Active Scout: Multi-Target Tracking Using Neural Radiance Fields in Dense Urban Environments
We study pursuit-evasion games in highly occluded urban environments, e.g. tall buildings in a city, where a scout (quadrotor) tracks multiple dynamic targets on the ground. We show that we can build a neural radiance field (NeRF) representation of the city -- online -- using RGB and depth images from different vantage points. This representation is used to calculate the information gain to both explore unknown parts of the city and track the targets -- thereby giving a completely first-principles approach to actively tracking dynamic targets. We demonstrate, using a custom-built simulator using Open Street Maps data of Philadelphia and New York City, that we can explore and locate 20 stationary targets within 300 steps. This is slower than a greedy baseline, which does not use active perception. But for dynamic targets that actively hide behind occlusions, we show that our approach maintains, at worst, a tracking error of 200m; the greedy baseline can have a tracking error as large as 600m. We observe a number of interesting properties in the scout's policies, e.g., it switches its attention to track a different target periodically, as the quality of the NeRF representation improves over time, the scout also becomes better in terms of target tracking.
Code (1)
Tasks
NeRFSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
ScoutVLA: UAV-Centric Active Perception via a Dual-Expert VLA Model for Open-World Embodied Question Answering
Aerial Embodied Question Answering (EQA) requires Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to actively perceive the environment and answer natural language questions. Existing outdoor EQA systems usually stop once the target ente…
Multimodal ReasoningContinuous ControlQuestion AnsweringScout-Assisted Planning for Heterogeneous Robot Teams under Partially Known Environments
Autonomous robot teams navigating partially known environments face costly backtracking when ground robots encounter blocked roads that are only revealed upon physical traversal. We address this with Scout-Assisted Plann…
Graph Neural NetworkSCOUT: Cyclic Causal Discovery Under Soft Interventions with Unknown Targets
Learning causal relationships between variables from data is a fundamental research area with many applications across disciplines. Most existing causal discovery algorithms rely on the assumptions that (i) the underlyin…
Taming the Light: Illumination-Invariant Semantic 3DGS-SLAM
Extreme exposure degrades both the 3D map reconstruction and semantic segmentation accuracy, which is particularly detrimental to tightly-coupled systems. To achieve illumination invariance, we propose a novel semantic S…
Semantic SegmentationSemantic SLAMDataScout: Automatic Data Fact Retrieval for Statement Augmentation with an LLM-Based Agent
A data story typically integrates data facts from multiple perspectives and stances to construct a comprehensive and objective narrative. However, retrieving these facts demands time for data search and challenges the cr…
Retrieval