SplatSDF: Boosting Neural Implicit SDF via Gaussian Splatting Fusion

A signed distance function (SDF) is a useful representation for continuous-space geometry and many related operations, including rendering, collision checking, and mesh generation. Hence, reconstructing SDF from image observations accurately and efficiently is a fundamental problem. Recently, neural implicit SDF (SDF-NeRF) techniques, trained using volumetric rendering, have gained a lot of attention. Compared to earlier truncated SDF (TSDF) fusion algorithms that rely on depth maps and voxelize continuous space, SDF-NeRF enables continuous-space SDF reconstruction with better geometric and photometric accuracy. However, the accuracy and convergence speed of scene-level SDF reconstruction require further improvements for many applications. With the advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) as an explicit representation with excellent rendering quality and speed, several works have focused on improving SDF-NeRF by introducing consistency losses on depth and surface normals between 3DGS and SDF-NeRF. However, loss-level connections alone lead to incremental improvements. We propose a novel neural implicit SDF called "SplatSDF" to fuse 3DGSandSDF-NeRF at an architecture level with significant boosts to geometric and photometric accuracy and convergence speed. Our SplatSDF relies on 3DGS as input only during training, and keeps the same complexity and efficiency as the original SDF-NeRF during inference. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art SDF-NeRF models on geometric and photometric evaluation by the time of submission.

PKF: Probabilistic Data Association Kalman Filter for Multi-Object Tracking

In this paper, we derive a new Kalman filter with probabilistic data association between measurements and states. We formulate a variational inference problem to approximate the posterior density of the state conditioned on the measurement data. We view the unknown data association as a latent variable and apply Expectation Maximization (EM) to obtain a filter with update step in the same form as the Kalman filter but with expanded measurement vector of all potential associations. We show that the association probabilities can be computed as permanents of matrices with measurement likelihood entries. We also propose an ambiguity check that associates only a subset of ambiguous measurements and states probabilistically, thus reducing the association time and preventing low-probability measurements from harming the estimation accuracy. Experiments in simulation show that our filter achieves lower tracking errors than the well-established joint probabilistic data association filter (JPDAF), while running at comparable rate. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our filter in multi-object tracking (MOT) on multiple real-world datasets, including MOT17, MOT20, and DanceTrack. We achieve better higher order tracking accuracy (HOTA) than previous Kalman-filter methods and remain real-time. Associating only bounding boxes without deep features or velocities, our method ranks top-10 on both MOT17 and MOT20 in terms of HOTA. Given offline detections, our algorithm tracks at 250+ fps on a single laptop CPU. Code is available at https://github.com/hwcao17/pkf.

Control Strategies for Pursuit-Evasion Under Occlusion Using Visibility and Safety Barrier Functions

This paper develops a control strategy for pursuit-evasion problems in environments with occlusions. We address the challenge of a mobile pursuer keeping a mobile evader within its field of view (FoV) despite line-of-sight obstructions. The signed distance function (SDF) of the FoV is used to formulate visibility as a control barrier function (CBF) constraint on the pursuer's control inputs. Similarly, obstacle avoidance is formulated as a CBF constraint based on the SDF of the obstacle set. While the visibility and safety CBFs are Lipschitz continuous, they are not differentiable everywhere, necessitating the use of generalized gradients. To achieve non-myopic pursuit, we generate reference control trajectories leading to evader visibility using a sampling-based kinodynamic planner. The pursuer then tracks this reference via convex optimization under the CBF constraints. We validate our approach in CARLA simulations and real-world robot experiments, demonstrating successful visibility maintenance using only onboard sensing, even under severe occlusions and dynamic evader movements.

Generalizable Motion Planning via Operator Learning

In this work, we introduce a planning neural operator (PNO) for predicting the value function of a motion planning problem. We recast value function approximation as learning a single operator from the cost function space to the value function space, which is defined by an Eikonal partial differential equation (PDE). Specifically, we recast computing value functions as learning a single operator across continuous function spaces which prove is equivalent to solving an Eikonal PDE. Through this reformulation, our learned PNO is able to generalize to new motion planning problems without retraining. Therefore, our PNO model, despite being trained with a finite number of samples at coarse resolution, inherits the zero-shot super-resolution property of neural operators. We demonstrate accurate value function approximation at 16 times the training resolution on the MovingAI lab's 2D city dataset and compare with state-of-the-art neural value function predictors on 3D scenes from the iGibson building dataset. Lastly, we investigate employing the value function output of PNO as a heuristic function to accelerate motion planning. We show theoretically that the PNO heuristic is $\epsilon$-consistent by introducing an inductive bias layer that guarantees our value functions satisfy the triangle inequality. With our heuristic, we achieve a 30% decrease in nodes visited while obtaining near optimal path lengths on the MovingAI lab 2D city dataset, compared to classical planning methods (A*, RRT*).

Neural Configuration Distance Function for Continuum Robot Control

This paper presents a novel method for modeling the shape of a continuum robot as a Neural Configuration Euclidean Distance Function (N-CEDF). By learning separate distance fields for each link and combining them through the kinematics chain, the learned N-CEDF provides an accurate and computationally efficient representation of the robot's shape. The key advantage of a distance function representation of a continuum robot is that it enables efficient collision checking for motion planning in dynamic and cluttered environments, even with point-cloud observations. We integrate the N-CEDF into a Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) controller to generate safe trajectories. The proposed approach is validated for continuum robots with various links in several simulated environments with static and dynamic obstacles.

Safe Bubble Cover for Motion Planning on Distance Fields

We consider the problem of planning collision-free trajectories on distance fields. Our key observation is that querying a distance field at one configuration reveals a region of safe space whose radius is given by the distance value, obviating the need for additional collision checking within the safe region. We refer to such regions as safe bubbles, and show that safe bubbles can be obtained from any Lipschitz-continuous safety constraint. Inspired by sampling-based planning algorithms, we present three algorithms for constructing a safe bubble cover of free space, named bubble roadmap (BRM), rapidly exploring bubble graph (RBG), and expansive bubble graph (EBG). The bubble sampling algorithms are combined with a hierarchical planning method that first computes a discrete path of bubbles, followed by a continuous path within the bubbles computed via convex optimization. Experimental results show that the bubble-based methods yield up to 5- 10 times cost reduction relative to conventional baselines while simultaneously reducing computational efforts by orders of magnitude.

Adaptive-Frequency Model Learning and Predictive Control for Dynamic Maneuvers on Legged Robots

Achieving both target accuracy and robustness in dynamic maneuvers with long flight phases, such as high or long jumps, has been a significant challenge for legged robots. To address this challenge, we propose a novel learning-based control approach consisting of model learning and model predictive control (MPC) utilizing an adaptive frequency scheme. Compared to existing MPC techniques, we learn a model directly from experiments, accounting not only for leg dynamics but also for modeling errors and unknown dynamics mismatch in hardware and during contact. Additionally, learning the model with adaptive frequency allows us to cover the entire flight phase and final jumping target, enhancing the prediction accuracy of the jumping trajectory. Using the learned model, we also design an adaptive-frequency MPC to effectively leverage different jumping phases and track the target accurately. In hardware experiments with a Unitree A1 robot, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms baseline MPC using a nominal model, reducing the jumping distance error up to 8 times. We achieve jumping distance errors of less than 3 percent during continuous jumping on uneven terrain with randomly-placed perturbations of random heights (up to 4 cm or 27 percent of the robot's standing height). Our approach obtains distance errors of 1-2 cm on 34 single and continuous jumps with different jumping targets and model uncertainties.

SlideSLAM: Sparse, Lightweight, Decentralized Metric-Semantic SLAM for Multi-Robot Navigation

This paper develops a real-time decentralized metric-semantic Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) approach that leverages a sparse and lightweight object-based representation to enable a heterogeneous robot team to autonomously explore 3D environments featuring indoor, urban, and forested areas without relying on GPS. We use a hierarchical metric-semantic representation of the environment, including high-level sparse semantic maps of object models and low-level voxel maps. We leverage the informativeness and viewpoint invariance of the high-level semantic map to obtain an effective semantics-driven place-recognition algorithm for inter-robot loop closure detection across aerial and ground robots with different sensing modalities. A communication module is designed to track each robot's observations and those of other robots within the communication range. Such observations are then used to construct a merged map. Our framework enables real-time decentralized operations onboard robots, allowing them to opportunistically leverage communication. We integrate and deploy our proposed framework on three types of aerial and ground robots. Extensive experimental results show an average localization error of 0.22 meters in position and -0.16 degrees in orientation, an object mapping F1 score of 0.92, and a communication packet size of merely 2-3 megabytes per kilometer trajectory with 1,000 landmarks. The project website can be found at https://xurobotics.github.io/slideslam/.

Cross-Embodiment Robot Manipulation Skill Transfer using Latent Space Alignment

This paper focuses on transferring control policies between robot manipulators with different morphology. While reinforcement learning (RL) methods have shown successful results in robot manipulation tasks, transferring a trained policy from simulation to a real robot or deploying it on a robot with different states, actions, or kinematics is challenging. To achieve cross-embodiment policy transfer, our key insight is to project the state and action spaces of the source and target robots to a common latent space representation. We first introduce encoders and decoders to associate the states and actions of the source robot with a latent space. The encoders, decoders, and a latent space control policy are trained simultaneously using loss functions measuring task performance, latent dynamics consistency, and encoder-decoder ability to reconstruct the original states and actions. To transfer the learned control policy, we only need to train target encoders and decoders that align a new target domain to the latent space. We use generative adversarial training with cycle consistency and latent dynamics losses without access to the task reward or reward tuning in the target domain. We demonstrate sim-to-sim and sim-to-real manipulation policy transfer with source and target robots of different states, actions, and embodiments. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/ExistentialRobotics/cross_embodiment_transfer}.

Sensor-Based Distributionally Robust Control for Safe Robot Navigation in Dynamic Environments

We introduce a novel method for safe mobile robot navigation in dynamic, unknown environments, utilizing onboard sensing to impose safety constraints without the need for accurate map reconstruction. Traditional methods typically rely on detailed map information to synthesize safe stabilizing controls for mobile robots, which can be computationally demanding and less effective, particularly in dynamic operational conditions. By leveraging recent advances in distributionally robust optimization, we develop a distributionally robust control barrier function (DR-CBF) constraint that directly processes range sensor data to impose safety constraints. Coupling this with a control Lyapunov function (CLF) for path tracking, we demonstrate that our CLF-DR-CBF control synthesis method achieves safe, efficient, and robust navigation in uncertain dynamic environments. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in simulated and real autonomous robot navigation experiments, marking a substantial advancement in real-time safety guarantees for mobile robots.