SLIDER: Sparse History-Guided Aerial Robot Target Search using Sliding Local Maps

Efficient exploration and target search in large-scale unknown environments remain challenging for aerial robots due to the demands of broad spatial coverage, fine-grained perception, and real-time decision-making. This paper presents SLIDER, a lightweight and memory-efficient framework that avoids reliance on globally dense maps by combining a local sliding map with sparse global history information. A novel observation quality evaluation method is proposed, leveraging historical poses and sensor models to assess point cloud data in real-time, enabling efficient frontier detection. To support scalable and responsive planning, an incremental viewpoint clustering strategy dynamically adapts to local updates, significantly reducing the number of candidate targets and decreasing computational load. A sparse global topological map is incrementally maintained to assist global planning and cost evaluation. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art methods in memory usage, decision latency, and search efficiency.

VDNeRF: Vision-only Dynamic Neural Radiance Field for Urban Scenes

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) implicitly model continuous three-dimensional scenes using a set of images with known camera poses, enabling the rendering of photorealistic novel views. However, existing NeRF-based methods encounter challenges in applications such as autonomous driving and robotic perception, primarily due to the difficulty of capturing accurate camera poses and limitations in handling large-scale dynamic environments. To address these issues, we propose Vision-only Dynamic NeRF (VDNeRF), a method that accurately recovers camera trajectories and learns spatiotemporal representations for dynamic urban scenes without requiring additional camera pose information or expensive sensor data. VDNeRF employs two separate NeRF models to jointly reconstruct the scene. The static NeRF model optimizes camera poses and static background, while the dynamic NeRF model incorporates the 3D scene flow to ensure accurate and consistent reconstruction of dynamic objects. To address the ambiguity between camera motion and independent object motion, we design an effective and powerful training framework to achieve robust camera pose estimation and self-supervised decomposition of static and dynamic elements in a scene. Extensive evaluations on mainstream urban driving datasets demonstrate that VDNeRF surpasses state-of-the-art NeRF-based pose-free methods in both camera pose estimation and dynamic novel view synthesis.