Maggie Wigness

Sadik Yagiz Yetim, Gaofeng Dong, Isaac-Neil Zanoria et al.

Accurate observation of dynamic environments traditionally relies on synthesizing raw, signal-level information from multiple distributed sensors. This work investigates an alternative approach: performing geospatial inference using only encrypted packet-level information, without access to the raw sensory data. We further explore how this indirect information can be fused with directly available sensory data to extend overall inference capabilities. We introduce GraySense, a learning-based framework that performs geospatial object tracking by analyzing encrypted wireless video transmission traffic, such as packet sizes, from cameras with inaccessible streams. GraySense leverages the inherent relationship between scene dynamics and transmitted packet sizes to infer object motion. The framework consists of two stages: (1) a Packet Grouping module that identifies frame boundaries and estimates frame sizes from encrypted network traffic, and (2) a Tracker module, based on a Transformer encoder with a recurrent state, which fuses indirect packet-based inputs with optional direct camera-based inputs to estimate the object's position. Extensive experiments with realistic videos from the CARLA simulator and emulated networks under varying conditions show that GraySense achieves 2.33 meters tracking error (Euclidean distance) without raw signal access, within the dimensions of tracked objects (4.61m x 1.93m). To our knowledge, this capability has not been previously demonstrated, expanding the use of latent signals for sensing.

Peng Jiang, Philip Osteen, Maggie Wigness et al.

Semantic scene understanding is crucial for robust and safe autonomous navigation, particularly so in off-road environments. Recent deep learning advances for 3D semantic segmentation rely heavily on large sets of training data, however existing autonomy datasets either represent urban environments or lack multimodal off-road data. We fill this gap with RELLIS-3D, a multimodal dataset collected in an off-road environment, which contains annotations for 13,556 LiDAR scans and 6,235 images. The data was collected on the Rellis Campus of Texas A\&M University and presents challenges to existing algorithms related to class imbalance and environmental topography. Additionally, we evaluate the current state-of-the-art deep learning semantic segmentation models on this dataset. Experimental results show that RELLIS-3D presents challenges for algorithms designed for segmentation in urban environments. This novel dataset provides the resources needed by researchers to continue to develop more advanced algorithms and investigate new research directions to enhance autonomous navigation in off-road environments. RELLIS-3D is available at https://github.com/unmannedlab/RELLIS-3D

Jason Wu, Shir-Kang Scott Jinn, Yuyang Yuan et al.

Multimodal deep neural networks deployed in realistic environments must contend with runtime variations: changes in modality quality, overall input complexity, and available platform resources. Current networks struggle with such fluctuations -- adaptive networks cannot adhere to a strict compute budget, controller-based networks neglect to consider input complexity, and statically provisioned networks fail at all the above. Consequently, they do not extract maximum utility from the expended computational resources. We present SWAN (Sample and World-Aware Multimodal Network), the first adaptive multimodal network that accomplishes all three goals. SWAN employs a quality-aware controller to assign resources among modalities according to a variable user-specified maximum budget. Within this budget, an adaptive gating module further optimizes efficiency by scaling layer utilization according to sample complexity. For further gains, SWAN also employs a token dropping module that masks semantically irrelevant multimodal features before performing detections. We evaluate SWAN in the domain of autonomous driving with complex multi-object 3D detection, reducing FLOPs by up to 49% with minimal degradation.

Shaunak Kolhe, Peng Jiang, Maggie Wigness et al.

Radar offers unique advantages for localization in unstructured environments, including robustness to weather, lighting, and airborne particulates. While most prior work has studied radar odometry in urban, largely planar settings, its performance in off-road environments remains less understood. In this paper, we investigate the potential of radar for off-road odometry estimation and identify key challenges that arise from full $SE(3)$ vehicle motion, terrain-induced ground returns, and sparse or unstable features. To address these issues, we introduce two simple baselines: Radar-KISSICP, which applies motion compensation to generate 3D-aware radar pointclouds, and Radar-IMU, which leverages IMU preintegration to stabilize scan matching. Experiments on the Great Outdoors (GO) dataset demonstrate that these baselines improve trajectory estimation in challenging routes and provide a reference point for future development of radar odometry in off-road robotics.

Tomoyoshi Kimura, Jinyang Li, Tianshi Wang et al.

This paper demonstrates the potential of vibration-based Foundation Models (FMs), pre-trained with unlabeled sensing data, to improve the robustness of run-time inference in (a class of) IoT applications. A case study is presented featuring a vehicle classification application using acoustic and seismic sensing. The work is motivated by the success of foundation models in the areas of natural language processing and computer vision, leading to generalizations of the FM concept to other domains as well, where significant amounts of unlabeled data exist that can be used for self-supervised pre-training. One such domain is IoT applications. Foundation models for selected sensing modalities in the IoT domain can be pre-trained in an environment-agnostic fashion using available unlabeled sensor data and then fine-tuned to the deployment at hand using a small amount of labeled data. The paper shows that the pre-training/fine-tuning approach improves the robustness of downstream inference and facilitates adaptation to different environmental conditions. More specifically, we present a case study in a real-world setting to evaluate a simple (vibration-based) FM-like model, called FOCAL, demonstrating its superior robustness and adaptation, compared to conventional supervised deep neural networks (DNNs). We also demonstrate its superior convergence over supervised solutions. Our findings highlight the advantages of vibration-based FMs (and FM-inspired selfsupervised models in general) in terms of inference robustness, runtime efficiency, and model adaptation (via fine-tuning) in resource-limited IoT settings.

Christian Ellis, Maggie Wigness, Craig Lennon et al.

Rapid progress in terrain-aware autonomous ground navigation has been driven by advances in supervised semantic segmentation. However, these methods rely on costly data collection and labor-intensive ground truth labeling to train deep models. Furthermore, autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in unrehearsed, unstructured environments where no labeled data exists and semantic categories may be ambiguous or domain-specific. Recent zero-shot approaches to unsupervised segmentation have shown promise in such settings but typically operate on individual frames, lacking temporal consistency-a critical property for robust perception in unstructured environments. To address this gap we introduce Frontier-Seg, a method for temporally consistent unsupervised segmentation of terrain from mobile robot video streams. Frontier-Seg clusters superpixel-level features extracted from foundation model backbones-specifically DINOv2-and enforces temporal consistency across frames to identify persistent terrain boundaries or frontiers without human supervision. We evaluate Frontier-Seg on a diverse set of benchmark datasets-including RUGD and RELLIS-3D-demonstrating its ability to perform unsupervised segmentation across unstructured off-road environments.

Sriram Siva, Maggie Wigness, John G. Rogers et al.

Ground robots require the crucial capability of traversing unstructured and unprepared terrains and avoiding obstacles to complete tasks in real-world robotics applications such as disaster response. When a robot operates in off-road field environments such as forests, the robot's actual behaviors often do not match its expected or planned behaviors, due to changes in the characteristics of terrains and the robot itself. Therefore, the capability of robot adaptation for consistent behavior generation is essential for maneuverability on unstructured off-road terrains. In order to address the challenge, we propose a novel method of self-reflective terrain-aware adaptation for ground robots to generate consistent controls to navigate over unstructured off-road terrains, which enables robots to more accurately execute the expected behaviors through robot self-reflection while adapting to varying unstructured terrains. To evaluate our method's performance, we conduct extensive experiments using real ground robots with various functionality changes over diverse unstructured off-road terrains. The comprehensive experimental results have shown that our self-reflective terrain-aware adaptation method enables ground robots to generate consistent navigational behaviors and outperforms the compared previous and baseline techniques.

Christian Ellis, Maggie Wigness, John G. Rogers et al.

Traditional imitation learning provides a set of methods and algorithms to learn a reward function or policy from expert demonstrations. Learning from demonstration has been shown to be advantageous for navigation tasks as it allows for machine learning non-experts to quickly provide information needed to learn complex traversal behaviors. However, a minimal set of demonstrations is unlikely to capture all relevant information needed to achieve the desired behavior in every possible future operational environment. Due to distributional shift among environments, a robot may encounter features that were rarely or never observed during training for which the appropriate reward value is uncertain, leading to undesired outcomes. This paper proposes a Bayesian technique which quantifies uncertainty over the weights of a linear reward function given a dataset of minimal human demonstrations to operate safely in dynamic environments. This uncertainty is quantified and incorporated into a risk averse set of weights used to generate cost maps for planning. Experiments in a 3-D environment with a simulated robot show that our proposed algorithm enables a robot to avoid dangerous terrain completely in two out of three test scenarios and accumulates a lower amount of risk than related approaches in all scenarios without requiring any additional demonstrations.

Sriram Siva, Maggie Wigness, John G. Rogers et al.

Terrain adaptation is an essential capability for a ground robot to effectively traverse unstructured off-road terrain in real-world field environments such as forests. However, the expected robot behaviors generated by terrain adaptation methods cannot always be executed accurately due to setbacks such as wheel slip and reduced tire pressure. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach for consistent behavior generation that enables the ground robot's actual behaviors to more accurately match expected behaviors while adapting to a variety of unstructured off-road terrain. Our approach learns offset behaviors that are used to compensate for the inconsistency between the actual and expected behaviors without requiring the explicit modeling of various setbacks. Our approach is also able to estimate the importance of the multi-modal features to improve terrain representations for better adaptation. In addition, we develop an algorithmic solver for our formulated regularized optimization problem, which is guaranteed to converge to the global optimal solution. To evaluate the method, we perform extensive experiments using various unstructured off-road terrain in real-world field environments. Experimental results have validated that our approach enables robots to traverse complex unstructured off-road terrain with more navigational behavior consistency, and it outperforms previous methods, particularly so on challenging terrain.