Perception Beyond the Visible: Incompleteness-Aware Scene Understanding for Robot Autonomy

Robots that operate over extended periods should not merely visit space; they should progressively understand it. Yet most 3D scene graph pipelines treat perception as a post-processing stage over a fixed dataset, decoupling scene representation from the decisions that determine what is observed in the first place. We present SCOUT, an online semantic exploration framework that closes this loop by coupling active traversal with probabilistic scene graph construction. Given a prior 2D occupancy map and posed RGB-D observations, SCOUT incrementally builds an uncertainty-aware 3D scene graph whose nodes maintain fused geometry and posterior beliefs over open-vocabulary object labels, while edges encode structural relations such as on, inside, belong, and next to. These beliefs are fed back to an uncertainty-guided traversal planner, which selects viewpoints by balancing expected semantic certainty gain, geometric coverage gain, and travel cost. In this way, the robot revisits ambiguous objects when additional evidence matters and expands into unseen free space when the scene remains incomplete. The resulting system treats semantic scene completeness as an operational objective rather than a passive by-product of semantic mapping, moving toward autonomous agents that can patrol, update, and reason about evolving indoor environments with minimal human intervention.

Perceptual uncertainty is a central challenge for heterogeneous robot teams operating in unstructured outdoor environments, where no single viewpoint affords reliable scene understanding. Perceptual uncertainty, arising from sources such as occlusions, manifests differently across robot viewpoints depending on scene structure. Detecting and resolving sources of perceptual uncertainty requires both scene-based contextual reasoning and capability-aware robot allocation. While vision-language models provide strong semantic priors for both, they are computationally prohibitive for onboard inference and lack calibrated uncertainty quantification. We introduce Co-GLANCE, a real-time onboard perception and decision-making system for uncertainty resolution in heterogeneous robot teams. Co-GLANCE distills the semantic reasoning capabilities of a vision-language model into an end-to-end model for occlusion segmentation and robot allocation, eliminating the need for cloud-based inference. To quantify perceptual uncertainty, Co-GLANCE combines conformal prediction with selective abstention to provide statistically valid coverage guarantees for segmentation, robot allocation, and detection outputs. These calibrated uncertainty estimates directly trigger active perception, dispatching the most appropriate robot to acquire informative viewpoints and resolve uncertainty. Across real-world scenarios, Co-GLANCE outperforms cloud-based vision-language model baselines in occlusion segmentation and robot allocation accuracy by 25% and 36%, respectively, while reducing per-frame inference latency 350x. We also release an air-ground dataset for future research. Code, videos, and dataset available at https://co-glance.github.io/ .

Semantic occupancy prediction enables dense 3D geometric and semantic understanding for autonomous driving. However, existing camera-based approaches implicitly assume complete surround-view observations, an assumption that rarely holds in real-world deployment due to occlusion, hardware malfunction, or communication failures. We study semantic occupancy prediction under incomplete multi-camera inputs and introduce $M^2$-Occ, a framework designed to preserve geometric structure and semantic coherence when views are missing. $M^2$-Occ addresses two complementary challenges. First, a Multi-view Masked Reconstruction (MMR) module leverages the spatial overlap among neighboring cameras to recover missing-view representations directly in the feature space. Second, a Feature Memory Module (FMM) introduces a learnable memory bank that stores class-level semantic prototypes. By retrieving and integrating these global priors, the FMM refines ambiguous voxel features, ensuring semantic consistency even when observational evidence is incomplete. We introduce a systematic missing-view evaluation protocol on the nuScenes-based SurroundOcc benchmark, encompassing both deterministic single-view failures and stochastic multi-view dropout scenarios. Under the safety-critical missing back-view setting, $M^2$-Occ improves the IoU by 4.36%. As the number of missing cameras increases, the robustness gap further widens; for instance, under the setting with five missing views, our method boosts the IoU by 6.67%. These gains are achieved without compromising full-view performance. The source code will be publicly released at https://github.com/qixi7up/M2-Occ.