arXiv subjects

Mario Alberto Valdes Saucedo

Publications and source records attributed to Mario Alberto Valdes Saucedo.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Towards Spatial Perception for Heterogeneous Robot Collaboration in Subterranean Mining Environments

The autonomous extraction of deep mineral deposits in abandoned underground mines is fundamentally a multi-agent integration problem. No single platform simultaneously offers the mobility to traverse kilometers of degraded drifts and the sensing payload required to characterize an ore body. This article presents the onboard perception pipeline that bridges two heterogeneous agents within the PERSEPHONE autonomous mining mission. Which consist of a lightweight Explorer robot that maps an unknown mine and generates a 3D scene graph of inspection targets, by running a zero-shot, vision-language semantic segmentation stack that detects mineral deposits directly from natural-language prompts. The map and the graph are then handed to a second Inspector robot, which carries an advanced sensing payload and uses them to plan close-range inspection viewpoints. We detail the complete pipeline, with emphasis on the geometric abstraction that turns raw detections into actionable inspection targets, spanning per-view bounding-box generation, cross-view box merging, plane fitting, and polygon extraction, and we report an extensive field validation in a subterranean test facility and in an active magnesite mine, covering both iron-vein and magnesite mineralization under realistic, perceptually degraded conditions.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

An Actionable Hierarchical Scene Representation Enhancing Autonomous Inspection Missions in Unknown Environments

In this article, we present the Layered Semantic Graphs (LSG), a novel actionable hierarchical scene graph, fully integrated with a multi-modal mission planner, the FLIE: A First-Look based Inspection and Exploration planner. The novelty of this work stems from aiming to address the task of maintaining an intuitive and multi-resolution scene representation, while simultaneously offering a tractable foundation for planning and scene understanding during an ongoing inspection mission of apriori unknown targets-of-interest in an unknown environment. The proposed LSG scheme is composed of locally nested hierarchical graphs, at multiple layers of abstraction, with the abstract concepts grounded on the functionality of the integrated FLIE planner. Furthermore, LSG encapsulates real-time semantic segmentation models that offer extraction and localization of desired semantic elements within the hierarchical representation. This extends the capability of the inspection planner, which can then leverage LSG to make an informed decision to inspect a particular semantic of interest. We also emphasize the hierarchical and semantic path-planning capabilities of LSG, which could extend inspection missions by improving situational awareness for human operators in an unknown environment. The validity of the proposed scheme is proven through extensive evaluations of the proposed architecture in simulations, as well as experimental field deployments on a Boston Dynamics Spot quadruped robot in urban outdoor environment settings.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

SPADE: Towards Scalable Path Planning Architecture on Actionable Multi-Domain 3D Scene Graphs

In this work, we introduce SPADE, a path planning framework designed for autonomous navigation in dynamic environments using 3D scene graphs. SPADE combines hierarchical path planning with local geometric awareness to enable collision-free movement in dynamic scenes. The framework bifurcates the planning problem into two: (a) solving the sparse abstract global layer plan and (b) iterative path refinement across denser lower local layers in step with local geometric scene navigation. To ensure efficient extraction of a feasible route in a dense multi-task domain scene graphs, the framework enforces informed sampling of traversable edges prior to path-planning. This removes extraneous information not relevant to path-planning and reduces the overall planning complexity over a graph. Existing approaches address the problem of path planning over scene graphs by decoupling hierarchical and geometric path evaluation processes. Specifically, this results in an inefficient replanning over the entire scene graph when encountering path obstructions blocking the original route. In contrast, SPADE prioritizes local layer planning coupled with local geometric scene navigation, enabling navigation through dynamic scenes while maintaining efficiency in computing a traversable route. We validate SPADE through extensive simulation experiments and real-world deployment on a quadrupedal robot, demonstrating its efficacy in handling complex and dynamic scenarios.

cs.RO↗