We introduce Go-SLAM, a novel framework that utilizes 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM to reconstruct dynamic environments while embedding object-level information within the scene representations. This framework employs advanced object segmentation techniques, assigning a unique identifier to each Gaussian splat that corresponds to the object it represents. Consequently, our system facilitates open-vocabulary querying, allowing users to locate objects using natural language descriptions. Furthermore, the framework features an optimal path generation module that calculates efficient navigation paths for robots toward queried objects, considering obstacles and environmental uncertainties. Comprehensive evaluations in various scene settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in delivering high-fidelity scene reconstructions, precise object segmentation, flexible object querying, and efficient robot path planning. This work represents an additional step forward in bridging the gap between 3D scene reconstruction, semantic object understanding, and real-time environment interactions.

Resource-constrained robots often suffer from energy inefficiencies, underutilized computational abilities due to inadequate task allocation, and a lack of robustness in dynamic environments, all of which strongly affect their performance. This paper introduces DREAM - Decentralized Reinforcement Learning for Exploration and Efficient Energy Management in Multi-Robot Systems, a comprehensive framework that optimizes the allocation of resources for efficient exploration. It advances beyond conventional heuristic-based task planning as observed conventionally. The framework incorporates Operational Range Estimation using Reinforcement Learning to perform exploration and obstacle avoidance in unfamiliar terrains. DREAM further introduces an Energy Consumption Model for goal allocation, thereby ensuring mission completion under constrained resources using a Graph Neural Network. This approach also ensures that the entire Multi-Robot System can survive for an extended period of time for further missions compared to the conventional approach of randomly allocating goals, which compromises one or more agents. Our approach adapts to prioritizing agents in real-time, showcasing remarkable resilience against dynamic environments. This robust solution was evaluated in various simulated environments, demonstrating adaptability and applicability across diverse scenarios. We observed a substantial improvement of about 25% over the baseline method, leading the way for future research in resource-constrained robotics.

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) in crowded environments presents a challenging problem in motion planning, aiming to find collision-free paths for all agents in the system. MAPF finds a wide range of applications in various domains, including aerial swarms, autonomous warehouse robotics, and self-driving vehicles. The current approaches for MAPF can be broadly categorized into two main categories: centralized and decentralized planning. Centralized planning suffers from the curse of dimensionality and thus does not scale well in large and complex environments. On the other hand, decentralized planning enables agents to engage in real-time path planning within a partially observable environment, demonstrating implicit coordination. However, they suffer from slow convergence and performance degradation in dense environments. In this paper, we introduce CRAMP, a crowd-aware decentralized approach to address this problem by leveraging reinforcement learning guided by a boosted curriculum-based training strategy. We test CRAMP on simulated environments and demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art decentralized methods for MAPF on various metrics. CRAMP improves the solution quality up to 58% measured in makespan and collision count, and up to 5% in success rate in comparison to previous methods.

We present a novel optimization algorithm called DroNeRF for the autonomous positioning of monocular camera drones around an object for real-time 3D reconstruction using only a few images. Neural Radiance Fields or NeRF, is a novel view synthesis technique used to generate new views of an object or scene from a set of input images. Using drones in conjunction with NeRF provides a unique and dynamic way to generate novel views of a scene, especially with limited scene capabilities of restricted movements. Our approach focuses on calculating optimized pose for individual drones while solely depending on the object geometry without using any external localization system. The unique camera positioning during the data-capturing phase significantly impacts the quality of the 3D model. To evaluate the quality of our generated novel views, we compute different perceptual metrics like the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index Measure(SSIM). Our work demonstrates the benefit of using an optimal placement of various drones with limited mobility to generate perceptually better results.

A key aspect of driving a road vehicle is to interact with other road users, assess their intentions and make risk-aware tactical decisions. An intuitive approach to enabling an intelligent automated driving system would be incorporating some aspects of human driving behavior. To this end, we propose a novel driving framework for egocentric views based on spatio-temporal traffic graphs. The traffic graphs model not only the spatial interactions amongst the road users but also their individual intentions through temporally associated message passing. We leverage a spatio-temporal graph convolutional network (ST-GCN) to train the graph edges. These edges are formulated using parameterized functions of 3D positions and scene-aware appearance features of road agents. Along with tactical behavior prediction, it is crucial to evaluate the risk-assessing ability of the proposed framework. We claim that our framework learns risk-aware representations by improving on the task of risk object identification, especially in identifying objects with vulnerable interactions like pedestrians and cyclists.

Amodal recognition is the ability of the system to detect occluded objects. Most SOTA Visual Recognition systems lack the ability to perform amodal recognition. Few studies have achieved amodal recognition through passive prediction or embodied recognition approaches. However, these approaches suffer from challenges in real-world applications, such as dynamic obstacles. We propose SeekNet, an improved optimization method for amodal recognition through embodied visual recognition. Additionally, we implement SeekNet for social robots, where there are multiple interactions with crowded pedestrians. We also demonstrate the benefits of our algorithm on occluded human detection and tracking over other baselines. Additionally, we set up a multi-robot environment with SeekNet to identify and track visual disease markers for airborne disease in crowded areas. We conduct our experiments in a simulated indoor environment and show that our method enhances the overall accuracy of the amodal recognition task and achieves the largest improvement in detection accuracy over time in comparison to the baseline approaches.