pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
CHARMS: A Cognitive Hierarchical Agent for Reasoning and Motion Stylization in Autonomous Driving
Authors: Jingyi Wang, DuanFeng Chu, Zejian Deng, LiPing Lu, Jinxiang Wang, Chen Sun
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Diversity

To address the challenge of insufficient interactivity and behavioral diversity in autonomous driving decision-making, this paper proposes a Cognitive Hierarchical Agent for Reasoning and Motion Stylization (CHARMS). By leveraging Level-k game theory, CHARMS captures human-like reasoning patterns through a two-stage training pipeline comprising reinforcement learning pretraining and supervised fine-tuning. This enables the resulting models to exhibit diverse and human-like behaviors, enhancing their decision-making capacity and interaction fidelity in complex traffic environments. Building upon this capability, we further develop a scenario generation framework that utilizes the Poisson cognitive hierarchy theory to control the distribution of vehicles with different driving styles through Poisson and binomial sampling. Experimental results demonstrate that CHARMS is capable of both making intelligent driving decisions as an ego vehicle and generating diverse, realistic driving scenarios as environment vehicles. The code for CHARMS is released at https://github.com/chuduanfeng/CHARMS.
Estimating Scene Flow in Robot Surroundings with Distributed Miniaturized Time-of-Flight Sensors
Authors: Jack Sander, Giammarco Caroleo, Alessandro Albini, Perla Maiolino
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Flow Estimation

Tracking motions of humans or objects in the surroundings of the robot is essential to improve safe robot motions and reactions. In this work, we present an approach for scene flow estimation from low-density and noisy point clouds acquired from miniaturized Time of Flight (ToF) sensors distributed on the robot body. The proposed method clusters points from consecutive frames and applies Iterative Closest Point (ICP) to estimate a dense motion flow, with additional steps introduced to mitigate the impact of sensor noise and low-density data points. Specifically, we employ a fitness-based classification to distinguish between stationary and moving points and an inlier removal strategy to refine geometric correspondences. The proposed approach is validated in an experimental setup where 24 ToF are used to estimate the velocity of an object moving at different controlled speeds. Experimental results show that the method consistently approximates the direction of the motion and its magnitude with an error which is in line with sensor noise.
All-day Depth Completion via Thermal-LiDAR Fusion
Authors: JangHyun Kim, Minseong Kweon, Jinsun Park, Ukcheol Shin
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Contrastive Learning, Depth Completion

Depth completion, which estimates dense depth from sparse LiDAR and RGB images, has demonstrated outstanding performance in well-lit conditions. However, due to the limitations of RGB sensors, existing methods often struggle to achieve reliable performance in harsh environments, such as heavy rain and low-light conditions. Furthermore, we observe that ground truth depth maps often suffer from large missing measurements in adverse weather conditions such as heavy rain, leading to insufficient supervision. In contrast, thermal cameras are known for providing clear and reliable visibility in such conditions, yet research on thermal-LiDAR depth completion remains underexplored. Moreover, the characteristics of thermal images, such as blurriness, low contrast, and noise, bring unclear depth boundary problems. To address these challenges, we first evaluate the feasibility and robustness of thermal-LiDAR depth completion across diverse lighting (eg., well-lit, low-light), weather (eg., clear-sky, rainy), and environment (eg., indoor, outdoor) conditions, by conducting extensive benchmarks on the MS$^2$ and ViViD datasets. In addition, we propose a framework that utilizes COntrastive learning and Pseudo-Supervision (COPS) to enhance depth boundary clarity and improve completion accuracy by leveraging a depth foundation model in two key ways. First, COPS enforces a depth-aware contrastive loss between different depth points by mining positive and negative samples using a monocular depth foundation model to sharpen depth boundaries. Second, it mitigates the issue of incomplete supervision from ground truth depth maps by leveraging foundation model predictions as dense depth priors. We also provide in-depth analyses of the key challenges in thermal-LiDAR depth completion to aid in understanding the task and encourage future research.
X-Capture: An Open-Source Portable Device for Multi-Sensory Learning
Authors: Samuel Clarke, Suzannah Wistreich, Yanjie Ze, Jiajun Wu
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00

Understanding objects through multiple sensory modalities is fundamental to human perception, enabling cross-sensory integration and richer comprehension. For AI and robotic systems to replicate this ability, access to diverse, high-quality multi-sensory data is critical. Existing datasets are often limited by their focus on controlled environments, simulated objects, or restricted modality pairings. We introduce X-Capture, an open-source, portable, and cost-effective device for real-world multi-sensory data collection, capable of capturing correlated RGBD images, tactile readings, and impact audio. With a build cost under $1,000, X-Capture democratizes the creation of multi-sensory datasets, requiring only consumer-grade tools for assembly. Using X-Capture, we curate a sample dataset of 3,000 total points on 500 everyday objects from diverse, real-world environments, offering both richness and variety. Our experiments demonstrate the value of both the quantity and the sensory breadth of our data for both pretraining and fine-tuning multi-modal representations for object-centric tasks such as cross-sensory retrieval and reconstruction. X-Capture lays the groundwork for advancing human-like sensory representations in AI, emphasizing scalability, accessibility, and real-world applicability.
MinkOcc: Towards real-time label-efficient semantic occupancy prediction
Authors: Samuel Sze, Daniele De Martini, Lars Kunze
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction, Autonomous Driving, Prediction

Developing 3D semantic occupancy prediction models often relies on dense 3D annotations for supervised learning, a process that is both labor and resource-intensive, underscoring the need for label-efficient or even label-free approaches. To address this, we introduce MinkOcc, a multi-modal 3D semantic occupancy prediction framework for cameras and LiDARs that proposes a two-step semi-supervised training procedure. Here, a small dataset of explicitly 3D annotations warm-starts the training process; then, the supervision is continued by simpler-to-annotate accumulated LiDAR sweeps and images -- semantically labelled through vision foundational models. MinkOcc effectively utilizes these sensor-rich supervisory cues and reduces reliance on manual labeling by 90\% while maintaining competitive accuracy. In addition, the proposed model incorporates information from LiDAR and camera data through early fusion and leverages sparse convolution networks for real-time prediction. With its efficiency in both supervision and computation, we aim to extend MinkOcc beyond curated datasets, enabling broader real-world deployment of 3D semantic occupancy prediction in autonomous driving.
Adapting World Models with Latent-State Dynamics Residuals
Authors: JB Lanier, KyungMin Kim, Armin Karamzade, Yifei Liu, Ankita Sinha, Kat He, Davide Corsi, Roy Fox
Date: 2025-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: MuJoCo, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Simulation-to-reality reinforcement learning (RL) faces the critical challenge of reconciling discrepancies between simulated and real-world dynamics, which can severely degrade agent performance. A promising approach involves learning corrections to simulator forward dynamics represented as a residual error function, however this operation is impractical with high-dimensional states such as images. To overcome this, we propose ReDRAW, a latent-state autoregressive world model pretrained in simulation and calibrated to target environments through residual corrections of latent-state dynamics rather than of explicit observed states. Using this adapted world model, ReDRAW enables RL agents to be optimized with imagined rollouts under corrected dynamics and then deployed in the real world. In multiple vision-based MuJoCo domains and a physical robot visual lane-following task, ReDRAW effectively models changes to dynamics and avoids overfitting in low data regimes where traditional transfer methods fail.
Preference-Driven Active 3D Scene Representation for Robotic Inspection in Nuclear Decommissioning
Authors: Zhen Meng, Kan Chen, Xiangmin Xu, Erwin Jose Lopez Pulgarin, Emma Li, Philip G. Zhao, David Flynn
Date: 2025-04-02 00:00:00

Active 3D scene representation is pivotal in modern robotics applications, including remote inspection, manipulation, and telepresence. Traditional methods primarily optimize geometric fidelity or rendering accuracy, but often overlook operator-specific objectives, such as safety-critical coverage or task-driven viewpoints. This limitation leads to suboptimal viewpoint selection, particularly in constrained environments such as nuclear decommissioning. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel framework that integrates expert operator preferences into the active 3D scene representation pipeline. Specifically, we employ Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to guide robotic path planning, reshaping the reward function based on expert input. To capture operator-specific priorities, we conduct interactive choice experiments that evaluate user preferences in 3D scene representation. We validate our framework using a UR3e robotic arm for reactor tile inspection in a nuclear decommissioning scenario. Compared to baseline methods, our approach enhances scene representation while optimizing trajectory efficiency. The RLHF-based policy consistently outperforms random selection, prioritizing task-critical details. By unifying explicit 3D geometric modeling with implicit human-in-the-loop optimization, this work establishes a foundation for adaptive, safety-critical robotic perception systems, paving the way for enhanced automation in nuclear decommissioning, remote maintenance, and other high-risk environments.
Evaluation of Flight Parameters in UAV-based 3D Reconstruction for Rooftop Infrastructure Assessment
Authors: Nick Chodura, Melissa Greeff, Joshua Woods
Date: 2025-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction

Rooftop 3D reconstruction using UAV-based photogrammetry offers a promising solution for infrastructure assessment, but existing methods often require high percentages of image overlap and extended flight times to ensure model accuracy when using autonomous flight paths. This study systematically evaluates key flight parameters-ground sampling distance (GSD) and image overlap-to optimize the 3D reconstruction of complex rooftop infrastructure. Controlled UAV flights were conducted over a multi-segment rooftop at Queen's University using a DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2, with varied GSD and overlap settings. The collected data were processed using Reality Capture software and evaluated against ground truth models generated from UAV-based LiDAR and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS). Experimental results indicate that a GSD range of 0.75-1.26 cm combined with 85% image overlap achieves a high degree of model accuracy, while minimizing images collected and flight time. These findings provide guidance for planning autonomous UAV flight paths for efficient rooftop assessments.
RoboAct-CLIP: Video-Driven Pre-training of Atomic Action Understanding for Robotics
Authors: Zhiyuan Zhang, Yuxin He, Yong Sun, Junyu Shi, Lijiang Liu, Qiang Nie
Date: 2025-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Understanding, Representation Learning

Visual Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as pivotal tools for robotic systems, enabling cross-task generalization, dynamic environmental interaction, and long-horizon planning through multimodal perception and semantic reasoning. However, existing open-source VLMs predominantly trained for generic vision-language alignment tasks fail to model temporally correlated action semantics that are crucial for robotic manipulation effectively. While current image-based fine-tuning methods partially adapt VLMs to robotic applications, they fundamentally disregard temporal evolution patterns in video sequences and suffer from visual feature entanglement between robotic agents, manipulated objects, and environmental contexts, thereby limiting semantic decoupling capability for atomic actions and compromising model generalizability.To overcome these challenges, this work presents RoboAct-CLIP with dual technical contributions: 1) A dataset reconstruction framework that performs semantic-constrained action unit segmentation and re-annotation on open-source robotic videos, constructing purified training sets containing singular atomic actions (e.g., "grasp"); 2) A temporal-decoupling fine-tuning strategy based on Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) architecture, which disentangles temporal action features across video frames from object-centric characteristics to achieve hierarchical representation learning of robotic atomic actions.Experimental results in simulated environments demonstrate that the RoboAct-CLIP pretrained model achieves a 12% higher success rate than baseline VLMs, along with superior generalization in multi-object manipulation tasks.
System Identification and Adaptive Input Estimation on the Jaiabot Micro Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
Authors: Ioannis Faros, Herbert G. Tanner
Date: 2025-04-01 00:00:00
Tasks: State Estimation

This paper reports an attempt to model the system dynamics and estimate both the unknown internal control input and the state of a recently developed marine autonomous vehicle, the Jaiabot. Although the Jaiabot has shown promise in many applications, process and sensor noise necessitates state estimation and noise filtering. In this work, we present the first surge and heading linear dynamical model for Jaiabots derived from real data collected during field testing. An adaptive input estimation algorithm is implemented to accurately estimate the control input and hence the state. For validation, this approach is compared to the classical Kalman filter, highlighting its advantages in handling unknown control inputs.
Real-Time Navigation for Autonomous Aerial Vehicles Using Video
Authors: Khizar Anjum, Parul Pandey, Vidyasagar Sadhu, Roberto Tron, Dario Pompili
Date: 2025-04-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, object-detection, Object Detection

Most applications in autonomous navigation using mounted cameras rely on the construction and processing of geometric 3D point clouds, which is an expensive process. However, there is another simpler way to make a space navigable quickly: to use semantic information (e.g., traffic signs) to guide the agent. However, detecting and acting on semantic information involves Computer Vision~(CV) algorithms such as object detection, which themselves are demanding for agents such as aerial drones with limited onboard resources. To solve this problem, we introduce a novel Markov Decision Process~(MDP) framework to reduce the workload of these CV approaches. We apply our proposed framework to both feature-based and neural-network-based object-detection tasks, using open-loop and closed-loop simulations as well as hardware-in-the-loop emulations. These holistic tests show significant benefits in energy consumption and speed with only a limited loss in accuracy compared to models based on static features and neural networks.
A Concise Survey on Lane Topology Reasoning for HD Mapping
Authors: Yi Yao, Miao Fan, Shengtong Xu, Haoyi Xiong, Xiangzeng Liu, WenBo Hu, Wenbing Huang
Date: 2025-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Lane topology reasoning techniques play a crucial role in high-definition (HD) mapping and autonomous driving applications. While recent years have witnessed significant advances in this field, there has been limited effort to consolidate these works into a comprehensive overview. This survey systematically reviews the evolution and current state of lane topology reasoning methods, categorizing them into three major paradigms: procedural modeling-based methods, aerial imagery-based methods, and onboard sensors-based methods. We analyze the progression from early rule-based approaches to modern learning-based solutions utilizing transformers, graph neural networks (GNNs), and other deep learning architectures. The paper examines standardized evaluation metrics, including road-level measures (APLS and TLTS score), and lane-level metrics (DET and TOP score), along with performance comparisons on benchmark datasets such as OpenLane-V2. We identify key technical challenges, including dataset availability and model efficiency, and outline promising directions for future research. This comprehensive review provides researchers and practitioners with insights into the theoretical frameworks, practical implementations, and emerging trends in lane topology reasoning for HD mapping applications.
Distance Estimation to Support Assistive Drones for the Visually Impaired using Robust Calibration
Authors: Suman Raj, Bhavani A Madhabhavi, Madhav Kumar, Prabhav Gupta, Yogesh Simmhan
Date: 2025-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation

Autonomous navigation by drones using onboard sensors, combined with deep learning and computer vision algorithms, is impacting a number of domains. We examine the use of drones to autonomously assist Visually Impaired People (VIPs) in navigating outdoor environments while avoiding obstacles. Here, we present NOVA, a robust calibration technique using depth maps to estimate absolute distances to obstacles in a campus environment. NOVA uses a dynamic-update method that can adapt to adversarial scenarios. We compare NOVA with SOTA depth map approaches, and with geometric and regression-based baseline models, for distance estimation to VIPs and other obstacles in diverse and dynamic conditions. We also provide exhaustive evaluations to validate the robustness and generalizability of our methods. NOVA predicts distances to VIP with an error <30cm and to different obstacles like cars and bicycles with a maximum of 60cm error, which are better than the baselines. NOVA also clearly out-performs SOTA depth map methods, by upto 5.3-14.6x.
CaLiV: LiDAR-to-Vehicle Calibration of Arbitrary Sensor Setups via Object Reconstruction
Authors: Ilir Tahiraj, Markus Edinger, Dominik Kulmer, Markus Lienkamp
Date: 2025-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Object Reconstruction

In autonomous systems, sensor calibration is essential for a safe and efficient navigation in dynamic environments. Accurate calibration is a prerequisite for reliable perception and planning tasks such as object detection and obstacle avoidance. Many existing LiDAR calibration methods require overlapping fields of view, while others use external sensing devices or postulate a feature-rich environment. In addition, Sensor-to-Vehicle calibration is not supported by the vast majority of calibration algorithms. In this work, we propose a novel target-based technique for extrinsic Sensor-to-Sensor and Sensor-to-Vehicle calibration of multi-LiDAR systems called CaLiV. This algorithm works for non-overlapping FoVs, as well as arbitrary calibration targets, and does not require any external sensing devices. First, we apply motion to produce FoV overlaps and utilize a simple unscented Kalman filter to obtain vehicle poses. Then, we use the Gaussian mixture model-based registration framework GMMCalib to align the point clouds in a common calibration frame. Finally, we reduce the task of recovering the sensor extrinsics to a minimization problem. We show that both translational and rotational Sensor-to-Sensor errors can be solved accurately by our method. In addition, all Sensor-to-Vehicle rotation angles can also be calibrated with high accuracy. We validate the simulation results in real-world experiments. The code is open source and available on https://github.com/TUMFTM/CaLiV.
Multi-Dimensional AGV Path Planning in 3D Warehouses Using Ant Colony Optimization and Advanced Neural Networks
Authors: Bo Zhang, Xiubo Liang, Wei Song, Yulu Chen
Date: 2025-03-30 00:00:00

Within modern warehouse scenarios, the rapid expansion of e-commerce and increasingly complex, multi-level storage environments have exposed the limitations of traditional AGV (Automated Guided Vehicle) path planning methods--often reliant on static 2D models and expert-tuned heuristics that struggle to handle dynamic traffic and congestion. Addressing these limitations, this paper introduces a novel AGV path planning approach for 3D warehouse environments that leverages a hybrid framework combining ACO (Ant Colony Optimization) with deep learning models, called NAHACO (Neural Adaptive Heuristic Ant Colony Optimization). NAHACO integrates three key innovations: first, an innovative heuristic algorithm for 3D warehouse cargo modeling using multidimensional tensors, which addresses the challenge of achieving superior heuristic accuracy; second, integration of a congestion-aware loss function within the ACO framework to adjust path costs based on traffic and capacity constraints, called CARL (Congestion-Aware Reinforce Loss), enabling dynamic heuristic calibration for optimizing ACO-based path planning; and third, an adaptive attention mechanism that captures multi-scale spatial features, thereby addressing dynamic heuristic calibration for further optimization of ACO-based path planning and AGV navigation. NAHACO significantly boosts path planning efficiency, yielding faster computation times and superior performance over both vanilla and state-of-the-art methods, while automatically adapting to warehouse constraints for real-time optimization. NAHACO outperforms state-of-the-art methods, lowering the total cost by up to 24.7% on TSP benchmarks. In warehouse tests, NAHACO cuts cost by up to 41.5% and congestion by up to 56.1% compared to previous methods.
Impedance and Stability Targeted Adaptation for Aerial Manipulator with Unknown Coupling Dynamics
Authors: Amitabh Sharma, Saksham Gupta, Shivansh Pratap Singh, Rishabh Dev Yadav, Hongyu Song, Wei Pan, Spandan Roy, Simone Baldi
Date: 2025-03-29 00:00:00

Stable aerial manipulation during dynamic tasks such as object catching, perching, or contact with rigid surfaces necessarily requires compliant behavior, which is often achieved via impedance control. Successful manipulation depends on how effectively the impedance control can tackle the unavoidable coupling forces between the aerial vehicle and the manipulator. However, the existing impedance controllers for aerial manipulator either ignore these coupling forces (in partitioned system compliance methods) or require their precise knowledge (in complete system compliance methods). Unfortunately, such forces are very difficult to model, if at all possible. To solve this long-standing control challenge, we introduce an impedance controller for aerial manipulator which does not rely on a priori knowledge of the system dynamics and of the coupling forces. The impedance control design can address unknown coupling forces, along with system parametric uncertainties, via suitably designed adaptive laws. The closed-loop system stability is proved analytically and experimental results with a payload-catching scenario demonstrate significant improvements in overall stability and tracking over the state-of-the-art impedance controllers using either partitioned or complete system compliance.