Haojia Gao

Haohua Que, Mingkai Liu, Jiayue Xie et al.

High-resolution sensors are critical for robust autonomous perception but impose a severe memory wall on battery-constrained electric vehicles. In these systems, data movement energy often outweighs computation. Traditional image compression is ill-suited as it is semantically blind and optimizes for storage rather than bus switching activity. We propose MotiMem, a hardware-software co-designed interface. Exploiting temporal coherence,MotiMem uses lightweight 2D Motion Propagation to dynamically identify Regions of Interest (RoI). Complementing this, a Hybrid Sparsity-Aware Coding scheme leverages adaptive inversion and truncation to induce bitlevel sparsity. Extensive experiments across nuScenes, Waymo, and KITTI with 16 detection models demonstrate that MotiMem reduces memory-interface dynamic energy by approximately 43 percent while retaining approximately 93 percent of the object detection accuracy, establishing a new Pareto frontier significantly superior to standard codecs like JPEG and WebP.

Haohua Que, Haojia Gao, Mingkai Liu et al.

Massive robot swarms can explore unknown environments quickly, but adding robots eventually stops helping. Doorways and dense traffic create congestion, increasing inter-robot contacts and reducing the value of each additional robot. We study this safety-efficiency tradeoff for ground swarms of tens to hundreds of robots. We present SPACE, Swarm Pheromone Fields for Adaptive Collision-Aware Exploration. Inspired by ant foraging, SPACE maintains a shared environmental field with an attractive frontier pheromone, a repellent explore pheromone, and a fast robot-density field. Coordination is decentralized and mediated through this field. We evaluate SPACE on real building floorplans, namely sixteen home layouts from the HouseExpo dataset and eight campus floors from the KTH dataset, with swarms of up to two hundred and fifty-six robots. SPACE lies on the empirical Pareto frontier. It attains the lowest inter-robot contact rate at every congested swarm size, four to seventeen times fewer than a greedy nearest-frontier planner, while keeping coverage time within about two percent of that near time-optimal planner. The results indicate that, at this scale, coordination mainly improves safety rather than coverage time.

Mingkai Liu, Haohua Que, Dikai Fan et al.

Per-scene 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity rendering, but practical robotic and AR scene capture pipelines often depend on external geometric initialization (e.g., SfM point clouds or depth estimates), which can be slow and brittle in on-site deployment. We present ACEsplat, a fast per-scene optimization framework that reconstructs 3D Gaussian representations from RGB images and camera poses only, without requiring external 3D priors (e.g., precomputed SfM models or supervised depth maps). ACEsplat uses a two-stage pipeline: (1) a self-supervised scene coordinate regression (SCR) module builds an internal geometry prior within 4--5 minutes; (2) SCR features and coordinate priors are fused by a lightweight Gaussian initialization head, followed by per-scene 3DGS optimization. On static-view rendering, ACEsplat achieves 29.11 dB PSNR on Wayspots with real-time SLAM poses and 33.20 dB on Cambridge Landmarks with SfM-refined poses. On RealEstate10K sparse-view novel view synthesis, it achieves competitive image fidelity under a challenging 2-view setting. ACEsplat completes scene-specific SCR mapping and 3DGS reconstruction within 15--25 minutes on a single GPU, making it a practical RGB+pose-only solution for rapid scene setup in robotics and mixed-reality applications.

Haojia Gao, Haohua Que, Kunrong Li et al.

Autonomous exploration in unknown environments is a critical challenge in robotics, particularly for applications such as indoor navigation, search and rescue, and service robotics. Traditional exploration strategies, such as frontier-based methods, often struggle to efficiently utilize prior knowledge of structural regularities in indoor spaces. To address this limitation, we propose Mapping at First Sense, a lightweight neural network-based approach that predicts unobserved areas in local maps, thereby enhancing exploration efficiency. The core of our method, SenseMapNet, integrates convolutional and transformerbased architectures to infer occluded regions while maintaining computational efficiency for real-time deployment on resourceconstrained robots. Additionally, we introduce SenseMapDataset, a curated dataset constructed from KTH and HouseExpo environments, which facilitates training and evaluation of neural models for indoor exploration. Experimental results demonstrate that SenseMapNet achieves an SSIM (structural similarity) of 0.78, LPIPS (perceptual quality) of 0.68, and an FID (feature distribution alignment) of 239.79, outperforming conventional methods in map reconstruction quality. Compared to traditional frontier-based exploration, our method reduces exploration time by 46.5% (from 2335.56s to 1248.68s) while maintaining a high coverage rate (88%) and achieving a reconstruction accuracy of 88%. The proposed method represents a promising step toward efficient, learning-driven robotic exploration in structured environments.