Francis E. H. Tay

Dongen Li, Yi Liu, Junqi Liu et al.

Achieving real-time Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) based on 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) in large-scale real-world environments remains challenging, as existing methods still struggle to jointly achieve low-latency pose estimation, continuous 3D Gaussian reconstruction, and long-term global consistency. In this paper, we present a tightly coupled LiDAR-Inertial-Visual 3DGS-based SLAM framework for real-time pose estimation and photorealistic mapping in large-scale real-world scenes. The system executes state estimation and 3D Gaussian primitive initialization in parallel with global Gaussian optimization, enabling continuous dense mapping. To improve Gaussian initialization quality and accelerate optimization convergence, we introduce a cascaded strategy that combines feed-forward predictions with geometric priors derived from voxel-based principal component analysis. To enhance global consistency, we perform loop closure directly on the optimized global Gaussian map by estimating loop constraints through Gaussian-based Generalized Iterative Closest Point registration, followed by pose-graph optimization. We also collect challenging large-scale looped outdoor sequences with hardware-synchronized LiDAR-camera-IMU and ground-truth trajectories for realistic evaluation. Extensive experiments on both public datasets and our dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a state of the art among real-time efficiency, localization accuracy, and rendering quality across diverse real-world scenes.

Ruiteng Zhao, Wenshuo Wang, Yicheng Ma et al.

Force sensing is a crucial modality for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) frameworks, as it enables fine-grained perception and dexterous manipulation in contact-rich tasks. We present Force-Distilled VLA (FD-VLA), a novel framework that integrates force awareness into contact-rich manipulation without relying on physical force sensors. The core of our approach is a Force Distillation Module (FDM), which distills force by mapping a learnable query token, conditioned on visual observations and robot states, into a predicted force token aligned with the latent representation of actual force signals. During inference, this distilled force token is injected into the pretrained VLM, enabling force-aware reasoning while preserving the integrity of its vision-language semantics. This design provides two key benefits: first, it allows practical deployment across a wide range of robots that lack expensive or fragile force-torque sensors, thereby reducing hardware cost and complexity; second, the FDM introduces an additional force-vision-state fusion prior to the VLM, which improves cross-modal alignment and enhances perception-action robustness in contact-rich scenarios. Surprisingly, our physical experiments show that the distilled force token outperforms direct sensor force measurements as well as other baselines, which highlights the effectiveness of this force-distilled VLA approach.