Towards Long-term Robotics in the Wild

In this paper, we emphasise the critical importance of large-scale datasets for advancing field robotics capabilities, particularly in natural environments. While numerous datasets exist for urban and suburban settings, those tailored to natural environments are scarce. Our recent benchmarks WildPlaces and WildScenes address this gap by providing synchronised image, lidar, semantic and accurate 6-DoF pose information in forest-type environments. We highlight the multi-modal nature of this dataset and discuss and demonstrate its utility in various downstream tasks, such as place recognition and 2D and 3D semantic segmentation tasks.