Real-Time AIoT for UAV Antenna Interference Detection via Edge-Cloud Collaboration

In the fifth-generation (5G) era, eliminating communication interference sources is crucial for maintaining network performance. Interference often originates from unauthorized or malfunctioning antennas, and radio monitoring agencies must address numerous sources of such antennas annually. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can improve inspection efficiency. However, the data transmission delay in the existing cloud-only (CO) artificial intelligence (AI) mode fails to meet the low latency requirements for real-time performance. Therefore, we propose a computer vision-based AI of Things (AIoT) system to detect antenna interference sources for UAVs. The system adopts an optimized edge-cloud collaboration (ECC+) mode, combining a keyframe selection algorithm (KSA), focusing on reducing end-to-end latency (E2EL) and ensuring reliable data transmission, which aligns with the core principles of ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC). At the core of our approach is an end-to-end antenna localization scheme based on the tracking-by-detection (TBD) paradigm, including a detector (EdgeAnt) and a tracker (AntSort). EdgeAnt achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with a mean average precision (mAP) of 42.1% on our custom antenna interference source dataset, requiring only 3 million parameters and 14.7 GFLOPs. On the COCO dataset, EdgeAnt achieves 38.9% mAP with 5.4 GFLOPs. We deployed EdgeAnt on Jetson Xavier NX (TRT) and Raspberry Pi 4B (NCNN), achieving real-time inference speeds of 21.1 (1088) and 4.8 (640) frames per second (FPS), respectively. Compared with CO mode, the ECC+ mode reduces E2EL by 88.9%, increases accuracy by 28.2%. Additionally, the system offers excellent scalability for coordinated multiple UAVs inspections. The detector code is publicly available at https://github.com/SCNU-RISLAB/EdgeAnt.

Real-Time Metric-Semantic Mapping for Autonomous Navigation in Outdoor Environments

The creation of a metric-semantic map, which encodes human-prior knowledge, represents a high-level abstraction of environments. However, constructing such a map poses challenges related to the fusion of multi-modal sensor data, the attainment of real-time mapping performance, and the preservation of structural and semantic information consistency. In this paper, we introduce an online metric-semantic mapping system that utilizes LiDAR-Visual-Inertial sensing to generate a global metric-semantic mesh map of large-scale outdoor environments. Leveraging GPU acceleration, our mapping process achieves exceptional speed, with frame processing taking less than 7ms, regardless of scenario scale. Furthermore, we seamlessly integrate the resultant map into a real-world navigation system, enabling metric-semantic-based terrain assessment and autonomous point-to-point navigation within a campus environment. Through extensive experiments conducted on both publicly available and self-collected datasets comprising 24 sequences, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our mapping and navigation methodologies. Code has been publicly released: https://github.com/gogojjh/cobra

MapEval: Towards Unified, Robust and Efficient SLAM Map Evaluation Framework

Evaluating massive-scale point cloud maps in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) remains challenging, primarily due to the absence of unified, robust and efficient evaluation frameworks. We present MapEval, an open-source framework for comprehensive quality assessment of point cloud maps, specifically addressing SLAM scenarios where ground truth map is inherently sparse compared to the mapped environment. Through systematic analysis of existing evaluation metrics in SLAM applications, we identify their fundamental limitations and establish clear guidelines for consistent map quality assessment. Building upon these insights, we propose a novel Gaussian-approximated Wasserstein distance in voxelized space, enabling two complementary metrics under the same error standard: Voxelized Average Wasserstein Distance (AWD) for global geometric accuracy and Spatial Consistency Score (SCS) for local consistency evaluation. This theoretical foundation leads to significant improvements in both robustness against noise and computational efficiency compared to conventional metrics. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that MapEval achieves at least \SI{100}{}-\SI{500}{} times faster while maintaining evaluation integrity. The MapEval library\footnote{\texttt{https://github.com/JokerJohn/Cloud\_Map\_Evaluation}} will be publicly available to promote standardized map evaluation practices in the robotics community.

GS-LIVM: Real-Time Photo-Realistic LiDAR-Inertial-Visual Mapping with Gaussian Splatting

In this paper, we introduce GS-LIVM, a real-time photo-realistic LiDAR-Inertial-Visual mapping framework with Gaussian Splatting tailored for outdoor scenes. Compared to existing methods based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), our approach enables real-time photo-realistic mapping while ensuring high-quality image rendering in large-scale unbounded outdoor environments. In this work, Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) is employed to mitigate the issues resulting from sparse and unevenly distributed LiDAR observations. The voxel-based 3D Gaussians map representation facilitates real-time dense mapping in large outdoor environments with acceleration governed by custom CUDA kernels. Moreover, the overall framework is designed in a covariance-centered manner, where the estimated covariance is used to initialize the scale and rotation of 3D Gaussians, as well as update the parameters of the GPR. We evaluate our algorithm on several outdoor datasets, and the results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of mapping efficiency and rendering quality. The source code is available on GitHub.

Heterogeneous LiDAR Dataset for Benchmarking Robust Localization in Diverse Degenerate Scenarios

The ability to estimate pose and generate maps using 3D LiDAR significantly enhances robotic system autonomy. However, existing open-source datasets lack representation of geometrically degenerate environments, limiting the development and benchmarking of robust LiDAR SLAM algorithms. To address this gap, we introduce GEODE, a comprehensive multi-LiDAR, multi-scenario dataset specifically designed to include real-world geometrically degenerate environments. GEODE comprises 64 trajectories spanning over 64 kilometers across seven diverse settings with varying degrees of degeneracy. The data was meticulously collected to promote the development of versatile algorithms by incorporating various LiDAR sensors, stereo cameras, IMUs, and diverse motion conditions. We evaluate state-of-the-art SLAM approaches using the GEODE dataset to highlight current limitations in LiDAR SLAM techniques. This extensive dataset will be publicly available at https://geode.github.io, supporting further advancements in LiDAR-based SLAM.

Efficient Camera Exposure Control for Visual Odometry via Deep Reinforcement Learning

The stability of visual odometry (VO) systems is undermined by degraded image quality, especially in environments with significant illumination changes. This study employs a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework to train agents for exposure control, aiming to enhance imaging performance in challenging conditions. A lightweight image simulator is developed to facilitate the training process, enabling the diversification of image exposure and sequence trajectory. This setup enables completely offline training, eliminating the need for direct interaction with camera hardware and the real environments. Different levels of reward functions are crafted to enhance the VO systems, equipping the DRL agents with varying intelligence. Extensive experiments have shown that our exposure control agents achieve superior efficiency-with an average inference duration of 1.58 ms per frame on a CPU-and respond more quickly than traditional feedback control schemes. By choosing an appropriate reward function, agents acquire an intelligent understanding of motion trends and anticipate future illumination changes. This predictive capability allows VO systems to deliver more stable and precise odometry results. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/ShuyangUni/drl_exposure_ctrl.

CV-MOS: A Cross-View Model for Motion Segmentation

In autonomous driving, accurately distinguishing between static and moving objects is crucial for the autonomous driving system. When performing the motion object segmentation (MOS) task, effectively leveraging motion information from objects becomes a primary challenge in improving the recognition of moving objects. Previous methods either utilized range view (RV) or bird's eye view (BEV) residual maps to capture motion information. Unlike traditional approaches, we propose combining RV and BEV residual maps to exploit a greater potential of motion information jointly. Thus, we introduce CV-MOS, a cross-view model for moving object segmentation. Novelty, we decouple spatial-temporal information by capturing the motion from BEV and RV residual maps and generating semantic features from range images, which are used as moving object guidance for the motion branch. Our direct and unique solution maximizes the use of range images and RV and BEV residual maps, significantly enhancing the performance of LiDAR-based MOS task. Our method achieved leading IoU(\%) scores of 77.5\% and 79.2\% on the validation and test sets of the SemanticKitti dataset. In particular, CV-MOS demonstrates SOTA performance to date on various datasets. The CV-MOS implementation is available at https://github.com/SCNU-RISLAB/CV-MOS

MS-Mapping: An Uncertainty-Aware Large-Scale Multi-Session LiDAR Mapping System

Large-scale multi-session LiDAR mapping is essential for a wide range of applications, including surveying, autonomous driving, crowdsourced mapping, and multi-agent navigation. However, existing approaches often struggle with data redundancy, robustness, and accuracy in complex environments. To address these challenges, we present MS-Mapping, an novel multi-session LiDAR mapping system that employs an incremental mapping scheme for robust and accurate map assembly in large-scale environments. Our approach introduces three key innovations: 1) A distribution-aware keyframe selection method that captures the subtle contributions of each point cloud frame to the map by analyzing the similarity of map distributions. This method effectively reduces data redundancy and pose graph size, while enhancing graph optimization speed; 2) An uncertainty model that automatically performs least-squares adjustments according to the covariance matrix during graph optimization, improving mapping precision, robustness, and flexibility without the need for scene-specific parameter tuning. This uncertainty model enables our system to monitor pose uncertainty and avoid ill-posed optimizations, thereby increasing adaptability to diverse and challenging environments. 3) To ensure fair evaluation, we redesign baseline comparisons and the evaluation benchmark. Direct assessment of map accuracy demonstrates the superiority of the proposed MS-Mapping algorithm compared to state-of-the-art methods. In addition to employing public datasets such as Urban-Nav, FusionPortable, and Newer College, we conducted extensive experiments on such a large \SI{855}{m}$\times$\SI{636}{m} ground truth map, collecting over \SI{20}{km} of indoor and outdoor data across more than ten sequences...

SurgicAI: A Fine-grained Platform for Data Collection and Benchmarking in Surgical Policy Learning

Despite advancements in robotic-assisted surgery, automating complex tasks like suturing remain challenging due to the need for adaptability and precision. Learning-based approaches, particularly reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL), require realistic simulation environments for efficient data collection. However, current platforms often include only relatively simple, non-dexterous manipulations and lack the flexibility required for effective learning and generalization. We introduce SurgicAI, a novel platform for development and benchmarking addressing these challenges by providing the flexibility to accommodate both modular subtasks and more importantly task decomposition in RL-based surgical robotics. Compatible with the da Vinci Surgical System, SurgicAI offers a standardized pipeline for collecting and utilizing expert demonstrations. It supports deployment of multiple RL and IL approaches, and the training of both singular and compositional subtasks in suturing scenarios, featuring high dexterity and modularization. Meanwhile, SurgicAI sets clear metrics and benchmarks for the assessment of learned policies. We implemented and evaluated multiple RL and IL algorithms on SurgicAI. Our detailed benchmark analysis underscores SurgicAI's potential to advance policy learning in surgical robotics. Details: \url{https://github.com/surgical-robotics-ai/SurgicAI

MS-Mapping: Multi-session LiDAR Mapping with Wasserstein-based Keyframe Selection

Large-scale multi-session LiDAR mapping plays a crucial role in various applications but faces significant challenges in data redundancy and pose graph scalability. This paper present MS-Mapping, a novel multi-session LiDAR mapping system that combines an incremental mapping scheme with support for various LiDAR-based odometry, enabling high-precision and consistent map assembly in large-scale environments. Our approach introduces a real-time keyframe selection method based on the Wasserstein distance, which effectively reduces data redundancy and pose graph complexity. We formulate the LiDAR point cloud keyframe selection problem using a similarity method based on Gaussian mixture models (GMM) and tackle the real-time challenge by employing an incremental voxel update method. Extensive experiments on large-scale campus scenes and over \SI{12.8}{km} of public and self-collected datasets demonstrate the efficiency, accuracy, and consistency of our map assembly approach. To facilitate further research and development in the community, we make our code https://github.com/JokerJohn/MS-Mapping and datasets publicly available.