Point Cloud Segmentation of Agricultural Vehicles using 3D Gaussian Splatting

Training neural networks for tasks such as 3D point cloud semantic segmentation demands extensive datasets, yet obtaining and annotating real-world point clouds is costly and labor-intensive. This work aims to introduce a novel pipeline for generating realistic synthetic data, by leveraging 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and Gaussian Opacity Fields (GOF) to generate 3D assets of multiple different agricultural vehicles instead of using generic models. These assets are placed in a simulated environment, where the point clouds are generated using a simulated LiDAR. This is a flexible approach that allows changing the LiDAR specifications without incurring additional costs. We evaluated the impact of synthetic data on segmentation models such as PointNet++, Point Transformer V3, and OACNN, by training and validating the models only on synthetic data. Remarkably, the PTv3 model had an mIoU of 91.35\%, a noteworthy result given that the model had neither been trained nor validated on any real data. Further studies even suggested that in certain scenarios the models trained only on synthetically generated data performed better than models trained on real-world data. Finally, experiments demonstrated that the models can generalize across semantic classes, enabling accurate predictions on mesh models they were never trained on.

Generating Synthetic Stereo Datasets using 3D Gaussian Splatting and Expert Knowledge Transfer

In this paper, we introduce a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)-based pipeline for stereo dataset generation, offering an efficient alternative to Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based methods. To obtain useful geometry estimates, we explore utilizing the reconstructed geometry from the explicit 3D representations as well as depth estimates from the FoundationStereo model in an expert knowledge transfer setup. We find that when fine-tuning stereo models on 3DGS-generated datasets, we demonstrate competitive performance in zero-shot generalization benchmarks. When using the reconstructed geometry directly, we observe that it is often noisy and contains artifacts, which propagate noise to the trained model. In contrast, we find that the disparity estimates from FoundationStereo are cleaner and consequently result in a better performance on the zero-shot generalization benchmarks. Our method highlights the potential for low-cost, high-fidelity dataset creation and fast fine-tuning for deep stereo models. Moreover, we also reveal that while the latest Gaussian Splatting based methods have achieved superior performance on established benchmarks, their robustness falls short in challenging in-the-wild settings warranting further exploration.

Demonstrating Autonomous 3D Path Planning on a Novel Scalable UGV-UAV Morphing Robot

Some animals exhibit multi-modal locomotion capability to traverse a wide range of terrains and environments, such as amphibians that can swim and walk or birds that can fly and walk. This capability is extremely beneficial for expanding the animal's habitat range and they can choose the most energy efficient mode of locomotion in a given environment. The robotic biomimicry of this multi-modal locomotion capability can be very challenging but offer the same advantages. However, the expanded range of locomotion also increases the complexity of performing localization and path planning. In this work, we present our morphing multi-modal robot, which is capable of ground and aerial locomotion, and the implementation of readily available SLAM and path planning solutions to navigate a complex indoor environment.