OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Confidence-Controlled Exploration: Efficient Sparse-Reward Policy Learning for Robot Navigation
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for robotic navigation, allowing robots to learn through trial and error. However, real-world robotic tasks often suffer from sparse rewards, leading to inefficient exploration and suboptimal policies due to sample inefficiency of RL. In this work, we introduce Confidence-Controlled Exploration (CCE), a novel method that improves sample efficiency in RL-based robotic navigation without modifying the reward function. Unlike existing approaches, such as entropy regularization and reward shaping, which can introduce instability by altering rewards, CCE dynamically adjusts trajectory length based on policy entropy. Specifically, it shortens trajectories when uncertainty is high to enhance exploration and extends them when confidence is high to prioritize exploitation. CCE is a principled and practical solution inspired by a theoretical connection between policy entropy and gradient estimation. It integrates seamlessly with on-policy and off-policy RL methods and requires minimal modifications. We validate CCE across REINFORCE, PPO, and SAC in both simulated and real-world navigation tasks. CCE outperforms fixed-trajectory and entropy-regularized baselines, achieving an 18\% higher success rate, 20-38\% shorter paths, and 9.32\% lower elevation costs under a fixed training sample budget. Finally, we deploy CCE on a Clearpath Husky robot, demonstrating its effectiveness in complex outdoor environments.
TartanGround: A Large-Scale Dataset for Ground Robot Perception and Navigation
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

We present TartanGround, a large-scale, multi-modal dataset to advance the perception and autonomy of ground robots operating in diverse environments. This dataset, collected in various photorealistic simulation environments includes multiple RGB stereo cameras for 360-degree coverage, along with depth, optical flow, stereo disparity, LiDAR point clouds, ground truth poses, semantic segmented images, and occupancy maps with semantic labels. Data is collected using an integrated automatic pipeline, which generates trajectories mimicking the motion patterns of various ground robot platforms, including wheeled and legged robots. We collect 910 trajectories across 70 environments, resulting in 1.5 million samples. Evaluations on occupancy prediction and SLAM tasks reveal that state-of-the-art methods trained on existing datasets struggle to generalize across diverse scenes. TartanGround can serve as a testbed for training and evaluation of a broad range of learning-based tasks, including occupancy prediction, SLAM, neural scene representation, perception-based navigation, and more, enabling advancements in robotic perception and autonomy towards achieving robust models generalizable to more diverse scenarios. The dataset and codebase are available on the webpage: https://tartanair.org/tartanground
SparseLoc: Sparse Open-Set Landmark-based Global Localization for Autonomous Navigation
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Global localization is a critical problem in autonomous navigation, enabling precise positioning without reliance on GPS. Modern global localization techniques often depend on dense LiDAR maps, which, while precise, require extensive storage and computational resources. Recent approaches have explored alternative methods, such as sparse maps and learned features, but they suffer from poor robustness and generalization. We propose SparseLoc, a global localization framework that leverages vision-language foundation models to generate sparse, semantic-topometric maps in a zero-shot manner. It combines this map representation with a Monte Carlo localization scheme enhanced by a novel late optimization strategy, ensuring improved pose estimation. By constructing compact yet highly discriminative maps and refining localization through a carefully designed optimization schedule, SparseLoc overcomes the limitations of existing techniques, offering a more efficient and robust solution for global localization. Our system achieves over a 5X improvement in localization accuracy compared to existing sparse mapping techniques. Despite utilizing only 1/500th of the points of dense mapping methods, it achieves comparable performance, maintaining an average global localization error below 5m and 2 degrees on KITTI sequences.
LERa: Replanning with Visual Feedback in Instruction Following
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Large Language Models are increasingly used in robotics for task planning, but their reliance on textual inputs limits their adaptability to real-world changes and failures. To address these challenges, we propose LERa - Look, Explain, Replan - a Visual Language Model-based replanning approach that utilizes visual feedback. Unlike existing methods, LERa requires only a raw RGB image, a natural language instruction, an initial task plan, and failure detection - without additional information such as object detection or predefined conditions that may be unavailable in a given scenario. The replanning process consists of three steps: (i) Look - where LERa generates a scene description and identifies errors; (ii) Explain - where it provides corrective guidance; and (iii) Replan - where it modifies the plan accordingly. LERa is adaptable to various agent architectures and can handle errors from both dynamic scene changes and task execution failures. We evaluate LERa on the newly introduced ALFRED-ChaOS and VirtualHome-ChaOS datasets, achieving a 40% improvement over baselines in dynamic environments. In tabletop manipulation tasks with a predefined probability of task failure within the PyBullet simulator, LERa improves success rates by up to 67%. Further experiments, including real-world trials with a tabletop manipulator robot, confirm LERa's effectiveness in replanning. We demonstrate that LERa is a robust and adaptable solution for error-aware task execution in robotics. The project page is available at https://lera-robo.github.io.
Do Visual-Language Grid Maps Capture Latent Semantics?
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Visual-language models (VLMs) have recently been introduced in robotic mapping using the latent representations, i.e., embeddings, of the VLMs to represent semantics in the map. They allow moving from a limited set of human-created labels toward open-vocabulary scene understanding, which is very useful for robots when operating in complex real-world environments and interacting with humans. While there is anecdotal evidence that maps built this way support downstream tasks, such as navigation, rigorous analysis of the quality of the maps using these embeddings is missing. In this paper, we propose a way to analyze the quality of maps created using VLMs. We investigate two critical properties of map quality: queryability and distinctness. The evaluation of queryability addresses the ability to retrieve information from the embeddings. We investigate intra-map distinctness to study the ability of the embeddings to represent abstract semantic classes and inter-map distinctness to evaluate the generalization properties of the representation. We propose metrics to evaluate these properties and evaluate two state-of-the-art mapping methods, VLMaps and OpenScene, using two encoders, LSeg and OpenSeg, using real-world data from the Matterport3D data set. Our findings show that while 3D features improve queryability, they are not scale invariant, whereas image-based embeddings generalize to multiple map resolutions. This allows the image-based methods to maintain smaller map sizes, which can be crucial for using these methods in real-world deployments. Furthermore, we show that the choice of the encoder has an effect on the results. The results imply that properly thresholding open-vocabulary queries is an open problem.
Automatic MILP Model Construction for Multi-Robot Task Allocation and Scheduling Based on Large Language Models
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

With the accelerated development of Industry 4.0, intelligent manufacturing systems increasingly require efficient task allocation and scheduling in multi-robot systems. However, existing methods rely on domain expertise and face challenges in adapting to dynamic production constraints. Additionally, enterprises have high privacy requirements for production scheduling data, which prevents the use of cloud-based large language models (LLMs) for solution development. To address these challenges, there is an urgent need for an automated modeling solution that meets data privacy requirements. This study proposes a knowledge-augmented mixed integer linear programming (MILP) automated formulation framework, integrating local LLMs with domain-specific knowledge bases to generate executable code from natural language descriptions automatically. The framework employs a knowledge-guided DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B model to extract complex spatiotemporal constraints (82% average accuracy) and leverages a supervised fine-tuned Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct model for efficient MILP code generation (90% average accuracy). Experimental results demonstrate that the framework successfully achieves automatic modeling in the aircraft skin manufacturing case while ensuring data privacy and computational efficiency. This research provides a low-barrier and highly reliable technical path for modeling in complex industrial scenarios.
ELMAR: Enhancing LiDAR Detection with 4D Radar Motion Awareness and Cross-modal Uncertainty
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

LiDAR and 4D radar are widely used in autonomous driving and robotics. While LiDAR provides rich spatial information, 4D radar offers velocity measurement and remains robust under adverse conditions. As a result, increasing studies have focused on the 4D radar-LiDAR fusion method to enhance the perception. However, the misalignment between different modalities is often overlooked. To address this challenge and leverage the strengths of both modalities, we propose a LiDAR detection framework enhanced by 4D radar motion status and cross-modal uncertainty. The object movement information from 4D radar is first captured using a Dynamic Motion-Aware Encoding module during feature extraction to enhance 4D radar predictions. Subsequently, the instance-wise uncertainties of bounding boxes are estimated to mitigate the cross-modal misalignment and refine the final LiDAR predictions. Extensive experiments on the View-of-Delft (VoD) dataset highlight the effectiveness of our method, achieving state-of-the-art performance with the mAP of 74.89% in the entire area and 88.70% within the driving corridor while maintaining a real-time inference speed of 30.02 FPS.
Scalable Real2Sim: Physics-Aware Asset Generation Via Robotic Pick-and-Place Setups
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Simulating object dynamics from real-world perception shows great promise for digital twins and robotic manipulation but often demands labor-intensive measurements and expertise. We present a fully automated Real2Sim pipeline that generates simulation-ready assets for real-world objects through robotic interaction. Using only a robot's joint torque sensors and an external camera, the pipeline identifies visual geometry, collision geometry, and physical properties such as inertial parameters. Our approach introduces a general method for extracting high-quality, object-centric meshes from photometric reconstruction techniques (e.g., NeRF, Gaussian Splatting) by employing alpha-transparent training while explicitly distinguishing foreground occlusions from background subtraction. We validate the full pipeline through extensive experiments, demonstrating its effectiveness across diverse objects. By eliminating the need for manual intervention or environment modifications, our pipeline can be integrated directly into existing pick-and-place setups, enabling scalable and efficient dataset creation. Project page (with code and data): https://scalable-real2sim.github.io/.
Coherent Online Road Topology Estimation and Reasoning with Standard-Definition Maps
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Most autonomous cars rely on the availability of high-definition (HD) maps. Current research aims to address this constraint by directly predicting HD map elements from onboard sensors and reasoning about the relationships between the predicted map and traffic elements. Despite recent advancements, the coherent online construction of HD maps remains a challenging endeavor, as it necessitates modeling the high complexity of road topologies in a unified and consistent manner. To address this challenge, we propose a coherent approach to predict lane segments and their corresponding topology, as well as road boundaries, all by leveraging prior map information represented by commonly available standard-definition (SD) maps. We propose a network architecture, which leverages hybrid lane segment encodings comprising prior information and denoising techniques to enhance training stability and performance. Furthermore, we facilitate past frames for temporal consistency. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that our approach outperforms previous methods by a large margin, highlighting the benefits of our modeling scheme.
OASIS: Real-Time Opti-Acoustic Sensing for Intervention Systems in Unstructured Environments
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

High resolution underwater 3D scene reconstruction is crucial for various applications, including construction, infrastructure maintenance, monitoring, exploration, and scientific investigation. Prior work has leveraged the complementary sensing modalities of imaging sonars and optical cameras for opti-acoustic 3D scene reconstruction, demonstrating improved results over methods which rely solely on either sensor. However, while most existing approaches focus on offline reconstruction, real-time spatial awareness is essential for both autonomous and piloted underwater vehicle operations. This paper presents OASIS, an opti-acoustic fusion method that integrates data from optical images with voxel carving techniques to achieve real-time 3D reconstruction unstructured underwater workspaces. Our approach utilizes an "eye-in-hand" configuration, which leverages the dexterity of robotic manipulator arms to capture multiple workspace views across a short baseline. We validate OASIS through tank-based experiments and present qualitative and quantitative results that highlight its utility for underwater manipulation tasks.
LiHRA: A LiDAR-Based HRI Dataset for Automated Risk Monitoring Methods
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

We present LiHRA, a novel dataset designed to facilitate the development of automated, learning-based, or classical risk monitoring (RM) methods for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios. The growing prevalence of collaborative robots in industrial environments has increased the need for reliable safety systems. However, the lack of high-quality datasets that capture realistic human-robot interactions, including potentially dangerous events, slows development. LiHRA addresses this challenge by providing a comprehensive, multi-modal dataset combining 3D LiDAR point clouds, human body keypoints, and robot joint states, capturing the complete spatial and dynamic context of human-robot collaboration. This combination of modalities allows for precise tracking of human movement, robot actions, and environmental conditions, enabling accurate RM during collaborative tasks. The LiHRA dataset covers six representative HRI scenarios involving collaborative and coexistent tasks, object handovers, and surface polishing, with safe and hazardous versions of each scenario. In total, the data set includes 4,431 labeled point clouds recorded at 10 Hz, providing a rich resource for training and benchmarking classical and AI-driven RM algorithms. Finally, to demonstrate LiHRA's utility, we introduce an RM method that quantifies the risk level in each scenario over time. This method leverages contextual information, including robot states and the dynamic model of the robot. With its combination of high-resolution LiDAR data, precise human tracking, robot state data, and realistic collision events, LiHRA offers an essential foundation for future research into real-time RM and adaptive safety strategies in human-robot workspaces.
Competency-Aware Planning for Probabilistically Safe Navigation Under Perception Uncertainty
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Perception-based navigation systems are useful for unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) navigation in complex terrains, where traditional depth-based navigation schemes are insufficient. However, these data-driven methods are highly dependent on their training data and can fail in surprising and dramatic ways with little warning. To ensure the safety of the vehicle and the surrounding environment, it is imperative that the navigation system is able to recognize the predictive uncertainty of the perception model and respond safely and effectively in the face of uncertainty. In an effort to enable safe navigation under perception uncertainty, we develop a probabilistic and reconstruction-based competency estimation (PaRCE) method to estimate the model's level of familiarity with an input image as a whole and with specific regions in the image. We find that the overall competency score can correctly predict correctly classified, misclassified, and out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. We also confirm that the regional competency maps can accurately distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar regions across images. We then use this competency information to develop a planning and control scheme that enables effective navigation while maintaining a low probability of error. We find that the competency-aware scheme greatly reduces the number of collisions with unfamiliar obstacles, compared to a baseline controller with no competency awareness. Furthermore, the regional competency information is very valuable in enabling efficient navigation.
Improving 6D Object Pose Estimation of Metallic Household and Industry Objects
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

6D object pose estimation suffers from reduced accuracy when applied to metallic objects. We set out to improve the state-of-the-art by addressing challenges such as reflections and specular highlights in industrial applications. Our novel BOP-compatible dataset, featuring a diverse set of metallic objects (cans, household, and industrial items) under various lighting and background conditions, provides additional geometric and visual cues. We demonstrate that these cues can be effectively leveraged to enhance overall performance. To illustrate the usefulness of the additional features, we improve upon the GDRNPP algorithm by introducing an additional keypoint prediction and material estimator head in order to improve spatial scene understanding. Evaluations on the new dataset show improved accuracy for metallic objects, supporting the hypothesis that additional geometric and visual cues can improve learning.
A Comprehensive Evaluation of LiDAR Odometry Techniques
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors have become the sensor of choice for many robotic state estimation tasks. Because of this, in recent years there has been significant work done to fine the most accurate method to perform state estimation using these sensors. In each of these prior works, an explosion of possible technique combinations has occurred, with each work comparing LiDAR Odometry (LO) "pipelines" to prior "pipelines". Unfortunately, little work up to this point has performed the significant amount of ablation studies comparing the various building-blocks of a LO pipeline. In this work, we summarize the various techniques that go into defining a LO pipeline and empirically evaluate these LO components on an expansive number of datasets across environments, LiDAR types, and vehicle motions. Finally, we make empirically-backed recommendations for the design of future LO pipelines to provide the most accurate and reliable performance.
Joint Pedestrian and Vehicle Traffic Optimization in Urban Environments using Reinforcement Learning
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Reinforcement learning (RL) holds significant promise for adaptive traffic signal control. While existing RL-based methods demonstrate effectiveness in reducing vehicular congestion, their predominant focus on vehicle-centric optimization leaves pedestrian mobility needs and safety challenges unaddressed. In this paper, we present a deep RL framework for adaptive control of eight traffic signals along a real-world urban corridor, jointly optimizing both pedestrian and vehicular efficiency. Our single-agent policy is trained using real-world pedestrian and vehicle demand data derived from Wi-Fi logs and video analysis. The results demonstrate significant performance improvements over traditional fixed-time signals, reducing average wait times per pedestrian and per vehicle by up to 67% and 52% respectively, while simultaneously decreasing total wait times for both groups by up to 67% and 53%. Additionally, our results demonstrate generalization capabilities across varying traffic demands, including conditions entirely unseen during training, validating RL's potential for developing transportation systems that serve all road users.
A Multimodal Neural Network for Recognizing Subjective Self-Disclosure Towards Social Robots
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Subjective self-disclosure is an important feature of human social interaction. While much has been done in the social and behavioural literature to characterise the features and consequences of subjective self-disclosure, little work has been done thus far to develop computational systems that are able to accurately model it. Even less work has been done that attempts to model specifically how human interactants self-disclose with robotic partners. It is becoming more pressing as we require social robots to work in conjunction with and establish relationships with humans in various social settings. In this paper, our aim is to develop a custom multimodal attention network based on models from the emotion recognition literature, training this model on a large self-collected self-disclosure video corpus, and constructing a new loss function, the scale preserving cross entropy loss, that improves upon both classification and regression versions of this problem. Our results show that the best performing model, trained with our novel loss function, achieves an F1 score of 0.83, an improvement of 0.48 from the best baseline model. This result makes significant headway in the aim of allowing social robots to pick up on an interaction partner's self-disclosures, an ability that will be essential in social robots with social cognition.
Learning Robust Agile Flight Control with Stability Guarantees
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

In the evolving landscape of high-speed agile quadrotor flight, achieving precise trajectory tracking at the platform's operational limits is paramount. Controllers must handle actuator constraints, exhibit robustness to disturbances, and remain computationally efficient for safety-critical applications. In this work, we present a novel neural-augmented feedback controller for agile flight control. The controller addresses individual limitations of existing state-of-the-art control paradigms and unifies their strengths. We demonstrate the controller's capabilities, including the accurate tracking of highly aggressive trajectories that surpass the feasibility of the actuators. Notably, the controller provides universal stability guarantees, enhancing its robustness and tracking performance even in exceedingly disturbance-prone settings. Its nonlinear feedback structure is highly efficient enabling fast computation at high update rates. Moreover, the learning process in simulation is both fast and stable, and the controller's inherent robustness allows direct deployment to real-world platforms without the need for training augmentations or fine-tuning.