arXiv subjects

Wanmeng Li

Publications and source records attributed to Wanmeng Li.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

TravKAN: Fast and Interpretable Nonlinear Traversability Analysis with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Traversability analysis is a fundamental capability for autonomous mobile robots operating in unstructured environments. While modern machine learning approaches such as deep neural networks and gradient-boosted trees achieve strong predictive performance, they lack interpretability and provide limited insight into the underlying terrain-robot interaction dynamics. In this paper, we propose TravKAN, a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network-based framework for fast, scalable, and interpretable traversability estimation. TravKAN represents multivariate decision functions through compositions of learnable univariate functions, enabling compact architectures and symbolic extraction of analytic expressions after training. In addition, we introduce a novel set of handcrafted features derived from the reflectivity channel of LiDAR sensors. To the best of our knowledge, reflectivity has not been systematically exploited for handcrafted traversability descriptors, despite its potential to capture material and surface properties complementary to geometric cues. We evaluate TravKAN on public, real-world urban and off-road datasets and compare it against strong baselines. TravKAN achieves strong performance across all metrics, outperforming conventional deep models and approaching the performance of XGBoost. TravKAN-Lite, i.e., TravKAN's symbolic representation, reveals meaningful nonlinear feature interactions and provides a compact, deployment-friendly, and fast analytic model. Ablation studies further show the robustness of our method to architectural variations and quantify the contribution of the proposed reflectivity-based features. These properties make TravKAN attractive for robotic systems requiring transparency, real-time computational efficiency, and interpretability in safety-critical decision-making.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

DPGLA: Bridging the Gap between Synthetic and Real Data for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in 3D LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

Annotating real-world LiDAR point clouds for use in intelligent autonomous systems is costly. To overcome this limitation, self-training-based Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) has been widely used to improve point cloud semantic segmentation by leveraging synthetic point cloud data. However, we argue that existing methods do not effectively utilize unlabeled data, as they either rely on predefined or fixed confidence thresholds, resulting in suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Pseudo-Label Filtering (DPLF) scheme to enhance real data utilization in point cloud UDA semantic segmentation. Additionally, we design a simple and efficient Prior-Guided Data Augmentation Pipeline (PG-DAP) to mitigate domain shift between synthetic and real-world point clouds. Finally, we utilize data mixing consistency loss to push the model to learn context-free representations. We implement and thoroughly evaluate our approach through extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art methods. Experiments on two challenging synthetic-to-real point cloud semantic segmentation tasks demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of the DPLF and PG-DAP modules. We release the code of our method in this paper.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Point-Plane Projections for Accurate LiDAR Semantic Segmentation in Small Data Scenarios

LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation is essential for interpreting 3D environments in applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. Recent methods achieve strong performance by exploiting different point cloud representations or incorporating data from other sensors, such as cameras or external datasets. However, these approaches often suffer from high computational complexity and require large amounts of training data, limiting their generalization in data-scarce scenarios. In this paper, we improve the performance of point-based methods by effectively learning features from 2D representations through point-plane projections, enabling the extraction of complementary information while relying solely on LiDAR data. Additionally, we introduce a geometry-aware technique for data augmentation that aligns with LiDAR sensor properties and mitigates class imbalance. We implemented and evaluated our method that applies point-plane projections onto multiple informative 2D representations of the point cloud. Experiments demonstrate that this approach leads to significant improvements in limited-data scenarios, while also achieving competitive results on two publicly available standard datasets, as SemanticKITTI and PandaSet. The code of our method is available at https://github.com/SiMoM0/3PNet

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

A Sonar-based AUV Positioning System for Underwater Environments with Low Infrastructure Density

The increasing demand for underwater vehicles highlights the necessity for robust localization solutions in inspection missions. In this work, we present a novel real-time sonar-based underwater global positioning algorithm for AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles) designed for environments with a sparse distribution of human-made assets. Our approach exploits two synergistic data interpretation frontends applied to the same stream of sonar data acquired by a multibeam Forward-Looking Sonar (FSD). These observations are fused within a Particle Filter (PF) either to weigh more particles that belong to high-likelihood regions or to solve symmetric ambiguities. Preliminary experiments carried out on a simulated environment resembling a real underwater plant provided promising results. This work represents a starting point towards future developments of the method and consequent exhaustive evaluations also in real-world scenarios.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Improving Generalization of Synthetically Trained Sonar Image Descriptors for Underwater Place Recognition

Autonomous navigation in underwater environments presents challenges due to factors such as light absorption and water turbidity, limiting the effectiveness of optical sensors. Sonar systems are commonly used for perception in underwater operations as they are unaffected by these limitations. Traditional computer vision algorithms are less effective when applied to sonar-generated acoustic images, while convolutional neural networks (CNNs) typically require large amounts of labeled training data that are often unavailable or difficult to acquire. To this end, we propose a novel compact deep sonar descriptor pipeline that can generalize to real scenarios while being trained exclusively on synthetic data. Our architecture is based on a ResNet18 back-end and a properly parameterized random Gaussian projection layer, whereas input sonar data is enhanced with standard ad-hoc normalization/prefiltering techniques. A customized synthetic data generation procedure is also presented. The proposed method has been evaluated extensively using both synthetic and publicly available real data, demonstrating its effectiveness compared to state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗