DeFM: Learning Foundation Representations from Depth for Robotics

Depth sensors are widely deployed across robotic platforms, and advances in fast, high-fidelity depth simulation have enabled robotic policies trained on depth observations to achieve robust sim-to-real transfer for a wide range of tasks. Despite this, representation learning for depth modality remains underexplored compared to RGB, where large-scale foundation models now define the state of the art. To address this gap, we present DeFM, a self-supervised foundation model trained entirely on depth images for robotic applications. Using a DINO-style self-distillation objective on a curated dataset of 60M depth images, DeFM learns geometric and semantic representations that generalize to diverse environments, tasks, and sensors. To retain metric awareness across multiple scales, we introduce a novel input normalization strategy. We further distill DeFM into compact models suitable for resource-constrained robotic systems. When evaluated on depth-based classification, segmentation, navigation, locomotion, and manipulation benchmarks, DeFM achieves state-of-the-art performance and demonstrates strong generalization from simulation to real-world environments. We release all our pretrained models, which can be adopted off-the-shelf for depth-based robotic learning without task-specific fine-tuning. Webpage: https://de-fm.github.io/

Optimization-Based System Identification and Moving Horizon Estimation Using Low-Cost Sensors for a Miniature Car-Like Robot

This paper presents an open-source miniature car-like robot with low-cost sensing and a pipeline for optimization-based system identification, state estimation, and control. The overall robotics platform comes at a cost of less than $700 and thus significantly simplifies the verification of advanced algorithms in a realistic setting. We present a modified bicycle model with Pacejka tire forces to model the dynamics of the considered all-wheel drive vehicle and to prevent singularities of the model at low velocities. Furthermore, we provide an optimization-based system identification approach and a moving horizon estimation (MHE) scheme. In extensive hardware experiments, we show that the presented system identification approach results in a model with high prediction accuracy, while the MHE results in accurate state estimates. Finally, the overall closed-loop system is shown to perform well even in the presence of sensor failure for limited time intervals. All hardware, firmware, and control and estimation software is released under a BSD 2-clause license to promote widespread adoption and collaboration within the community.