Multimodal Sensor Fusion

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37 papers in the last four weeks, up 131% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 275

Aug 6, 2026cs.RO

KILVO: Kinematic-Inertial-LiDAR-Visual Odometry with Robust Multimodal Adaptation for Humanoid Robots

This article presents a kinematic-inertial-LiDAR-visual odometry for humanoid robots, called KILVO. Tailored to the platform features, requirements, and real-world complexity, it fully utilizes the sensors commonly equipped on humanoid robots, including joint encoders, IMU, LiDAR, and camera, within an asynchronous-sequential hybrid error-state iterated Kalman filter (ESIKF). Specifically, inertial data are used for prediction, leg kinematics are processed asynchronously at a high rate and provide proprioceptive constraints, while exteroception is updated sequentially, first by registering LiDAR points for geometric priors and then by updating the visual component via photometric errors. Moreover, the framework is elaborately designed with multimodal adaptation for resilience to sensor failures. A compact contact estimation module is also developed, sharing information with state estimation without additional sensors. Extensive experiments on public datasets and in the real world across multiple humanoid robots, gait patterns, and scenarios demonstrate that KILVO achieves highly competitive accuracy, efficiency, and output rates, with strong robustness against sensor degradation and failures, making it more suitable for humanoid robots than state-of-the-art fusion methods. Our code and datasets are released on GitHub.

Jixin Gao, Fucheng Liu, Teng Zhang +1

Kalman Filtering Inertial Odometry LiDAR Odometry Visual Odometry Robot State Estimation Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

Talk2Sensors: 3D Visual Grounding in Autonomous Driving via Sensor-Adaptive Physical Cue Matching

As a key capability for embodied intelligence, 3D visual grounding (3DVG) has been predominantly studied in indoor scenes with RGB-D or point-cloud inputs, while existing outdoor extensions largely rely on monocular images alone. Both settings fall short of real-world outdoor perception, where heterogeneous sensors capture complementary yet distinct physical properties, such as visual texture, 3D geometry, and object kinematics, that are indispensable for flexible and robust query-adaptive grounding but remain under-exploited. To bridge this gap, we introduce Talk2Sensors, the first multi-sensor 3D visual grounding dataset built upon camera, LiDAR, and 4D radar. It contains 8,682 language instructions and 20,558 referred objects, with diverse prompts explicitly aligned with sensor-specific physical cues. Furthermore, we propose TSFormer, a unified Transformer-based framework for language-guided 3D visual grounding in autonomous driving. TSFormer adopts a coarse-to-fine property-aware fusion strategy: the Language-Routed Property Sampler first performs coarse text-conditioned feature retrieval by modulating sensor sampling weights with query-level linguistic cues, while the subsequent Sparse-Preserving Modality Arbiter module conducts fine-grained modality arbitration and text-guided refinement to determine the precise referred spatial location. This design enables dynamic routing of appearance, geometry, and motion cues according to the semantic requirements of each prompt, preventing dense modalities from overwhelming sparse but critical sensor signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TSFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks: it improves over the strongest baseline by 8.05 mAP on Talk2Sensors, and transfers to the monocular Mono3DRefer benchmark with 53.05% [email protected].

Runwei Guan, Di Tian, Ningwei Ouyang +9

Thrust of Artificial Intelligence, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · MMLab, CUHK · School of Transportation Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology +7

Autonomous Driving Datasets VLMs for Autonomous Driving Multimodal Sensor Fusion 3D VLMs 3D Visual Grounding

Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

Predictive Failure Detection in Network Hardware Using Thermal Imaging and Deep Learning with Sensor Fusion

Unplanned network hardware malfunctions can interrupt services and result in expensive downtime in data centers. A deep learning-based predictive maintenance strategy is presented that utilizes thermal imaging and power sensor data to detect early indicators of equipment breakdown in routers, switches, and servers. A simulated dataset was generated comprising annotated thermal pictures and power readings indicative of three operating states: Normal, Warning, and Critical. Three ImageNet-pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN) models ResNet-50, InceptionV3, and VGG16 were assessed together with a multi-modal CNN-LSTM fusion model that integrates visual and sensor time-series information. Experiments were performed with and without pre-processing procedures, including region-of-interest (ROI) extraction and normalization. In the absence of pre-processing, CNNs attained moderate accuracy (e.g., ResNet-50 at 52%), but ROI-based pre-processing significantly enhanced performance (ResNet-50 accuracy reaching 91%). The CNN-LSTM model attained the greatest accuracy of 94%, with precision and recall approaching 95%, illustrating the effectiveness of multi-modal fusion. The results validate that domain-specific pre-processing and sensor fusion substantially improve early failure prediction, providing a potential foundation for proactive maintenance of network hardware through non-intrusive monitoring.

Ashly Joseph

Independent Researcher

Convolutional RNNs Predictive Maintenance Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Aug 3, 2026cs.RO

Residual-Based Adaptive Kalman Filtering for Legged Robot State Estimation

State estimation is a key component in model-based control of walking robots and, more broadly, applicable wherever hidden variables must be inferred. The Kalman filter is widely used to estimate floating-base position and velocity by fusing multiple sensing modalities. However, tuning noise parameters is challenging and typically requires expert knowledge. Moreover, fixed noise parameters are unsuitable for varying gaits and environments. We propose an online adaptation strategy for the process noise covariance matrix Q and the measurement noise covariance matrix R. Specifically, we introduce a filter residual and innovation-based covariance adaptation method for legged robot state estimation and evaluate it against a baseline approach relying on IMU and foot force measurements. The proposed adaptation is implemented within an Invariant Extended Kalman Filter (InEKF) fusing IMU and leg kinematics. Experiments on indoor and outdoor datasets with a Unitree Go2 quadruped show that adapting R is sufficient and improves accuracy by 25% for the trotting gait compared to the fixed-tuned InEKF. Finally, the proposed residual-based adaptation achieves comparable performance to the foot force approach, without requiring foot force measurements or additional parameter tuning.

Mihaela Popescu, Dennis Mronga, Shivesh Kumar +1

Legged Robotics Kalman Filtering Ensemble Kalman Filtering Robot State Estimation Invariant EKF Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

GEOID-Flood: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Benchmark Dataset for Flood Segmentation

Geospatial foundation models aim to learn representations that transfer across regions and sensors, yet evaluating them on specific tasks requires large, high-quality, multi-modal benchmarks that measure how well such models extract value from data. Concerning flood mapping, existing datasets rarely combine bi-temporal SAR and co-registered optical imagery at scale, leaving the value of foundation models for this downstream task largely untested. We introduce GEOID-Flood, a large-scale multi-modal flood segmentation benchmark, derived from Copernicus Emergency Management Service activations, spanning 219 events across 65 countries over ten years. The dataset provides more than 14,000 tiles with co-registered pre- and post-event Sentinel-1, in GRD and RTC format, pre-event Sentinel-2 composite, and DEM, including manually validated labels that separate background from permanent water and flooded water. Using this benchmark, we evaluate foundation models against conventional encoders across single-image, multi-temporal, and multi-modal protocols. We report three main findings: foundation models offer a consistent but modest advantage; optical-SAR fusion with finetuning best resolves transient flooding; and models trained on GEOID-Flood transfer to unseen events better than those trained on existing datasets. Dataset and code available at https://github.com/links-ads/geoid-flood.

Gaetano Chiriaco, Luca Barco, Andrea Bragagnolo +2

Fondazione LINKS, Via Pier Carlo Boggio, 61, 10138 Torino, Italy · Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy

Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Geospatial Foundation Models Flood Inundation Mapping Remote Sensing Benchmarks Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Aug 2, 2026cs.CV

Driver2Map: Imitating Human Driving for Online High-Definition Map Construction

High-definition (HD) maps are essential for autonomous driving systems. In constructing such maps, onboard multi-view camera images, standard-definition maps and satellite images provide crucial information. However, due to the modality and perspective differences among these data sources, existing methods often struggle to effectively align and fuse them, making online HD map construction still challenging. To address these issues, we propose Driver2Map, an online HD map construction model inspired by human drivers. Unlike existing HD map construction models that utilize only two modalities, our Driver2Map can simultaneously exploit three modalities. Specifically, we propose a "two-stage alignment" strategy to reduce spatial misalignment across different modalities. Additionally, we introduce "Pose-Guided BEV Fusion", a BEV (bird's-eye-view) generation module that leverages camera pose information to adaptively weight multi-view features, thereby effectively suppressing cross-view feature overlap during BEV generation. Also, we design a "Pretrained Prior for Map Refinement" module to refine the initial prediction by learning map structure priors, thus improving the HD map prediction under dynamic occlusions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Driver2Map outperforms existing methods on both IoU and AP metrics.

Pan Yin, Runtian Xia, Weisong Kuang +3

Xi’an Jiaotong University

HD Map Construction Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Aug 2, 2026cs.RO

CAAT: Contact-Aware Attention Scaling and Tactile Masking for Data-Efficient Contact-Rich Manipulation

In contact-rich manipulation, visual observations primarily guide motion in free space, whereas tactile observations become particularly informative during contact. However, standard Transformer-based visuo-tactile policies typically rely on either token concatenation or learnable gating. These approaches lack explicit contact-aware priors, making it difficult to efficiently learn effective cross-modal representations from demonstrations. To address this limitation, we propose CAAT, a lightweight contact-aware framework that explicitly incorporates contact priors through attention scaling and dynamic tactile masking. Specifically, CAAT emphasizes visual information before contact and tactile information during contact. It also suppresses static background tokens by comparing the current tactile observation with a non-contact reference. CAAT can be integrated into commonly used Transformer-based policies without modifying their action decoders. In simulation, integrating CAAT with ACT improves the average success rate by 18.0 percentage points over direct visuo-tactile fusion and by 10.0 percentage points over gated fusion. In real-world experiments using a visuo-tactile UMI platform, CAAT achieves an average success rate of 60.0% across ACT, Diffusion Policy, and

π_0

, outperforming the strongest baseline by an average of 21.1 percentage points. These results demonstrate that explicit contact priors and dynamic tactile masking are effective in improving visuo-tactile policy learning and task performance of diverse policy architectures. https://mrjiangjm.github.io/caat/

Jiaming Jiang, Yuzhe Huang, Hao Liang +7

ShanghaiTech University · Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence · Beihang University +2

Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Visuo-Tactile Representation Learning Robot Imitation Learning Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 31, 2026cs.RO

AquaJEPA: An Action-Conditioned Multimodal JEPA Family for Underwater Robot Dynamics

Underwater robots rely on complementary sensors whose reliability changes abruptly with water visibility and vehicle motion. We introduce AquaJEPA, a sensor-configurable family of action-conditioned joint-embedding predictive models spanning full multimodal, camera-only, sonar-only, and sensor-dropout configurations. Its members share a latent objective and receding-horizon control interface that predict future representations and physical dynamics from camera, forward-looking sonar, proprioception, and thruster commands. Trained from scratch on one hour of action-labelled data, the family is evaluated in Stonefish on 120 fresh paired scenarios spanning unseen layouts, visibility changes, dynamics shifts, and scheduled DVL loss. AquaJEPA-base achieves the strongest aggregate closed-loop performance, improving success over state-only by 12.5 percentage points and reducing final error by 0.189 m; both paired 95% intervals exclude zero. In a separate three-seed evaluation, it reduces paired final error relative to AquaJEPA-S by 0.118 m, with the same direction for every seed. AquaJEPA-robust more than halves prediction error during camera and camera-DVL blackouts. These results show that full multimodal prediction improves over state-only control and the sonar-only family member in this benchmark, while sensor-dropout training provides robustness under sensor loss.

Alan-Barsag Gazzaev, Alexey Gavrilov, Sergey Muravyov

ITMO University

Multimodal Robustness Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture Robotics Underwater Robotics Autonomous Underwater Navigation Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 30, 2026cs.CV

Large scale cross-regional remote sensing flood monitoring framework for operative mapping and impact analysis

Effective flood monitoring is critical for minimizing the impacts of flood disasters on populations and infrastructure. Yet reliable remote sensing across extensive and environmentally diverse regions remains challenging, as most segmentation algorithms lack the generalisation capacity required for large-scale application, while annotated flood data are scarce and unevenly distributed. This study presents an end-to-end multimodal framework for Russian Federation territories sustainable flood monitoring and damage assessment based on synthetic aperture radar data, multispectral imagery, and digital elevation models with their derivatives, forming a 21-channel input. Using a self-collected multimodal dataset covering seven Russian regions, two strategies for water surface detection under limited data conditions were compared: a supervised U-Net++ model and the self-supervised AnySat architecture pre-trained and fine-tuned for the segmentation task. Under the data conditions of this study, supervised learning proved more effective, while the AnySat-based approach offered greater stability and retains advantages for settings where larger unlabelled data or missing modalities at inference are expected. The best flood area predictions were used to estimate flood impact in urban areas in terms of the area affected, material damage, casualties, and ecological and agricultural impact. The estimations were conducted following the official methodology of the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations. Applied to the 2019 Tulun flood, the obtained results closely matched official assessments, except for material damage, due to the open-source databases usage. The results demonstrate the potential of deep learning and multimodal satellite data integration for scalable, reliable flood monitoring across diverse environmental and data-limited conditions.

Ilya Novikov, Svetlana Illarionova, Ruslan Dzharkinov +6

Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow, 121205, Russia. · Trofimuk Institute of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics SB RAS, Novosibirsk, 630090, Russia. · King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, 31261, Saudi Arabia. +2

Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Disaster Damage Assessment Flood Inundation Mapping Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 30, 2026cs.CV

Filling the Pareto-Optimal Front for Affordance Segmentation on Embedded Devices Using RGB-D Cameras

While depth sensors have the potential to complement RGB data for affordance segmentation in wearable robots, their usage seems to remain underexplored. The paper proposes two approaches: a reformulated version of hardware-aware neural architecture search, endowed with a newly designed search space to integrate depth (D) information into small-sized deep networks, and a dedicated fine-tuning approach, including a preprocessing layer to merge depth information with RGB data and make it compatible with conventional architectures. In both cases, those methods aim to generate solutions that benefit from modern (portable) hardware accelerators and overcome existing tiny-like approaches, which often fail to tackle critical scenarios due to the severe constraints set by the supporting hardware. Extensive experiments on a pair of real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method as compared with existing solutions. The approach presented in the paper generates, in most cases, solutions that identify the Pareto optimal front to balance generalization performance and hardware requirements. The paper also describes the supporting prototype, including a Jetson Nano board and a RealSense RGB-D camera. When considering the energy profile of the device, the overall system can attain real-time performances within an energy budget that is compatible with standard batteries, such as those used in smartphones.

Edoardo Ragusa, Giovanni Paolo Canuti, Simone Lugani +2

DITEN, University of Genoa, Genova, Italy

Hardware-Aware NAS Edge ML Robotic Perception Semantic Segmentation Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 30, 2026cs.CV

Space2Ground 2.0: A Multi-Source Dataset and Framework for Agricultural Monitoring through Fusion of Street-Level and Satellite Imagery

Accurate and scalable parcel-level agricultural monitoring remains challenging because satellite Earth Observation alone provides only an overhead perspective of agricultural parcels, while optical observations are further affected by cloud-induced temporal gaps. This paper presents Space2Ground 2.0, a multi-source framework integrating Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 multispectral time series with geo-tagged street-level imagery acquired using vehicle-mounted cameras and shared through the Mapillary platform. A largely automated processing pipeline performs semantic filtering, image quality assessment, viewpoint-based parcel association, and dataset refinement, transforming large volumes of crowdsourced imagery into parcel-linked, analysis-ready data. Applied over Cyprus during the 2022 growing season, the pipeline produced a curated dataset of 46,050 annotated street-level images, selected from an initial collection exceeding 900,000 images and linked with satellite information for 8,581 agricultural parcels. The practical value of the dataset was assessed through parcel-level crop classification experiments using both single- and multi-source observations. The results demonstrate that street-level imagery provides complementary fine-scale visual information that enhances classification when integrated with satellite time series. Overall, Space2Ground 2.0 provides an openly available benchmark dataset and a reproducible methodology for multimodal agricultural monitoring, with potential applications in visual verification, reduced reliance on costly field inspections, and data-driven agricultural policy implementation.

Iason Tsardanidis, Alkiviadis Koukos, George Choumos +2

Operational Unit BEYOND Centre, IAASARS, National Observatory of Athens, Athens, Greece · DHI Water & Environment, Hørsholm, Denmark · Artificial Intelligence Group, Wageningen University & Research, The Netherlands

Agricultural Image Analysis Agricultural Remote Sensing Remote Sensing Benchmarks Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 28, 2026eess.SP

CORF-GS: Real-Time Wireless Radiance Field Reconstruction via Coupled Optical-RF Gaussian Splatting

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)-based wireless radiance field (WRF) reconstruction provide an efficient solution for wireless channel modeling. However, existing WRF reconstruction methods rely on pre-collected observations and offline optimization, and thus struggle to provide real-time channel knowledge. To bridge this gap, we propose CORF-GS, a real-time WRF reconstruction framework that processes sequential optical and radio frequency (RF) keyframes. Specifically, CORF-GS constructs a unified Gaussian representation for optical and RF with shared geometry and modality-specific appearance, allowing high-resolution optical images to provide structural priors for WRF reconstruction. When a new keyframe arrives, CORF-GS first employs optical-guided Gaussian sampling to densify the WRF in under-represented regions. Since light and radio waves may respond differently to the same object surfaces due to wavelength mismatch, relying solely on optical guidance may neglect RF-informative areas. Therefore, CORF-GS performs coupled optical-RF optimization to jointly refine the shared Gaussians. Compared with the existing two-stage training pipelines, this prevents WRF from passively adapting to a frozen optical geometry and encourages the shared Gaussians to adapt to both optical structures and RF power distributions. Simulations show that CORF-GS achieves state-of-the-art RF spectrum synthesis quality and reduces the reconstruction time by

6.4\times

compared with existing WRF methods.

Jinya Zhang, Jiajia Guo, Chao-Kai Wen +1

3D Gaussian Splatting Streaming 3D Reconstruction Radio Propagation Modeling Multimodal Sensor Fusion Neural Radiance Fields

Jul 26, 2026cs.CV

DAP-Pose: Deep Temporal Alignment and Physics-aware Cross-modal Sensor Fusion for Robust Pose Estimation

Robust and accurate pose estimation with multi-modal sensors is fundamental for autonomous vehicles and mobile robotic systems in complex environments. In this paper, we propose DAP-Pose, a unified end-to-end model for robust multi-modal pose estimation. DAP-Pose introduces a Bi-level Cross-modal Fusion (BCF) module that captures complementary semantic and geometric motion cues from visual, inertial, and GNSS measurements. To handle temporal offsets, we designed a Deep Temporal Alignment (DTA) module that explicitly aligns asynchronous streams in latent space, enabling coherent motion modeling without strict hardware synchronization. Furthermore, we incorporate physics-aware constraints via manifold geometry and GNSS-guided absolute metric scale, enforcing motion consistency and mitigating drift. Experiments upon the public KITTI benchmark dataset were conducted to evaluate the performance of DAP-Pose against existing methods. DAP-Pose achieved the state-of-the-art performance, with the lowest average translation error (

t_{rel}

) of 1.31% and rotation error (

r_{rel}

) of 0.46

^{\circ}

. Furthermore, it accurately estimates poses and maintains robust performance under severe artificially injected temporal misalignment.

Jianhan Lin, Yuchu Qin, Jiateng Yuan +2

Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China · International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals, Beijing 100094, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, Beijing 100049, China +1

Visual-Inertial Odometry Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 26, 2026cs.CV

MOJITO: Modal Joint Learning for Unified End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving systems commonly follow a cascaded two-stage pipeline where a perception stage compresses multi-modal sensor inputs into a compact context and a downstream planner predicts trajectories conditioned on this context. We argue that this one-way perception-to-planning interface forces sensor inputs into a compact representation, losing the fine-grained details critical for planning. Moreover, by constraining the planner to this compressed context, it is difficult to leverage the rich representations offered by modern vision foundation models. To address these issues, we propose MOJITO, a unified sensor-to-action framework for end-to-end autonomous driving built on modal joint learning. MOJITO removes the cascaded interface and instead performs block-wise Modal Joint Attention that simultaneously updates action, image, and LiDAR features, allowing the planner to directly access multi-modal features during action generation. MOJITO achieves 88.9 PDMS on the NAVSIM v1 dataset and 88.4 EPDMS on the more challenging NAVSIM v2 dataset, setting a new state-of-the-art. Extensive experiments further demonstrate strong scalability, instruction following, and diverse trajectory generation. Code and models are available at https://github.com/mumucc01/MOJITO.

Zhijing Cheng, Xuancheng Zhang, Donglin Di +4

University of Science and Technology of China, China · Li Auto, China · University of New South Wales, Australia

End-to-End Autonomous Driving Autonomous Driving Planning Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 24, 2026physics.flu-dyn

PRIMS: Physics-guided Representation for Fluid Identification in Multimodal Sensing

Accurate on-device fluid identification is essential for microfluidic applications, yet maintaining reliability under varying flow, pressure, and temperature remains a key challenge. Existing learning-based methods often treat sensor signals as domain-agnostic features, neglecting the underlying physical relationships that govern fluid behavior, thereby limiting generalization and interpretability. To address this, we propose PRIMS, a physics-aware multimodal Transformer that integrates physical knowledge into representation learning and attention mechanisms through three dedicated modules: (1) Physics-based Token Vectorization transforms raw Coriolis and pressure sensor signals into physically meaningful token embeddings; (2) Physical Component Synthesizer models viscosity-related dependencies among flow, pressure, and density; and (3) Physics-guided Fusion captures cross-physical correlations through attention-based integration. By embedding these physics-based relationships directly into the model architecture, PRIMS bridges analytical fluid mechanics and deep learning, enabling interpretable, data-efficient, and resilient fluid classification. Evaluations on a five-fluid benchmark under dynamic flow, pressure, and temperature conditions show that PRIMS achieves 98.92% average F1-score with only 0.46 million parameters, a 14 times reduction compared to state-of-the-art Transformer-based methods. PRIMS also consistently outperforms prior SOTA models under out-of-distribution shifts to unseen temperature ranges and unseen flow-rate ranges, indicating strong robustness to operating conditions not observed during training. These findings suggest that designing architectures that explicitly mirror governing physical relationships can make them learn transferable, environment-independent representations, improving real-world reliability for microfluidic sensing.

Hai-Long Nguyen, Trung Thanh Nguyen, Lars Holm +2

University of Twente, Netherlands · Nagoya University, Japan

OOD Generalization Physics-Informed ML Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 24, 2026cs.RO

DB-VIO: Dual-Branch Visual Inertial Odometry with Enhanced Visual-Inertial Representation

Visual inertial odometry (VIO) is essential for accurate 6-DoF motion estimation in mobile robotic systems. Recent learning-based VIO methods have shown promising progress, but they often rely on unified visual--inertial representations and a single temporal model for full-pose estimation, limiting their ability to capture the heterogeneous dynamics of rotation and translation. Moreover, monocular visual features often lack explicit geometric structure, while raw inertial encoding leaves the underlying rotational kinematics implicit, weakening the rotation-related cues in IMU features. To address these issues, we propose DB-VIO, a dual-branch visual inertial odometry framework with enhanced visual--inertial representation. DB-VIO incorporates depth cues to improve monocular visual perception, injects an explicit integrated-attitude prior to strengthen rotation-aware inertial representation, and decouples pose estimation into dedicated rotational and translational branches for motion-specific temporal modeling. Experiments on autonomous driving and aerial robot benchmarks show that DB-VIO achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving the corresponding baselines by 20% on KITTI and 33% on EuRoC. Notably, under the more agile motion patterns of EuRoC, DB-VIO improves the rotational metric by 65.7% over prior methods. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of DB-VIO across different platforms and motion scenarios.

Ziyu Wan, Lin Zhao

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore.

Visual-Inertial Odometry Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 24, 2026cs.RO

Mag4D-SLAM Dataset: A Repeated-Traversal Multi-Modal 4D Geomagnetic Dataset for Localization and Mapping

Geomagnetic sensing offers an infrastructure-free, absolute orientation reference that is robust to GNSS denial and visual degradation, yet no large-scale outdoor robotics dataset supports its systematic study in SLAM. Existing magnetic datasets are confined to small-scale indoor environments and lack the synchronized multi-modal sensing, repeated-traversal structure, and high-precision 6-DoF ground truth required for geomagnetic SLAM research. We present Mag4D-SLAM, the first large-scale outdoor geomagnetic SLAM dataset. It comprises 14 sequences totaling over 18 km of synchronized LiDAR, camera, IMU, tri-axis magnetometer, and GNSS measurements with SE(3) ground-truth poses, collected along structured campus trajectories under paired day/night conditions in both forward and reverse directions. Through repeated-traversal experiments, we analyze three core properties: magnetic field repeatability across different recording sessions (daytime and nighttime), drift-free global heading estimation, and location-discriminative magnetic signatures for cross-session place recognition. Mag4D-SLAM is designed to support research on yaw drift mitigation, magnetic loop closure, and long-term localization and to open new research questions on how geomagnetic sensing can complement visual and LiDAR modalities or provide a fallback cue under illumination changes, structural repetition, and GNSS-denied long-term operation.

Bibhutibhusan Nayak, Hyoseok Ju, Giseop Kim

Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering, DGIST, Daegu, Republic of Korea

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping GNSS-Denied Localization Robot Localization Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 24, 2026eess.SP

Multimodal Wearable-Based Olfactory-Induced Emotion Recognition in Arousal-Valence Dimensions

Olfaction is important for emotion regulation because it acts as a non-intrusive and cognitively lightweight pathway that directly engages the brain s affective circuitry and achieves unobtrusive emotional modulation. This trait is essential for advancing practical affective computing in daily and attention-critical scenarios. However, current olfactory emotion research has two key limitations. First, it overemphasises the valence dimension while neglecting arousal. Second, it lacks multimodal datasets that synchronously capture central and peripheral physiological responses to olfactory stimuli. To address these issues, we construct a large-scale multimodal olfactory emotion dataset based on 111 subjects, in which odors are labeled in the 2D arousal-valence space and electroencephalogram (EEG), electrocardiogram (ECG), and photoplethysmography (PPG) signals synchronously recorded. Nevertheless, multimodal signals present challenges such as non-stationarity, differences in latency, and cross-modal heterogeneity. Thus, we propose a spatiotemporal-frequency hybrid fusion network (STF-HFNet), which integrates three core modules. Frequency aggregation processing learns adaptive frequency aggregation in order to model non-stationary dynamics. Reciprocal guided attention enables reciprocal bidirectional calibration for cross-modal temporal alignment without synchronisation priors. Hybrid collaborative fusion combines spatial and channel attention mechanisms to enhance cross-modal complementarity while suppressing redundant information. Extensive experiments show that STF-HFNet achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) recognition accuracies of 88.34% on the AMIGOS dataset and 92.40% on our self-constructed dataset, and outperform the SOTA methods by 8.27% and 5.07%, respectively.

Chen-Yang Xu, Lan Zhang, Fei-Yi Fan +2

School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China · Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China · School of Medical Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China

Valence-Arousal Modeling Multimodal Emotion Recognition Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 23, 2026cs.RO

Human-Inspired Framework for Robotic Craniotomy: Integrating Multimodal Fusion and Adaptive Trajectory Adjustment

Manual craniotomy is a high-risk, skill-dependent procedure associated with surgeon fatigue and potential dural injury. While robotic approaches have improved safety, existing open-loop systems rely solely on preoperative images and cannot compensate for intraoperative registration errors or tissue deformation. To address this, we propose a human-inspired closed-loop robotic craniotomy framework that intelligently integrates preoperative planning with intraoperative execution. An adaptive dual-contour fusion algorithm is employed to generate trajectories that conform to complex cranial geometries while maintaining a consistent tool-bone relative pose. For intraoperative perception, a multimodal two-stage cross-modal attention block (CMA)-temporal convolutional network (TCN)-Transformer network combined with an adaptive Bayesian filter fuses force and acoustic signals to achieve robust breakthrough detection under varying bone conditions. Upon detection, an in-situ projection-based trajectory adjustment strategy dynamically compensates for depth deviations, enabling safe residual bone isolation. Experiments on bovine ribs show a breakthrough prediction accuracy of 97%, a detection latency of 0.048 +/- 0.097 s, and a maximum overshoot of 0.29 mm. All four ex vivo cranial experiments were successfully completed without dural injury. These results demonstrate that the proposed cybernetic framework enables safe and autonomous craniotomy with highly effective closed-loop control.

Renzhen Le, Xiao Zhang, Di Wu +5

Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China · Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan

Robotic Control Robot Trajectory Tracking Surgical Robotics Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 22, 2026cs.CV

Ocular Verification for Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) headsets (e.g., Meta Quest, Apple Vision Pro) provide a seamless user experience due to their fast, frictionless interaction with the physical world in a simulated environment. User authentication relies on biometric cues such as iris in such headsets. However, traditional iris recognition protocols may not be adequate in cases of unconstrained acquisition, which is typical of VR-based data. In this work, we examine three crucial aspects: (1) evaluating ISO/IEC 29794-6 iris quality metrics on VRBiom dataset and analyzing their limitations, (2) addressing data-specific challenges such as off-axis gaze, non-uniform illumination, and specular reflection using generative models, and (3) performing unimodal (iris, periocular) recognition and multimodal score-level fusion (iris + periocular). We observe that some metrics (e.g., margin adequacy) fail on VR-acquired data; whereas, image adjustments primarily benefit periocular recognition, and multimodal fusion lowers EER by ~11% over unimodal iris recognition performance. We will release the evaluation scripts upon acceptance for reproducibility.

Husanpreet Singh, Robert Tran, Ayushree Kharel +1

University of Wyoming, USA · San Diego State University, USA

Biometric Identification Virtual Reality Image Quality Assessment Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 21, 2026cs.RO

NGPS: GPS-Denied Aerial Geo-Localization and 2.5D Reconstruction via Deep Satellite Image Matching and Multi-Rate Sensor Fusion

We present NGPS (Next-Generation Positioning System), a visual geo-localization framework for high-altitude UAVs that provides GPS-free absolute positioning by matching down-facing images to georeferenced satellite imagery with deep features. The system combines (1) adaptive confidence-weighted UKF fusion, where NGPS covariance is modulated by RANSAC inlier ratio, reprojection error, and match confidence; (2) velocity-predictive kernel extraction, using VIO velocity to predict the satellite search region; and (3) an asynchronous multi-rate temporal priority queue that interleaves absolute position (1-2 Hz), VIO (10-20 Hz), and IMU (100-200 Hz) updates in chronological order. Globally optimized poses from VINS pose-graph optimization, anchored by NGPS corrections, further enable real-time 2.5D georeferenced orthomosaic reconstruction. On five flight sequences (60-150 m AGL), NGPS achieves 2.94 m position RMSE, with worst-case ATE 6.04 m at 150 m AGL and 2 m/s, yielding a 3.5x improvement over standalone monocular VIO. The system runs in real time on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX. Part of the implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/snktshrma/ngps_flight.

Sanket Sharma

Independent Researcher

Cross-View Geo-Localization UAV Navigation GNSS-Denied Localization Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 21, 2026cs.LG

Regime-Aware Physics-Guided Early Warning of Lithium-Ion Battery Thermal Runaway Using Thermo-Mechanical Signals

Thermal runaway in lithium-ion batteries poses a major safety risk to electric vehicles and energy storage systems. Current early-warning methods depend mainly on temperature and may therefore miss mechanical precursors that emerge before rapid heating. We introduce a regime-aware, physics-guided framework that integrates temperature, voltage, force, deformation, and state-of-charge measurements for early warning under controlled mechanical abuse. A lightweight convolutional classifier first infers safe, warning, or danger regimes from mechanical signals. These regime estimates then condition a causal temporal convolutional backbone through feature-wise linear modulation, physics-biased attention, and regime-dependent gating. Joint learning unifies regime identification, thermal-runaway detection, and time-to-disaster estimation. We evaluate the framework using leave-one-experiment-out cross-validation on 30 mechanical-abuse tests across state-of-charge levels of 10%, 50%, and 90% and two loading protocols. The method achieves an F1 score of 0.89, a high-temperature prediction root-mean-square error of 12.3 °C, a mean warning lead time of 15.6 s, a detection success rate of 0.92, and an experiment-level false alarm rate of 2.7%. Its lead time exceeds that of the strongest baseline by 69.6%. Removing force reduces the lead time by 60.3%, highlighting the value of mechanical precursors. These results support regime-aware thermo-mechanical fusion as a promising strategy for earlier and more reliable thermal-runaway warning under controlled abuse conditions.

Syed Sajid Ullah, Muhammad Zunair Zamir, Salman Khan

Temporal Convolutional Networks Physics-Informed ML Lithium-Ion Batteries Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 19, 2026cs.AI

DeeperRadar: End-to-End MIMO Radar Design and Multi-Modal Fusion for Autonomous Vehicle Perception

DeeperRadar is a radar-centric, sensor-stack-conditioned framework that co-designs radar sensing and multi-modal 3D detection for autonomous mobility by learning a sparse acquisition pattern end-to-end with the fusion model. A learnable MIMO design module is trained end-to-end within a fusion network that operates directly on raw radar ADC data together with camera images and LiDAR point clouds. During training, the design module is supervised by the other sensors, enabling the system to learn both which receiver antennas to activate and the effective number of them. At deployment, the design module is removed and replaced by the learned sparse subsampling mask, leaving the downstream model architecture unchanged. Evaluated on the RADIal dataset, DeeperRadar discovers sparse, task-aware radar configurations that match or exceed full-array baselines while using fewer receivers, potentially reducing radar cost and integration complexity. These results show that learned optimal MIMO radar design depends on the fusion stack and the downstream perception task.

Eli Goldenshluger, Barak Pinkovich, Chaim Baskin

Technion–Israel Institute of Technology · Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Autonomous Driving Perception 3D Object Detection Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 18, 2026cs.CV

FogDrive: A Multi-Modal Synthetic Driving Dataset for Perception under Graded Fog

Perception under adverse weather remains a critical bottleneck for reliable autonomous driving, yet existing benchmarks lack the systematic multi-modal alignments needed to evaluate robust sensor fusion. Real-world weather datasets suffer from uncontrolled collection and single-level, uncalibrated conditions, while synthetic alternatives either target camera-only restoration or lack the paired clean-and-foggy structure needed to benchmark "defog-then-detect" pipelines. We present FogDrive, a rigorously calibrated, multi-modal autonomous-driving dataset bridging data-centric engineering and robust machine learning. Built with the CARLA simulator, FogDrive contains 660 scenes (~133k fully annotated frames, 50:50 day/night) across four synchronized cameras (RGB, depth, semantic segmentation), a LiDAR and semantic-LiDAR pair, and front radar. Physically consistent fog is modeled independently on camera channels (Koschmieder model) and LiDAR channels (Beer-Lambert law) at three calibrated visibility densities (160m, 100m, 50m). Every scene ships in four matched variants (clean plus three graded fog levels) with cross-calibrated 2D and 3D bounding boxes. A semantic-segmentation-based quality audit over 8k images validates annotations at 95.1% precision and over 99% recall for vehicles within 40m. We establish baseline benchmarks with state-of-the-art architectures (TransFusion, BEVFusion, YOLOv8-m) across two paradigms: 3D multi-modal fusion and 2D image restoration. These yield critical data-centric insights: mixing multi-density fog during training tightens 3D bounding-box geometry without added data-scaling cost, while in 2D pipelines image-quality metrics (PSNR, SSIM) prove poor predictors of downstream detection performance. FogDrive will be fully open-sourced alongside our data-generation framework to accelerate robust, multi-modal research.

Vansh Panwar

Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati

Autonomous Driving Datasets Autonomous Driving Benchmarks Multimodal Robustness Autonomous Driving Perception Autonomous Driving Simulation Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 17, 2026cs.RO

PRISM: Multimodal Terrain Mapping for Rover Navigation in Unstructured Environments

Robotic navigation in unstructured environments requires robust situational awareness to safely traverse hazards such as steep slopes and rocky terrain. To address this challenge, perception systems increasingly rely on multimodal sensor fusion. Specifically, integrating thermal imagery with standard optical and depth sensors enhances terrain differentiation, directly improving the reliability of mapping algorithms. This paper presents PRISM, a multimodal perception system for terrain mapping in unstructured settings. PRISM leverages a custom sensor suite to capture aligned RGB, depth, and thermal (RGB-D-T) imagery. At its core is OmniUnet, a novel vision transformer-based network specifically designed for multimodal semantic terrain segmentation. We validated the proposed system using two newly annotated datasets (BASEPROD and LAENTIEC) and demonstrate its real-world applicability through physical field experiments. Deployed on a resource-constrained embedded computer, PRISM efficiently generates traversability maps that directly enable autonomous navigation via a rover's Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) subsystem.

Raul Castilla-Arquillo, Carlos Perez-del-Pulgar, Levin Gerdes +2

Space Robotics (SpaceR) Research Group, SnT, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg · Department of Automation and Systems Engineering, Universidad de Málaga, Andalucia Tech, 29070 Málaga, Spain

Robot Navigation Vision Transformer Semantic Segmentation Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 17, 2026cs.CV

On the Geometry of Learned Representations in Event-Based Multi-Modal Egomotion Estimation

Classical approaches to event-based egomotion estimation, including those adopted by the top-performing teams of the ELOPE challenge, rely on geometric optimization frameworks such as contrast maximization, homography estimation, or dense optical flow combined with analytic motion inversion. This work investigates the geometric structure that emerges inside a multi-modal network for egomotion estimation. Event tensors, inertial measurements, and range signals are fused through a cross-modal attention architecture and trained in a batch setting. We analyze the latent space geometry and attention dynamics, showing that (i) embeddings lie on low-dimensional manifolds aligned with motion variables, (ii) attention weights adapt with angular excitation and visual reliability, and (iii) the fused representation recovers classical observability cues. These results bridge analytical estimation theory and modern data-driven fusion.

Stefano Silvestrini, Michele Ceresoli

Politecnico di Milano, Via Giuseppe La Masa, 34, 20156, Milan, Italy

Representation Geometry Event-Based Vision Visual Odometry Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 16, 2026cs.RO

KineFuse: Kinematic-Aware Haptic Fusion for In-Hand Occluded-Object Pose Tracking

Dexterous in-hand manipulation requires continuous 6D pose tracking, yet the manipulating fingers inevitably occlude the object from the camera. We study how to structure the sparse haptic signals already available on multi-fingered hands, including proprioception, proximal force/torque, and binary contact, to complement a pretrained visual pose tracker under occlusion. We propose a kinematic-aware finger-level encoder and systematically compare it against four alternative designs through three levels of evaluation: per-frame refinement, sequential open-loop tracking, and closed-loop manipulation. Our experiments reveal that (i) per-frame evaluation cannot distinguish encoder quality, while sequential tracking amplifies architectural differences by up to 15 times; (ii) the structured encoder learns task-specific cross-modal gating, using vision exclusively for translation and dedicating one attention head to haptics for rotation, without explicit supervision; and (iii) compact finger-level tokenization with 4 tokens outperforms both flat fusion and joint-level representations, which suppress vision through norm dominance. We validate that improved tracking yields higher success in a downstream reorientation task and provide qualitative real-world demonstrations. Our project page is available at https://cold-young.github.io/kine-fuse/.

Chanyoung Ahn, Jaesung Lee, Sungwoo Park +1

Center for Humanoid Research, KIST, Seoul, 02792 South Korea · Korea University, Seoul, 02841 South Korea

Object Pose Estimation Robotic Manipulation Tactile Sensing for Robotic Manipulation Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 15, 2026cs.RO

Industrial Dexterity Benchmark: A Hardware-Software Benchmarking Platform for Industrial Dexterous Manipulation

Dexterous manipulation remains a critical bottleneck in industrial automation; tasks such as cable routing, connector insertion, and precision assembly still rely heavily on manual labor despite decades of robotics research. This work presents a progression from classical, modular robotics pipelines toward an end-to-end multimodal imitation-learning framework for industrial dexterous manipulation. As a part of this work, we introduce three key contributions: a set of Industrial Dexterity Benchmark (IDB) boards aimed to mimic datacenter cable management, automotive cable harnesses, and gearbox assembly tasks; a scalable imitation learning framework (DAG-ROS); and a multimodal diffusion-based policy framework (AG-iDP3) that creates models fusing RGB images, point clouds, joint positions, and wrist-frame wrench data. Focusing on the datacenter cable manipulation board, we evaluate the performance of a task involving cleaning a single cable over variations of an end-to-end AI policy using 48 trials per configuration. The best performing configuration, a multimodal expansion Diffusion Policy (DP), includes a multi-view RGB image source passed through an R3M encoder and reaches a 78% grasp and insert combined task success rate. This performance marks a significant improvement over the 36% observed from the single-camera RGB DP baseline. Each of the tested configurations requires only approximately 100 teleoperated demonstrations per task phase. These results indicate that the correct learned policy can outperform classical vision and control robotic methods in robustness, generalization, and deployment efficiency, justifying a shift toward scalable robotic automation for high up-time industrial environments.

Honglu He, Jacob Laufer, Zhiwu Zheng +8

Analog Devices, Inc., USA

Dexterous Manipulation Diffusion Policy Robot Imitation Learning Robot Manipulation Benchmarks Industrial Robotics Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 15, 2026cs.RO

WNOJ-LIO: A White-Noise-on-Jerk Motion-Prior EKF for High-Dynamic LiDAR-IMU Fusion

LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO) is a key component of autonomous navigation, but high-dynamic driving exposes two coupled challenges: intra-scan motion distortion and vibration-contaminated inertial measurements. Most real-time LiDAR-inertial pipelines propagate the system state by integrating raw IMU measurements and then use the propagated trajectory for point cloud de-distortion, thereby propagating inertial noise into both the corrected scan and the subsequent scan-to-map registration. This paper presents WNOJ-LIO, a LiDAR-IMU fusion framework based on a White-Noise-on-Jerk (WNOJ) Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). WNOJ-LIO employs a decoupled WNOJ prior on

\R^3 \times \SO(3)

for state prediction and treats the IMU as a high-frequency measurement source rather than the driver of state propagation. The resulting posterior state history is then used for LiDAR scan de-distortion and subsequent point-to-plane LiDAR updates. The decoupled process model enables closed-form covariance propagation, thereby bridging the gap between batch WNOJ Gaussian process (GP) trajectory priors and recursive filtering. Simulation results demonstrate improvements in acceleration and angular-velocity denoising, scan de-distortion, and localization accuracy over a FAST-LIO-style baseline. Real-world experiments were conducted using an autonomous racing car on four driving segments with maximum speeds ranging from 53 to 208~km/h, covering a wide range of vehicle vibration levels. The experiments further validate the proposed method and provide a comprehensive evaluation of its performance in estimating acceleration, angular velocity, body-frame linear velocity, attitude, and position under highly dynamic driving. The source code of WNOJ-LIO is publicly available at https://github.com/LvJohny/wnoj-ekf-lio.git.

Junning Lyu, Qizhi Guo, Xia Ning +2

School of Aerospace Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China

Inertial Odometry LiDAR Odometry Robot State Estimation Multimodal Sensor Fusion Extended Kalman Filtering

Jul 14, 2026cs.RO

Attitude Estimation Using Inertial and Barometric Measurements

Accurate and robust attitude estimation is a key challenge for autonomous vehicles, particularly in GNSS-denied conditions and during highly accelerated flight. In such conditions, Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) alone are insufficient for reliable tilt estimation due to the ambiguity between gravitational and inertial accelerations. Although auxiliary velocity sensors such as GNSS, Pitot tubes, Doppler radar, or Visual Inertial Odometry are commonly used, they may be unavailable, intermittent, or costly. This paper introduces a barometer-aided attitude estimation architecture that exploits barometric altitude measurements to provide complementary information on the vehicle's vertical motion, thereby enhancing attitude estimation within nonlinear observers on SO(3). The contributions are twofold. First, we design a deterministic Riccati observer cascaded with a complementary filter, ensuring almost-global asymptotic stability (AGAS) under a uniform observability (UO) condition while preserving the geometric structure of the attitude dynamics. Second, we propose a nonlinear observer evolving on SO(3)xR2, which integrates IMU measurements as inputs and barometer and magnetometer measurements as outputs within a unified framework, guaranteeing local exponential stability (LES) under relaxed uniform observability conditions. The proposed approaches are validated using both simulated and real flight data. The results demonstrate that barometer-aided estimation provides a lightweight, reliable, and effective complementary sensing modality for attitude estimation in minimal-sensing configurations, offering a practical alternative when conventional velocity measurements are unavailable or degraded.

Melone Nyoba Tchonkeu, Soulaimane Berkane, Tarek Hamel

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Quebec in Outaouais, Gatineau, QC J8X3X7, Canada · Department of Electrical Engineering, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON P7B 5E1, Canada · I3S-UniCA-CNRS, University Cote d’Azur and the Institut Universitaire de France, 06903 Sophia Antipolis, France

Robot State Estimation Inertial Navigation Multimodal Sensor Fusion