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 outdoor environment


Realms for Integrated Agent Intelligence

Neural Information Processing Systems

AI agents today are mostly siloed -- they either retrieve and reason over vast amount of digital information and knowledge obtained online; or interact with the physical world through embodied perception, planning and action -- but rarely both. This separation limits their ability to solve tasks that require integrated physical and digital intelligence, such as cooking from online recipes, navigating with dynamic map data, or interpreting real-world landmarks using web knowledge. We introduce EMBODIEDWEBAGENTS, a novel paradigm for AI agents that fluidly bridge embodiment and web-scale reasoning.



Splatblox: Traversability-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Outdoor Robot Navigation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present Splatblox, a real-time system for autonomous navigation in outdoor environments with dense vegetation, irregular obstacles, and complex terrain. Our method fuses segmented RGB images and LiDAR point clouds using Gaussian Splatting to construct a traversability-aware Euclidean Signed Distance Field (ESDF) that jointly encodes geometry and semantics. Updated online, this field enables semantic reasoning to distinguish traversable vegetation (e.g., tall grass) from rigid obstacles (e.g., trees), while LiDAR ensures 360-degree geometric coverage for extended planning horizons. We validate Splatblox on a quadruped robot and demonstrate transfer to a wheeled platform. In field trials across vegetation-rich scenarios, it outperforms state-of-the-art methods with over 50% higher success rate, 40% fewer freezing incidents, 5% shorter paths, and up to 13% faster time to goal, while supporting long-range missions up to 100 meters. Experiment videos and more details can be found on our project page: https://splatblox.github.io


DR. Nav: Semantic-Geometric Representations for Proactive Dead-End Recovery and Navigation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present DR. Nav (Dead-End Recovery-aware Navigation), a novel approach to autonomous navigation in scenarios where dead-end detection and recovery are critical, particularly in unstructured environments where robots must handle corners, vegetation occlusions, and blocked junctions. DR. Nav introduces a proactive strategy for navigation in unmapped environments without prior assumptions. Our method unifies dead-end prediction and recovery by generating a single, continuous, real-time semantic cost map. Specifically, DR. Nav leverages cross-modal RGB-LiDAR fusion with attention-based filtering to estimate per-cell dead-end likelihoods and recovery points, which are continuously updated through Bayesian inference to enhance robustness. Unlike prior mapping methods that only encode traversability, DR. Nav explicitly incorporates recovery-aware risk into the navigation cost map, enabling robots to anticipate unsafe regions and plan safer alternative trajectories. We evaluate DR. Nav across multiple dense indoor and outdoor scenarios and demonstrate an increase of 83.33% in accuracy in detection, a 52.4% reduction in time-to-goal (path efficiency), compared to state-of-the-art planners such as DWA, MPPI, and Nav2 DWB. Furthermore, the dead-end classifier functions


LVD-GS: Gaussian Splatting SLAM for Dynamic Scenes via Hierarchical Explicit-Implicit Representation Collaboration Rendering

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM has emerged as a widely used technique for high-fidelity mapping in spatial intelligence. However, existing methods often rely on a single representation scheme, which limits their performance in large-scale dynamic outdoor scenes and leads to cumulative pose errors and scale ambiguity. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{LVD-GS}, a novel LiDAR-Visual 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM system. Motivated by the human chain-of-thought process for information seeking, we introduce a hierarchical collaborative representation module that facilitates mutual reinforcement for mapping optimization, effectively mitigating scale drift and enhancing reconstruction robustness. Furthermore, to effectively eliminate the influence of dynamic objects, we propose a joint dynamic modeling module that generates fine-grained dynamic masks by fusing open-world segmentation with implicit residual constraints, guided by uncertainty estimates from DINO-Depth features. Extensive evaluations on KITTI, nuScenes, and self-collected datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods.


ZeST: an LLM-based Zero-Shot Traversability Navigation for Unknown Environments

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--The advancement of robotics and autonomous navigation systems hinges on the ability to accurately predict terrain traversability. Traditional methods for generating datasets to train these prediction models often involve putting robots into potentially hazardous environments, posing risks to equipment and safety. T o solve this problem, we present ZeST, a novel approach leveraging visual reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to create a traversability map in real-time without exposing robots to danger . Our approach not only performs zero-shot traversability and mitigates the risks associated with real-world data collection but also accelerates the development of advanced navigation systems, offering a cost-effective and scalable solution. T o support our findings, we present navigation results, in both controlled indoor and unstructured outdoor environments. As shown in the experiments, our method provides safer navigation when compared to other state-of-the-art methods, constantly reaching the final goal. The development of autonomous navigation systems is a cornerstone of robotics, with terrain traversability prediction being a critical component [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. Traversability prediction refers to the ability of a robot to assess whether a given terrain is passable or poses risks to its operation.



Indoor/Outdoor Spectrum Sharing Enabled by GNSS-based Classifiers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The desirability of the mid-band frequency range (1 - 10 GHz) for federal and commercial applications, combined with the growing applications for commercial indoor use-cases, such as factory automation, opens up a new approach to spectrum sharing: the same frequency bands used outdoors by federal incumbents can be reused by commercial indoor users. A recent example of such sharing, between commercial systems, is the 6 GHz band (5.925 - 7.125 GHz) where unlicensed, low-power-indoor (LPI) users share the band with outdoor incumbents, primarily fixed microwave links. However, to date, there exist no reliable, automatic means of determining whether a device is indoors or outdoors, necessitating the use of other mechanisms such as mandating indoor access points (APs) to have integrated antennas and not be battery powered, and reducing transmit power of client devices which may be outdoors. An accurate indoor/outdoor (I/O) classification addresses these challenges, enabling automatic transmit power adjustments without interfering with incumbents. To this end, we leverage the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals for I/O classification. GNSS signals, designed inherently for outdoor reception and highly susceptible to indoor attenuation and blocking, provide a robust and distinguishing feature for environmental sensing. We develop various methodologies, including threshold-based techniques and machine learning approaches and evaluate them using an expanded dataset gathered from diverse geographical locations. Our results demonstrate that GNSS-based methods alone can achieve greater accuracy than approaches relying solely on wireless (Wi-Fi) data, particularly in unfamiliar locations. Furthermore, the integration of GNSS data with Wi-Fi information leads to improved classification accuracy, showcasing the significant benefits of multi-modal data fusion.


Terra: Hierarchical Terrain-Aware 3D Scene Graph for Task-Agnostic Outdoor Mapping

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Outdoor intelligent autonomous robotic operation relies on a sufficiently expressive map of the environment. Classical geometric mapping methods retain essential structural environment information, but lack a semantic understanding and organization to allow high-level robotic reasoning. 3D scene graphs (3DSGs) address this limitation by integrating geometric, topological, and semantic relationships into a multi-level graph-based map. Outdoor autonomous operations commonly rely on terrain information either due to task-dependence or the traversability of the robotic platform. We propose a novel approach that combines indoor 3DSG techniques with standard outdoor geometric mapping and terrain-aware reasoning, producing terrain-aware place nodes and hierarchically organized regions for outdoor environments. Our method generates a task-agnostic metric-semantic sparse map and constructs a 3DSG from this map for downstream planning tasks, all while remaining lightweight for autonomous robotic operation. Our thorough evaluation demonstrates our 3DSG method performs on par with state-of-the-art camera-based 3DSG methods in object retrieval and surpasses them in region classification while remaining memory efficient. We demonstrate its effectiveness in diverse robotic tasks of object retrieval and region monitoring in both simulation and real-world environments.


Event-Based Visual Teach-and-Repeat via Fast Fourier-Domain Cross-Correlation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Visual teach-and-repeat navigation enables robots to autonomously traverse previously demonstrated paths by comparing current sensory input with recorded trajectories. However, conventional frame-based cameras fundamentally limit system responsiveness: their fixed frame rates (typically 30-60 Hz) create inherent latency between environmental changes and control responses. Here we present the first event-camera-based visual teach-and-repeat system. To achieve this, we develop a frequency-domain cross-correlation framework that transforms the event stream matching problem into computationally efficient Fourier space multiplications, capable of exceeding 300Hz processing rates, an order of magnitude faster than frame-based approaches. By exploiting the binary nature of event frames and applying image compression techniques, we further enhance the computational speed of the cross-correlation process without sacrificing localization accuracy. Extensive experiments using a Prophesee EVK4 HD event camera mounted on an AgileX Scout Mini robot demonstrate successful autonomous navigation across 4000+ meters of indoor and outdoor trajectories. Our system achieves ATEs below 24 cm while maintaining consistent high-frequency control updates. Our evaluations show that our approach achieves substantially higher update rates compared to conventional frame-based systems, underscoring the practical viability of event-based perception for real-time robotic navigation.