WildFusion helps robot traverse difficult terrain

The work from Duke University, North Carolina, has been accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2025), which will be held May 19-23, 2025, in Atlanta, Georgia.

“WildFusion opens a new chapter in robotic navigation and 3D mapping,” said Boyuan Chen, the Dickinson Family Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Computer Science at Duke University. “It helps robots to operate more confidently in unstructured, unpredictable environments like forests, disaster zones and off-road terrain.”

"Typical robots rely heavily on vision or LiDAR alone, which often falter without clear paths or predictable landmarks," said Yanbaihui Liu, the lead student author and a second-year PhD  student in Chen’s lab. “Even advanced 3D mapping methods struggle to reconstruct a continuous map when sensor data is sparse, noisy or incomplete, which is a frequent problem in unstructured outdoor environments. That’s exactly the challenge WildFusion was designed to solve.”