Visual localization becomes extremely challenging in planetary-like terrains characterized by low texture, perceptual aliasing, harsh illumination, and sparse, weakly overlapping viewpoints induced by forward rover motion and unconstrained driving directions. Under these conditions, state-of-the-art image-to-image and image-to-map matching pipelines suffer significant performance degradation.
arXiv:2606. 29237v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robust robot autonomy depends on scene representations that remain stable enough to support localization, navigation, and downstream decision making in dynamic environments.
By Qixin Xiao
arXiv:2607. 08408v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Gaussian splatting is the current state-of-the-art for dense, deformable 3D anatomy reconstruction in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS); however, most pipelines are offline and depend on accurate camera trajectory priors (often from robotic kinematics), limiting applicability when priors are missing or noisy.
By Tianyi Song, Sierra Bonilla, Xinwei Ju, Evangelos Mazomenos, Danail Stoyanov, Adam Schmidt, Omid Mohareri, Sophia Bano, Francisco Vasconcelos
Gaussian splatting is the current state-of-the-art for dense, deformable 3D anatomy reconstruction in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS); however, most pipelines are offline and depend on accurate camera trajectory priors (often from robotic kinematics), limiting applicability when priors are missing or noisy. To address these limitations, we propose Track2Map, an online 3D Gaussian Splatting pipeline that jointly optimizes camera trajectory and 3D deformable scene representation directly from surgical video.
arXiv:2607. 04661v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reconstructing 3D scene structures from sparse, low-overlap observations remains a fundamental challenge in autonomous driving.
By Guoqing Wang, Pin Tang, Xiangxuan Ren, Liping Hou, Chao Ma
We present a novel integrated architecture for robust online 3D Gaussian splatting, real-time VR exploration, and speech-driven Vision-Language-Model interaction. Unlike methods assuming clean depth or external poses, our system combines ORB-SLAM3-based pose estimation with online Gaussian reconstruction for noisy real-world data.
arXiv:2602. 23172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Capturing 4D spatiotemporal scene structure is crucial for the safe and reliable operation of robots in dynamic environments.
By Maximilian Luz, Rohit Mohan, Thomas N\"urnberg, Yakov Miron, Daniele Cattaneo, Abhinav Valada
Geometry is invariant to viewpoint, which makes any collection of images a redundant encoding of a single 3D state. Existing feed-forward reconstruction models fail to exploit this: per-view methods emit overlapping, unaligned pointmaps that grow linearly with input count, while global-latent methods commit to a fixed, low-resolution output.
Scaling 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to large outdoor scenes is costly in both data acquisition and computation. Adopting panoramic images with equirectangular projection (ERP) can reduce capture effort via their full $360^{\circ}$ field of view, yet the resulting omnipresent visibility invalidates existing partitioning strategies that rely on local camera frustums, causing block-wise optimization to degenerate into global training.
Merging multiple 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scenes into a single unified Gaussian representation is essential for large-scale 3D mapping and long-term map management. Despite its importance, this area remains underexplored, and existing solutions exhibit several limitations.
arXiv:2608. 15260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Maintaining global geometric consistency is a central challenge in long-sequence 3D reconstruction, with scale drift being the most critical failure mode.
By Wei Zhang, Yihang Wu, Songhua Li, Qi Wang
arXiv:2608. 15024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current Vision-based SLAM systems fail catastrophically when motion blur corrupts the visual input, as they attempt the ill-posed inverse problem of recovering sharp content from degraded observations.
By Zhiqiang Hu, Shouren Huang, Masatoshi Ishikawa