Natural environments present a complex challenge to robotics perception systems. Current models, particularly vision foundation models, are largely trained on structured, urban environments leading to weaknesses in their perception for field robotics tasks. We showcase the limitations of current models using our recently released WildCross benchmark, a new cross-modal benchmark for place recognition and metric depth estimation in large-scale natural environments. WildCross comprises over 476K sequential RGB frames with semi-dense depth and surface normal annotations, each aligned with accurate 6DoF pose and synchronized dense lidar submaps. In this work, we provide an expanded analysis of the benchmark results from the recent WildCross benchmark, with particular emphasis on expanded metric depth estimation experiments. Access to the code repository and dataset for this work can be found at https://csiro-robotics.github.io/WildCross.
Visual place recognition in natural forest environments remains challenging due to repetitive vegetation, weak structural cues, and significant appearance variation across traversals. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a lightweight depth-aware distillation framework that injects geometric cues into a DINOv2-based place recognition model, while maintaining its pre-trained descriptor space. Evaluated on the recent WildCross benchmark, the proposed approach yields gains over an appearance-only counterpart, providing robustness to appearance variations. These results demonstrate the importance of depth as a strong complementary modality for place recognition in natural environments and identify depth-aware distillation as a promising direction for more robust forest perception.
Walter Nedov, Saimunur Rahman, Kavindie Katuwandeniya +3
We present DXPR, a depth-based cross-modal place recognition (CMPR) framework that uses vision foundation models (VFMs) to match monocular camera queries against a LiDAR map without modality-specific encoders. This enables robots and autonomous vehicles to robustly localize using only cameras within pre-built LiDAR maps, even under severe seasonal, weather, and illumination changes. The key idea is to convert both camera images and LiDAR scans into a unified depth image representation so that a single VFM backbone with an aggregation head can learn modality-invariant global descriptors. To make pairwise metric learning faithful to scene geometry, we introduce a geometry-aware overlap miner: after cross-modal scale alignment of camera and LiDAR depth, we forward-warp measurements between views to compute a pixel-level overlap score. This score relabels ambiguous pairs and adaptively modulates the positive margin in a multi-similarity loss to avoid overfitting on weakly overlapping views. Extensive experiments on KITTI odometry and Boreas demonstrate strong performance and robustness across seasons, weather, and day/night. On KITTI, DXPR achieves near-perfect Recall@1 on most sequences and outperforms prior CMPR baselines. On Boreas, DXPR achieves intra-sequence performance on par with a strong single-modal baseline (DINOv2-SALAD), while showing clear improvements in the more challenging inter-sequence setting. Compared with RangeBEV, our method consistently performs better in both intra- and inter-sequence evaluations, demonstrating robustness under diverse seasonal and illumination changes.
Robotic foundation models achieve impressive performance on standard manipulation benchmarks, yet these evaluations typically assume clean, timely, and consistent visual observations throughout execution. We introduce LIBERO-VPro, a benchmark for systematically evaluating the closed-loop visual robustness of robotic foundation models by perturbing the visual evidence available during execution. LIBERO-VPro covers four complementary dimensions, including Visual Evidence Degradation, Camera Staleness, Visual Source Consistency, and Task-Relevant Scene Variation, spanning 12 challenge categories, 96 experimental settings, and 3,296 task-condition cases. We evaluate three vision-language-action models and three world-action models over approximately 196,000 simulated episodes, complemented by 200 real-world rollouts on a Franka Research 3. Our results reveal that strong nominal performance can mask substantial weaknesses in visual grounding and adaptation. Models often remain successful despite severe object-level occlusion, yet degrade sharply when local interaction cues are disrupted or familiar spatial priors are violated. They are also highly sensitive to stale or missing observations and struggle when changed task preconditions require behavioral adaptation. Finally, VLAs and WAMs exhibit distinct robustness profiles, showing that visual robustness is multi-dimensional and architecture-dependent. LIBERO-VPro provides a systematic diagnostic framework for developing robotic foundation models that can more reliably ground and adapt their actions under challenging visual conditions.