A consistent spatial-temporal coordination across multiple agents is fundamental for collaborative perception, which seeks to improve perception abilities through information exchange among agents. To achieve this spatial-temporal alignment, traditional methods depend on external devices to provide localization and clock signals. However, hardware-generated signals could be vulnerable to noise and potentially malicious attack, jeopardizing the precision of spatial-temporal alignment. Rather than relying on external hardwares, this work proposes a novel approach: aligning by recognizing the inherent geometric patterns within the perceptual data of various agents. Following this spirit, we propose a robust collaborative perception system that operates independently of external localization and clock devices. The key module of our system,~\emph{FreeAlign}, constructs a salient object graph for each agent based on its detected boxes and uses a graph neural network to identify common subgraphs between agents, leading to accurate relative pose and time. We validate \emph{FreeAlign} on both real-world and simulated datasets. The results show that, the ~\emph{FreeAlign} empowered robust collaborative perception system perform comparably to systems relying on precise localization and clock devices.

Humans naturally retain memories of permanent elements, while ephemeral moments often slip through the cracks of memory. This selective retention is crucial for robotic perception, localization, and mapping. To endow robots with this capability, we introduce 3D Gaussian Mapping (3DGM), a self-supervised, camera-only offline mapping framework grounded in 3D Gaussian Splatting. 3DGM converts multitraverse RGB videos from the same region into a Gaussian-based environmental map while concurrently performing 2D ephemeral object segmentation. Our key observation is that the environment remains consistent across traversals, while objects frequently change. This allows us to exploit self-supervision from repeated traversals to achieve environment-object decomposition. More specifically, 3DGM formulates multitraverse environmental mapping as a robust differentiable rendering problem, treating pixels of the environment and objects as inliers and outliers, respectively. Using robust feature distillation, feature residuals mining, and robust optimization, 3DGM jointly performs 2D segmentation and 3D mapping without human intervention. We build the Mapverse benchmark, sourced from the Ithaca365 and nuPlan datasets, to evaluate our method in unsupervised 2D segmentation, 3D reconstruction, and neural rendering. Extensive results verify the effectiveness and potential of our method for self-driving and robotics.

Adopting omnidirectional Field of View (FoV) cameras in aerial robots vastly improves perception ability, significantly advancing aerial robotics's capabilities in inspection, reconstruction, and rescue tasks. However, such sensors also elevate system complexity, e.g., hardware design, and corresponding algorithm, which limits researchers from utilizing aerial robots with omnidirectional FoV in their research. To bridge this gap, we propose OmniNxt, a fully open-source aerial robotics platform with omnidirectional perception. We design a high-performance flight controller NxtPX4 and a multi-fisheye camera set for OmniNxt. Meanwhile, the compatible software is carefully devised, which empowers OmniNxt to achieve accurate localization and real-time dense mapping with limited computation resource occupancy. We conducted extensive real-world experiments to validate the superior performance of OmniNxt in practical applications. All the hardware and software are open-access at https://github.com/HKUST-Aerial-Robotics/OmniNxt, and we provide docker images of each crucial module in the proposed system. Project page: https://hkust-aerial-robotics.github.io/OmniNxt.

This paper tackles the challenge of autonomous target search using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in complex unknown environments. To fill the gap in systematic approaches for this task, we introduce Star-Searcher, an aerial system featuring specialized sensor suites, mapping, and planning modules to optimize searching. Path planning challenges due to increased inspection requirements are addressed through a hierarchical planner with a visibility-based viewpoint clustering method. This simplifies planning by breaking it into global and local sub-problems, ensuring efficient global and local path coverage in real-time. Furthermore, our global path planning employs a history-aware mechanism to reduce motion inconsistency from frequent map changes, significantly enhancing search efficiency. We conduct comparisons with state-of-the-art methods in both simulation and the real world, demonstrating shorter flight paths, reduced time, and higher target search completeness. Our approach will be open-sourced for community benefit at https://github.com/SYSU-STAR/STAR-Searcher.

Surface prediction and completion have been widely studied in various applications. Recently, research in surface completion has evolved from small objects to complex large-scale scenes. As a result, researchers have begun increasing the volume of data and leveraging a greater variety of data modalities including rendered RGB images, descriptive texts, depth images, etc, to enhance algorithm performance. However, existing datasets suffer from a deficiency in the amounts of scene-level models along with the corresponding multi-modal information. Therefore, a method to scale the datasets and generate multi-modal information in them efficiently is essential. To bridge this research gap, we propose MASSTAR: a Multi-modal lArge-scale Scene dataset with a verSatile Toolchain for surfAce pRediction and completion. We develop a versatile and efficient toolchain for processing the raw 3D data from the environments. It screens out a set of fine-grained scene models and generates the corresponding multi-modal data. Utilizing the toolchain, we then generate an example dataset composed of over a thousand scene-level models with partial real-world data added. We compare MASSTAR with the existing datasets, which validates its superiority: the ability to efficiently extract high-quality models from complex scenarios to expand the dataset. Additionally, several representative surface completion algorithms are benchmarked on MASSTAR, which reveals that existing algorithms can hardly deal with scene-level completion. We will release the source code of our toolchain and the dataset. For more details, please see our project page at https://sysu-star.github.io/MASSTAR.

In this work we focus on learning facial representations that can be adapted to train effective face recognition models, particularly in the absence of labels. Firstly, compared with existing labelled face datasets, a vastly larger magnitude of unlabeled faces exists in the real world. We explore the learning strategy of these unlabeled facial images through self-supervised pretraining to transfer generalized face recognition performance. Moreover, motivated by one recent finding, that is, the face saliency area is critical for face recognition, in contrast to utilizing random cropped blocks of images for constructing augmentations in pretraining, we utilize patches localized by extracted facial landmarks. This enables our method - namely LAndmark-based Facial Self-supervised learning LAFS), to learn key representation that is more critical for face recognition. We also incorporate two landmark-specific augmentations which introduce more diversity of landmark information to further regularize the learning. With learned landmark-based facial representations, we further adapt the representation for face recognition with regularization mitigating variations in landmark positions. Our method achieves significant improvement over the state-of-the-art on multiple face recognition benchmarks, especially on more challenging few-shot scenarios.

A robot's ability to anticipate the 3D action target location of a hand's movement from egocentric videos can greatly improve safety and efficiency in human-robot interaction (HRI). While previous research predominantly focused on semantic action classification or 2D target region prediction, we argue that predicting the action target's 3D coordinate could pave the way for more versatile downstream robotics tasks, especially given the increasing prevalence of headset devices. This study expands EgoPAT3D, the sole dataset dedicated to egocentric 3D action target prediction. We augment both its size and diversity, enhancing its potential for generalization. Moreover, we substantially enhance the baseline algorithm by introducing a large pre-trained model and human prior knowledge. Remarkably, our novel algorithm can now achieve superior prediction outcomes using solely RGB images, eliminating the previous need for 3D point clouds and IMU input. Furthermore, we deploy our enhanced baseline algorithm on a real-world robotic platform to illustrate its practical utility in straightforward HRI tasks. The demonstrations showcase the real-world applicability of our advancements and may inspire more HRI use cases involving egocentric vision. All code and data are open-sourced and can be found on the project website.

Utilizing distributed renewable and energy storage resources in local distribution networks via peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading has long been touted as a solution to improve energy systems' resilience and sustainability. Consumers and prosumers (those who have energy generation resources), however, do not have the expertise to engage in repeated P2P trading, and the zero-marginal costs of renewables present challenges in determining fair market prices. To address these issues, we propose multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) frameworks to help automate consumers' bidding and management of their solar PV and energy storage resources, under a specific P2P clearing mechanism that utilizes the so-called supply-demand ratio. In addition, we show how the MARL frameworks can integrate physical network constraints to realize voltage control, hence ensuring physical feasibility of the P2P energy trading and paving way for real-world implementations.

Collecting traffic data is crucial for transportation systems and urban planning, and is often more desirable through easy-to-deploy but power-constrained devices, due to the unavailability or high cost of power and network infrastructure. The limited power means an inevitable trade-off between data collection duration and accuracy/resolution. We introduce a novel learning-based framework that strategically decides observation timings for battery-powered devices and reconstructs the full data stream from sparsely sampled observations, resulting in minimal performance loss and a significantly prolonged system lifetime. Our framework comprises a predictor, a controller, and an estimator. The predictor utilizes historical data to forecast future trends within a fixed time horizon. The controller uses the forecasts to determine the next optimal timing for data collection. Finally, the estimator reconstructs the complete data profile from the sampled observations. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method on PeMS data by an RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) predictor and estimator, and a DRQN (Deep Recurrent Q-Network) controller, and compare it against the baseline that uses Kalman filter and uniform sampling. The results indicate that our method outperforms the baseline, primarily due to the inclusion of more representative data points in the profile, resulting in an overall 10\% improvement in estimation accuracy. Source code will be publicly available.

The robotics community is increasingly interested in autonomous aerial transportation. Unmanned aerial vehicles with suspended payloads have advantages over other systems, including mechanical simplicity and agility, but pose great challenges in planning and control. To realize fully autonomous aerial transportation, this paper presents a systematic solution to address these difficulties. First, we present a real-time planning method that generates smooth trajectories considering the time-varying shape and non-linear dynamics of the system, ensuring whole-body safety and dynamic feasibility. Additionally, an adaptive NMPC with a hierarchical disturbance compensation strategy is designed to overcome unknown external perturbations and inaccurate model parameters. Extensive experiments show that our method is capable of generating high-quality trajectories online, even in highly constrained environments, and tracking aggressive flight trajectories accurately, even under significant uncertainty. We plan to release our code to benefit the community.