The field of robotic perception and navigation is rapidly advancing, with a focus on developing innovative solutions to address complex challenges. Recent developments have centered around improving the accuracy and robustness of visual SLAM systems, enabling robots to navigate and map dynamic environments. Notable progress has also been made in the area of tactile sensing, with the development of whisker-based tactile flight systems for tiny drones. Furthermore, researchers have been exploring the use of ultra-wideband synthetic aperture radar imaging for mobile robot mapping, which has shown promising results in adverse environmental conditions. The integration of deep learning-based methods, such as vision transformers, has also been a key area of research, with applications in visual odometry, place recognition, and object detection. Overall, these advancements are paving the way for more robust, efficient, and adaptable robotic systems. Noteworthy papers include RSV-SLAM, which introduces a real-time semantic RGBD SLAM approach for dynamic environments, and Novel UWB Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging, which proposes a pipeline for mobile robots to incorporate UWB radar-based SAR imaging for high-resolution environmental mapping.
Advancements in Robotic Perception and Navigation
Sources
RSV-SLAM: Toward Real-Time Semantic Visual SLAM in Indoor Dynamic Environments
Novel UWB Synthetic Aperture Radar Imaging for Mobile Robot Mapping
Whisker-based Tactile Flight for Tiny Drones
Convolutional Neural Nets vs Vision Transformers: A SpaceNet Case Study with Balanced vs Imbalanced Regimes
Visual Odometry with Transformers
Real-Time Threaded Houbara Detection and Segmentation for Wildlife Conservation using Mobile Platforms
Robust Visual Embodiment: How Robots Discover Their Bodies in Real Environments
The Overlooked Value of Test-time Reference Sets in Visual Place Recognition
TCB-VIO: Tightly-Coupled Focal-Plane Binary-Enhanced Visual Inertial Odometry
From Filters to VLMs: Benchmarking Defogging Methods through Object Detection and Segmentation Performance
A Recursive Pyramidal Algorithm for Solving the Image Registration Problem
Flexible and Efficient Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Sequential Visual Place Recognition
OKVIS2-X: Open Keyframe-based Visual-Inertial SLAM Configurable with Dense Depth or LiDAR, and GNSS
Bio-Inspired Robotic Houbara: From Development to Field Deployment for Behavioral Studies
Benchmark on Monocular Metric Depth Estimation in Wildlife Setting
A Comparative Study of Vision Transformers and CNNs for Few-Shot Rigid Transformation and Fundamental Matrix Estimation
CLEAR-IR: Clarity-Enhanced Active Reconstruction of Infrared Imagery
RGBD Gaze Tracking Using Transformer for Feature Fusion
Road Surface Condition Detection with Machine Learning using New York State Department of Transportation Camera Images and Weather Forecast Data
Real-Time Glass Detection and Reprojection using Sensor Fusion Onboard Aerial Robots