Recent research has achieved remarkable novel view rendering and scene reconstruction results with Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), including extensions to the LiDAR modality. Few studies have, however, explored the key design differences between RGB NeRFs and LiDAR NeRFs, particularly considering their underlying working principles. In this work, we provide both theoretical and empirical evidence suggesting that the density of volume sampling plays a significant role in LiDAR NeRF. Based on this finding, we propose a novel Neural LiDAR Bundle Adjustment (NeLD-BA) algorithm, which is tailored using efficient volume sampling of LiDAR rays for joint optimization of LiDAR map and poses. Extensive experiments are performed using the Newer College and FusionPortable datasets to demonstrate the proposed NeLD-BA's state-of-the-art performance in multi-view point cloud registration and 3D mapping. We will open-source our code for the community.
Dynamic obstacle avoidance in unstructured outdoor environments remains a critical challenge for autonomous mobile robots, particularly when large-scale robot-specific training data and simulation-based policies are impractical. We present a data-efficient, interpretable method f…
Dynamic environments remain a fundamental challenge for visual SLAM, where unreliable observations from moving objects and rapid motion degrade state estimation accuracy. Although event cameras preserve fine-grained spatio-temporal information, most existing event-based SLAM fram…
Making tradeoffs between execution latency and result utility (i.e., anytime computing) for adapting to dynamic operational requirements has been shown to enhance the performance of cyber-physical systems. In this work, we focus on enabling anytime computing for deep neural netwo…
Loop closure is essential to reduce drift and build globally consistent maps in large-scale environments. However, reliable loop closure with only geometric information from, e.g., a LiDAR sensor, remains challenging due to the difficulty of constructing discriminative geometric…
Robust dynamic object detection and tracking are essential for enabling robots to operate safely and effectively alongside humans in complex environments such as construction sites. While LiDAR-based SLAM and occupancy grid methods offer viable solutions for detecting and trackin…
Thermal imaging is resilient to adverse conditions, such as intense illumination, low-light operation, and fog, and can therefore mitigate odometry degradation when visible-spectrum imagery becomes unreliable. Nevertheless, most thermal cameras employ automatic gain control (AGC)…