Sensing

Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for urban sensing has emerged as a powerful paradigm to monitor the status of the city, e.g., air quality and noise levels, through agile aerial crowdsourcing. Despite this potential, existing UAV-based sensing approaches overlook environmental disturbances like wind that drastically impact drone velocity and energy efficiency. Consequently, directly applying existing methods to this joint delivery and sensing paradigm in dynamic environments faces two severe challenges: (1) scalability bottlenecks as fleet sizes expand; and (2) multi-timescale decision heterogeneity between macro task dispatching and micro velocity control. To tackle these, we formalize the problem as SensUAV and propose a Two TimeScale Reinforcement Learning framework (TSRL). Specifically, TSRL separates decision-making into two cooperative layers. At the macro level, a task-embedding sensing dispatcher handles scalability by separately encoding distinct task features and sequentially evaluating UAV suitability before task selection. At the micro level, a wind-aware velocity controller learns fine-grained velocity scheduling to adapt to dynamic environmental variations. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that TSRL significantly outperforms baselines, achieving average system profit improvements of 20.1% in Hangzhou and 46.6% in Shanghai.

High-fidelity simulation of mmWave radar signals for dynamic human motion is valuable for developing radar-based human sensing models; yet collecting accurately labeled measurements for a specific deployment site remains expensive. We present HybridSim, a physics-learning hybrid simulator that synthesizes mmWave radar signals from dynamic human meshes under a fixed indoor room configuration, explicitly decoupling propagation into two components. To parameterize the human subject, we use a tri-plane representation to extract human features and a Graph Convolutional Network to stabilize optimization and mitigate gradient instability. The direct signal path is modeled via an inverse-rendering formulation with a microfacet BRDF to capture primary surface reflections. In parallel, the indirect path is approximated by combining 3D Gaussian Splatting with a virtual-receiver geometry to fit and reproduce site-specific multipath interference patterns, achieving substantially lower computational cost than explicit full ray tracing. Experiments in a fixed-room setting show improved agreement with a physically based reference and consistent gains on downstream radar-based human sensing tasks when using HybridSim for site-specific data augmentation.

Remote sensing offers an unparalleled vantage point for observing the Earth's long-term surface evolution, yet it demands that a model not only perceive land cover at isolated moments, but also track changes, memorize evolution histories, and reason across time and space. However, existing studies lack a systematic evaluation that dissects these distinct competencies. To fill this gap, we introduce ChronoBench, a multidimensional benchmark that decomposes this task into four progressive cognitive levels (i.e., Land Cover Perception, Temporal Recognition, Long-Term Memory, and Spatio-Temporal Reasoning). The ChronoBench comprises 12 sub-tasks and 17,689 rigorously validated QA (Question-Answer) pairs. Extensive evaluations reveal that mainstream MLLMs fall drastically behind human experts, with Long-Term Memory emerging as the most critical bottleneck. Motivated by this finding, we further propose GeoChrono, an MLLM with enhanced capabilities for tracing, memorizing, and reasoning about long-term geographic evolution. Leveraging the physical prior that geographic parcels remain spatially fixed while their semantics evolve, we design a Temporal Trajectory Encoder~(TempEnc) that constructs per-location temporal trajectories for dedicated land cover evolution modeling, and we introduce a Coarse-to-Fine Token Compressor~(C2FComp) that adaptively preserves dynamic regions while compressing the static background. To support training, we also construct ChronoInstruct, a 104K-sample instruction-tuning dataset spanning all competency levels for training. GeoChrono achieves state-of-the-art performance on ChronoBench, surpassing the leading commercial MLLMs by over 20%, while C2FComp reduces visual tokens by over 56% while retaining GeoChrono's 94.6% performance. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/IntelliSensing/GeoChrono

Robotic systems increasingly demand tactile sensing that approaches the adaptability and resolution of human skin to enable dexterous manipulation and safe interaction. OptiTac is a biomimetic tactile sensor that emulates the mechanoreceptor-to-nerve architecture of human touch by pairing each mechanical pin on a soft skin with an optical fiber acting as an artificial nerve. This design demonstrates an architectural principle for routing tactile information away from the sensing surface while preserving high spatial resolution, establishing a practical route toward distributed tactile sensing in future robotic systems. By treating tactile signals as images, simple analytical methods, rather than opaque deep-learning models, are used to infer contact location, size, and shape, providing interpretable and scalable tactile intelligence. This work demonstrates how evolutionary principles from biology can guide the development of artificial nerve systems for robots, offering a pathway toward human-like tactile perception in next-generation robotic platforms. More broadly, OptiTac establishes an artificial nerve-inspired sensing framework for interpretable robotic touch and a scalable route toward future distributed tactile systems.

This paper presents a scalable, open-source visuotactile sensing system for tensegrity robots that enables six-axis wrench estimation and contact detection. The proposed endcap sensor integrates an elastomeric shell, a 3D-printed thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) interface, and a rigid base housing an embedded camera and LED illumination ring. A novel gyroid-infill bonding technique is introduced to form a durable elastomer-TPU interface without adhesives, yielding a lightweight and modular design compatible with large-scale tensegrity structures. A tactile-to-wrench neural network maps shear vector fields to six-dimensional force and torque measurements. Experimental results demonstrate accurate and stable wrench estimation with a mean squared error (MSE) of 0.1531 on static validation data and out-of-domain generalization under dynamic motion. Furthermore, full-system integration on a 12 kg tensegrity robot confirms the sensor's ability to reliably identify ground contacts. The system substantially improves the practicality of tactile feedback for tensegrity robots, offering a low-cost, reproducible, and physically interpretable pathway toward contact-aware proprioception and state estimation. Open source files are available at \href{https://github.com/Jonathan-Twz/tensegrity-gelfoot}{github.com/Jonathan-Twz/tensegrity-gelfoot}

Tactile image generation significantly reduces the dependency on expensive and wear-prone sensors by synthesizing high-fidelity tactile data, offering an efficient solution for tactile information acquisition in robotic perception and human-machine interaction systems. However, existing methods depend on large-scale, diverse datasets from specific sensors and lack efficient data utilization and robust generalization capabilities, struggling in vision-limited environments. To address this, we introduce VQ-Touch, a tactile generation framework that supports both cross-sensor and multi-scenario applications. Specifically, to efficiently extract complex deformation and texture features from the data, we propose DM-VQGAN, an effective tactile representation learner. Furthermore, we introduce a discrete diffusion decoder with a unified conditioning interface, supporting multimodal generation tasks such as images and labels, and enhances the model's generalization capability through few-shot mixed training, thus achieving compatibility with current mainstream sensors and their variants. Experiments show that VQ-Touch surpasses state-of-the-art methods in multiple tasks.

In underwater covert cooperative missions, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) often cannot rely on active sonar to continuously obtain complete information, since active sensing and frequent communications increase the risk of exposure. As a result, AUVs primarily rely on passive observation, an approach that yields incomplete local perception and limited task efficiency. Although underwater acoustic communications can mitigate this limitation through information sharing, they are simultaneously constrained by long delays, severe interference, low reliability, and the risk of covert exposure. Existing communications-oriented multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) studies often model communication as an ideal information flow, whereas traditional communication optimization primarily focuses on link-level performance. However, both are insufficient to characterize the actual contribution of perceptual information to cooperative tasks under realistic conditions of covert physical communications. This paper proposes a Sensed Information Value Realization Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (SVR-MARL) framework that leverages practical information to characterize the utility of information for cooperative tasks and learns distributed cooperative policies under realistic communication and covert constraints. Through a case study of covert multi-AUV cooperative localization and tracking, the potential of the proposed framework to improve collaborative task efficiency while reducing unnecessary communication and exposure risks is demonstrated.

Sensor-rich data-driven applications increasingly use Bayesian approaches to infer latent states of dynamic systems from noisy sensor measurements and physical models. Yet the computation of the likelihood remains an essential bottleneck for accurate posteriors and performant inference. This paper presents a Bayesian filtering technique that uses processor-native uncertainty tracking for both uncertainty propagation and inference. The technique implements deterministic hierarchical importance restructuring through a native operation, giving deterministic latency and bounded memory use for arbitrary models written as program code. Benchmarks across three nonlinear state-space systems compare the approach against particle filters and Monte-Carlo-based likelihood estimators. The technique enables deterministic approximate filtering with as high as 805$\times$ average speedup against direct Monte Carlo work at matched result quality for model evaluation, and Pareto-dominant accuracy-latency trade-offs for posterior inference while remaining competitive in RMSE with baseline particle filters.

Low-Gain Avalanche Diodes (LGADs) and AC-coupled Low-Gain Avalanche Diodes (AC-LGADs) are promising technologies for precision timing and four-dimensional tracking. In AC-LGADs, the AC pad is coupled to the resistive n$^{+}$ layer through a dielectric layer, while the gain layer remains unsegmented. This structure provides a 100% fill factor and enables good spatial resolution with a relaxed readout pitch. The same signal-sharing mechanism that makes interpolation possible complicates the readout: charge spreads across multiple pads, the useful information can approach the electronic-noise threshold, and matrix-inversion approaches can become computationally challenging and sensitive to off-diagonal noise. In this work, we study machine-learning-based reconstruction and compression for resistive silicon sensors. We use full-waveform information from correlated pads to regularise the reconstruction and extract spatial information beyond what is available from binary readouts or reduced-amplitude summaries. We first introduce recurrent neural network models based on LSTM layers, which provide a proof-of-concept implementation for full-waveform reconstruction and have been tested for FPGA deployment using \hls. We also study routes towards bandwidth reduction with waveform rasterisation and window-selection methods, and extend the approach beyond the first model to topology-agnostic transformer-based architectures that use pad coordinates as part of the input. These models are designed to support arbitrary pad counts and geometries, mitigate edge distortions, preserve approximately $10~μ\mathrm{m}$ position resolution for $500~μ\mathrm{m}\times500~μ\mathrm{m}$ pitched sensors, and guide future resistive-silicon sensor designs

Although self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a promising way to reduce annotation effort in close-range remote sensing, its effectiveness for high-resolution multispectral unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery remains underexplored due to limited data. This study evaluated SSL pretraining for precision agriculture using cm-scale multispectral drone imagery collected across multiple sensors, years, and regions. Transformer-based encoders were pretrained with Momentum Contrast v3 (MoCo-v3) and Masked Autoencoders on a harmonized dataset combining msuav500K with newly collected multi-year UAV imagery from agricultural fields in Finland. Pretraining used four spectral bands (Green, Red, Red-Edge, Near-Infrared) for cross-sensor compatibility. The models were evaluated on crop-weed semantic segmentation using the WeedMap dataset with 5--100% training data. The following two subsets served as downstream tasks: Task A (Germany, RedEdge-M), where all pretrained models were compared under partial and full fine-tuning, and Task B (Switzerland, Sequoia), where the best encoder from Task A was assessed. Our Swin Transformer pretrained with MoCo-v3 achieved the strongest performance on both tasks, surpassing the Swin Transformer model of Doornbos et al. pretrained on a pre-release of msuav500K. Our pretrained Swin Transformer further demonstrated cross-sensor and cross-region generalization. We additionally provide a public multi-year multispectral UAV dataset from Finland to support future research.

Distributed optical fiber sensing (DOFS) combines the advantages of fiber optic sensors, including flexibility, small size, immunity to electromagnetic interference, and high metrological performance, with the capability to transform a single optical fiber into a continuous sensing element for spatially resolved mechanical measurements. Optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR), based on Rayleigh backscattering, enables high spatial resolution DOFS measurements, broadening the range of potential sensing applications. However, OFDR based DOFS remains largely unexplored for biomedical applications, despite the need for sensitive, spatially resolved, and conformable sensing interfaces. This study presents a soft DOFS based mat as a large-area interface for physiological monitoring. A single-mode optical fiber was embedded in a flexible silicone matrix and arranged in a serpentine layout to distribute sensing over the mat surface. With a gage pitch of 2.6 mm, the system provided 2250 sensing sites across the active area at a sampling frequency of 50 Hz. The mat was assessed on six healthy volunteers in a seated nearable configuration on the backrest of a standard office chair. The distributed output enabled two dimensional mapping of the mat response, reflecting back mat mechanical coupling and cardiorespiratory induced perturbations. Respiratory rate and heart rate were therefore estimated and compared with a reference wearable system. The maps revealed physiologically coherent spatial and temporal patterns, while the estimated rates showed good agreement with the reference measurements. These results demonstrate the feasibility of combining large area distributed sensing, spatial mapping, and quantitative cardiorespiratory monitoring within a DOFS based soft nearable interface.

Existing robotic perception is constrained by sensors that are either robot-mounted or permanently fixed in the environment, locking perception to a limited set of viewpoints. Yet as robots perform increasingly diverse tasks, the most informative viewpoint shifts from one task to the next-often somewhere onboard sensor and static infrastructure can not readily satisfy. To address this gap, we propose SensorPerch, a novel realization of active perception that decouples sensing from both the robot embodiment and the environment by treating sensors as independent physical entities that the robot can autonomously detach and re-attach within the environment. SensorPerch presents one realization of this paradigm: a lightweight, wireless, reconfigurable sensor platform that can perch on diverse surfaces, paired with a viewpoint-selection framework that determines task-optimal sensor placements. Together, these enable robots to construct task-relevant viewpoints on demand, independent of the robot's current position and available fixed infrastructure. We demonstrate the paradigm on two task classes: (i) object-coupled perception, where SensorPerch enables persistent object-state detection beyond the robot's current position, achieving successful event detection even when the robot is not nearby; and (ii) policy-coupled perception, where SensorPerch allows robots to construct diverse, policy-specific viewpoints for various policies, achieving success rates comparable to those obtained using oracle viewpoints.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced generalist robotic manipulation, yet real-world deployment reveals a fundamental challenge: robots are equipped with diverse and heterogeneous sensor configurations, auxiliary sensors can fail unexpectedly during operation, and different robot embodiments often lack certain sensors by design. A unified policy that can exploit auxiliary perceptual inputs when available while remaining reliable under sensor absence, whether incidental or by design, is therefore essential for practical deployment. However, existing VLA policies couple action generation to a fixed sensor set through shared dense computation, making them brittle when sensors are missing and limiting their ability to specialize across diverse tasks and long-horizon behaviors. We propose CoRE-VLA, a scalable and robust VLA framework that formulates action generation as context-conditioned sparse computation. Sensor availability gates modality-specialized experts, enabling graceful degradation under missing sensors without retraining. Task intent further routes action-side representations to task-relevant experts, improving specialization across diverse tasks and long-horizon subgoals. While the framework is designed to accommodate different auxiliary sensors, we focus on depth as a representative and practically important auxiliary modality in our experiments. Experiments on LIBERO, RoboCasa GR1 Tabletop, and real-world dual-arm manipulation show that CoRE-VLA achieves strong results on long-horizon and multi-task benchmarks, and outperforms both a dense-action-generator ablation and a strong pretrained VLA baseline, including in zero-shot generalization to unseen scenarios. Modality analysis shows that CoRE-VLA can exploit auxiliary depth when available while remaining robust when depth is unavailable during deployment.

Monocular spacecraft 6D pose estimation remains difficult under weak texture, thin structures, illumination variation, and occlusion. This article presents GAP-GDRNet, a geometry-aware RGB framework built on GDR-Net for a single-target synthetic spacecraft benchmark. The method strengthens the geometry-guided regression pipeline at two points. First, AFR is placed before dense geometric prediction to combine global structural attention with local weak-texture enhancement. Second, PGSA is inserted into Patch-PnP to relate downsampled geometric regions before final pose regression. Dense supervision is obtained from a Blender-based rendering and annotation process that provides masks, model-coordinate maps, camera intrinsics, and 6D pose labels. On the self-built spacecraft dataset, GAP-GDRNet achieves a rotation error of 1.96°, a translation error of 0.0165 m,and 95.16% ADD@0.02 m, outperforming the reproduced GDR-Net baseline by 3.88 percentage points while running at 35.97 FPS. Tests on T-LESS and LM-O further show consistent gains over the reproduced baseline on textureless and occluded non-spacecraft objects.

Current road safety systems primarily focus on minimizing post-collision damage. However, advances in algorithmic perception are shifting focus toward early collision prediction, especially in lowvisibility conditions like nighttime or fog, where thermal infrared sensing outperforms both human vision and RGB imaging. While available RGB-infrared datasets such as FLIR ADAS and LLVIP are good benchmarks, they mostly consist of clear weather and overly simple scenarios. In this article, we introduce the LYNRED-MDS: Multimodal Detection Subset, a subset of the LYNRED Mobility Dataset, comprised of 4000 RGB-infrared image pairs captured under diverse weather, lighting, and road conditions around Grenoble, France. Our dataset spans varied driving contexts (urban, rural, mountainous, etc.) and a vehicle fleet compliant with Western European standards. Thermal cross-dataset evaluation using a YOLOv8n baseline suggests that our dataset offers strong generalization potential for pedestrian detection in driving scenarios. By covering critical edge cases, our dataset supports the development of more reliable and deployable vision systems for advanced driver-assistance systems.

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have shown great promise in integrating understanding and generation across diverse modalities. However, existing research rarely extends this paradigm to the tactile domain, where both object-level semantics and sensor-level configurations jointly determine the meaning of touch. To address this gap, we propose UniTac, the first UMM designed for tactile understanding and generation. UniTac models the tactile process as a transition from non-contact to contact, capturing the physical interaction between sensors and objects through a dual-level representation that encodes both sensor and object attributes. For tactile understanding, UniTac introduces two tasks, object property description and sensor identification, to enhance reasoning over physical and cross-sensor information. For tactile generation, we design a two-stage training paradigm consisting of reconstruction and alignment, together with a sensor-prior-based sampling strategy that simulates realistic tactile contact. Trained on large-scale multi-sensor datasets, UniTac achieves state-of-the-art performance in tactile understanding and generates realistic tactile signals across sensors.

Continuous driver monitoring in automated vehicles requires low-latency inference while avoiding unsafe decisions under uncertain driver states. Large vision-language models provide broad multimodal priors, but their latency and limited reliability in this setting make them unsuitable as always-on in-cabin monitors. We propose a cost-aware selective inference framework for deployable multimodal driver monitoring. The core system is a lightweight RGB-physiological student that combines in-cabin visual observations with window-level HR/EDA signals, and a learned gate that decides when to accept the fast prediction or abstain for safety intervention. Additional controls show that the learned scores contain sample-level information beyond scenario priors, while exact physiological synchronization remains a limitation. To incorporate predictive evidence, we further study a compact driver-state world modeling module that rolls out latent driver-state features and estimates future fast-model errors and counterfactual system-level action costs. On scenario-induced driver-demand recognition, the RGB-physiological student improves over RGB-only and physiology-only baselines, reaching 0.7440 Macro-F1 and 0.9099 balanced accuracy with 11.39M parameters and 3.08ms inference latency. Cost-aware selective inference reduces unsafe false negatives from 17.37% under always-fast inference to approximately 5% across seeds, while maintaining deployment-level latency. While driver-state world modeling offers valuable predictive signals, worst-group evaluations highlight persistent operating-point calibration drift. Ultimately, reliable edge driver monitoring requires advancing not only perception backbones, but also risk-aware selective control and group-robust calibration.

Locating survivors of building collapses within the first 72 hours is a critical challenge in disaster response, and existing sensing modalities provide only partial information about the structure beneath the rubble. This paper proposes drone-based quantum magnetometry as a complementary modality and develops a simulation pipeline spanning rubble physics, sensor-array deployment, and active spatial reconstruction. We use Unreal Engine to generate a steel-reinforced concrete parking-garage collapse and compute the induced magnetic field via a per-triangle dipole approximation, establishing that meaningful magnetic structure is recoverable in the sub-pT to sub-nT range from roughly 1 m above the roofline. Then, we feed sparse multi-sensor samples into a Gaussian Process Regression back-end driven by Bayesian active sampling and validate the pipeline across multiple independent collapse realizations; a three-sensor array optimizes the trade-off between gradient resolution and UAV payload constraints, and active sampling reaches peak structural correlation in roughly $100$ samples. Together, these results indicate that quantum-grade sensing could become a useful tool for drone-based structural analysis and potentially void detection in collapsed buildings.

Tactile sensing is essential for humanoid robots to achieve safe physical interaction, dexterous manipulation, and truly human-like responsiveness. However, the design of such systems remains challenging. Conventional approaches often suffer from complex multilayer structures, intricate wiring, high cost, and poor scalability, making it difficult to realize full-body tactile sensing with real-time, low-latency detection while maintaining minimal computational load on the robot's main processor. In this work, we present a simple, scalable and hardware friendly tactile sensing system for a companion humanoid robot based on the self-capacitance principle. The proposed sensor system employs a single conductive fabric layer with a conductive fabric wire architecture and does not require intricate electrode patterning. Scalability was demonstrated by fabricating a 100-point sensor array on a flexible printed circuit (FPC). Evaluation across sampling frequencies showed that 10 Hz is insufficient and misses transient events, whereas 100 Hz and 1000 Hz reliably capture and clearly distinguish all interaction types: gentle touch, slow tapping, fast tapping, and hitting. A decision-tree classifier was implemented directly on the FPGA, offloading real-time inference from the Raspberry Pi 4 with minimal latency and negligible power overhead. This design fully meets the tactile sensing requirements of the HIRO-chan robot and is well-suited for full-body tactile sensing in HIRO-chan and other companion robots.

One may construct a 3D multimedia display using miniature drones configured with light sources, Flying Light Specks (FLSs). Swarms of FLSs localize to illuminate complex 3D shapes and animated sequences consistent with the coordinates of points in a point cloud. This requires FLSs to accurately measure their pose relative to one another using sensors such as cameras. Such sensors have a sweet range in which they provide the highest accuracy. A challenge is how an FLS tracks another FLS outside its sensor's sweet range, dictated by the point cloud data. We address this challenge by proposing a novel technique called Swazure that solves the missing sensor data using cooperation among FLSs. It implements physical data independence by abstracting the physical characteristics of the sensors, making point cloud data independent of the sensor hardware. The size of an FLS relative to the minimum distance between points of a point cloud is an important parameter. With medium-sized FLSs, Swazure is able to position 100% of the FLS's neighbors. Larger FLS sizes may result in potential obstructions that prevent Swazure from quantifying relative pose. We present two heuristics, Move Obstructing and Move Source, to address this limitation. Our experimental results show the superiority of the Move Obstructing heuristic which resolves approximately 30% of obstructions in the worst case scenario.

Robust perception underpins autonomous driving, and most recent progress comes from scaling the model-larger backbones, foundation models, and cooperative multi-agent fusion. We pursue a complementary, upstream question: what should the camera itself measure? Using a differentiable RAW-to-task pipeline, we decompose which sensor degrees of freedom benefit dense prediction. Learning the spectral colour-filter-array (CFA) weights is the dominant lever, improving mIoU by +0.017 (KITTI-360) and +0.023 (ACDC) over a fixed camera. In contrast, point-spread-function (optics) co-design is net-negative (-0.020 mIoU on KITTI-360) - a consequence of the data-processing inequality, which also bounds the task information that any downstream model, however large or cooperative, can recover. Noise co-optimisation is marginal, and counter to intuition enlarging the CFA tile beyond 2x2 consistently hurts, as the filters are confined to the rank three sRGB input. Because the intervention is at the sensor, the gains are model-agnostic; we validate robustness on ACDC's fog, night, rain, and snow, and conclude with a simple recipe: learn the 2x2 CFA weights and keep an identity PSF.

Machine learning models for remote sensing are trained and deployed on a static set of modalities. However, as we equip newer satellites with novel sensors and retire old ones, practitioners may wish to deploy an existing model on a substitution, superset, or subset of modalities with minimal retraining given data availability or practical computational constraints. We study the setting of updating existing models to changing modalities and identify three main scenarios: Modality Transfer (substitution), Addition (superset), and Peeking (subset). We propose DeluluNet, an architecture with modular components for all three changing modality scenarios. DeluluNet is trained end-to-end, learning a multi-modal model from a unimodal teacher and unlabeled multimodal data via modality hallucination--predicting missing modality representations from those that are present. As a result, DeluluNet can keep predicting even when input modalities change, providing a practical alternative to re-labeling and re-training in a changing world.

Zero-energy Internet of Things (IoT) enables passive or near-passive devices to operate on harvested energy rather than batteries. Backscatter communication (BackCom) supports this vision by enabling tags to transmit data via reflection and modulation of incident RF signals, but it suffers from weak reflections, double-path loss, limited coverage, direct-link interference, and dependence on external RF sources. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can mitigate these limitations by acting as mobile carrier emitters, data collectors, relays, aerial receivers, mobile anchors, sensing platforms, and edge-intelligence nodes. Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) further enables the sharing of wireless resources for data transmission, localization, target sensing, and environmental awareness. This article surveys RF-based AI-empowered UAV-assisted backscatter localization and ISAC for zero-energy IoT. It reviews enabling technologies, presents a structured PRISMA-informed methodology, and develops a unified taxonomy covering network architectures, UAV roles, backscatter modes, RF sources, localization and sensing functions, AI techniques, and performance metrics. It also discusses UAV-assisted BackCom, passive localization, ISAC-enabled UAV-backscatter systems, and AI-driven optimization through comparative tables, quantitative trend analysis, coverage evaluation, and tutorial-style numerical illustrations. Finally, it identifies open challenges and future directions in realistic channel modeling, energy-neutral operation, benchmarking, reproducibility, scalable and trustworthy AI, security, privacy, hardware validation, and integration with RIS, MEC, digital twins, and 6G technologies.

Real-time LiDAR clustering identifies structures in point clouds, which is an essential prerequisite for many mobile robotics algorithms. Current methods are mostly developed for repetitive mechanical LiDAR sensors. Recently, the use of non-repetitive LiDAR sensors is strongly increasing due to their small cost and form factor. Such non-repetitive Risley prism-based sensors violate two key assumptions of repetitive mechanical sensors: structured scan lines and well-defined frame boundaries. Their Rhodonea-curve trajectories produce non-uniform point distributions, and the absence of a rotation cycle renders conventional scan line indexing inapplicable. To meet such new requirements, we developed C-ARC, a Continuous-Adaptive Range Clustering framework that maintains a persistent dual-graph over a sliding window, decoupling high-frequency point insertion from on-demand cluster retrieval. This is crucial for key functionalities like SLAM or tracking. An adaptive range grid resolution mechanism calibrates grid dimensions at initialization using an exponential control loop, balancing the sparsity-collision trade-off without prior knowledge of the scanning pattern. Implemented as an open-sourced single-threaded C++17 library, C-ARC produces real-time cluster output at 20 Hz on commodity hardware for the Livox Mid-360. Evaluation on the Livox Avia identifies unbounded cell occupancy as the primary limitation for sensors with strongly concentrated scan patterns. The adaptive resolution mechanism additionally improves clustering quality for existing grid-based methods on non-repetitive data.

Humans naturally leverage diverse sensing modalities to interact with the physical world, while most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robotics rely solely on RGB observations. This limits their ability to perceive physical properties that are difficult or impossible to infer from RGB cameras, such as temperature, sound, or radar response. We present MuseVLA, an adaptive multimodal sensing VLA model that integrates novel sensors as on-demand tools for robotic manipulation. Given a task instruction and visual context, MuseVLA first generates a sensor token and target description that select the sensing modality to invoke and what to attend to, analogous to a tool call with arguments. It then converts the selected sensor measurement into a grounded sensor image, a unified intermediate representation that encodes heterogeneous readings for multimodal fusion and action generation. This design decouples sensor-specific processing from the VLA backbone, enabling efficient integration of diverse modalities. To reduce the need for expensive multisensory robot datasets, we further introduce a data synthesis pipeline that augments existing RGB video datasets with grounded sensor images, enabling generalization to unseen sensor-guided tasks. We evaluate MuseVLA on a real-world robot across challenging dexterous hand manipulation tasks that require multimodal sensing inputs, including temperature-guided pick-and-place, audio-driven object search, and radar-assisted hidden object retrieval. MuseVLA achieves 80.6% success rate on average, outperforming RGB-only and multisensory VLA baselines significantly, and exhibits strong zero-shot capabilities on unseen tasks.

This paper presents a contact-based 3-D surface measurement method based on a Digital Fringe Projection (DFP) system, belonging to the vision-based tactile sensing family pioneered by the commercially successful GelSight sensor. Such sensors have proven effective for robotic fingertip manipulation and contact sensing. However, because GelSight employs photometric stereo with RGB LEDs, it does not measure absolute depth directly but instead infers it by integrating estimated surface gradients, which can accumulate reconstruction errors; in addition, it becomes increasingly difficult to calibrate as the sensing area grows, and its depth accuracy is challenged on highly reflective or transparent objects. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a fringe-projection-based contact measurement technique that performs triangulation-based 3-D reconstruction on a coated silicone contact surface, providing dense per-pixel surface geometry and full-field 3-D shape measurement over the contact region. By integrating high-accuracy digital fringe projection into the sensor, our approach simplifies calibration over larger areas and enhances depth precision for complex surfaces. Experimental results, including a direct comparison with a GelSight Mini sensor, a sphere-fitting accuracy evaluation, and an uncertainty analysis, confirm that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy and stability of structured-light-based 3-D measurements, allowing reliable reconstruction of objects with diverse optical properties.

Physiological stress and emotion recognition are important for health monitoring and affective computing. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of deep learning models such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), and Transformer on the WESAD dataset for multimodal affect recognition using wrist and chest sensor signals. We perform ablation studies to assess the individual contributions of each modality by training models on wrist-only and chest-only inputs. In addition, we implement a late-fusion ensemble strategy that combines predictions from all three architectures trained on multimodal input. We also employ early fusion at the sensor level by concatenating wrist and chest signals before feeding them into each model. Our results show that Transformer models consistently achieve the highest accuracy in multimodal settings, while TCN models perform best in the wrist-only configuration. The ensemble method yields the highest overall accuracy (98.91 +/- 0.13%) and macro-F1 score (98.56 +/- 0.17%). These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of sensor fusion and ensemble-based fusion in developing robust systems for physiological emotion recognition.

Deploying neural networks on low-power microcontrollers (MCUs) requires selecting model architectures under tight memory, latency, and energy constraints. Existing workflows often simplify this process along one or more axes: static proxy costs such as FLOPs or parameters, treating one MCU as representative, and continuous-inference tests instead of deployed sensing schedules. These assumptions can mis-rank Pareto-front candidates, miss infeasible deployments, and obscure schedule-dependent energy. We present CREST (Cross-platform Runtime Evaluation and Search Tool), a deployment-realistic hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) neural architecture search (NAS) framework for MCU sensing systems. CREST keeps the optimizer, HIL measurement boundary, logging, and replay workflow fixed while exposing workload, model family, target backend, schedule, quantization, and scoring policy as configurable axes. This makes deployment effects experimentally separable within one reusable workflow. We evaluate CREST on inertial odometry and audio classification across three Arm Cortex-M targets. For inertial odometry, measured-energy HIL search reduces median per-inference energy by 41.7% versus FLOPs-based selection and 40.8% versus memory-traffic-based selection at similar error. FLOPs-based selection also chooses infeasible deployments on memory-constrained targets. On the STM32 N657 target, continuous-inference and duty-cycled searches produce different Pareto frontiers. For audio classification, the same application-level policy selects different DS-CNN architectures on different boards, and cross-board replay changes deployment cost substantially. Overall, CREST shows that deployment-realistic MCU NAS must jointly optimize model architecture, target platform, runtime schedule, and deployment policy rather than relying only on static proxy costs or continuous-inference measurements.

Self-supervised geospatial foundation models (GeoFMs) learn transferable representations from remote sensing data, but their downstream behavior is difficult to characterize. We study six representative GeoFMs spanning joint-embedding, reconstruction, and multimodal pretraining families, and evaluate transfer across classification, regression, and segmentation benchmarks under different label availability and downstream pipelines. We find that model rankings change across tasks and adaptation settings. Layerwise probing shows that, in most cases, task-relevant information is more accessible in intermediate transformer blocks compared to final-layer embeddings, and that GeoFMs exhibit distinct depthwise profiles. In segmentation case studies on PASTIS and Sen1Floods11, downstream adaptation settings such as decoder design and fine-tuning can be as impactful as the choice of GeoFM, and standard dense-prediction heads may be poorly aligned with how GeoFMs organize information over depth. Finally, CKA analysis on case studies shows that fine-tuning does not rewrite GeoFMs uniformly across depth, and the strongest changes are localized to the first linear layer of the MLP in ViT blocks. These results help explain why GeoFM rankings shift across benchmarks and motivate more representation-aware evaluation and adaptation strategies.

Artificial dynamic tactile sensing requires sensitivity, robustness, and compliance, yet existing technologies face trade-offs when scaling to large-area arrays, compounded by wiring complexity and cost. Here, we report a passive distributed paradigm using deep sub-wavelength acoustic waveguides that decouples performance from structural flexibility. Elastic-membrane-capped Helmholtz resonators interconnected by spring-reinforced microtubes form an enclosed network with invariant acoustic transmission under macroscopic bending. By sparsely embedding microphones, the system achieves real-time localization (4 mm highest spatial resolution; >99% accuracy in a 4 microphones 64-node sensing array) and waveform reconstruction of low-frequency signals (<100 Hz). Fast Continuous Wavelet Transform and a lightweight neural network enable inference within 5.5 ms. We demonstrate conformable prototypes-fingertip arrays, a tactile glove, and large-area skins-detecting stimuli from single-hair contact to 5-mg particle impacts, arterial pulse waves, feather touches, and finger contact. This establishes a scalable, flexible, low-cost paradigm for next-generation human-machine interfaces.

Pixel-bin image sensors are becoming the default choice for smartphone cameras due to their resolution vs light-gathering trade-off. However, their larger inter-color separation compared to the Bayer color filter array (CFA) makes them challenging to demosaic. Furthermore, existing deep learning-based demosaicing methods are CFA-specific, requiring multiple individual models that take up precious onboard resources and demand larger development and maintenance efforts. In this work, we propose a modular unified architecture for demosaicing various pixel-bin sensors that provides higher image quality while being extensible and lightweight. Additionally, to enable plug-and-play operation, we introduce a learning-free CFA-identification module to detect the CFA type of raw data accurately.

Despite the success of vision-based generalist robotic policies, existing tactile-based policies remain tied to fixed embodiments and sensor setups. This is because tactile signals are highly heterogeneous across hardware, making cross-sensor generalization difficult. We present FTP-1,the first generalist foundation tactile policy pretrained to acquire transferable tactile manipulation abilities across diverse sensors and embodiments. FTP-1 supports varied tactile inputs, including image-, array-, and state-based signals, by using heterogeneous encoders to project them into unified morphology-aware latent tokens that are jointly modeled by a shared tactile Transformer expert. Pretrained on around 3,000 hours of tactile manipulation data aggregated from 26 data sources, spanning human and robot demonstrations across 21 sensors, FTP-1 learns tactile skills that transfer beyond the sensors seen during pretraining. Across downstream finetuning experiments spanning 5 hardware configurations, FTP-1 improves contact-rich manipulation on seen sensor setups by +17.2% and, surprisingly, transfers to two previously unseen tactile-sensor setups, achieving a +31% gain in success rate. FTP-1 establishes the first unified foundation baseline for tactile manipulation, providing future tactile policies with a shared model-level starting point. Pretrained models, datasets, training code and more visualization at https://ftp1-policy.github.io.

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 introduces a novel tactile sensor for in-hand manipulation with slip-aware control that integrates velocity, force/torque, and pressure map sensing into a single device with a deformable contact pad. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first sensor to combine these sensing modalities within a single compliant structure. The sensor features a deformable contact surface and can robustly track both flat and curved surfaces across a wide range of materials. Its performance is evaluated through a comprehensive set of experiments that highlight both its capabilities and limitations. The sensor is designed for rapid and low-cost fabrication using a combination of standard PCB manufacturing and rapid prototyping techniques.

Robots deployed in human-centric environments routinely receive natural-language descriptions of spatial information ("I left my backpack on the table") that reference parts of the world beyond their perceptual field of view. Traditional metric-semantic mapping ignores this signal, while off-the-shelf multimodal models remain limited in 3D spatial reasoning and are not directly amenable to fusion with other sensor modalities. To convert language observations into a calibrated spatial distribution, we train a Language Sensor Model (LSM) that maps each utterance and its scene-graph context to a multimodal distribution, with mixture weights encoding referential ambiguity (e.g., "which table") and component covariances encoding spatial uncertainty (e.g., where "on the table" the target lies). We then introduce VL-Map (Vision-Language Metric-Semantic Mapping), a probabilistic framework that treats these language predictions as stochastic observations and fuses them with onboard perception within a unified belief map. On the VLA-3D benchmark as well as on a real-world mobile robot, LSM is the only language predictor whose covariance estimates remain within the calibrated regime; fused into VL-Map, it leads to more accurate predictions of the target object location (~70% more probability mass on the true target compared to the strongest foundation-model baseline).

We present SegmentAnyTreeV2, a sensor- and platform-agnostic framework for semantic and instance segmentation of forest point clouds. The model combines a serialization-based Point Transformer v3 backbone with a lightweight semantic head and a tree-focused cross-attention mask decoder. Semantic predictions restrict instance decoding to tree-class voxels, while instance-aware query initialization, one-to-many seed supervision, and asymmetric mask scoring improve separation in dense and structurally complex stands. We further introduce FOR-instance v3, an expanded benchmark comprising 427 scenes and 26,496 annotated trees across diverse biomes, forest structures, and LiDAR platforms. On the FOR-instanceV2 test split, SegmentAnyTreeV2 achieves 90.5% precision, 80.2% recall, 85.0% F1, 90.7% coverage, and 87.6% semantic mIoU, outperforming previous learning-based methods in both instance detection and mask completeness. Zero-shot evaluation on independent sites further demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization.

Smart eyewear enables unobtrusive, context-aware interaction through multimodal sensors and on-device intelligence, but is severely limited by power, memory, and compute constraints in a compact form factor. Open-hardware platforms supporting event-based vision and embedded ML at this scale are rare. This work introduces an open-source smart glasses platform for rapid prototyping of novel sensors and algorithms. Its modular design uses a flexible FPC interposer to support both event-based and frame-based cameras without full PCB redesign. A hardware-software co-designed power management system combines a configurable PMIC with event-driven wake-up via an nRF5340 coordinator, keeping the GAP9 RISC-V SoC powered down between inferences. The prototype achieves up to 11.5 hours of continuous on-device ML from a 200 mAh battery. As a demonstration, an egocentric hand gesture recognition pipeline was evaluated on the LynX dataset using polarity-separated event histograms from a Prophesee GENX320 camera. R(2+1)D achieved the best cross-subject accuracy of 83.94% (macro F1 = 0.781) under leave-two-subjects-out validation, with 78.3 ms end-to-end inference latency on the GAP9. Temporal augmentation and removal of ambiguous classes provided the largest gains (+8.9 pp). All hardware designs, firmware, and models are released open source.

Vulnerable road users (VRUs) account for approximately half of urban traffic deaths globally, with intersections concentrating a disproportionate share of these casualties. Recent reviews of sensing technology for VRU protection have cataloged dozens of single-sensor and dual-sensor deployments, yet none of the surveyed systems couples multi-modal sensing with edge-side near-miss analytics and bidirectional vehicle-to-everything (V2X) and pedestrian-to-everything (P2X) messaging in a single intersection cabinet. This paper presents an integrated framework for VRU protection at signalized intersections, combining LiDAR, radar, RGB camera, and thermal camera at the perception layer, edge-based prediction and surrogate-safety analytics at the computation layer, V2X and P2X messaging at the communication layer, and adaptive signal control at the actuation layer. The framework is grounded in an empirical case study using R-LiViT, the first publicly released roadside LiDAR-Visual-Thermal dataset, which provides 200 multi-modal sequences and 2,400 annotated RGB-T frames at three German intersections. Analysis of 53,319 detection annotations reveals that VRUs comprise approximately 49% of all road-user observations, that day-to-night density drops by 38% for pedestrians and 45% for vehicles while the night distribution shows a higher close-proximity share, that per-frame close-proximity event counts vary approximately 10-fold across the eight unique locations at three intersections, and that 83% of pedestrian bounding boxes are small in image space, indicating that VRUs are typically far from any single sensor. These findings support multi-modal sensing, edge-side analytics, and adaptive context-sensitive deployment rather than uniform single-sensor solutions.

Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly considered as aerial platforms capable of providing both sensing and communication services, representing a promising paradigm for intelligent transportation systems. This paper investigates the optimal time allocation for a UAV-enabled integrated sensing and communication (ISaC) system operating in the X-band for vehicular networks. We analyze the trade-off between sensing accuracy and communication performance under practical UAV constraints and fading effects, considering both single-shadowing and double-shadowing channel models. An optimization framework is developed to allocate time between sensing and communication while guaranteeing minimum communication rates and sufficient sensing reliability. Simulation results demonstrate adaptive time allocation strategies, highlighting how UAV-to-ground channel conditions and target distances influence the balance between sensing and communication in smart mobility scenarios.

Real-time monitoring of the temperature distribution within components and sub-structures is a challenging topic in many systems due to restrictions on feasible sensor locations. While machine learning (ML) proves a versatile tool in many applications, its adoption for high-resolution thermal monitoring is hindered by the availability of high-quality datasets for training. In this work, we propose a novel approach for generating datasets for industrial applications based on randomized physics-based simulations. We demonstrate the approach in a proof-of-concept hardware setup: A neural network (NN) trained only on such a synthetic dataset, is used to reconstruct the internal temperature field from sparse sensors embedded in the hardware. The NN-based reconstructions do not only outperform Kriging in robustness but also enable real-time inference, making the method suitable for online monitoring of otherwise unobservable thermal states.

Underground mines present extreme conditions for autonomous robot navigation: GPS is denied, lighting is degraded, and tunnel topology is loop-rich and non-convex. Simulation benchmarks grounded in real production-mine geometry and compatible with GPU-accelerated learning pipelines do not yet exist in the open-source ecosystem. We present MineXplore, an open-source MuJoCo-based navigation benchmark derived from the Leung et al. 2017 Chilean underground copper mine dataset. The environment reconstructs a 104,423 sq.m tunnel network through an six-stage contour-to-MJCF pipeline incorporating octagonal wall cross-sections, LiDAR-sourced jagged wall geometry, three terrain friction zones, a global 5 degree incline, and periodic spot lighting. Geometric fidelity is validated at an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.9538 against the source survey map, and surface texture similarity scores 79.4% across six structural dimensions. A single-agent PPO baseline trained via RLlib across five independent random seeds achieves a best rolling coverage of 88.89% (3 of 5 seeds reaching the 90% coverage target), confirming that MineXplore supports stable and reproducible policy learning under realistic underground sensing and topology.

Existing datasets cannot support large-scale learning in multi-agent, multi-sensor, or multi-domain autonomy, where diversity and coordination are essential. We present a modular dataset generation pipeline that creates terabyte-scale, ground-truth-labeled data for ground, aerial, and infrastructure-based systems using the AVstack framework and CARLA simulator. Supporting single- and multi-agent configurations with flexible sensor suites, the pipeline enables controllable experimentation across challenging conditions. Representative perception and fusion studies show how generated data can support application-specific training and collaborative autonomy.

In robotics systems, vast amounts of visual data are easily captured at high resolution using low-cost, low-power hardware. Yet, limited bandwidth and on-device compute resources prevent full utilization when transmitted via conventional codecs like JPEG/MPEG. Newer codecs, like AV1/AVIF, improve the rate-distortion trade-off, but demand far more resources for encoding, impractical without custom ASICs. Recent asymmetric autoencoders deliver high quality under extreme power and bandwidth constraints, but add prohibitive decoding cost and use bespoke formats that ignore decades of infrastructure built around standards like JPEG. To address these limitations, we introduce a compression framework for cloud robotics based on a Sensor Embedded Autoencoder paired with a One-Time Transcode for Efficient Reconstruction (SEAOTTER). Because the sensor, cloud, and consumer stages face very different power and bandwidth budgets, SEAOTTER combines the compactness of a learned latent with the broad usability of a standard JPEG file. Since naive transcoding degrades performance, we propose a learnable JPEG color and quantization transform that enables increased accuracy for global, dense, and vision-language-based perception. Using SEAOTTER, we train both general-purpose and task-aware transcoding pipelines for a pre-trained, frozen encoder. At a compression ratio of 200:1 and compared to AVIF, we observe 7 times faster encoding, 3.5 times faster decoding, and +8% ImageNet top-1 accuracy, while retaining compatibility with JPEG infrastructure. Our code is available at https://github.com/UT-SysML/seaotter .

Assessing built-environment interaction, such as wheelchair accessibility, is difficult because real-world mobility is shaped by distributed, context-dependent, and temporary barriers that are hard to capture at scale. To support scalable assessment, this paper examines whether vision-language models (VLMs) can identify accessibility barriers from Google Street View (GSV) imagery. We propose an expert-guided retrieval-augmented framework that combines GSV images, ADA-informed guidance, and expert-derived rubrics to evaluate accessibility dimensions. We collect a campus-scale dataset at the University of Florida, linking 407 unique GSV locations with GPS-derived wheelchair dwell behavior as a mobility-friction signal. Results show that VLM ratings are both negatively correlated and distributionally similar with dwell time, indicating partial but consistent alignment with a behavioral proxy for mobility friction. Visual cue analysis shows that certain environmental objects, such as curb ramps and crosswalks, are associated with higher VLM accessibility scores, while alignment remains limited for subtle surface conditions, transient obstructions, and viewpoint-dependent barriers. Overall, our findings show the potential of expert-guided VLMs for scalable accessibility assessment aligning with sensor-derived indicators of real-world wheelchair navigation.

Ultra-high-resolution image sensors offer the potential to capture fine spatial details critical for many visual perception tasks, but acquiring and processing all pixels at full resolution is often infeasible under realistic bandwidth, latency, and power constraints. Existing approaches address this challenge through acquisition strategies such as spatial or temporal downsampling, which irrevocably discard information before task relevance can be assessed. In this work, we introduce a real-time, predictive, and task-aware foveated imaging system that operates directly at image acquisition time. Leveraging emerging dual-stream sensor architectures, our method dynamically allocates limited pixel bandwidth to task-relevant regions of interest while maintaining a low-resolution global context. We formulate foveated acquisition as a sensor attention policy-learning problem, in which past observations guide actions that determine future measurements, closing the perception-acquisition loop. Through extensive simulation across multiple perception tasks, we demonstrate that our approach achieves high task performance under strict pixel budgets and significantly outperforms relevant baselines operating at the same bandwidth. We further validate our system on a 200-megapixel dual-stream sensor, capturing real-world videos under realistic bandwidth and latency constraints, demonstrating the practical feasibility of task-driven, acquisition-time foveated imaging.

Recently, partial differential equations (PDEs) have been used to directly model the measurement process in signal processing, although their evaluation is costly. In this paper, we propose a novel alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based algorithm called physics-aware linearized ADMM (PA-LADMM) for inverse problems from PDE-based measurement processes. The key idea is the linearization of the subproblem with PDEs, leading to a cost-efficient update rule that calls only a PDE solver and its gradient evaluation per iteration. The algorithm has a theoretical convergence guarantee under certain conditions. In addition, we combine it with deep unfolding to unroll the PA-LADMM and train its internal parameters using supervised data. Two distinct experiments, compressed sensing with optical fiber communication and image restoration from noisy anisotropic diffusion, demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

We show that an array of scatterers which has been designed to have latent ("hidden") symmetries can be used as a sensor. We use the capacitance matrix as a canonical model for three-dimensional hybridisation and study how the introduction of an "intruder'' scatterer breaks the latent symmetries. By analysing the degree to which each symmetry is broken, we identify the radius of the intruder and localize its position. This can be achieved using a dictionary-based approach, however Bayesian inference or an artificial neural network (multi-layer perceptron) perform better in the presence of measurement noise. To our knowledge, this is the first time latent symmetries have been exploited successfully for sensing problems. It is also the first time latent symmetries have been observed in a three-dimensional open system that cannot be approximated by a sparse graph.

Underwater robots typically use both cameras and sonar for perception to leverage the rich semantic details of vision and the robust range measurements of acoustics. However, learning to map between these modalities via cross-modal prediction remains underexplored due to limited sonar-visual paired datasets. We present SOVIS, a sonar-visual dataset for cross-modal underwater perception. SOVIS comprises over 76,000 paired frames collected across 17 dives at six sites in the Trondheimfjord, supported by an end-to-end pipeline that cleans and synchronizes the cross-modal sensor data. We also introduce an interactive annotation tool designed to accelerate the labeling process for this paired data. Finally, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept cross-modal fish detection task using a small subset of labeled data, achieving a 7x improvement in mAP@0.10 over a monocular camera baseline. SOVIS serves as the first step toward advancing cross-modal underwater perception research, enabling research directions such as dense sonar prediction from monocular images.

Current end-to-end autonomous driving systems predominantly rely on frame-based sensors, which suffer from inherent perception latency and motion blur during highly dynamic encounters, specifically sudden pedestrian crossings. To address this critical safety vulnerability, we propose DeepIPCv3, a novel multi-modal autonomous navigation framework that synergizes the dense 3D spatial geometry of LiDAR point clouds with the microsecond-level asynchronous event streams of a Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS). We introduce a Transformer-inspired cross-modal attention mechanism to dynamically correlate these distinct modalities, allowing the network to instantaneously prioritize high-speed dynamic updates without sacrificing structural scene awareness. The fused latent representations are then mapped to safe local waypoints and executable control commands via a hybrid policy network that blends heuristic trajectory tracking with direct neural predictions. Due to the severe physical risks associated with live testing of these sudden crossing scenarios, the framework is rigorously evaluated offline using a custom multi-modal dataset collected across both well-illuminated noon and challenging evening conditions. Extensive comparative and ablation studies demonstrate that DeepIPCv3 achieves state-of-the-art predictive performance. By effectively eliminating exposure failures and motion blur, the proposed LiDAR and DVS fusion yields the lowest trajectory and control command errors, enabling highly reactive, mathematically bounded evasive maneuvers regardless of ambient illumination. To support future research, we will release the codes to our GitHub repo at https://github.com/oskarnatan/DeepIPCv3.

Wearable and mobile sensing technologies enable continuous monitoring of human behavior and health in real-world settings. However, predictive modeling in longitudinal multimodal data remains challenging, particularly when targeting complex or clinically derived outcomes. In this work, we present a longitudinal multimodal study of 66 older adults conducted in real-world conditions and combining wearable sensing, behavioral monitoring, and clinical assessments. This setting provides a rare opportunity to study an underrepresented population in long-term, into-the-wild conditions. Building on this dataset, we investigate how the alignment between sensed signals and target variables affects predictive performance across health-related tasks. We design a unified evaluation framework spanning tasks with increasing levels of observability, including Activity Levels prediction, Sleep Duration estimation, and Sleep Apnea Severity classification. Our results reveal a clear gradient of predictability: highly observable behavioral targets achieve robust performance (macro-F1 65%), while more abstract outcomes remain challenging despite consistent improvements over baseline models. Moreover, through explainability analysis, we show that historical features consistently emerge as the most informative predictors, highlighting the central role of longitudinal information.

Transformer-based architectures have advanced sequence modeling in language and vision, yet general-purpose representation learning for heterogeneous multivariate time series remains underexplored. We introduce CHARM (Channel-Aware Representation Model), which incorporates channel-level textual descriptions into a Transformer encoder equivariant to channel order. CHARM is trained with a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) and a novel loss promoting informative, temporally stable embeddings; latent-space prediction encourages robustness to sensor noise while description-aware gating provides interpretability through learned inter-channel relationships. Across anomaly detection, classification, and short- and long-term forecasting, the learned embeddings achieve strong performance using only a linear probe. Performance is driven primarily by the JEPA objective and conditioning architecture, with text descriptions serving as channel identifiers for cross-dataset generalization.

To operate in the physical world, embodied agents must perceive their environment in an "always-on" fashion, selectively accessing the most informative sensors to balance energy constraints and task accuracy. Despite its importance for resource-constrained devices, energy-aware perception remains under-explored, with most prior work assuming unlimited compute. To address this, we introduce Ego-METAS: the first Egocentric online Multimodal Energy-efficient Temporal Action Segmentation benchmark. Ego-METAS provides a unified testbed of more than 100 hours of untrimmed egocentric video from EgoExo4D, CMU-MMAC, and CaptainCook4D, spanning 5 modalities (RGB, audio, gaze, IMU, and monochrome camera). We formulate an online temporal action segmentation task where models must dynamically select which sensors to activate at each timestep while strictly adhering to hardware-representative energy budgets. Alongside the benchmark, we release unified splits, cleaned annotations, pre-extracted features, and a diverse suite of baseline routing policies. Our evaluations show that optimal routing is highly scenario-dependent, and that existing policy-learning methods, designed primarily for trimmed clips, struggle to adapt to continuous, untrimmed environments. However, even simple dynamic fusion of complementary modalities (e.g., via random routing) proves critical for balancing predictive accuracy against strict energy budgets. Ultimately, Ego-METAS provides a standardized foundation to develop robust, cost-aware policies for autonomous, always-on embodied AI.

Non-contact material identification enables adaptive interaction for embodied intelligence yet faces challenges from geometry-induced variations (e.g., orientation, shape, distance) and single-modality ambiguities. In this paper, we present GaMi, a multimodal material identification system integrating mmWave and acoustic sensing to robustly operate under unconstrained geometric conditions. By leveraging the insight of shared geometric consistency between co-located bimodal sensors, GaMi employs an intra-sample cross-modal subtractive disentanglement framework. By semantically aligning modalities and subtracting the shared geometric context, it isolates intrinsic material features. Furthermore, GaMi incorporates inter-sample contrastive learning to correct the residual interference caused by cross-modal misalignment. Additionally, a pairing-based adaptation strategy between two modalities enables few-shot generalization across devices. Extensive evaluations on 20 materials show that GaMi achieves 95.2% accuracy, outperforming single-modality baselines across unseen geometric conditions.

Spatio-temporal forecasting on sensor graphs is commonly tackled with a single backbone architecture applied uniformly across all nodes, although graph regions can exhibit different dynamics. Road segments differ in functional class, structure, and traffic behavior, suggesting that node-wise expert specialization can be useful. We propose GC-MoE, a graph-conditioned mixture of experts framework that assigns each node a personalized combination of frozen forecasting experts based on graph topology and the recent traffic input window. GC-MoE combines frozen pretrained spatio-temporal GNN experts with an input-aware, spatially contextualized router while training only a lightweight routing module. We also study a bounded graph-conditioned output refinement layer as an optional extension and include node-adaptive ST-LoRA adapters only as an ablation diagnostic. Across four standard benchmarks (PEMS04, PEMS07, METR-LA, and PEMS-BAY), GC-MoE improves MAE over a zero-parameter ensemble baseline, with competitive RMSE and MAPE, while training only ~17K parameters on top of 1.5M frozen expert weights. The implementation is available at https://github.com/Ahghaffari/gc_moe.

Direct physical guidance is a natural means of teaching and interacting with robots, and robotic skins make a key contribution by enabling sensitive contact sensing and localization. This paper presents a tactile-proprioceptive sensor fusion framework for natural physical human-robot interaction. Tactile cues from pneumatic skin pads serve as contact indicators that bypass the ambiguity between frictional residues and applied external forces, enabling highly sensitive contact detection without explicit friction identification. We fuse these cues with motor-current-based proprioception to reconstruct multi-axis contact forces on the robot surface. To maintain accuracy during motion, we employ a temporal convolutional network (TCN) to mitigate friction hysteresis during stick-slip transitions, reducing uncertainty at contact onset and yielding smooth, responsive guidance. We validate the approach on a skin-integrated robot arm: (i) multi-axis forces are reconstructed in stationary contacts, and (ii) simultaneous force estimation and kinesthetic teaching are demonstrated. Results indicate improved sensitivity and responsiveness across diverse contact conditions compared with tactile-only and proprioceptive-only baselines, supporting tactile-proprioceptive fusion as a reliable pathway to safe, intuitive physical human-robot interaction.

Foundation models offer a promising route to transferable remote sensing representations, but many current approaches depend on very large pretraining datasets and fixed sensor configurations, limiting their suitability for ecological and environmental applications, where observations often vary across platforms, spatial and spectral resolutions, and available modalities. We introduce FLORO, a multimodal geospatial foundation model designed to learn transferable representations from a small but highly diverse remote sensing corpus. FLORO is pretrained using masked autoencoding on a heterogeneous combination of Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, SkySAT imagery, elevation, and UAV-derived data. To accommodate sensor variability, FLORO incorporates availability-aware inputs that indicate which spectral bands and auxiliary modalities are present in each sample, enabling a unified input space across heterogeneous sensor configurations. We evaluated FLORO on the PANGAEA benchmark under a frozen-encoder protocol across scene classification, segmentation, and regression tasks. Despite being pretrained on a smaller corpus than competing foundation models, FLORO achieved strong and stable transfer across optical, optical-SAR, and optical-elevation benchmarks spanning medium-resolution satellite, airborne, and ultra-high-resolution UAV imagery. FLORO obtained the second-best average segmentation performance across six PANGAEA benchmarks, trailing only a recently introduced foundation model pretrained on over two orders of magnitude more images, remained competitive on scene classification, and was robust in regression tasks, while qualitative results showed improved preservation of spatial structure in flood, urban, biomass, and canopy-height prediction settings. In a separate controlled experiment on EuroSAT-MS, geo-positional encoding further improved classification relative to absolute positional encoding.

Dense semantic segmentation is essential for autonomous driving, yet many multi-modal datasets lack pixel-level annotations. The Zenseact Open Dataset (ZOD) provides rich multi-sensor data but only bounding-box labels, limiting its use for segmentation research. Our primary contribution is a Segment Anything Model (SAM)-based annotation pipeline that produces dense, pixel-level annotations for ZOD by converting bounding boxes into semantic masks. In this pilot study, we process over 100,000 frames and manually curate a 2,300-frame subset (36% acceptance rate) to establish a reliable baseline. Using these annotations, we evaluate transformer-based CLFT and CNN-based DeepLabV3+ architectures across diverse weather conditions, achieving up to 48.1% mIoU with CLFT-Hybrid. To address extreme class imbalance, where pedestrians, cyclists, and signs constitute less than 1% of pixels, we explore specialized models targeting rare classes. We further validate the pipeline on the Iseauto autonomous-vehicle platform, achieving 77.5% mIoU, and show that SAM-derived representations transfer effectively across sensor configurations via bidirectional transfer learning. All code and annotations are released to support reproducible research.

Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UASs) have become a growing threat to the security of critical infrastructure, exploiting spatiotemporal gaps in sensor perimeters to infiltrate restricted airspace undetected. We formulate this interaction as a two-player zero-sum differential game between an adversarial UAS and a heterogeneous sensor network of directional and omnidirectional sensors. Unlike earlier game-theoretic approaches that restrict the defender to discrete placement graphs or fixed configurations, we introduce a continuous sensor redeployment technique in which each sensor slides freely along the convex building boundaries. This is enforced via a log-sum-exp smooth approximation that preserves differentiability at polygon vertices, enabling optimization with gradient-based methods. The attacker's best response is computed via a two-step approach combining STP-RRT* for feasible trajectory initialization and nonlinear programming for detection-minimization refinement. The joint optimization converges to a Local Nash Equilibrium (LNE) via alternating bilevel optimization, with analytical first-order stationarity conditions derived for both players, thereby establishing a deployable baseline for heterogeneous sensor placements in CUAS missions.

We describe our preliminary design of a real-time asynchronous event-based monocular odometry for planetary exploration. Operating under strict computational constraints, planetary rovers frequently encounter complex, unpredictable environments that demand high-speed sensing and robustness to high dynamic range (HDR) lighting. Event cameras address these needs by reporting asynchronous, pixel-wise brightness changes with microsecond resolution, significantly reducing data bandwidth while maintaining robustness in extreme lighting conditions. We propose an approach based on an Error-State Kalman Filter (ESKF) that leverages this asynchronous event stream to continuously estimate camera ego-motion. The camera state is updated with every tracked position output generated by RATE, a real-time asynchronous feature tracker.

In robotic applications, actuators are typically designed to be stiff with minimal backlash to ensure precision and repeatability. However, this limits compliance, leading to potential damage and poor force control in uncertain environments. Series Elastic Actuation (SEA) introduces compliance to enhance disturbance rejection and enable force measurement via Hooke's Law but reduces system bandwidth. A custom Series Elastic (SE) element was retrofitted to a black-box actuator to mitigate non-linearities like backlash and static friction. Integrating the SE element enabled high-fidelity force measurements, improving force control bandwidth and performance. A torsional SE element was designed through Finite Element (FE) analysis, yielding a stiffness of 2155.4 Nm/rad. Open-loop force control bandwidth was measured for the original motor and the SEA-integrated configuration, while closed-loop bandwidth was assessed using feedback from the SEA and a commercial force sensor. The SEA module increased bandwidth from 10.32 Hz to 30.32 Hz, a 2.93X improvement. Additionally, it outperformed the commercial sensor by 7.63% despite costing 25 GBP, a fraction of the price.