arXiv subjects

Miguel Fernandez-Cortizas

Publications and source records attributed to Miguel Fernandez-Cortizas.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Taxonomy on Collective Awareness

As robotic teams tackle increasingly complex tasks in dynamic and unstructured environments, effective coordination requires agents to maintain accurate, aligned representations of their environment, teammates, and mission state. We argue that Mutual Awareness, Shared Situational Awareness, and Team Situational Awareness --- three concepts widely invoked in the multi-robot systems literature --- are not interchangeable: they form a containment hierarchy in which each type subsumes the previous in scope, and span a distribution spectrum from fully individualized understanding (MA) to fully uniform understanding (SSA), with TSA occupying a mixed position. We establish this through a two-dimensional taxonomy organized along the object of awareness and awareness distribution axes. Treating these terms as synonyms obscures the precise coordination requirements each imposes on a robotic system. A Search and Rescue case study with heterogeneous aerial and ground robots grounds each taxonomy position in concrete coordination requirements. These findings provide a conceptual foundation for principled specification, design, and comparison of collective awareness in multi-robot systems.

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arXiv2026

BIM Informed Visual SLAM for Construction Environments

Monitoring building construction sites requires comparing the as-planned design with the as-built state, which can be estimated in real time using Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques. However, visual SLAM is prone to trajectory drift in construction environments, producing maps that are geometrically inaccurate with the actual environment. To address this limitation, we augment an existing RGB-D SLAM system with structural priors derived from the Building Information Model (BIM). The system associates detected walls with their BIM counterparts and includes these correspondences as geometric constraints in the back-end optimization, reducing drift and enhancing global consistency. The proposed method operates in real time and is validated on multiple real construction sites, achieving an average trajectory error reduction of 25.23% and a 7.14% improvement in map accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines. Robustness analyses further demonstrate resilience to incomplete BIM data and geometric discrepancies between as-planned models and the as-built environment.

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arXiv2026

MVP-SLAM: Multi-Camera Visual-Inertial Floorplan-Prior SLAM

Indoor building construction sites are demanding environments for visual SLAM, where variable lighting and repetitive, low-textured structures make the system drift over long trajectories, though structural elements such as walls remain distinguishable despite these conditions. These buildings are constructed according to their as-planned floor plans, available from the design phase, and although the actual as-built site can differ from this design, floor plans still provide a metric reference, both to localize the system in the building and to correct drift. Existing methods often use the floor plan to correct an already-built trajectory offline, and those that instead correct it online typically rely on depth sensors. We instead present MVP-SLAM, an online visual-inertial SLAM on two opposite-facing fisheye cameras that corrects drift from cameras alone by matching walls detected in its map to the floor plan, through a drift-aware policy. A multi-stage integration then turns each matched pair incrementally into a persistent correction, so the trajectory stays corrected and localized within the floor plan as it is built. MVP-SLAM was validated on the multi-floor construction sites of the Hilti-Trimble SLAM Challenge 2026, ranking 2nd of 22 teams in the Localization task (0.29 m mean RMSE) and 5th of 62 teams in the SLAM task (0.24 m), the top-ranked one in both tasks among those that operate online, integrate the floor plan, and localize within it.

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arXiv2026

SUFLECA: Scaling Up Feature Learning for CAD-to-image Alignment

CAD-to-image alignment aims to estimate an object's 9D pose (rotation, translation, and anisotropic scale) from a single RGB image, with applications in robotics and augmented reality. Recent zero-shot methods use vision foundation models to match image regions to CAD models; yet their correspondences are typically appearance-driven or unreliable under occlusion or synthetic-to-real domain shift. To address these limitations, we introduce SUFLECA (Scaling Up Feature LEarning for CAD-to-image Alignment), a weakly supervised framework for zero-shot CAD alignment with two key contributions. First, SUFLECA scales up geometry-grounded feature learning from pretrained visual representations through Normalized Object Coordinates (NOCs) supervision on images spanning up to 12 real and synthetic datasets, learning compact geometry-aware features that generalize across domains. Second, we propose a geometrically consistent matching algorithm that establishes reliable CAD-to-image correspondences. Together, these contributions enable accurate, sub-second alignment per object instance without iterative pose refinement. On ScanNet25k, SUFLECA achieves 32.8%/42.6% category/instance accuracy, outperforming the strongest zero-shot baseline by 9.7/12.5 percentage points with a smaller computational footprint, and for the first time on this benchmark, even surpassing existing pose-supervised methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/snt-arg/SUFLECA

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arXiv2026

A Review Of Robotic World Models For Dynamic Environments Based On Factor And Scene Graphs

Models based on graphs have emerged in robotics as a powerful foundation for internal world representations, where factor and scene graphs are among the most prominent model types found in the related literature and in successful robotic solutions. Initially, many of these models were assuming static environments as a simplification. Herein, factor graphs mainly provide uncertainty-aware geometric estimations while scene graphs enable a structured semantic abstraction. However, real-world robotic environments are often dynamic, posing severe challenges for purely static world representations. Therefore, this review presents a comprehensive view on how dynamic aspects of real-world environments can be addressed in such graph-based world models. We organize our assessments around three main aspects: (I) suitable representations, (II) pipelines to construct and update the representations, and (III) their exploitation for downstream tasks. We review approaches that are either based on factor or scene graphs, but put special emphasis on novel approaches that combine both types to form hybrid models. We mainly analyze how different types of dynamics can be modeled herein, and categorize common architectural patterns. Finally, emerging trends and open challenges are identified, including uncertainty propagation from learned perception through the representation layers, the observability of dynamic-entity motion and scale under minimal sensing, scalable lifelong maintenance, and the lack of datasets and evaluation protocols that ground world-model quality in downstream task performance under dynamics.

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arXiv2026

Distributed Coordination for Resilient Multi-UAV Remote Sensing: A Photovoltaic Inspection Case Study

Deploying multiple UAVs for remote sensing enables proportional reductions in mission time, but realizing these benefits requires the fleet to coordinate at runtime: distributing sensing targets, responding to platform failures, and recovering from degraded data quality. In inspection campaigns, where mission value depends on complete coverage and the usability of every capture, a centralized ground-station coordinator is a single point of failure: a lost link or station fault leaves sensing gaps that cannot be filled without operator intervention. We propose the \textbf{SwarmLink}, an inter-agent communication infrastructure that non-invasively extends any existing aerial framework with peer-to-peer coordination capability, without modifying the host system. We apply it to photovoltaic plant inspection as a representative large-scale sensing campaign, extending Aerostack2 with a distributed auction that unifies initial sensing-target allocation, platform-failure recovery, and data-quality-triggered reassignment into a single runtime mechanism. All three disruption scenarios reduce to the same re-auction over remaining targets and active platforms, requiring zero modifications to the Aerostack2 core and no ground-station involvement during the mission.

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arXiv2026

Generation of Uncertainty-Aware High-Level Spatial Concepts in Factorized 3D Scene Graphs via Graph Neural Networks

Enabling robots to autonomously discover high-level spatial concepts (e.g., rooms and walls) from primitive geometric observations (e.g., planar surfaces) within 3D Scene Graphs is essential for robust indoor navigation and mapping. These graphs provide a hierarchical metric-semantic representation in which such concepts are organized. To further enhance graph-SLAM performance, Factorized 3D Scene Graphs incorporate these concepts as optimization factors that constrain relative geometry and enforce global consistency. However, both stages of this process remain largely manual: concepts are typically derived using hand-crafted, concept-specific heuristics, while factors and their covariances are likewise manually designed. This reliance on manual specification limits generalization across diverse environments and scalability to new concept classes. This paper presents a novel learning-based method that infers spatial concepts online from observed vertical planes and introduces them as optimizable factors within a SLAM backend, eliminating the need to handcraft concept generation, factor design, and covariance specification. We evaluate our approach in simulated environments with complex layouts, improving room detection by 20.7% and trajectory estimation by 19.2%. Validated on real construction sites, room detection improves by 5.3% and map matching accuracy by 3.8%.

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arXiv2026

COMPASS: COmpact Multi-channel Prior-map And Scene Signature for Floor-Plan-Based Visual Localization

Architectural floor plans are widely available priors which contain not only geometry but also the semantic information of the environment, yet existing localization methods largely ignore this semantic information. To address this, we present COMPASS, an algorithm that exploits both geometric and semantic priors from floor plans to estimate the pose of a robot equipped with dual fisheye cameras. Inspired by scan context descriptor from LiDAR-based place recognition, we design a multi-channel radial descriptor that encodes the geometric layout surrounding a position. From the floor plan, rays are cast in 360 azimuth bins and the results are encoded into five channels: normalized range, structural hit type (wall, window, or opening), range gradient, inverse range, and local range variance. From the image side, the same descriptor structure is populated by detecting structural elements in the fisheye imagery. As a first step toward full cross-modal matching, we present a window detection algorithm for fisheye images that uses a line segment detector to identify window frames via vertical edge clustering and brightness verification. Detected windows are projected to azimuthal bearings through the fisheye camera model, producing the hit-type channel of the visual descriptor. As a proof of concept, we generate both descriptors at a single known pose from the Hilti-Trimble SLAM Challenge 2026 dataset and demonstrate that the wall-window pattern extracted from the first frame of each camera closely matches the floor plan descriptor, validating the feasibility of cross-modal structural matching.

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arXiv2026

Robust Graph Matching through Semantic Relationship Generation for SLAM

Graph-based representations such as Scene Graphs enable localization in structured indoor environments by matching a locally observed graph, constructed from sensor data, to a prior map. This process is particularly challenging in environments with repetitive or symmetric layouts, where structural cues alone are often insufficient to resolve ambiguities. We propose a semantic-enhanced graph matching approach that explicitly models relations between detected objects and structural elements, such as rooms and wall planes. Objects are detected from RGB-D data and integrated into the graph, and their relations to structural elements are exploited to filter candidate correspondences prior to geometric verification, significantly reducing ambiguity and search complexity. The proposed method is integrated within the iS-Graphs framework and evaluated in synthetic and simulated environments. Results show that semantic relations significantly reduce the number of candidate matches, improve computational efficiency, and enable faster convergence, particularly in symmetric scenarios where purely geometric approaches fail.

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arXiv2026

Passage-Aware Structural Mapping for RGB-D Visual SLAM

Doorways and passages are critical structural elements for indoor robot navigation, yet they remain underexplored in modern Visual SLAM (VSLAM) frameworks. This paper presents a passage-aware structural mapping approach for RGB-D VSLAM that detects doors and traversable openings by jointly fusing geometric, semantic, and topological cues. Doors are modeled as planar entities embedded within walls and classified as traversable or non-traversable based on their coplanarity with the supporting wall. Passages are inferred through two complementary strategies: traversal evidence accumulated from camera-wall interactions across consecutive keyframes, and geometric opening validation based on discontinuities in the mapped wall geometry. The proposed method is integrated into vS-Graphs as a proof of concept, enriching its scene graph with passage-level abstractions and improving room connectivity modeling. Qualitative evaluations on indoor office sequences demonstrate reliable doorway detection, and the framework lays the foundation for exploiting these elements in BIM-informed VSLAM. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/snt-arg/visual_sgraphs/tree/doorway_integration.

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arXiv2026

Dual Pose-Graph Semantic Localization for Vision-Based Autonomous Drone Racing

Autonomous drone racing demands robust real-time localization under extreme conditions: high-speed flight, aggressive maneuvers, and payload-constrained platforms that often rely on a single camera for perception. Existing visual SLAM systems, while effective in general scenarios, struggle with motion blur and feature instability inherent to racing dynamics, and do not exploit the structured nature of racing environments. In this work, we present a dual pose-graph architecture that fuses odometry with semantic detections for robust localization. A temporary graph accumulates multiple gate observations between keyframes and optimizes them into a single refined constraint per landmark, which is then promoted to a persistent main graph. This design preserves the information richness of frequent detections while preventing graph growth from degrading real-time performance. The system is designed to be sensor-agnostic, although in this work we validate it using monocular visual-inertial odometry and visual gate detections. Experimental evaluation on the TII-RATM dataset shows a 56% to 74% reduction in ATE compared to standalone VIO, while an ablation study confirms that the dual-graph architecture achieves 10% to 12% higher accuracy than a single-graph baseline at identical computational cost. Deployment in the A2RL competition demonstrated that the system performs real-time onboard localization during flight, reducing the drift of the odometry baseline by up to 4.2 m per lap.

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arXiv2026

vS-Graphs: Tightly Coupling Visual SLAM and 3D Scene Graphs Exploiting Hierarchical Scene Understanding

Current Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (VSLAM) systems often struggle to create maps that are both semantically rich and easily interpretable. While incorporating semantic scene knowledge aids in building richer maps with contextual associations among mapped objects, representing them in structured formats, such as scene graphs, has not been widely addressed, resulting in complex map comprehension and limited scalability. This paper introduces vS-Graphs, a novel real-time VSLAM framework that integrates vision-based scene understanding with map reconstruction and comprehensible graph-based representation. The framework infers structural elements (i.e., rooms and floors) from detected building components (i.e., walls and ground surfaces) and incorporates them into optimizable 3D scene graphs. This solution enhances the reconstructed map's semantic richness, comprehensibility, and localization accuracy. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks and real-world datasets demonstrate that vS-Graphs achieves an average of 15.22% accuracy gain across all tested datasets compared to state-of-the-art VSLAM methods. Furthermore, the proposed framework achieves environment-driven semantic entity detection accuracy comparable to that of precise LiDAR-based frameworks, using only visual features. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/snt-arg/visual_sgraphs and is actively being improved. Moreover, a web page containing more media and evaluation outcomes is available on https://snt-arg.github.io/vsgraphs-results/.

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arXiv2026

Flocking behavior for dynamic and complex swarm structures

Maintaining the formation of complex structures with multiple UAVs and achieving complex trajectories remains a major challenge. This work presents an algorithm for implementing the flocking behavior of UAVs based on the concept of Virtual Centroid to easily develop a structure for the flock. The approach builds on the classical virtual-based behavior, providing a theoretical framework for incorporating enhancements to dynamically control both the number of agents and the formation of the structure. Simulation tests and real-world experiments were conducted, demonstrating its simplicity even with complex formations and complex trajectories.

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arXiv2026

A Methodology for Designing Knowledge-Driven Missions for Robots

This paper presents a comprehensive methodology for implementing knowledge graphs in ROS 2 systems, aiming to enhance the efficiency and intelligence of autonomous robotic missions. The methodology encompasses several key steps: defining initial and target conditions, structuring tasks and subtasks, planning their sequence, representing task-related data in a knowledge graph, and designing the mission using a high-level language. Each step builds on the previous one to ensure a cohesive process from initial setup to final execution. A practical implementation within the Aerostack2 framework is demonstrated through a simulated search and rescue mission in a Gazebo environment, where drones autonomously locate a target. This implementation highlights the effectiveness of the methodology in improving decision-making and mission performance by leveraging knowledge graphs.

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arXiv2025

DYNEMO-SLAM: Dynamic Entity and Motion-Aware 3D Scene Graph SLAM

Robots operating in dynamic environments face significant challenges due to the presence of moving agents and displaced objects. Traditional SLAM systems typically assume a static world or treat dynamic as outliers, discarding their information to preserve map consistency. As a result, they cannot exploit dynamic entities as persistent landmarks, do not model and exploit their motion over time, and therefore quickly degrade in highly cluttered environments with few reliable static features. This paper presents a novel 3D scene graph-based SLAM framework that addresses the challenge of modeling and estimating the pose of dynamic entities into the SLAM backend. Our framework incorporates semantic motion priors and dynamic entity-aware constraints to jointly optimize the robot trajectory, dynamic entity poses, and the surrounding environment structure within a unified graph formulation. In parallel, a dynamic keyframe selection policy and a semantic loop-closure prefiltering step enable the system to remain robust and effective in highly dynamic environments by continuously adapting to scene changes and filtering inconsistent observations. The simulation and real-world experimental results show a 49.97% reduction in ATE compared to the baseline method employed, demonstrating the effectiveness of incorporating dynamic entities and estimating their poses for improved robustness and richer scene representation in complex scenarios while maintaining real-time performance.

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arXiv2025

SMapper: A Multi-Modal Data Acquisition Platform for SLAM Benchmarking

Advancing research in fields such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and autonomous navigation critically depends on the availability of reliable and reproducible multimodal datasets. While several influential datasets have driven progress in these domains, they often suffer from limitations in sensing modalities, environmental diversity, and the reproducibility of the underlying hardware setups. To address these challenges, this paper introduces SMapper, a novel open-hardware, multi-sensor platform designed explicitly for, though not limited to, SLAM research. The device integrates synchronized LiDAR, multi-camera, and inertial sensing, supported by a robust calibration and synchronization pipeline that ensures precise spatio-temporal alignment across modalities. Its open and replicable design allows researchers to extend its capabilities and reproduce experiments across both handheld and robot-mounted scenarios. To demonstrate its practicality, we additionally release SMapper-light, a publicly available SLAM dataset containing representative indoor and outdoor sequences. The dataset includes tightly synchronized multimodal data and ground truth trajectories derived from offline LiDAR-based SLAM with sub-centimeter accuracy, alongside dense 3D reconstructions. Furthermore, the paper contains benchmarking results on state-of-the-art LiDAR and visual SLAM frameworks using the SMapper-light dataset. By combining open-hardware design, reproducible data collection, and comprehensive benchmarking, SMapper establishes a robust foundation for advancing SLAM algorithm development, evaluation, and reproducibility. The project's documentation, including source code, CAD models, and dataset links, is publicly available at https://snt-arg.github.io/smapper_docs.

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arXiv2025

Human Interaction for Collaborative Semantic SLAM using Extended Reality

Semantic SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) systems enrich robot maps with structural and semantic information, enabling robots to operate more effectively in complex environments. However, these systems struggle in real-world scenarios with occlusions, incomplete data, or ambiguous geometries, as they cannot fully leverage the higher-level spatial and semantic knowledge humans naturally apply. We introduce HICS-SLAM, a Human-in-the-Loop semantic SLAM framework that uses a shared extended reality environment for real-time collaboration. The system allows human operators to directly interact with and visualize the robot's 3D scene graph, and add high-level semantic concepts (e.g., rooms or structural entities) into the mapping process. We propose a graph-based semantic fusion methodology that integrates these human interventions with robot perception, enabling scalable collaboration for enhanced situational awareness. Experimental evaluations on real-world construction site datasets demonstrate improvements in room detection accuracy, map precision, and semantic completeness compared to automated baselines, demonstrating both the effectiveness of the approach and its potential for future extensions.

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arXiv2024

Aerostack2: A Software Framework for Developing Multi-robot Aerial Systems

The development of autonomous aerial systems, particularly for multi-robot configurations, is a complex challenge requiring multidisciplinary expertise. Unlike ground robotics, aerial robotics has seen limited standardization, leading to fragmented development efforts. To address this gap, we introduce Aerostack2, a comprehensive, open-source ROS 2 based framework designed for creating versatile and robust multi-robot aerial systems. Aerostack2 features platform independence, a modular plugin architecture, and behavior-based mission control, enabling easy customization and integration across various platforms. In this paper, we detail the full architecture of Aerostack2, which has been tested with several platforms in both simulation and real flights. We demonstrate its effectiveness through multiple validation scenarios, highlighting its potential to accelerate innovation and enhance collaboration in the aerial robotics community.

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