Papers for

robot perception teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

FunArt decodes movable parts and motions from single 3D scans

FunArt: Decoding Functional Structure and Articulation from Generative 3D Latents

Abstract: To operate effectively in human environments, robots must identify articulated objects, segment their movable and interactive parts, and estimate their kinematic models. Existing articulated scene representations typically recover kinematics from observed interactions, while methods operating on static scans often decouple articulation from functional interactive elements. We present FunArt, a framework that constructs articulation-aware functional 3D scene graphs from posed RGB-D observations captured in a single static configuration. FunArt reconstructs object instances, converts their fused geometry directly into the O-Voxel representation of TRELLIS.2, and exploits its frozen, sparse-compression VAE as a structural prior. A lightweight query-based decoder combines compact object-level latents with dense, surface-aligned features to jointly segment movable parts and functional interactive elements while estimating motion type, axis, origin, and range. On the Articulate3D dataset, FunArt achieves state-of-the-art performance across movable-part segmentation, articulation estimation, and functional-element segmentation, both with and without ground-truth object input. In the end-to-end setting, it outperforms the strongest baselines by 1.5 AP_{50} points for movable parts, 2.8 AP_{50} points under joint origin-and-axis constraints, and 6.7 AP_{50} points for functional elements. These results demonstrate that generative 3D latents encode actionable structural cues that can initialize robotic perception and planning before physical interaction.

Thu 17 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionRobotics
The gist
Robots need to understand how parts on objects move to use them properly, but most methods require seeing those objects in motion. The researchers developed FunArt, a system that looks at a single 3D scan of an object to figure out its parts that can move, how they move, and how to interact with them. FunArt uses a special way to represent 3D objects and learns from general shapes to guess part boundaries and motion details without needing videos of the objects moving. This helps robots better plan how to manipulate objects just by seeing them once.
Open → 2609.20673v1

Improving 3D scene geometry from few images using tensor voting

TV-SGS: Gaussian Splatting with Geometric Information Propagation via Tensor Voting under sparse views

Abstract: Gaussian Splatting has been effective in inferring scene representations that excel in novel view synthesis. Multiple splats cooperate seamlessly to synthesize the pixels of novel views and are jointly optimized even though they only affect each other indirectly, via pixels they project to in common. We present an approach that enables direct communication among splats to enhance the geometric structures they form in 3D. This is accomplished by Tensor Voting, which was originally designed to infer structures from noisy inputs and has been adapted here to provide supervision during test-time optimization, leading to more accurate scene geometry. We introduce a new class of 3D losses that do not rely on rendering and can be combined with essentially all losses previously reported in the literature. Our 3D losses are especially effective when the input views are sparse and geometric regularization is essential due to limited supervision from the images. Our method is easy to integrate with a diverse set of backbones, and our experiments on the DTU and Tanks-and-Temples datasets demonstrate that TV-SGS improves the geometry of the outputs compared to the backbone, while maintaining or improving rendering quality.

Mon 7 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Creating 3D scenes from photos is tricky, especially when you only have a few pictures. The authors improved a method called Gaussian Splatting by making parts of the 3D model communicate directly using a technique called Tensor Voting. This helps the 3D shapes become clearer and more accurate, even when there aren’t many pictures to guide the process. Their approach works well with existing methods and improves how 3D scenes look and feel.
Open → 2609.07734v1