{"title":"Cluster-ALIV: Aerial LiDAR-Inertia-Visual Dense Reconstruction for Cluster UAV","authors":"Xiaohan Li;Jie Zhang;Shuhui Bu;Lin Chen;Kun Li;Zhenyu Xia;Yizhu Zhang;Xuan Jia","doi":"10.1109/LRA.2025.3559839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2025.3559839","url":null,"abstract":"Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with LiDAR, camera, and Inertial Measurement Unit sensors are increasingly utilized for real-time dense reconstruction in large-scale rescue operations and environmental monitoring, among others. However, achieving algorithmic robustness remains challenging due to the UAVs' high-speed flight and rapid pose changes. Additionally, energy constraints on individual UAVs can be mitigated through multi-UAV collaboration, improving operational efficiency. Nevertheless, when faced with unknown environments or the loss of Global Navigation Satellite System signal, most multi-UAV dense reconstruction systems can't work, making it hard to construct a global consistent map. In this letter, we propose Cluster-ALIV, a real-time dense reconstruction system for multiple UAVs that effectively supports aerial, large-scale scenarios with lost global positioning and weak co-visibility of LiDAR or vision. The system integrates LiDAR-Inertial-Visual odometry through multi-sensor fusion to generate accurate, gravity-aligned, colorized LiDAR point clouds and visual information with scale. Overall, in the Cluster-ALIV, each UAV executes a LiDAR-Inertial-Visual odometry, transmitting point cloud and visual data to a ground server, where multi-UAV joint optimization is performed through LiDAR post-processing, visual post-processing, and normal distributions transform refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our system can efficiently construct large-scale dense map in real time with high accuracy and robustness.","PeriodicalId":13241,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters","volume":"10 6","pages":"5329-5336"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143856380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Robust Parallel Cooperative Control of Cable-Driven Robot System via Adaptive Integral Sliding Mode","authors":"Xiaolei Li;Qixin Kui;Weiran Yao;Ligang Wu","doi":"10.1109/LRA.2025.3559837","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2025.3559837","url":null,"abstract":"This paper develops an adaptive integral sliding mode control scheme to manipulate the cable-driven robots, realizing robust parallel cooperation performance for the variable loads. The considered cable-driven robot system (CDRS) employs multiple flexible cables to cooperatively regulate the robotics platform, which results in the control issues of parallel and distributed manipulations. In this regard, a parallel cooperation strategy is proposed to regulate the parallel cooperation performance of CDRS adaptively. It presents a cross-coupled cooperation principle based on a ring topology, effectively reducing the computational redundancy caused by global cooperative errors in parallel and distributed manipulations. Based on this, an adaptive integral sliding mode cooperative controller is developed to regulate multiple flexible cables in a cooperative manner, which can achieve a smoother control process by reducing the chattering issues of flexible cables. Finally, the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed scheme are verified by multiple groups of robotics experiments with variable loads.","PeriodicalId":13241,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters","volume":"10 6","pages":"5433-5440"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143860762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Long Zhuang;Yiqing Yao;Nuo Li;Zijian Wang;Lingtong Zhong;Zijing Zhang;Tao Zhang
{"title":"4DRC-OC: Online Calibration of 4D Millimeter Wave Radar-Camera With Depth Map Assistance","authors":"Long Zhuang;Yiqing Yao;Nuo Li;Zijian Wang;Lingtong Zhong;Zijing Zhang;Tao Zhang","doi":"10.1109/LRA.2025.3558453","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2025.3558453","url":null,"abstract":"The online calibration of 4D millimeter-wave radar and camera is crucial for advancing perception and SLAM technologies in complex environments. It eliminates the reliance on manual labeling, offering real-time and convenience. However, the sparse nature of 4D radar point clouds presents challenges in establishing correspondences with camera images. This letter proposes an online 4D radar-camera online calibration method (4DRC-OC) that utilizes unified depth map representations for auxiliary training, ensuring feature alignment and modal unification between the two sensors. Due to the limited useful information within sparse depth maps, 4DRC-OC uses dynamic convolution to adaptively capture detailed features. Furthermore, this letter designs a correlation module based on channel-wise fusion (CMCF) that computes correlations between error depth maps and RGB-derived depth maps, thereby enhancing features to facilitate extrinsic parameter regression. Experimental results on the Dual-Radar dataset validate the superiority of the proposed approach in extrinsic calibration.","PeriodicalId":13241,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters","volume":"10 6","pages":"5273-5280"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143848901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pingyi Tian;Kai Li;Xuanqi Wu;Sanqiang Yu;Yu Hu;Qin Shi
{"title":"Indoor Geomagnetic Matching Location Based on Iterative Local Search and Improved Particle Swarm Fusion","authors":"Pingyi Tian;Kai Li;Xuanqi Wu;Sanqiang Yu;Yu Hu;Qin Shi","doi":"10.1109/LRA.2025.3558705","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2025.3558705","url":null,"abstract":"In the complex indoor environment, geomagnetic matching is an effective way to realize indoor positioning of mobile robots. Aiming at the problem that the application of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm leads to the decline of geomagnetic matching accuracy, stability and convergence speed, an Iterated Local Search-Improved Particle Swarm Optimization (ILS-IPSO) algorithm is proposed. By analyzing the time-frequency characteristics and data distribution characteristics of geomagnetic survey data, geomagnetic data preprocessing and geomagnetic reference map construction are carried out. By introducing 3<inline-formula><tex-math>${bm{sigma }}$</tex-math></inline-formula> contour Search domain constraint in the particle swarm optimization process, the weight factor, learning factors, step control factor of PSO algorithm are optimized, and finally the Local disturbance and search are implemented in combination with Iterated Local Search (ILS) algorithm. The experimental results show that the average matching accuracy error of ILS-IPSO is reduced to 0.0508 m, and the standard deviation of matching error is reduced to 0.0198m. Compared with PSO, Linear Dynamic time-varying Inertial Weight Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (LDIW-PSO) and Cosine Decreasing Inertia Weight Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (CDIW-PSO) algorithms, the average matching accuracy is increased by 94.72%, 92.37% and 87.98%, the standard deviation of matching error decreased by 87.13%, 83.26% and 89.81% respectively. The optimal fitness of ILS-IPSO algorithm is increased by 79.51%, 61.81% and 57.06%, and the iteration efficiency is increased by 69.23%, 55.56% and 33.33%, respectively. This method performs well in the accuracy, stability and convergence of geomagnetic positioning, and can be widely used in the field of indoor positioning.","PeriodicalId":13241,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters","volume":"10 6","pages":"5337-5344"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143856203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"BESTAnP: Bi-Step Efficient and Statistically Optimal Estimator for Acoustic-n-Point Problem","authors":"Wenliang Sheng;Hongxu Zhao;Lingpeng Chen;Guangyang Zeng;Yunling Shao;Yuze Hong;Chao Yang;Ziyang Hong;Junfeng Wu","doi":"10.1109/LRA.2025.3558451","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2025.3558451","url":null,"abstract":"We consider the acoustic-n-point (AnP) problem, which estimates the pose of a 2D forward-looking sonar (FLS) according to <inline-formula><tex-math>$n$</tex-math></inline-formula> 3D-2D point correspondences. We explore the nature of the measured partial spherical coordinates and reveal their inherent relationships to translation and orientation. Based on this, we propose a bi-step efficient and statistically optimal AnP (BESTAnP) algorithm that decouples the estimation of translation and orientation. Specifically, in the first step, the translation estimation is formulated as the range-based localization problem based on distance-only measurements. In the second step, the rotation is estimated via eigendecomposition based on azimuth-only measurements and the estimated translation. BESTAnP is the first AnP algorithm that gives a closed-form solution for the full 6 <inline-formula><tex-math>$^{circ }$</tex-math></inline-formula>-of-freedom (DoF) pose. In addition, we conduct bias elimination for BESTAnP such that it owns the statistical property of consistency. Through simulation and real-world experiments, we demonstrate that compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, BESTAnP is over ten times faster and features real-time capacity in resource-constrained platforms while exhibiting comparable accuracy. Moreover, we embed BESTAnP into a single sonar-based odometry which shows its effectiveness for trajectory estimation.","PeriodicalId":13241,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters","volume":"10 6","pages":"5313-5320"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143856314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"MambaXCTrack: Mamba-Based Tracker With SSM Cross-Correlation and Motion Prompt for Ultrasound Needle Tracking","authors":"Yuelin Zhang;Long Lei;Wanquan Yan;Tianyi Zhang;Raymond Shing-Yan Tang;Shing Shin Cheng","doi":"10.1109/LRA.2025.3558377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2025.3558377","url":null,"abstract":"Ultrasound (US)-guided needle insertion is widely employed in percutaneous interventions. However, providing feedback on the needle tip position via US imaging presents challenges due to noise, artifacts, and the thin imaging plane of US, which degrades needle features and leads to intermittent tip visibility. In this letter, a Mamba-based US needle tracker MambaXCTrack utilizing structured state space models cross-correlation (SSMX-Corr) and implicit motion prompt is proposed, which is the first application of Mamba in US needle tracking. The SSMX-Corr enhances cross-correlation by long-range modeling and global searching of distant semantic features between template and search maps, benefiting the tracking under noise and artifacts by implicitly learning potential distant semantic cues. By combining with cross-map interleaved scan (CIS), local pixel-wise interaction with positional inductive bias can also be introduced to SSMX-Corr. The implicit low-level motion descriptor is proposed as a non-visual prompt to enhance tracking robustness, addressing the intermittent tip visibility problem. Extensive experiments on a dataset with motorized needle insertion in both phantom and tissue samples demonstrate that the proposed tracker outperforms other state-of-the-art trackers while ablation studies further highlight the effectiveness of each proposed tracking module.","PeriodicalId":13241,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters","volume":"10 5","pages":"5130-5137"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143856238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Evaluating the Effect of State and Action Selection on In-Hand Manipulation Performance for Transferability","authors":"Nigel Swenson;Jeremiah Goddard;Xiaoli Fern;Ravi Balasubramanian;Cindy Grimm","doi":"10.1109/LRA.2025.3558699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2025.3558699","url":null,"abstract":"Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated success across multiple robotic grasping and manipulation tasks. However, for RL to be widely applicable, policies must be able to transfer across the sim-to-real gap, <italic>and</i> transfer to hand geometries that they are not trained on. Methods such as domain randomization and domain adaptation only partially help with bridging these gaps. In this letter, we explore the impact of state and action space selection on transferability across both the sim-to-real gap and across different hand geometries. Using two exemplar manipulation tasks we demonstrate that state and action space selection significantly affect the overall performance of a policy and its robustness to both types of transfer. We also show that, for both types of transfer, a reduced state space that avoids hand specific information is preferable, even when it provides less information than a full state space.","PeriodicalId":13241,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters","volume":"10 6","pages":"5217-5224"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143845364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"BoundPlanner: A Convex-Set-Based Approach to Bounded Manipulator Trajectory Planning","authors":"Thies Oelerich;Christian Hartl-Nesic;Florian Beck;Andreas Kugi","doi":"10.1109/LRA.2025.3558450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2025.3558450","url":null,"abstract":"Online trajectory planning enables robot manipulators to react quickly to changing environments or tasks.Many robot trajectory planners exist for known environments but are often too slow for online computations. Current methods in online trajectory planning do not find suitable trajectories in challenging scenarios that respect the limits of the robot and account for collisions. This work proposes a trajectory planning framework consisting of the novel Cartesian path planner based on convex sets, called BoundPlanner, and the online trajectory planner BoundMPC [Oelerich, et al. (2025)]. BoundPlanner explores and maps the collision-free space using convex sets to compute a reference path with bounds. BoundMPC is extended in this work to handle convex sets for path deviations, which allows the robot to optimally follow the path within the bounds while accounting for the robot's kinematics. Collisions of the robot's kinematic chain are considered by a novel convex-set-based collision avoidance formulation independent on the number of obstacles. Simulations and experiments with a 7-DoF manipulator show the performance of the proposed planner compared to state-of-the-art methods.","PeriodicalId":13241,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters","volume":"10 6","pages":"5393-5400"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10950074","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143856138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Novel Cable-Driven Variable-Stiffness Manipulator With Teeth-Engagement Structure for Transoral Surgery","authors":"Baojun Chen;Lingdi Li;Siyang Zuo","doi":"10.1109/LRA.2025.3558452","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2025.3558452","url":null,"abstract":"As one of the minimally invasive surgeries (MIS), transoral robotic surgery (TORS) has garnered sustained interest for the treatment of pathological tissue, such as oropharyngeal tumors. Flexible manipulators employed in transoral surgeries necessitate the variable-stiffness capabilities to perform diverse tasks. Specifically, the manipulator must flexibly navigate through natural orifices to reach the target site and subsequently enhance the stiffness to provide a stable platform for surgical instrument manipulation. However, most existing flexible surgical manipulators have relatively small stiffness variation ratio and long transition time between flexible and rigid states. In this letter, we proposed a novel cable-driven variable-stiffness flexible manipulator with teeth-engagement structure to address such challenges. The proposed manipulator has an 18-mm diameter and provides four channels for forceps, electric knife, water/gas, and CMOS camera. Experiment results of manipulator's bending range and bending characteristics indicated that the manipulator could meet the requirements of transoral surgery. The variable-stiffness experiments showed that the manipulator could achieve a stiffness variation ratio up to 84.07 folds. Laryngeal phantom experiments and ex vivo tissue experiments were performed to further demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed manipulator. We believe this study could provide new ideas for the development of flexible manipulators requiring high load capability.","PeriodicalId":13241,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters","volume":"10 6","pages":"5241-5248"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143848800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Qingwei Dong;Tingting Wu;Peng Zeng;Chuanzhi zang;Guangxi Wan;Shijie Cui
{"title":"Enhancing Robot Learning Through Cognitive Reasoning Trajectory Optimization Under Unknown Dynamics","authors":"Qingwei Dong;Tingting Wu;Peng Zeng;Chuanzhi zang;Guangxi Wan;Shijie Cui","doi":"10.1109/LRA.2025.3558648","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2025.3558648","url":null,"abstract":"In the domain of robot learning, equipping robots with the capability to swiftly acquire operational skills poses a significant challenge. Currently, reinforcement learning techniques are adept at addressing dynamic, unstructured problems involving rich contact scenarios. However, the convergence rate of these algorithms is often slow due to the high dimensionality of the robot state-action mapping space and the extensive initial policy search space. Meanwhile, advancements in large language models (LLMs) have endowed these models with a degree of logical reasoning ability, enabling them to take goal-oriented actions proactively during the initial phase of a robotic task. These models can implicitly generate features of states and uncover underlying patterns in trajectory generation. Yet, in complex manipulative tasks involving rich contact scenarios, LLMs still fall short. Thus, integrating the robust interactive capabilities of reinforcement learning with the strong logical reasoning of LLMs, and enhancing policy search with LLMs, could potentially accelerate the speed of policy searches significantly. In this letter, we introduce a Cognitive Reasoning Trajectory Optimization method. This approach utilizes Low-level Cognitive Control Tuning to enable LLMs with robust logical reasoning to make effective single-step decisions in Markov Decision Process (MDP) tasks. By fitting dynamic models with high-quality cognitive reasoning data and optimizing control strategies, this method constrains the policy search space and enhances the efficiency of trajectory optimization. Experimental results on various manipulative tasks using the Sawyer robot in the Mujoco simulator validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.","PeriodicalId":13241,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters","volume":"10 6","pages":"5401-5408"},"PeriodicalIF":4.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143860889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}