Robotic Perception

Precision visual inspection underpins quality assurance across aerospace, semiconductor, and medical manufacturing, where undetected surface anomalies on high-value parts translate directly into scrap, rework, and field failures. Robotic visual inspection requires precise alignment between the end-effector and local surface geometry in the presence of perception noise and surface irregularities. In industrial settings, a human operator is often kept in the loop via teleoperation or shared autonomy, introducing real-time adjustments that render purely offline motion planning inadequate. This motivates control architectures capable of reactive, compliant behavior under combined human and perceptual uncertainty. This paper presents a novel real-time, closed-loop robotic orientation control pipeline for precision visual inspection, with an admittance-based framework that unifies operator input and perception-driven surface alignment. We design the end-effector as a virtual sphere moving through a viscous medium, such that the resulting physically interpretable mass--damper system generates synchronized, compliant motion from orientation error and operator commands. We validate the framework on a 6-DOF manipulator demonstrating stable normal-tracking and a final mean orientation error of 0.4°.

We introduce a data-efficient distributed Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) framework designed for a team of robots equipped with LiDAR, cameras, and inertial sensors. Our framework uses scene graph matching to identify inter-robot measurement constraints. Unlike prior approaches that rely on feature-level matching, our framework is the first to perform scene graph matching using only object labels and centroids. Our approach constructs a scene graph by using fused RGB-LiDAR point clouds to generate both a semantically segmented point cloud layer, and a layer of discrete bounded objects, to accompany estimated robot trajectories. Scene graph matching is performed collaboratively through exchanging and matching object data with neighboring robots. To maximize communication efficiency, we utilize a multi-step data exchange and optimization process. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach using both simulation and real-world datasets collected by legged robots in indoor and outdoor environments.

This work explores the use of artificial intelligence in mobile robotics to achieve autonomous detection and pose estimation of load carriers for automated pickup. A deep neural network is designed to recognize predefined landmarks on the carrier from RGBD data; these landmarks are then used to compute the carrier's pose. The network operates directly on RGBD images to estimate landmark positions, which form the basis for determining the carrier's location. The approach is validated in extensive experiments and comprises both software and hardware implementations. A deep learning-based framework is presented to detect load carriers and estimate their pose for use with autonomous logistics vehicles. Our method uses a convolutional neural network to identify characteristic reference points on the carrier from RGBD input and computes its pose by combining these inferred landmarks with prior geometric knowledge. Experiments show that the resulting accuracy is sufficient for reliable load carrier detection in industrial environments, confirming the suitability of the method for autonomous intralogistics applications.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are brain-inspired, event-driven models that compute with sparse spikes, which enables highly efficient visual perception in resource-constrained embodied AI models. The emergence of Spiking-Transformer models with spike self-attention has substantially improved the learning capacity of pure SNNs. Although SNNs are energy efficient, their performance is still limited by the spike-based architecture and optimization challenges, as standard gradient descent rules cannot be directly applied. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have shown rich multi-modal knowledge representation capabilities for visual perception. Thus, it is promising to leverage VLMs for better Spikformer training. To this end, we present VL2Spike, a novel spike-based knowledge distillation (KD) framework that bridges multi-modal knowledge from VLMs with compact Spikformer models. This design enhances the learning capacity of Spikformer models while preserving their energy-efficiency merits, thereby offering a practical pathway toward low-power robotic perception. Our VL2Spike brings two key technical contributions. To align with spiking dynamics, we first propose spatial-temporal visual spike (SVS) distillation, which achieves (1) shared manifold alignment between VLM image features and spike tokens, and (2) warm-started temporal consistency on membrane potentials and spike rates. We then design a novel spike prototype-guided linguistic (SPL) distillation strategy that aligns Spikformer's class prototypes and logits with promptable VLM text embeddings. Extensive experiments show that VL2Spike achieves 6.81% gain across three static datasets with only 15.7% energy consumption. It also exhibits strong generalization capacity on robotic visual place recognition (VPR) with a gain of 6.63%, highlighting its potential for low-power perception in embodied AI.

Tactile imaging seeks to reconstruct the internal structure of soft objects through touch sensing, with applications in medical diagnosis and robotic manipulation. Recent self-supervised learning approaches have shown promising results, but rely on global, unstructured representations and robot-controlled sensing, limiting generalization and practical use. We propose Local Encoder for Spatial Sensing (LESS), an object-centric tactile representation that exploits the local nature of touch. The tactile scene is modeled as a grid of recurrent encoders with local receptive fields, whose states are fused to reconstruct 2D or 3D images of internal structure. This compositional design enables strong generalization: models trained on single-inclusion phantoms accurately image objects with multiple inclusions and varying sizes. The local structure further supports spatial uncertainty estimation. In addition, we enable hand-held tactile imaging via external pose tracking and human-like palpation data, and extend tactile imaging to full 3D reconstruction.

Accurate and robust localization is a fundamental requirement for service and inspection robots, particularly in feature-sparse indoor environments where traditional systems struggle due to a lack of distinct landmarks. While prior maps can enhance robustness, precise and compact maps capturing real-world details are often unavailable for new or frequently changing environments. This paper presents BIM-Loc, a novel discrepancy-aware LiDAR-based localization method that directly integrates Building Information Models (BIM) from the design phase. BIM-Loc simultaneously estimates trajectories aligned with the BIM coordinate system and identifies discrepancies between real-world observations and the as-designed BIM in an online fashion. Our core contributions include: (1) a novel multi-hit ray casting strategy for efficient BIM-point data association and projection of 3D observations into 2D texture space; (2) a pose graph optimization framework with BIM-integrated factors that enforces consistency among odometry, sequential scans, and BIM structures; and (3) a hierarchical Bayesian inference module that incrementally updates a continuous 2D surface representation for discrepancy detection, propagating updates from the pixel to the structure level. Extensive evaluations in both simulation and real-world applications demonstrate that BIM-Loc significantly outperforms state-of-the-art map-based methods in localization accuracy and robustness.

This paper proposes, an improved version of the 3 in sewer pipe inspection robot equipped with an emergency evacuation mechanism. The low traction force and poor stepover capability, which were challenges of the first version, have been improved by simply connecting the propulsion units. The coupled propulsion units feature a differential mechanism capable of posture changes via a single wire, enabling adaptation to pipe diameter variations. To traverse obstacles like pipe joints, a control method was devised that detects obstacle contact through current load on the drive wheel motors and slackens the wire. This method was verified through simulated pipe experiments. Load comparisons were made using current waveforms applied to the drive wheels. Our proposed control method significantly improved the step-over capability of the new articulated robots.

This work introduces Spatial Annotations from Robot Demonstrations with Reliability Calibration (SPARC), a risk-aware framework that automatically labels robot demonstrations with structured spatial annotations and assigns each annotation a reliability score. Structured spatial annotations, such as bounding boxes, object trajectories, and manipulation phase labels, benefit a broad range of robotics applications from training grounded robot policies and embodied foundation models to motion planning and hierarchical task composition. Existing automated pipelines generate such annotations at scale but provide no reliable quality signal: detector confidence is poorly calibrated for annotation correctness, forcing a choice between accepting noisy labels or discarding useful samples. In contrast to existing automated pipelines, SPARC leverages the spatio-temporal structure inherent to robot tasks to generate a reliability signal, reducing noisy labels and retaining more useful samples. We further introduce Interaction-Aware Bench (IA-Bench), a benchmark that measures model accuracy in grounding the locations of interacted objects in robot demonstrations. On 1.7k human-annotated demonstrations spanning diverse embodiments and scenarios, SPARC significantly outperforms detection-only baselines in localization accuracy while retaining three times more samples at high-precision operating points. Our experiments demonstrate that models finetuned on our annotations achieve state-of-the-art results on object-grounding and pointing benchmarks among similarly sized models, while remaining competitive on broader spatial-reasoning suites without manually verified or annotated training data. Furthermore, policies trained on SPARC-generated annotations outperform baselines in cluttered, visually ambiguous real-world scenes. Code, data, and models are available at intuitive-robots.github.io/sparc-labeling.

Long-horizon robot mobile manipulation requires continual reasoning about localization, environment changes, and task progress, all of which are challenging to infer from image observations alone. In this paper, we show that conditioning a mobile manipulation policy on a spatiotemporal feature map improves reasoning over long horizons. The map represents the environment and the articulated robot body as neural points in a shared latent space and is updated online from egocentric observations and proprioceptive state. We update the environment neural points using object-level rigid tracking and the robot neural points using forward kinematics. We use our spatiotemporal environment and robot feature (SERF) map as a state input to a vision-language-action (VLA) model by extracting map tokens from multiple reference frames and spatial scales, providing the policy with both local and global context. We demonstrate SERF on BEHAVIOR-1K, a benchmark for long-horizon mobile manipulation in household environments. Experiments show that the SERF VLA policy outperforms image-only baselines, reaches subgoals faster by following more direct trajectories, improves robustness to scene-configuration shifts, and recovers from object-drop failures.

Physiological awareness is important for service, social, and assistive robots that interact with humans in everyday environments. Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables non-contact heart-rate (HR) estimation from an RGB camera, making it a promising sensing modality for robot-mounted vision systems. However, illumination variation remains a major barrier to robust deployment. This paper presents an end-to-end spatial-temporal transformer framework for remote HR estimation on a new dataset with varied illumination. Our estimator integrates PRNet-based 3D face alignment, clip-level illumination augmentation, the Residual Temporal Standardization Module, and controlled hybrid temporal-frequency supervision. The training objective combines a Soft-Shifted Pearson waveform loss with a spectral Kullback-Leibler divergence loss, where a tuned weight ($\mathbfβ$) controls the contribution of frequency-domain heart-rate guidance. Experiments on a static all-level mix protocol covering three illumination levels show that $\mathbfβ=5$ provides the strongest result among the tested beta settings, achieving a best-run HR mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.79 bpm and an HR correlation of 0.982. Compared with the PhysFormer baseline evaluated on our dataset, our estimator reduces HR MAE by 93.6 %, while increasing HR correlation from 0.088 to 0.982, making it usable when illumination varies.

This paper presents the design, development, and experimental verification of PEBRE, an open-hardware add-on for fast software development on the Pepper Robot. Our project enhances Pepper's computational and perception capabilities by integrating external components such as a Jetson Orin Nano, Logitech BRIO, Intel RealSense D435i, Samson UB1, and RØDE VideoMicro II. Our results show that the new hardware considerably improved Pepper's perception abilities and computational power. This development contributes to the community by implementing an open hardware and open-source modular add-on to the Pepper robot and keeping this relevant research platform functional beyond its expected lifespan. With PEBRE, we aim to facilitate faster software development and more efficient integration of external components, ultimately enhancing the capabilities of the Pepper robot.

High-risk applications in robotics, such as robot-assisted surgery, present unique challenges. These systems must be both highly precise and interpretable in order to be deployed in environments with very low tolerance for error or unsafe exploration. We present the first robotic system to demonstrate autonomous clip positioning on a physical phantom in laparoscopic surgery, one of the most common interventions in general surgery. After segmentation of a colorless point cloud from a single camera, target positions for the clips are extracted using spline interpolation, and can then be adjusted by the human operator. The segmentation model is trained on only 60 hand-labeled real point clouds, reflecting data scarcity in the surgical domain. We overcome this with a combination of pre-training on 128,000 synthetic point clouds and two novel data augmentation techniques. The motion of the end-effector to each target is visualized for the operator, satisfying the unique motion constraints of minimally-invasive surgery while ensuring that the robot's actions are verifiable and interpretable. In real robot experiments, our system localizes targets with the required precision of 0.75mm at a 95% success rate and executes autonomous clip positioning with a 100% success rate. We provide insights that are applicable to many other surgical and non-surgical tasks that require identifying and navigating to a precise target. Source code and project page: https://github.com/balazsgyenes/kirurc

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.

Falls are one of the leading causes of injury and hospitalization among elderly individuals, making reliable fall awareness an essential capability for safety monitoring in residential environments. However, existing fall detection systems often rely on wearable devices or fixed sensing installations, which may suffer from low user compliance, limited spatial coverage, or degraded performance under occlusion and poor lighting conditions. In this work, we propose \textbf{EM-Fall}, an embodied fall detection framework deployed on a mobile humanoid robot. The system integrates millimeter-wave (mmWave) sensing with robotic mobility, allowing the robot to actively adjust its sensing viewpoint and maintain target observability across rooms and under occlusion. To address interference in complex residential environments, including pet motion and multipath artifacts, we design a human-centered perception pipeline combined with lightweight temporal modeling to capture motion evolution before, during, and after fall events. We evaluate the proposed system across eight real indoor environments with four participants and construct an in-home mmWave fall detection dataset. Experimental results show that the embodied mobile sensing paradigm improves monitoring continuity and maintains robust fall detection performance under diverse environmental conditions. The proposed framework provides a practical solution for robot-assisted safety monitoring in home environments.

Embodied world models have emerged as a pivotal paradigm for visual robotic decision-making and interactive environment simulation. However, conventional embodied frameworks rely on low-dimensional structured action vectors (e.g., joint angles and end-effector poses), which suffer from limited expressive capacity, poor generalization across diverse embodiments, and unnatural dynamic modeling for complex physical interactions. To address these limitations, this paper proposesiMac (Image as Action Control), a novel unified control paradigm that treats raw visual images as native action representations for embodied world models. Departing from traditional explicit kinematic action encoding, iMac formulates continuous visual manipulation as image-based action tokens, which inherently encapsulate spatial motion intentions, interactive geometric constraints and subtle physical dynamics. We construct a dual-branch embodied architecture consisting of an image-action encoder and a dynamic world predictor: the encoder compresses target-driven visual images into compact action embeddings, while the predictor learns environment transition rules conditioned on image actions to achieve high-fidelity future state prediction and closed-loop embodied control. Extensive experiments are conducted on public embodied manipulation benchmarks and real-world robotic scenarios. The results demonstrate that iMac outperforms vector-based action control baselines in prediction accuracy, task success rate and cross-scene generalization ability. Moreover, our image-action design eliminates the reliance on manually defined action spaces, realizing flexible and universal control for heterogeneous embodied agents. This work provides an innovative visual-action perspective for embodied world models, offering a simple yet effective paradigm for scalable robotic perception and manipulation.

Reliable robotic navigation necessitates the seamless integration of accurate global localization and dense, metric-consistent obstacle perception. A common strategy to achieve these capabilities involves integrating diverse sensing modalities: cameras offer rich visual features for localization, while active sensors like LiDAR provide direct metric measurements. However, such multi-sensor configurations necessitate complex spatial-temporal calibration and increase deployment overhead. Although vision-only approaches offer a low-cost and scalable alternative, existing monocular visual systems typically struggle to simultaneously achieve efficient, globally consistent localization and dense, metric-consistent geometric perception. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{VGP-Nav}, a unified framework for \textit{Metric-Aware Visual Geometric Perception} that relies solely on monocular RGB input to jointly support metric localization and obstacle perception. Our key insight is to anchor localization-grounded visual geometry to physically meaningful scale constraints derived from ground-plane geometry, thereby providing a reliable metric reference for monocular perception. VGP-Nav resolves monocular scale ambiguity online and produces localization-grounded, metric obstacle representations that are directly applicable to downstream planning. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong generalization across diverse environments and successful deployment on real mobile robots, highlighting the practicality of our approach for scalable, low-cost, and safe autonomous navigation.

LiDAR-based 3D Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) typically relies solely on geometric information, which is often insufficient to distinguish between targets during prolonged occlusions or in crowded human-populated environments. While integrating RGB-based Re-Identification (ReID) offers a theoretical solution for preserving identity context, existing approaches often rely on computationally expensive parallel detectors that hinder real-time robot responsiveness. This work presents a systematic study of image-based ReID in online 3D MOT, utilizing a lightweight projection-based framework to decouple geometric and appearance modeling for mobile robots. A comprehensive analysis of feature extraction architectures is conducted, employing lightweight CNNs and Vision Transformers, and evaluating various multi-modal data association strategies to balance computational latency with robust tracking. Experiments on the Pedestrian class of the KITTI dataset reveal that naive linear fusion, of appearance and motion costs, degrades performance due to visual noise. Conversely, a cascaded matching strategy successfully recovers occluded tracks without compromising overall precision, effectively preventing identity switches to maintain human-robot interaction continuity. We show that lightweight architectures can offer an optimal trade-off between the low latency required for safe navigation and the discriminative power needed for social awareness.

Successful robot automation requires accurate global localization to support repeatability, task planning, goal specification, and safe operation. However, reliable localization in GNSS-denied environments remains an open problem. Overhead aerial imagery offers a promising solution, but existing approaches primarily target structured urban environments and have been rarely demonstrated in unstructured natural terrain. Limitations of the state-of-the-art include a reliance on models trained for specific environments, as well as difficulty handling repetitive geometries and featureless landscapes commonly found in natural outdoor areas. To overcome these challenges, we present Meridian, a method for matching high-level metric-semantic primitives across aerial images and ground robot RGB-D camera data that achieves accurate global localization and generalizes well across diverse environments, all without any training or algorithmic fine-tuning on area-specific data. We formulate novel consistency metrics to estimate a distribution over robot submap poses and to reject outlier hypotheses in a robust pose graph optimization step for accurate robot trajectory estimation. We demonstrate that our algorithm can localize a ground robot across a wide variety of environments, including an autonomous driving dataset, a park and campus area, and a wilderness camp, with an average optimized trajectory error of 2.4 m over 19 km of ground traversal.

Point clouds are a primary sensory representation for robotic perception, underpinning LiDAR-based autonomous driving, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and navigation. Within these pipelines, Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) is the most well-known downsampling operator, as its uniform coverage preserves the geometric structure on which downstream perception relies. However, the large time complexity of classical FPS scales poorly with the million-point-per-second rates of modern 3D sensors, making it a dominant latency bottleneck that conflicts with the real-time and limited onboard compute budgets of robotic systems. Therefore, we propose RadiusFPS, an FPS acceleration framework based on spherical voxel pruning that preserves the standard FPS update rule under the same initialization and tie-breaking policy. By indexing the point cloud with spherical voxels, RadiusFPS derives a conservative geometric bound that prunes redundant distance computations in each iteration, complemented by a coordinate-wise point-skip test that removes residual updates. We further introduce RadiusFPS-G, a warp-level GPU implementation that fuses voxel selection, pruning, and distance update into memory-coalesced kernels, eliminating costly global-memory round-trips. On indoor (S3DIS, ScanNet) and outdoor LiDAR (SemanticKITTI) benchmarks, RadiusFPS-G attains up to 2.5x speedup over GPU-based FPS and matches or exceeds QuickFPS among the evaluated methods while using roughly half its GPU memory, with comparable segmentation accuracy. When coupled with the learning-based FastPoint sampler, the resulting pipeline achieves the fastest End-to-End inference among all evaluated configurations. These properties make high-quality FPS-style sampling practical for latency- and memory-constrained robotic vision.

Existing robot planning systems rely on appearance-based reasoning, where visual observations are encoded into latent spaces organized around object appearances (e.g., recognizing a "cart" based on how it looks). However, planning requires reasoning about task-relevant functionalities of objects (e.g., whether an object is "movable"), which appearance-based latent spaces do not capture. As a result, existing approaches struggle to generalize to novel robot-object interactions. We address this limited generalizability through affordance reasoning, enabling planning based on task-relevant object functionalities instead of appearance alone. We introduce A4D, which maps visual observations into a shared latent space structured around affordances (e.g., "movable"). By projecting visual observations into this functional latent space and measuring their proximity to affordances, A4D infers functionalities relevant to the observed object. Furthermore, we introduce an affordance discovery mechanism that expands the latent space to handle unseen scenarios where existing affordances are insufficient. A4D uses proximity in the functional latent space to quantify uncertainty in affordance inference and selectively triggers affordance discovery. We evaluate A4D across several planning tasks involving diverse and unseen affordances. A4D achieves 94% inference accuracy on existing affordances outperforming state-of-the-art approaches by over 15% points, improves new-affordance inference accuracy from 70% to over 90% with fewer than 10% of the original training data, and enables 100x faster inference. Code, videos, and data available at: https://A4Dance-reasoning.github.io.

The estimation of odometry in legged robots depends on the assumption that the velocity of the foot with respect to the world remains zero during the stance phase. Feedback for the main body velocity is derived from the kinematic serial chain of the feet making accurate leg phase detection is a critical subproblem. A considerable number of studies employ ground reaction force sensors mounted at the tip of the foot to classify, yet these sensors may not be universally available for all legged robots. Additionally, these sensors are often unresponsive to unaccounted disturbances, such as slippage, while the foot remains in contact with the ground. In this study, we propose a self-supervised representation learning framework for contact detection that utilizes the standard sensor set of joint encoders without reliance on force sensor augmentations. We employ learned representations to model the stance and swing phases probabilistically. The experimental results obtained confirm the efficacy of the proposed self-supervised contact detector. Our framework exhibited superior performance in comparison to supervised methods which necessitate sensor set augmentation and labeling, as well as baseline probabilistic approaches. Additionally, we make our code available to the public.

Low-cost 2D LiDARs lack the intensity channel that higher-end sensors use to diagnose measurement failures, yet they are widely used on educational and budget robotics platforms. We present SENTINEL, a training - free, label - free reliability estimation framework that gives range - only LiDAR an effective diagnostic signal. SENTINEL combines geometry-based scan statistics with cross - modal depth consistency between LiDAR and an RGB - D camera to compute a per - scan reliability score between 0 and 1. When the score falls below a threshold, corrupted scans are rejected and the robot falls back to calibrated wheel odometry, preventing silent SLAM corruption. We evaluate SENTINEL on a GEFIER R1 four - wheel skid-steer robot equipped with an RPLidar A2M12 and an Intel RealSense D435i in a 185 cm by 245 cm arena containing controlled transparent and reflective failure elements on a central obstacle. Spatial reliability maps across five surface conditions, including glass, mirror, shiny paper, and a mixed mirror and shiny-paper condition, show clear separation between clean and failure cases, allowing affected regions to be identified as reject or noise. Because these failure modes are absent in simulation, validation is performed entirely on real hardware.

Simulation environments are useful for both robot policy learning and planning verification and validation. Traditionally, the process of creating a simulation was onerous. Creating a bespoke simulation environment for each individual environment that a robot would operate in was simply infeasible. In this work, we introduce PerceptTwin, a fully automatic pipeline that constructs interactive simulations directly from semantic scene representations produced by a robot's perception stack. PerceptTwin combines open-vocabulary object maps with 3D asset generation, affordance prediction, and commonsense condition checking. These interactive simulations can be used to validate and refine plans before they are executed on the robot hardware. Borrowing from the AI alignment literature, we also introduce an LLM judge that verifies plan correctness and alignment with human preferences. Experiments show that PerceptTwin feedback allows LLM planners to refine plans, enhance safety, and resist harmful black-box prompting attacks. In our suite of tasks, PerceptTwin improves plan success by an average of approximately 39% for GPT5, GPT5Mini, and GPT5Nano planners. Additionally, PerceptTwin also improves human plan verification by up to 18% on average for plans that fail due to unfilled skill preconditions. Our results demonstrate the potential of open-vocabulary scene simulation from robot perception as a foundation for safer, more reliable robot planning.

Object pose estimation is a fundamental problem for an agent system to perceive or manipulate objects in images or videos. However, current instance-level methods struggle with generalization to unseen objects. Category-level methods seek to address this, but remain constrained by the complexities of learning in the non-linear Sim(3) space and intra-class variations. To address these challenges, We propose an effective method for category-level object pose estimation with two key innovations: (1) A translation/size estimator, featuring a semantic-guided symmetry-aware module that leverages robust generalization capabilities of a large vision model (LVM) to infer symmetry points, resulting in accurate translation and size without shape priors. This result serves as a precomputed cue for rotation estimation, thereby reducing the difficulty of learning in the non-linear Sim(3) space and laying a robust foundation for tackling the inherently more challenging rotation estimation. (2) A feature fusion module, based on our proposed spherical large-kernel inception convolution, fuses semantic features from the LVM with systematically computed geometric features to extract essential pose features from intra-class variations by modeling long-range dependencies without excessive computational cost. Built on these innovations, we achieve SOTA on benchmarks and real-world scenes, while developing a robust robotic picking system capable of handling diverse objects. Our code will be available at the project page: {\hypersetup{urlcolor=blue}https://panfei-cheng.github.io/SSH-Pose}.

Robot localization systems are critical for autonomous navigation and safety. Adversarial perturbations can mislead these systems, resulting in mislocalization, navigation errors, or unsafe interactions, especially in mission-critical scenarios. This paper investigates the vulnerability of deep learning based localization pipelines to adversarial attacks. We propose a novel framework for generating adversarial queries that specifically target Product Quantization (PQ) in visual localization systems. Our method employs a Lightweight Product Quantization Network (LPQN) to perturb query feature encodings, misleading the retrieval process by returning semantically irrelevant database entries. Adversarial queries are generated via a two-phase procedure: a forward pass that perturbs feature distributions and a backward pass that refines the perturbation through optimization. The lightweight design of LPQN allows the creation of subtle yet highly effective perturbations with minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments in both controlled and real-world robotic environments demonstrate that our approach substantially degrades PQN performance, exposing critical vulnerabilities in practical applications.

Transparent objects remain challenging for robotic perception due to unreliable depth sensing caused by refraction and reflection. While prior approaches rely on multi-view reconstruction or depth completion, they are often difficult to scale or deploy in real-world robotic systems. In this paper, we present a practical framework for transparent object perception and manipulation based on single-view RGB input. Our approach predicts voxel-space occupancy directly from a single image, providing a geometry-aware representation that supports downstream robotic grasping. To enable large-scale training, we construct a simulation pipeline that generates paired RGB images and voxel occupancy annotations under diverse materials and lighting conditions. We demonstrate that the predicted occupancy representation is robust to domain shifts and transfers effectively from simulation to real-world robotic setups without fine-tuning. A simple rule-based grasping strategy built on top of the occupancy further achieves reliable grasp performance on transparent objects. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments show that our framework provides accurate 3D understanding and enables practical manipulation of transparent objects. These results suggest that single-view occupancy prediction offers a scalable and effective solution for transparent object perception in robotics.

Hierarchical 3D Scene Graphs (3DSG) have emerged as an actionable and scalable representation for long-term autonomy incorporating metric, semantic, and topological information in the scene. However, the question of geometric representation of objects in 3DSG has been overlooked as most methods use simplified geometric models such as partial point clouds or 3D bounding boxes. In this work, we introduce a hierarchical object representation that can be leveraged for high-fidelity object-level reconstruction, object-based robust re-localization or map alignment, and efficient and analytical collision checking for safe robot navigation planning in dense and cluttered environments. The representation is structurally organized into four distinct layers, progressively abstracting the scene from raw sensor data to dense 3D meshes to analytical primitives such as superquadrics, which provide a sparse and analytical representation for object geometry. We develop a pipeline that builds the hierarchical object representation from RGB-D image stream captured by a robot, and demonstrate its working in real-world open-set object scenes in both indoor and outdoor environments. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets including HOPE, ReplicaCAD, Kimera-Multi, and NUS Campus Dataset collected using Unitree B2 Robot validate our pipeline in both indoor and outdoor environments. We show that our superquadric-based map alignment method outperforms the current state-of-the-art object based map alignment method ROMAN. Our code can be found at https://github.com/perceptica-robotics/Hickory.

Persistent maps used by autonomous robots increasingly fuse a geometric perception stack whose assertions are well-characterized with a foundation-model channel that produces semantic claims without calibrated reliability about the same scene. Contemporary mapping systems integrate the two channels by treating the foundation-model channel as an additional voter into a per-element posterior, uncalibrated for its own per-class reliability and without machinery to flag when the two channels contradict each other at a given moment. We propose an update operator with two cooperating mechanisms: a per-class calibrated commit gate, and a per-event conflict-drop window that refuses to commit foundation-model claims contradicted by the geometric channel at the moment of the claim. We evaluate on KITTI-360 and ScanNet, with an oracle geometric channel (panoptic ground truth) and an off-the-shelf online semantic segmenter (Mask2Former) to demonstrate real-world performance. The operator produces substantially more accurate committed maps (KITTI is car commit precision 99.7% vs. 43.9% for the calibration-only operator; mean per-class IoU 0.522 vs. 0.180), retains more compositional true positives at higher precision than a monolithic compositional VLM prompt. The framework operates at deployment quality across both oracle and off-the-shelf-segmenter geometric channels, and is invariant under foundation-model substitution.

Outdoor robot teams need a shared dense map despite limited overlap, independent reference frames, and uncertain monocular scale. Collaborative dense SLAM systems typically resolve this with depth sensors, which add payload, power, and calibration cost. We present CoMo3R-SLAM, a collaborative monocular dense SLAM system that places learned feed-forward 3D reconstruction priors at the center of the multi-agent problem: their dense pointmaps anchor scale across agents and supply correspondences strong enough to verify inter-agent links geometrically. Each agent tracks and fuses its own keyframes from a single RGB stream, while a coordinator retrieves cross-agent keyframes over the prior's encoder features, verifies them by bidirectional dense pointmap matching, synchronizes the independent similarity gauges in closed form, and refines every keyframe in one unified multi-agent sim(3) graph. Finally, a pose-depth alternation over geometry-aware segments lets inter-agent observations constrain dense structure as well as trajectories. Requiring neither measured depth nor supplied intrinsics, CoMo3R-SLAM attains the lowest trajectory error on three of four Tanks and Temples scenes, and competitive accuracy on Waymo driving sequences, while running at approximately 6-8 FPS on RTX 3080 Ti. A long-horizon traversal, independently captured day and night streams, and teams of up to four agents further map its operating range.

Robot manipulation critically depends on perception that preserves the action-relevant aspects of a scene. Yet most robot learning pipelines are built upon visual encoders pre-trained for static recognition or vision-language alignment, leaving motion understanding to downstream policies. We introduce DynaFLIP, a dynamics-aware multimodal pre-training framework that pushes motion understanding upstream into perception. We construct image-language-3D flow triplets from heterogeneous human and robot videos, and use these triplets as training-time supervision to shape an image-only encoder. Our key idea is to encourage the three modalities to span a small simplex volume in the shared hyperspherical space -- a smaller simplex volume indicating stronger alignment. To avoid the geometric ambiguity and trivial collapse of naive volume minimization, we combine simplex-volume minimization with a cosine regularizer and a contrastive objective. Our analyses show that DynaFLIP focuses on control-relevant regions critical for manipulation. The resulting dynamics-aware representations serve as reusable visual backbones and consistently outperform baselines across diverse downstream policies, including VLAs. We validate this across diverse simulation and real-world setups, with gains reaching +22.5% under out-of-distribution scenarios. Our results suggest that robot generalization improves when visual representations are trained to encode not just what is present, but how the world changes under action.

Event-based vision sensors offer asynchronous, high-temporal-resolution measurements that are attractive for low-latency robotic perception, but many event-based motion estimation methods are computationally intensive and difficult to map to FPGA hardware. We present a streaming velocity estimator that discretizes asynchronous events into fixed-duration time bins, constructs a 1-bit spatial occupancy grid, and evaluates multiple velocity hypotheses in parallel using only fixed-width integer logic - shift registers, counters, comparators, and small LUT-mapped multiplies - with no dividers and no DSP blocks. It requires no frame reconstruction, no floating-point arithmetic, and no iterative optimization. The method deliberately trades dense sub-pixel optical flow for a sparse, quantized velocity estimate at each active pixel, suited to low-latency tasks such as reactive obstacle avoidance on size-, weight-, and power-constrained platforms. On noisy synthetic data with known ground-truth velocities, the method recovers both magnitude and direction, with magnitude estimates being most challenged when objects of different velocities intersect. On a real event-camera sequence, directional accuracy reaches 99.5% across all four evaluated motion segments, with performance remaining robust across occupancy densities in the 10-40% range. We characterize the algorithm's density-dependent behavior, present a parameter sensitivity analysis, show that the proposed datapath requires less than 2 kB of storage, and implement a single-axis prototype on a low-cost Xilinx Artix-7.

In safety-critical robotics applications, guaranteed and practical uncertainty quantification (UQ) in perception is vital. Many existing works either offer no formal containment guarantee, rely on restrictive modeling assumptions, or focus only on pose estimation rather than a complete SLAM pipeline. This paper presents provably guaranteed UQ algorithms for 3D-3D landmark-based SLAM. The algorithms consist of three basic UQ modules: forward UQ for mapping, backward UQ for pose tracking, and pose compound. Each module produces a certified uncertainty set; when the input uncertainty bounds are deterministic, the output sets inherit deterministic guarantees, i.e., they provably contain the true poses and landmarks. Specifically, we use polytopes to represent uncertainty sets, enabling tractable computations and a unified treatment of pose uncertainty. To enhance algorithms' practical usability, we incorporate conformal prediction to calibrate measurement uncertainty from data with prescribed probability. Simulations and experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithms provide both strong theoretical guarantees and practical usability. The code is open-sourced at https://github.com/LIAS-CUHKSZ/Polytopic-SLAM-Uncertainty-Quantification.

We present the stochastic decoupled policy gradient (SDPG), a lightweight visual reinforcement learning (RL) method that trains diverse visuomotor control policies end-to-end within a few hours on a single NVIDIA RTX 4080 GPU. SDPG estimates policy gradients via random perturbations of trajectory rollouts, requiring orders of magnitude fewer batch-rendered environments and substantially reducing compute and memory overhead. On visual MuJoCo benchmarks, SDPG consistently outperforms baseline methods in training time, memory usage, and rewards. Finally, to support future research, we introduce a suite of realistic visual robotics benchmarks spanning dexterous manipulation, challenging locomotion, and demonstrate effective sim-to-real transfer on physical hardware.

Surgical instrument pose estimation provides crucial information for promising applications, including autonomous robotic surgery, skill assessment, and standardization of surgical workflow. However, this task remains highly challenging due to high precision requirements, frequent occlusions, textureless instruments, scarcity of depth information and very limited annotated data. These constraints often lead to unsatisfactory performance when employing general object pose estimation approaches to surgical scenarios. To address these issues, we first construct a new dataset SynSurg6D, to alleviate the data shortage in this task. We further propose SurfSurg6D, a dense-correspondence framework tailored for surgical instrument pose estimation. Experimental results on the SurgRIPE, EndoVis2018 and SurgPose datasets demonstrate that the introduction of our generated dataset SynSurg6D is able to diversify the pose distributions, thus enhancing the performance of existing approaches. Furthermore, SurfSurg6D outperforms existing methods, providing a robust solution for precise and efficient RGB-only pose estimation.

Robotic perception in unstructured environments remains challenging despite the zero-shot capabilities of foundation models such as SAM. This work attributes performance degradation to non-uniform representation shifts across transformer layers: shallow layers exhibit substantial domain gaps (CKA < 0.5), whereas deep layers transfer effectively (CKA > 0.7). Based on this observation, we propose RepSAM, a representation-guided parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) framework for adapting foundation models to robotic vision. RepSAM employs a theoretically grounded CKA-guided rank allocation strategy combined with a multi-modal fusion module for robust handling of challenging robotic scenarios, including transparent objects and cluttered scenes. Experimental evaluation across six benchmarks and robotic manipulation tasks demonstrates that RepSAM achieves 97.9% of full fine-tuning performance (89.0% vs. 90.9% mIoU) while reducing trainable parameters by 158x (from 632M to 4.0M). RepSAM outperforms DoRA by 7.9% mIoU with just 4 hours of training on a single A100 GPU (a 96x reduction from full fine-tuning, which takes 384 GPU-hours). These improvements are statistically significant (p < 0.01) and translate to a 12.0% absolute improvement in robotic manipulation success rates over the LoRA (RGB) baseline.

Recent advances in imitation learning and vision-language models highlight the need for high-fidelity tactile perception, with 6-DoF tactile object pose estimation providing a crucial foundation for precise robotic manipulation. We introduce InvariantCloud, a 6-DoF pose estimation framework that leverages the global invariance of surface marker constellations on vision-based tactile sensors. In contrast to recent approaches, our one-shot globally invariant point cloud registration suppresses cumulative drift and overcomes long-standing limitations in accurately estimating yaw (Z-axis) rotation. Experimental verifications show that InvariantCloud achieves superior yaw tracking accuracy and re-localization repeatability compared to existing benchmarks, demonstrating its precision and robustness in long-sequence manipulation tasks.

Deploying heterogeneous multi-agent robot fleets for collaborative perception requires robust data exchange and scalable software architectures. However, standard ROS 2 implementations often suffer from network saturation, namespace collisions, and severe computational overhead when distributing dense sensor streams across devices. To address these bottlenecks, we present SFG-ROS, a resource-aware multi-agent software framework designed for dynamic fleet deployments. SFG-ROS addresses these challenges through three primary contributions. First, schema-driven traffic routing isolates high-frequency intra-agent traffic from the global network using a programmatic fully qualified name schema and targeted Fast DDS routing. Second, an on-demand centralized decoding pipeline automatically offloads high-bandwidth sensor data decompression, eliminating redundant processing across local consumer nodes. Finally, a hardware-agnostic container pipeline dynamically adapts to heterogeneous accelerators, seamlessly bridging development environments with zero-touch, field-ready execution. We evaluate the framework using a fleet of wheeled and legged robots equipped with LiDAR and stereo depth cameras. Experimental results show SFG-ROS bounds network traffic to $\mathcal{O}(1)$ and, by replacing redundant decompression with lightweight IPC, reduces the per-subscriber CPU scaling penalty by 72.3% versus standard ROS 2, all while maintaining low latency. Finally, we publish SFG-ROS under a permissive license, available via \href{https://iis-esslingen.github.io/sfg-ros}{iis-esslingen.github.io/sfg-ros}.

Reliable uncertainty estimation is critical for deploying monocular depth deep neural networks (DNNs) in safety-critical robotic systems. Conventional uncertainty methods such as ensembles and sampling-based approaches require multiple inferences per image, incurring substantial compute and memory overhead. Moreover, uncertainty predicted from a single image misses out on measuring disagreement between predictions across views of the same region. We propose Uncertainty from Motion* (UfM*), an uncertainty estimation algorithm that measures multiview disagreement efficiently by comparing previous and current views using a compact Gaussian mixture, requiring only a single DNN inference per image. Using Gaussians to compute multiview disagreement is not only more compute- and memory-efficient than a prior approach using a point cloud, but also improves uncertainty by measuring disagreement across regions of 3D space. UfM* paired with aleatoric uncertainty improves expected calibration error by 24-28% compared to an ensemble, while requiring only 3% of the energy and 0.02% of the memory on 100 out-of-distribution ScanNet sequences. We demonstrate UfM* consumes only 63 mJ per 224x224 image while running real-time at 30 FPS on an Arm Cortex-A76 CPU onboard a miniature energy-constrained robot, highlighting that measuring multiview disagreement using Gaussians enables efficient uncertainty for resource-constrained robotic systems.

Tactile sensing plays a key role in robotic manipulation, particularly in tasks like surface inspection. Successful execution requires maintaining contact while accurately tracking object contours. In this work, we propose a Vision-Based Tactile Model Predictive Control (VBT-MPC) framework for robotic contour following using a Vision-Based Tactile Sensor (VBTS) mounted in an eye-in-hand configuration. The proposed controller operates directly in contour features space, thereby avoiding the need for separate pose-estimation modules or complex force-control architectures. We further compare our VBT-MPC with visual-servoing strategies adapted to tactile features, and evaluate contour tracking on objects with diverse geometries and materials in both simulation and real-world experiments.

The simultaneous localization and mapping community has introduced a growing number of systems adapted for multi-session operations where the operational environment features low-dynamic changes that impact mapping, such as surface wear, weather phenomena, or seasonal change. These systems allow for lifelong operations by a robot within these environments. There is also growing interest in operations in environments where the unique ground texture is the only mapping feature available for use. These ground texture systems are not yet targeted for multi-session low-dynamic-change environments though. This work explores the impact of three different techniques on trajectory estimation accuracy in these multi-session low-dynamic ground texture environments. Of the three, the use of Kullback-Leibler Divergence, as a similarity score and a bias influencing loop closure confidence, is found to have the most success. We show an analysis of all three methods and a deeper exploration of the impact of Kullback-Leibler Divergence. We also introduce a dataset for use by the robotics community that contains multi-session images where the ground changes between sessions and also high-accuracy pose information for use in evaluation.

Monocular SLAM historically suffers from scale ambiguity and tracking failure in dynamic environments. While recent vision foundation models (VFMs) provide remarkable zero-shot depth priors, naively integrating these deterministic predictions ignores predictive uncertainty and frame-to-frame scale inconsistencies. We propose PRISM-SLAM, a real-time framework that rigorously integrates VFM priors into a structured Bayesian factor graph to achieve scale-aware, metric-consistent localization and mapping. Specifically, we introduce a Plücker Ray-Distance Factor to anchor monocular observations in absolute space within a globally consistent metric coordinate system, mathematically resolving scale drift by making the metric scale Fisher-identifiable. To handle environmental dynamics, we derive an epistemic uncertainty proxy from temporal depth consistency and formulate a Dynamic Scene Uncertainty Gating (DSUG) mechanism. This soft-gating approach probabilistically down-weights dynamic distractors without incurring the heavy computational overhead associated with traditional semantic segmentation masks. By employing a multi-process architecture that asynchronously processes VFM inference and geometric tracking, PRISM-SLAM provides verified metric output at 30 FPS using solely RGB input, bridging the gap between foundation models and real-world robotic applications. Evaluated on the TUM RGB-D and 7-Scenes benchmarks, PRISM-SLAM achieves a metric $SE(3)$ Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE) nearly identical to its oracle-aligned $Sim(3)$ error. This demonstrates that our system can produce deployment-ready metric trajectories by delivering robust metric SLAM solutions without any post-hoc scale correction. Project page: https://prismslam-cmd.github.io/prismslam_pr/

Autonomous agile robots need more than metric geometry: they must understand objects, rooms, places, and spatial relations for search, inspection, exploration, and human robot interaction. Conventional metric maps support localization and collision avoidance, but do not provide this semantic and relational structure. 3D scene graphs address this gap by connecting geometry with object level and room level understanding. Building such representations on agile platforms remains difficult because aerial and lightweight robots operate under strict payload, power, and compute limits, making RGB-D cameras and LiDAR sensors impractical for many onboard settings. We present Mono-Hydra++, a real time monocular RGB plus IMU pipeline for indoor metric semantic mapping and hierarchical 3D scene graph construction. The system combines M2H-MX, a DINOv3 based multi-task model for depth and semantics, with a deep feature visual inertial odometry front end, sparse predicted depth constraints in the VIO derived pose graph, semantic masking for dynamic regions, and pose aware temporal alignment before volumetric fusion in the Mono-Hydra backend. On the Go-SLAM ScanNet evaluation subset, Mono-Hydra++ achieves 1.6% lower average trajectory error than the strongest RGB-D baseline in our comparison, while using only monocular RGB plus IMU input. On calibrated 7-Scenes, it improves average ATE by 29.8% over the strongest competing calibrated baseline. We further validate Mono-Hydra++ in a real ITC building deployment using RealSense RGB plus IMU and demonstrate embedded feasibility by deploying the ONNX/TensorRT FP16 M2H-MX-L perception model at 25.53 FPS on a Jetson Orin NX 16GB. These results show that Mono-Hydra++ can provide real time metric semantic mapping and scene graph construction for resource constrained robotic platforms without relying on active depth sensors.

Accurate visual state estimation has been a central topic in robotics with a wide range of applications in robot navigation, autonomous driving, and autonomous flight. Recent advances in robot perception have led to significant improvements in the accuracy and robustness of state estimation, yet a fundamental challenge remains in how to quantify and calibrate its precision, i.e., how confident we are in an estimate and whether failures can be detected. This issue is particularly pronounced in visual-inertial odometry (VIO), where the heteroscedastic and multimodal nature of the problem makes uncertainty quantification especially difficult. This paper introduces MUSE (Multimodal Uncertainty Quantification of State Estimation), a novel real-time learning-based framework that leverages the strong and efficient sequential modeling capacity of Mamba to estimate localization uncertainty from multiple asynchronous sensor streams. Experiments on both public and in-house datasets demonstrate that MUSE achieves superior reliability and robustness compared to existing uncertainty quantification methods, and ablation studies justify the benefits of its key design choices.

Robust robotic autonomy remains challenging in complex environments, where loss of stability on uneven or slippery terrain can induce extreme accelerations and angular velocities. Such motions corrupt sensor measurements and degrade state estimation, motivating the need for improved algorithmic robustness. To investigate this issue, we introduce the Tumbling-Induced Gyroscope Saturation (TIGS) dataset, which consists of recordings from a mechanical lidar and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) tumbling down a hill. The dataset contains angular speeds up to four times higher than those in similar datasets and is publicly available. We then propose two complementary methods to improve Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) robustness and evaluate them on TIGS. First, Saturation-Aware Angular Velocity Estimation (SAAVE) estimates angular velocities when gyroscope measurements become saturated during aggressive motions, reducing angular speed estimation error by 83.4%. Second, Stretch-ICP, a novel registration and deskewing algorithm, enables reconstruction of smoother 6-Degrees Of Freedom (DOF) trajectories under aggressive motions compared to classical Iterative Closest Point (ICP). Stretch-ICP reduces linear and angular velocity errors by 95.2% and 94.8%, respectively, at scan boundaries. Together, these contributions improve the robustness and consistency of lidar-inertial state estimation under aggressive motions.

Purpose: Mechanical thrombectomy (MT) improves stroke outcomes, but is limited by a lack of local treatment access. Widespread distribution of reinforcement learning (RL)-based robotic systems can be used to alleviate this challenge through autonomous navigation, but current RL methods require live device tip coordinate tracking to function. This paper aims to develop and evaluate a real-time catheter tip tracking pipeline under fluoroscopy, addressing challenges such as low contrast, noise, and device occlusion. Methods: A multi-threaded pipeline was designed, incorporating frame reading, preprocessing, inference, and post-processing. Deep learning segmentation models, including U-Net, U-Net+Transformer, and SegFormer, were trained and benchmarked using two-class and three-class formulations. Post-processing involved two-step component filtering, one-pixel medial skeletonization, and greedy arc-length path following with contour fall-back. Results: On manually-labeled moderate complexity fluoroscopic video data, the two-class SegFormer achieved a mean absolute error of 4.44 mm, outperforming U-Net (4.60 mm), U-Net+Transformer (6.20 mm) and all three-class models (5.19-7.74 mm). On segmentation benchmarks, the system exceeded state-of-the-art CathAction results with improvements of up to +5% in Dice scores for three-segmentation. Conclusion: The results demonstrate that the proposed multi-threaded tracking framework maintains stable performance under challenging imaging conditions, outperforming prior benchmarks, while providing a reliable and efficient foundation for RL-based autonomous MT navigation.

Collaborative photorealistic 3D reconstruction from multiple agents enables rapid large-scale scene capture for virtual production and cooperative multi-robot exploration. While recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) SLAM algorithms can generate high-fidelity real-time mapping, most of the existing multi-agent Gaussian SLAM methods still rely on RGB-D sensors to obtain metric depth and simplify cross-agent alignment, which limits the deployment on lightweight, low-cost, or power-constrained robotic platforms. To address this challenge, we propose MAGS-SLAM, the first RGB-only multi-agent 3DGS SLAM framework for collaborative scene reconstruction. Each agent independently builds local monocular Gaussian submaps and transmits compact submap summaries rather than raw observations or dense maps. To facilitate robust collaboration in the presence of monocular scale ambiguity, our framework integrates compact submap communication, geometry- and appearance-aware loop verification, and occupancy-aware Gaussian fusion, enabling coherent global reconstruction without active depth sensors. We further introduce ReplicaMultiagent Plus benchmark for evaluating collaborative Gaussian SLAM. Intensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that MAGS-SLAM achieves competitive tracking accuracy and comparable or superior rendering quality to state-of-the-art RGB-D collaborative Gaussian SLAM methods while relying only RGB images.

Object-centric view planning is a core component of active geometric 3D reconstruction in robotics, yet existing evaluations often conflate object complexity, planning difficulty, budget assumptions, and physical reachability constraints. As a result, conclusions drawn from idealized view-planning evaluations may not reliably predict performance under realistic reconstruction settings. We introduce ObjView-Bench, an evaluation framework for rethinking difficulty and deployment in object-centric view planning. First, we disentangle three quantities underlying view-planning evaluation: omnidirectional self-occlusion as an object-side attribute, observation saturation difficulty, and protocol-dependent planning difficulty defined through a set-cover formulation. This separation supports controlled dataset construction, analysis of slow-saturation objects, and a case study showing that planning difficulty-aware sampling can improve learned view planners. Second, we design deployment-oriented evaluation protocols that reveal how budget regimes and reachable-view constraints alter method behavior. Across classical, learned, and hybrid planners, ObjView-Bench shows that difficulty, budget, and reachability constraints substantially change method rankings and failure modes.

Point clouds are a fundamental representation for robotic perception tasks such as localization, mapping, and object pose estimation. However, LiDAR-acquired point clouds are inherently sparse and non-uniform, providing incomplete observations of the underlying scene geometry. This makes reliable geometric reasoning challenging and degrades downstream perception performance. Existing approaches attempt to compensate for these limitations by estimating local geometry, but often rely on hand-crafted statistics or end-to-end supervised learning, which can suffer from limited scalability or require large amounts of accurately labeled data. To address these challenges, we explicitly model point cloud geometry under a principled mathematical formulation. We represent local geometry as a statistical manifold induced by a family of Gaussian distributions, where each point is associated with a Gaussian capturing its local geometric structure. Based on this formulation, we introduce Point-to-Ellipsoid (POLI), a deep neural estimator that predicts per-point Gaussian geometry. POLI learns a mapping from point cloud observations to their underlying geometry in a self-supervised manner, removing the need for labeled data while preserving strong geometric inductive biases. The resulting representation integrates seamlessly into existing robotic perception pipelines without architectural modifications. Extensive experiments show that POLI enables accurate and robust geometry estimation and consistently improves performance across diverse robotic perception tasks.

Vision-language models have demonstrated strong performance across robotic perception and instruction-following tasks. However, they still struggle with precise spatial reasoning, particularly in predicting object locations and fine-grained object states. We propose StateVLM, a vision-language model designed to learn fine-grained object representations, including object localization and grasp-relevant region prediction. We introduce a joint training objective that integrates an auxiliary regression loss (ARL) with the standard causal language modeling (CLM) objective to improve numerical reasoning and spatial understanding. To evaluate whether models can move beyond category-level grounding toward state-aware spatial understanding, we introduce an open-source benchmark, Object State Affordance Reasoning (OSAR), comprising 1,172 scenes with 7,746 individual objects and their corresponding bounding boxes. Empirical experiments on the Referring Expression Comprehension datasets demonstrate that integrating ARL improves model performance compared with CLM only. Experiments on the OSAR benchmark further demonstrate that StateVLM with ARL achieves an average improvement of 5.2% over models trained with CLM only. These results show that ARL is particularly beneficial for the complex affordance reasoning tasks that require object state understanding. The joint training objective in StateVLM demonstrates that integrating an auxiliary regression objective into VLM training improves numerical reasoning, and the OSAR benchmark provides a new testbed for understanding object state affordances in robotics.

Robotic laser profiling is widely used for dimensional verification and surface inspection, yet measurement fidelity is often dominated by sensor configuration rather than robot motion. Industrial profilers expose multiple coupled parameters, including sampling frequency, measurement range, exposure time, receiver dynamic range, and illumination, that are still tuned by trial-and-error; mismatches can cause saturation, clipping, or missing returns that cannot be recovered downstream. We formulate instruction-conditioned sensing parameter recommendation; given a pre-scan RGB observation and a natural-language inspection instruction, infer a discrete configuration over key parameters of a robot-mounted profiler. To benchmark this problem, we develop Instruct-Obs2Param, a real-world multimodal dataset linking inspection intents and multi-view pose and illumination variation across 16 objects to canonical parameter regimes. We then propose ScanHD, a hyperdimensional computing framework that binds instruction and observation into a task-aware code and performs parameter-wise associative reasoning with compact memories, matching discrete scanner regimes while yielding stable, interpretable, low-latency decisions. On Instruct-Obs2Param, ScanHD achieves 92.7% average exact accuracy and 98.1% average Win@1 accuracy across the five parameters, with strong cross-split generalization and low-latency inference suitable for deployment, outperforming rule-based heuristics, conventional multimodal models, and multimodal large language models. This work enables autonomous, instruction-conditioned sensing configuration from task intent and scene context, eliminating manual tuning and elevating sensor configuration from a static setting to an adaptive decision variable.

Visual affordances identify regions in an image with potential interactions, offering a novel paradigm for scene understanding. Recognizing affordances allows autonomous robots to act more naturally, could enhance human-robot interactions, enrich augmented reality systems, and benefit prosthetic vision devices. Accurate and localized prediction of affordance regions, rather than general saliency maps is crucial for these applications. We present a model for instance segmentation of affordances by adopting sample-based and ensembles approaches for uncertainty estimation. We extend an attention-based architecture for our novel task, showing with detailed ablation experiments the effects of each component. By comparing the distribution of these different detections, we extract pixel-wise epistemic and aleatoric variances at both the semantic and spatial levels. In addition, we propose a novel measure called Probability-based Mask Quality, which enables a comprehensive analysis of semantic and spatial variations in a probabilistic instance segmentation model. Our results show that the global consensus of multiple sub-networks of Bayesian models improve deterministic networks due to a better mask refinement and generalization. This fact, joined with the more powerful features extracted by attention-based mechanisms, represent an improvement of +7.4 p.p on the $F_β^w$ score in the challenging IIT-Aff dataset. Bayesian models are also better calibrated, producing less overconfident probabilities and with a better uncertainty estimation. Qualitative results show that aleatoric variance appears in the contour of the objects, while the epistemic variance is observed in visual challenging pixels, adding interpretability to the neural network.

Single-view RGB object pose estimators have reached a level of precision and efficiency that makes them good candidates for vision-based robot control. However, off-the-shelf methods lack temporal consistency and robustness that are mandatory for a stable feedback control. In this work, we develop a factor graph approach to enforce temporal consistency of the object pose estimates. In particular, the proposed approach: (i) incorporates object motion models, (ii) explicitly estimates the object pose measurement uncertainty, and (iii) integrates the above two components in an online optimization-based estimator. We demonstrate that with appropriate outlier rejection and smoothing using the proposed factor graph approach, we can significantly improve the results on standardized pose estimation benchmarks. We experimentally validate the stability of the proposed approach for a feedback-based robot control task in which the object is tracked by the camera attached to a torque controlled manipulator.

Dense and accurate depth estimation is essential for robotic manipulation, grasping, and navigation, yet currently available depth sensors are prone to errors on transparent, specular, and general non-Lambertian surfaces. To mitigate these errors, large-scale monocular depth estimation approaches provide strong structural priors, but their predictions can be potentially skewed or mis-scaled in metric units, limiting their direct use in robotics. Thus, in this work, we propose a training-free depth grounding framework that anchors monocular depth estimation priors from a depth foundation model in raw sensor depth through factor graph optimization. Our method performs a patch-wise affine alignment, locally grounding monocular predictions in metric real-world depth while preserving fine-grained geometric structure and discontinuities. To facilitate evaluation in challenging real-world conditions, we introduce a benchmark dataset with dense scene-wide ground truth depth in the presence of non-Lambertian objects. Ground truth is obtained via matte reflection spray and multi-camera fusion, overcoming the reliance on object-only CAD-based annotations used in prior datasets. Extensive evaluations across diverse sensors and domains demonstrate consistent improvements in depth performance without any (re-)training. We make our implementation publicly available at https://anchord.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

Bandwidth-constrained robotic and surveillance systems often rely on a single compressed video stream to support both continuous scene awareness and downstream machine perception. In practice, this creates a mismatch: low-bitrate video can preserve motion and coarse context, but often loses the fine local detail needed for reliable object recognition and decision-making. Motivated by a hybrid architecture in which low-resolution video supports dynamic scene understanding while eventdriven high-detail regions of interest (ROIs) support close-up identification and analytics, this paper formalizes a two-channel visual telemetry scheme in which a continuous low-bitrate video stream is augmented by selectively transmitted high-detail still ROIs. This first paper does not attempt to prove the superiority of a new still-image codec. Instead, it establishes the hybrid transmission paradigm itself using a practical and reproducible codec stack: x265/HEVC for the base video stream and JPEG stills for ROI refinement. We formulate the problem as bitrate-constrained information selection for robotic vision and define an experimental protocol in which video-only and hybrid schemes are compared under matched total communication budgets. The study is designed around UAV-oriented datasets, two practical bitrate regimes, several ROI triggering policies, and object-level classification refinement on selectively transmitted ROI stills. The resulting paper lays the methodological foundation for a second-stage investigation of JPEG AI as the semantic still-image channel within the same hybrid architecture.

We present RADIO-ViPE (Reduce All Domains Into One -- Video Pose Engine), an online semantic SLAM system that enables geometry-aware open-vocabulary grounding, associating arbitrary natural language queries with localized 3D regions and objects in dynamic environments. Unlike existing approaches that require calibrated, posed RGB-D input, RADIO-ViPE operates directly on raw monocular RGB video streams, requiring no prior camera intrinsics, depth sensors, or pose initialization. The system tightly couples multi-modal embeddings -- spanning vision and language -- derived from agglomerative foundation models (e.g., RADIO) with geometric scene information. This coupling takes place in initialization, optimization and factor graph connections to improve the consistency of the map from multiple modalities. The optimization is wrapped within adaptive robust kernels, designed to handle both actively moving objects and agent-displaced scene elements (e.g., furniture rearranged during ego-centric session). Experiments demonstrate that RADIO-ViPE achieves state-of-the-art results on the dynamic TUM-RGBD benchmark while maintaining competitive performance against offline open-vocabulary methods that rely on calibrated data and static scene assumptions. RADIO-ViPE bridges a critical gap in real-world deployment, enabling robust open-vocabulary semantic grounding for autonomous robotics and unconstrained in-the-wild video streams. Project page: https://be2rlab.github.io/radio_vipe

Robotic ultrasound has advanced local image-driven control, contact regulation, and view optimization, yet current systems lack the anatomical understanding needed to determine what to scan, where to begin, and how to adapt to individual patient anatomy. These gaps make systems still reliant on expert intervention to initiate scanning. Here we present SAMe, a semantic anatomy mapping engine that provides robotic ultrasound with an explicit anatomical prior layer. SAMe addresses scan initiation as a target-to-anatomy-to-action process: it grounds under-specified clinical complaints into structured target organs, instantiates a patient-specific anatomical representation for the grounded targets from a single external body image, and translates this representation into control-facing 6-DoF probe initialization states without any additional registration using preoperative CT or MRI. The anatomical representation maintained by SAMe is explicit, lightweight (single-organ inference in 0.08s), and compatible with downstream control by design. Across semantic grounding, anatomical instantiation, and real-robot evaluation, SAMe shows strong performance across the full initialization pipeline. In real-robot experiments, centroid-based SAMe initialization outperformed the body-keypoint-based heuristic baseline under a budget-matched single-target setting for both liver (86.7% versus 46.7%) and kidney (80.0% versus 73.3%) initialization. Furthermore, The trial-level organ-hit rate reached 97.3% for liver and 83.3% for kidney when multiple candidate targets were available. These results establish an explicit anatomical prior layer that addresses scan initialization and is designed to support broader downstream autonomous scanning pipelines, providing the anatomical foundation for complaint-driven, anatomically informed robotic ultrasonography.

Collision-free motion is often aided by tactile and proximity sensors distributed on the body of the robot due to their resistance to occlusion as opposed to external cameras. However, how to shape the sensor's properties, such as sensing coverage; type; and range, to enable avoidant behavior remains unclear. In this work, we present a reinforcement learning framework for whole-body collision avoidance on a humanoid H1-2 robot and use it to characterize how sensor properties shape learned avoidance behavior. Using dodgeball as a benchmark task, we ablate the properties of sensors distributed across the upper body of the robot and find that raw proximity measurements can substitute for explicit object localization provided the sensing range is sufficient and that sparse non-directional proximity signals outpace dense directional alternatives in sample efficiency.

We propose VISION-SLS, a method for nonlinear output-feedback control from high-resolution RGB images which provides robust constraint satisfaction guarantees under calibrated uncertainty bounds despite partial observability, sensor noise, and nonlinear dynamics. To enable scalability while retaining guarantees, we propose: (i) a learned low-dimensional observation map from pretrained visual features with state-dependent error bounds, and (ii) a causal affine time-varying output-feedback policy optimized via System Level Synthesis (SLS). We develop a scalable, novel solver for the resulting nonconvex program that leverages sequential convex programming coupled with efficient Riccati recursions. On two simulated visuomotor tasks (a 4D car and a 10D quadrotor) with >= 512 x 512 pixels and a 59D humanoid task with partial observability, our method enables safe, information-gathering behavior that reduces uncertainty while guaranteeing constraint satisfaction with empirically-calibrated error bounds. We also validate our method on hardware, safely controlling a ground vehicle from onboard images, outperforming baselines in safety rate and solve times. Together, these results show that learned visual abstractions coupled with an efficient solver make SLS-based safe visuomotor output-feedback practical at scale. The code implementation of our method is available at https://github.com/trustworthyrobotics/VISION-SLS.

Understanding the surrounding environment is fundamental in autonomous driving and robotic perception. Distinguishing between known classes and previously unseen objects is crucial in real-world environments, as done in Anomaly Segmentation. However, research in the 3D field remains limited, with most existing approaches applying post-processing techniques from 2D vision. To cover this lack, we propose a new efficient approach that directly operates in the feature space, modeling the feature distribution of inlier classes to constrain anomalous samples. Moreover, the only publicly available 3D LiDAR anomaly segmentation dataset contains simple scenarios, with few anomaly instances, and exhibits a severe domain gap due to its sensor resolution. To bridge this gap, we introduce a set of mixed real-synthetic datasets for 3D LiDAR anomaly segmentation, built upon established semantic segmentation benchmarks, with multiple out-of-distribution objects and diverse, complex environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art and competitive results on the existing real-world dataset and the newly introduced mixed datasets, respectively, validating the effectiveness of our method and the utility of the proposed datasets. Code and datasets are available at https://simom0.github.io/lido-page/.

Reliable depth estimation from spherical images is crucial for 360° vision in robotic navigation and immersive scene understanding. However, the onboard spherical camera can experience unintentional pose variations in real-world robotic platforms that, along with the geometric distortions inherent in equirectangular projections, significantly impact the effectiveness of depth estimation. To study this issue, a novel public benchmark, called Sphere-Depth, is introduced to systematically evaluate the robustness of monocular depth estimation models from equirectangular images in a reproducible way. Camera pose perturbations are simulated and used to assess the performance of a popular perspective-based model, Depth Anything, and of spherical-aware models such as Depth Anywhere, ACDNet, Bifuse++, and SliceNet. Furthermore, to ensure meaningful evaluation across models, a depth calibration-based error protocol is proposed to convert predicted relative depth values into metric depth values using supervised learned scaling factors for each model. Experiments show that even models explicitly designed to process spherical images exhibit substantial performance degradation when variations in the camera pose are observed with respect to the canonical pose. The full benchmark, evaluation protocol, and dataset splits are made publicly available at: https://github.com/sgazzeh/Sphere_depth