suffer from catastrophic divergence under rapid object motion. We present RoPT, a robust tracking framework engineered to overcome this limitation by unifying visual perception, temporal kinematics, and global re-localization into a tightly coupled closed loop. Unlike existing open-loop trackers, RoPT delivers three critical capabilities that fundamentally alter system resilience. First, the visual perception component tracks object masks to robustly handle partial and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28791 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Target-based extrinsic calibration estimates the rigid transform between sensors from a few observations of a known target, and its result is commonly assessed by the root-mean-square error of the fitted residuals. However, this scalar error is computed on the same observations and therefore cannot indicate whether to accept the result, re-extract, recollect or add observations. This paper presents VeriCalib, which formulates extrinsic calibration as a verifiable estimation problem and reports a calibration state. The key insight is a two-level extrinsic compensation mechanism, in which the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28701 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Accurate ground plane normal estimation is essential for odometry in spherical mobile mapping systems (SMMS), which face challenges from rapid rotations and limited ground coverage. We propose two RANSAC-based approaches: single-scan estimation with normal vector scoring and multi-step validation, and LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO)-based estimation using a global 3D map. Evaluated across diverse real-world datasets against terrestrial laser scanner ground truth, results show that LIO-based estimation significantly outperforms single-scan methods in accuracy and robustness. Integrating ground …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28530 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Collaborative perception enables agents to retrieve the scene semantics and geometry beyond the field of view of any individual agent. This broader scene understanding enhances transportation safety and improves efficiency in multi-robot systems. However, existing collaborative semantic occupancy methods rely on dense 3D voxel annotations and are limited to recognizing objects within a predefined set of semantic classes. To overcome these limitations, we present CoGaussian, an open-vocabulary Gaussian-based collaborative semantic occupancy prediction framework. CoGaussian represents a scene …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27704 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Semantic occupancy mapping supports embodied perception during exploration and detailed scene understanding afterward, giving rise to two complementary requirements: online incremental mapping for maintaining an up-to-date global map under causal constraints, and offline global map refinement for improving the completed scene representation with additional computation. We present VEOcc++, a unified voxel-centric framework that connects both stages through a persistent sparse voxel feature map. During exploration, the map expands with newly observed regions and integrates aligned local …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27696 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

3D scene graphs support language-guided navigation by organizing physical entities and their containment and spatial relations into hierarchical maps. Building such structured maps requires a scene representation that consistently distinguishes semantic regions and object instances across viewpoints. To this end, we present PanoGraphGS, a unified framework that integrates panoptic 3D Gaussian representation learning with hierarchical 3D scene graph construction. The framework learns semantic and instance features on shared Gaussian geometry. Prototype-based semantic learning and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27547 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Online LiDAR-camera calibration remains a fundamental yet challenging task in the field of robotics. Recently, deep learning-based data-driven approaches have emerged, offering high-precision, targetless calibration capabilities. However, existing methods often suffer from a critical dataset shortcut phenomenon due to the lack of extrinsic diversity in their training data. Networks tend to overfit to fixed nominal extrinsic configurations, leading to severe performance degradation and poor generalization in real-world deployments. To address this limitation, we propose a highly generalizable …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27522 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Omnidirectional cameras provide surround-view information, significantly overcoming the field-of-view constraints for traditional visual localization systems. However, existing localization systems fail to fully exploit the characteristics of omnidirectional cameras, struggling to deliver accurate and robust localization performance amidst scene content variations and illumination-induced appearance changes. In this work, we propose OmniVLoc, a surround-view localization system based on a topo-metric framework. By integrating state-of-the-art global place recognition and monocular depth …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27310 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

In real-time autonomous field applications, GNSS is often unreliable and inaccurate. A possible solution is localizing against a prebuilt map like a satellite image, as it is georeferenced and already surveyed. In this work, we localize a spinning radar measurement against overhead RGB imagery with a learned observation model. We use a radar representation pretrained by masked reconstruction and align it to features from a satellite image. A particle filter propagated by radar odometry proposes candidate poses, and our observation model provides a likelihood over these poses. We evaluate our …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27275 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Maximum clique and maximum consensus are widely used formulations for robust point cloud registration in robotics. Maximum consensus seeks one transformation that aligns as many matches as possible, while maximum clique selects matches through pairwise distance tests. Maximum clique is often used as a substitute for or an approximation to maximum consensus, with empirical evidence suggesting a close relationship. However, how closely the two formulations agree is not fully understood. We study this relationship theoretically. We show that a maximum clique can have arbitrarily large alignment …