OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
CoopDETR: A Unified Cooperative Perception Framework for 3D Detection via Object Query
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Cooperative perception enhances the individual perception capabilities of autonomous vehicles (AVs) by providing a comprehensive view of the environment. However, balancing perception performance and transmission costs remains a significant challenge. Current approaches that transmit region-level features across agents are limited in interpretability and demand substantial bandwidth, making them unsuitable for practical applications. In this work, we propose CoopDETR, a novel cooperative perception framework that introduces object-level feature cooperation via object query. Our framework consists of two key modules: single-agent query generation, which efficiently encodes raw sensor data into object queries, reducing transmission cost while preserving essential information for detection; and cross-agent query fusion, which includes Spatial Query Matching (SQM) and Object Query Aggregation (OQA) to enable effective interaction between queries. Our experiments on the OPV2V and V2XSet datasets demonstrate that CoopDETR achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly reduces transmission costs to 1/782 of previous methods.
Unlock the Power of Unlabeled Data in Language Driving Model
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Recent Vision-based Large Language Models~(VisionLLMs) for autonomous driving have seen rapid advancements. However, such promotion is extremely dependent on large-scale high-quality annotated data, which is costly and labor-intensive. To address this issue, we propose unlocking the value of abundant yet unlabeled data to improve the language-driving model in a semi-supervised learning manner. Specifically, we first introduce a series of template-based prompts to extract scene information, generating questions that create pseudo-answers for the unlabeled data based on a model trained with limited labeled data. Next, we propose a Self-Consistency Refinement method to improve the quality of these pseudo-annotations, which are later used for further training. By utilizing a pre-trained VisionLLM (e.g., InternVL), we build a strong Language Driving Model (LDM) for driving scene question-answering, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments on the DriveLM benchmark show that our approach performs well with just 5% labeled data, achieving competitive performance against models trained with full datasets. In particular, our LDM achieves 44.85% performance with limited labeled data, increasing to 54.27% when using unlabeled data, while models trained with full datasets reach 60.68% on the DriveLM benchmark.
OccRWKV: Rethinking Efficient 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction with Linear Complexity
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

3D semantic occupancy prediction networks have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reconstructing the geometric and semantic structure of 3D scenes, providing crucial information for robot navigation and autonomous driving systems. However, due to their large overhead from dense network structure designs, existing networks face challenges balancing accuracy and latency. In this paper, we introduce OccRWKV, an efficient semantic occupancy network inspired by Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV). OccRWKV separates semantics, occupancy prediction, and feature fusion into distinct branches, each incorporating Sem-RWKV and Geo-RWKV blocks. These blocks are designed to capture long-range dependencies, enabling the network to learn domain-specific representation (i.e., semantics and geometry), which enhances prediction accuracy. Leveraging the sparse nature of real-world 3D occupancy, we reduce computational overhead by projecting features into the bird's-eye view (BEV) space and propose a BEV-RWKV block for efficient feature enhancement and fusion. This enables real-time inference at 22.2 FPS without compromising performance. Experiments demonstrate that OccRWKV outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the SemanticKITTI dataset, achieving a mIoU of 25.1 while being 20 times faster than the best baseline, Co-Occ, making it suitable for real-time deployment on robots to enhance autonomous navigation efficiency. Code and video are available on our project page: https://jmwang0117.github.io/OccRWKV/.
Human-Robot Cooperative Distribution Coupling for Hamiltonian-Constrained Social Navigation
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Navigating in human-filled public spaces is a critical challenge for deploying autonomous robots in real-world environments. This paper introduces NaviDIFF, a novel Hamiltonian-constrained socially-aware navigation framework designed to address the complexities of human-robot interaction and socially-aware path planning. NaviDIFF integrates a port-Hamiltonian framework to model dynamic physical interactions and a diffusion model to manage uncertainty in human-robot cooperation. The framework leverages a spatial-temporal transformer to capture social and temporal dependencies, enabling more accurate spatial-temporal environmental dynamics understanding and port-Hamiltonian physical interactive process construction. Additionally, reinforcement learning from human feedback is employed to fine-tune robot policies, ensuring adaptation to human preferences and social norms. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NaviDIFF outperforms state-of-the-art methods in social navigation tasks, offering improved stability, efficiency, and adaptability.
KARMA: Augmenting Embodied AI Agents with Long-and-Short Term Memory Systems
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Embodied AI agents responsible for executing interconnected, long-sequence household tasks often face difficulties with in-context memory, leading to inefficiencies and errors in task execution. To address this issue, we introduce KARMA, an innovative memory system that integrates long-term and short-term memory modules, enhancing large language models (LLMs) for planning in embodied agents through memory-augmented prompting. KARMA distinguishes between long-term and short-term memory, with long-term memory capturing comprehensive 3D scene graphs as representations of the environment, while short-term memory dynamically records changes in objects' positions and states. This dual-memory structure allows agents to retrieve relevant past scene experiences, thereby improving the accuracy and efficiency of task planning. Short-term memory employs strategies for effective and adaptive memory replacement, ensuring the retention of critical information while discarding less pertinent data. Compared to state-of-the-art embodied agents enhanced with memory, our memory-augmented embodied AI agent improves success rates by 1.3x and 2.3x in Composite Tasks and Complex Tasks within the AI2-THOR simulator, respectively, and enhances task execution efficiency by 3.4x and 62.7x. Furthermore, we demonstrate that KARMA's plug-and-play capability allows for seamless deployment on real-world robotic systems, such as mobile manipulation platforms.Through this plug-and-play memory system, KARMA significantly enhances the ability of embodied agents to generate coherent and contextually appropriate plans, making the execution of complex household tasks more efficient. The experimental videos from the work can be found at https://youtu.be/4BT7fnw9ehs. Our code is available at https://github.com/WZX0Swarm0Robotics/KARMA/tree/master.
Dashing for the Golden Snitch: Multi-Drone Time-Optimal Motion Planning with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Recent innovations in autonomous drones have facilitated time-optimal flight in single-drone configurations, and enhanced maneuverability in multi-drone systems by applying optimal control and learning-based methods. However, few studies have achieved time-optimal motion planning for multi-drone systems, particularly during highly agile maneuvers or in dynamic scenarios. This paper presents a decentralized policy network using multi-agent reinforcement learning for time-optimal multi-drone flight. To strike a balance between flight efficiency and collision avoidance, we introduce a soft collision-free mechanism inspired by optimization-based methods. By customizing PPO in a centralized training, decentralized execution (CTDE) fashion, we unlock higher efficiency and stability in training while ensuring lightweight implementation. Extensive simulations show that, despite slight performance trade-offs compared to single-drone systems, our multi-drone approach maintains near-time-optimal performance with a low collision rate. Real-world experiments validate our method, with two quadrotors using the same network as in simulation achieving a maximum speed of 13.65 m/s and a maximum body rate of 13.4 rad/s in a 5.5 m * 5.5 m * 2.0 m space across various tracks, relying entirely on onboard computation.
TransDiff: Diffusion-Based Method for Manipulating Transparent Objects Using a Single RGB-D Image
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Manipulating transparent objects presents significant challenges due to the complexities introduced by their reflection and refraction properties, which considerably hinder the accurate estimation of their 3D shapes. To address these challenges, we propose a single-view RGB-D-based depth completion framework, TransDiff, that leverages the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models(DDPM) to achieve material-agnostic object grasping in desktop. Specifically, we leverage features extracted from RGB images, including semantic segmentation, edge maps, and normal maps, to condition the depth map generation process. Our method learns an iterative denoising process that transforms a random depth distribution into a depth map, guided by initially refined depth information, ensuring more accurate depth estimation in scenarios involving transparent objects. Additionally, we propose a novel training method to better align the noisy depth and RGB image features, which are used as conditions to refine depth estimation step by step. Finally, we utilized an improved inference process to accelerate the denoising procedure. Through comprehensive experimental validation, we demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the baselines in both synthetic and real-world benchmarks with acceptable inference time. The demo of our method can be found on https://wang-haoxiao.github.io/TransDiff/
Feature Extractor or Decision Maker: Rethinking the Role of Visual Encoders in Visuomotor Policies
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

An end-to-end (E2E) visuomotor policy is typically treated as a unified whole, but recent approaches using out-of-domain (OOD) data to pretrain the visual encoder have cleanly separated the visual encoder from the network, with the remainder referred to as the policy. We propose Visual Alignment Testing, an experimental framework designed to evaluate the validity of this functional separation. Our results indicate that in E2E-trained models, visual encoders actively contribute to decision-making resulting from motor data supervision, contradicting the assumed functional separation. In contrast, OOD-pretrained models, where encoders lack this capability, experience an average performance drop of 42\% in our benchmark results, compared to the state-of-the-art performance achieved by E2E policies. We believe this initial exploration of visual encoders' role can provide a first step towards guiding future pretraining methods to address their decision-making ability, such as developing task-conditioned or context-aware encoders.
Personalization in Human-Robot Interaction Through Preference-Based Action Representation Learning
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) has shown significant promise for personalization in human-robot interaction (HRI) by explicitly integrating human preferences into the robot learning process. However, existing practices often require training a personalized robot policy from scratch, resulting in inefficient use of human feedback. In this paper, we propose preference-based action representation learning (PbARL), an efficient fine-tuning method that decouples common task structure from preference by leveraging pre-trained robot policies. Instead of directly fine-tuning the pre-trained policy with human preference, PbARL uses it as a reference for an action representation learning task that maximizes the mutual information between the pre-trained source domain and the target user preference-aligned domain. This approach allows the robot to personalize its behaviors while preserving original task performance and eliminates the need for extensive prior information from the source domain, thereby enhancing efficiency and practicality in real-world HRI scenarios. Empirical results on the Assistive Gym benchmark and a real-world user study (N=8) demonstrate the benefits of our method compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
DFM: Deep Fourier Mimic for Expressive Dance Motion Learning
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

As entertainment robots gain popularity, the demand for natural and expressive motion, particularly in dancing, continues to rise. Traditionally, dancing motions have been manually designed by artists, a process that is both labor-intensive and restricted to simple motion playback, lacking the flexibility to incorporate additional tasks such as locomotion or gaze control during dancing. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Deep Fourier Mimic (DFM), a novel method that combines advanced motion representation with Reinforcement Learning (RL) to enable smooth transitions between motions while concurrently managing auxiliary tasks during dance sequences. While previous frequency domain based motion representations have successfully encoded dance motions into latent parameters, they often impose overly rigid periodic assumptions at the local level, resulting in reduced tracking accuracy and motion expressiveness, which is a critical aspect for entertainment robots. By relaxing these locally periodic constraints, our approach not only enhances tracking precision but also facilitates smooth transitions between different motions. Furthermore, the learned RL policy that supports simultaneous base activities, such as locomotion and gaze control, allows entertainment robots to engage more dynamically and interactively with users rather than merely replaying static, pre-designed dance routines.
Learning Quiet Walking for a Small Home Robot
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

As home robotics gains traction, robots are increasingly integrated into households, offering companionship and assistance. Quadruped robots, particularly those resembling dogs, have emerged as popular alternatives for traditional pets. However, user feedback highlights concerns about the noise these robots generate during walking at home, particularly the loud footstep sound. To address this issue, we propose a sim-to-real based reinforcement learning (RL) approach to minimize the foot contact velocity highly related to the footstep sound. Our framework incorporates three key elements: learning varying PD gains to actively dampen and stiffen each joint, utilizing foot contact sensors, and employing curriculum learning to gradually enforce penalties on foot contact velocity. Experiments demonstrate that our learned policy achieves superior quietness compared to a RL baseline and the carefully handcrafted Sony commercial controllers. Furthermore, the trade-off between robustness and quietness is shown. This research contributes to developing quieter and more user-friendly robotic companions in home environments.
Pushing Through Clutter with Movability Awareness of Blocking Obstacles
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Navigation Among Movable Obstacles (NAMO) poses a challenge for traditional path-planning methods when obstacles block the path, requiring push actions to reach the goal. We propose a framework that enables movability-aware planning to overcome this challenge without relying on explicit obstacle placement. Our framework integrates a global Semantic Visibility Graph and a local Model Predictive Path Integral (SVG-MPPI) approach to efficiently sample rollouts, taking into account the continuous range of obstacle movability. A physics engine is adopted to simulate the interaction result of the rollouts with the environment, and generate trajectories that minimize contact force. In qualitative and quantitative experiments, SVG-MPPI outperforms the existing paradigm that uses only binary movability for planning, achieving higher success rates with reduced cumulative contact forces. Our code is available at: https://github.com/tud-amr/SVG-MPPI
LiDARDustX: A LiDAR Dataset for Dusty Unstructured Road Environments
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Autonomous driving datasets are essential for validating the progress of intelligent vehicle algorithms, which include localization, perception, and prediction. However, existing datasets are predominantly focused on structured urban environments, which limits the exploration of unstructured and specialized scenarios, particularly those characterized by significant dust levels. This paper introduces the LiDARDustX dataset, which is specifically designed for perception tasks under high-dust conditions, such as those encountered in mining areas. The LiDARDustX dataset consists of 30,000 LiDAR frames captured by six different LiDAR sensors, each accompanied by 3D bounding box annotations and point cloud semantic segmentation. Notably, over 80% of the dataset comprises dust-affected scenes. By utilizing this dataset, we have established a benchmark for evaluating the performance of state-of-the-art 3D detection and segmentation algorithms. Additionally, we have analyzed the impact of dust on perception accuracy and delved into the causes of these effects. The data and further information can be accessed at: https://github.com/vincentweikey/LiDARDustX.
Leveraging Symmetry to Accelerate Learning of Trajectory Tracking Controllers for Free-Flying Robotic Systems
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Tracking controllers enable robotic systems to accurately follow planned reference trajectories. In particular, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in the synthesis of controllers for systems with complex dynamics and modest online compute budgets. However, the poor sample efficiency of RL and the challenges of reward design make training slow and sometimes unstable, especially for high-dimensional systems. In this work, we leverage the inherent Lie group symmetries of robotic systems with a floating base to mitigate these challenges when learning tracking controllers. We model a general tracking problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) that captures the evolution of both the physical and reference states. Next, we prove that symmetry in the underlying dynamics and running costs leads to an MDP homomorphism, a mapping that allows a policy trained on a lower-dimensional "quotient" MDP to be lifted to an optimal tracking controller for the original system. We compare this symmetry-informed approach to an unstructured baseline, using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to learn tracking controllers for three systems: the Particle (a forced point mass), the Astrobee (a fullyactuated space robot), and the Quadrotor (an underactuated system). Results show that a symmetry-aware approach both accelerates training and reduces tracking error at convergence.
LDM-ISP: Enhancing Neural ISP for Low Light with Latent Diffusion Models
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Enhancing a low-light noisy RAW image into a well-exposed and clean sRGB image is a significant challenge for modern digital cameras. Prior approaches have difficulties in recovering fine-grained details and true colors of the scene under extremely low-light environments due to near-to-zero SNR. Meanwhile, diffusion models have shown significant progress towards general domain image generation. In this paper, we propose to leverage the pre-trained latent diffusion model to perform the neural ISP for enhancing extremely low-light images. Specifically, to tailor the pre-trained latent diffusion model to operate on the RAW domain, we train a set of lightweight taming modules to inject the RAW information into the diffusion denoising process via modulating the intermediate features of UNet. We further observe different roles of UNet denoising and decoder reconstruction in the latent diffusion model, which inspires us to decompose the low-light image enhancement task into latent-space low-frequency content generation and decoding-phase high-frequency detail maintenance. Through extensive experiments on representative datasets, we demonstrate our simple design not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in quantitative evaluations but also shows significant superiority in visual comparisons over strong baselines, which highlight the effectiveness of powerful generative priors for neural ISP under extremely low-light environments. The project page is available at https://csqiangwen.github.io/projects/ldm-isp/
FreeDriveRF: Monocular RGB Dynamic NeRF Without Poses for Autonomous Driving via Point-Level Dynamic-Static Decoupling
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Dynamic scene reconstruction for autonomous driving enables vehicles to perceive and interpret complex scene changes more precisely. Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have recently shown promising capability in scene modeling. However, many existing methods rely heavily on accurate poses inputs and multi-sensor data, leading to increased system complexity. To address this, we propose FreeDriveRF, which reconstructs dynamic driving scenes using only sequential RGB images without requiring poses inputs. We innovatively decouple dynamic and static parts at the early sampling level using semantic supervision, mitigating image blurring and artifacts. To overcome the challenges posed by object motion and occlusion in monocular camera, we introduce a warped ray-guided dynamic object rendering consistency loss, utilizing optical flow to better constrain the dynamic modeling process. Additionally, we incorporate estimated dynamic flow to constrain the pose optimization process, improving the stability and accuracy of unbounded scene reconstruction. Extensive experiments conducted on the KITTI and Waymo datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method in dynamic scene modeling for autonomous driving.
Nearest-Neighbourless Asymptotically Optimal Motion Planning with Fully Connected Informed Trees (FCIT*)
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Improving the performance of motion planning algorithms for high-degree-of-freedom robots usually requires reducing the cost or frequency of computationally expensive operations. Traditionally, and especially for asymptotically optimal sampling-based motion planners, the most expensive operations are local motion validation and querying the nearest neighbours of a configuration. Recent advances have significantly reduced the cost of motion validation by using single instruction/multiple data (SIMD) parallelism to improve solution times for satisficing motion planning problems. These advances have not yet been applied to asymptotically optimal motion planning. This paper presents Fully Connected Informed Trees (FCIT*), the first fully connected, informed, anytime almost-surely asymptotically optimal (ASAO) algorithm. FCIT* exploits the radically reduced cost of edge evaluation via SIMD parallelism to build and search fully connected graphs. This removes the need for nearest-neighbours structures, which are a dominant cost for many sampling-based motion planners, and allows it to find initial solutions faster than state-of-the-art ASAO (VAMP, OMPL) and satisficing (OMPL) algorithms on the MotionBenchMaker dataset while converging towards optimal plans in an anytime manner.