LiftNav: Path Planning via Semantic Lifting in TSDF-Guided Gaussian Splatting

Autonomous robots in unknown indoor environments require both reliable collision avoidance and object-level understanding. Classical representations such as TSDF support safe planning but lack semantics, while photorealistic methods like Gaussian Splatting (GS) provide rich appearance yet suffer from soft geometry, limiting precise obstacle avoidance. We present LiftNav, a hybrid navigation framework built on GSFusion's TSDF+GS dual map, augmented with a real-time pipeline of YOLO-based detection, TSDF-based 3D lifting, and B-spline trajectory optimization. This design enables flexible semantic navigation without dense 3D embeddings. We further introduce a hinge-loss-based collision penalty that improves trajectory smoothness and safety. We evaluate our approach in a simulation using the Replica dataset. Compared against a state-of-the-art radiance field baseline we show a 100% feasibility rate and shorter trajectories.

CoRe-GS: Coarse-to-Refined Gaussian Splatting with Semantic Object Focus

Mobile reconstruction for autonomous aerial robotics holds strong potential for critical applications such as tele-guidance and disaster response. These tasks demand both accurate 3D reconstruction and fast scene processing. Instead of reconstructing the entire scene in detail, it is often more efficient to focus on specific objects, i.e., points of interest (PoIs). Mobile robots equipped with advanced sensing can usually detect these early during data acquisition or preliminary analysis, reducing the need for full-scene optimization. Gaussian Splatting (GS) has recently shown promise in delivering high-quality novel view synthesis and 3D representation by an incremental learning process. Extending GS with scene editing, semantics adds useful per-splat features to isolate objects effectively. Semantic 3D Gaussian editing can already be achieved before the full training cycle is completed, reducing the overall training time. Moreover, the semantically relevant area, the PoI, is usually already known during capturing. To balance high-quality reconstruction with reduced training time, we propose CoRe-GS. We first generate a coarse segmentation-ready scene with semantic GS and then refine it for the semantic object using our novel color-based effective filtering for effective object isolation. This is speeding up the training process to be about a quarter less than a full training cycle for semantic GS. We evaluate our approach on two datasets, SCRREAM (real-world, outdoor) and NeRDS 360 (synthetic, indoor), showing reduced runtime and higher novel-view-synthesis quality.