To perceive, humans use memory to fill in gaps caused by our limited visibility, whether due to occlusion or our narrow field of view. However, most 3D object detectors are limited to using sensor evidence from a short temporal window (0.1s-0.3s). In this work, we present a simple and effective add-on for enhancing any existing 3D object detector with long-term memory regardless of its sensor modality (e.g., LiDAR, camera) and network architecture. We propose a model to effectively align and fuse object proposals from a detector with object proposals from a memory bank of past predictions, exploiting trajectory forecasts to align proposals across time. We propose a novel schedule to train our model on temporal data that balances data diversity and the gap between training and inference. By applying our method to existing LiDAR and camera-based detectors on the Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) and Argoverse 2 Sensor (AV2) dataset, we demonstrate significant improvements in detection performance (+2.5 to +7.6 AP points). Our method attains the best performance on the WOD 3D detection leaderboard among online methods (excluding ensembles or test-time augmentation).

We present DIO, a flexible world model that can estimate the scene occupancy-flow from a sparse set of LiDAR observations, and decompose it into individual instances. DIO can not only complete instance shapes at the present time, but also forecast their occupancy-flow evolution over a future horizon. Thanks to its flexible prompt representation, DIO can take instance prompts from off-the-shelf models like 3D detectors, achieving state-of-the-art performance in the task of 4D semantic occupancy completion and forecasting on the Argoverse 2 dataset. Moreover, our world model can easily and effectively be transferred to downstream tasks like LiDAR point cloud forecasting, ranking first compared to all baselines in the Argoverse 4D occupancy forecasting challenge.

Perceiving the world and forecasting its future state is a critical task for self-driving. Supervised approaches leverage annotated object labels to learn a model of the world—traditionally with object detections and trajectory predictions, or temporal bird's-eye-view (BEV) occupancy fields. However, these annotations are expensive and typically limited to a set of predefined categories that do not cover everything we might encounter on the road. Instead, we learn to perceive and forecast a continuous 4D (spatiotemporal) occupancy field with self-supervision from Li-DAR data. This unsupervised world model can be easily and effectively transferred to downstream tasks. We tackle point cloud forecasting by adding a lightweight learned renderer and achieve state-of-the-art performance in Argoverse 2, nuScenes, and KITTI. To further showcase its transferability, we fine-tune our model for BEV semantic occupancy forecasting and show that it outperforms the fully supervised state-of-the-art, especially when labeled data is scarce. Finally, when compared to prior state-of-the-art on spatio-temporal geometric occupancy prediction, our 4D world model achieves a much higher recall of objects from classes relevant to self-driving.

A self-driving vehicle must understand its environment to determine the appropriate action. Traditional autonomy systems rely on object detection to find the agents in the scene. However, object detection assumes a discrete set of objects and loses information about uncertainty, so any errors compound when predicting the future behavior of those agents. Alternatively, dense occupancy grid maps have been utilized to understand free-space. However, predicting a grid for the entire scene is wasteful since only certain spatio-temporal regions are reachable and relevant to the self-driving vehicle. We present a unified, interpretable, and efficient autonomy framework that moves away from cascading modules that first perceive, then predict, and finally plan. Instead, we shift the paradigm to have the planner query occupancy at relevant spatio-temporal points, restricting the computation to those regions of interest. Exploiting this representation, we evaluate a candidate trajectory around key factors such as collision avoidance, comfort, and progress for safety and interpretability. Our approach achieves better highway driving quality than the state-of-the-art on high-fidelity closed-loop simulations.

In recent years, semidefinite relaxations of common optimization problems in robotics have attracted growing attention due to their ability to provide globally optimal solutions. In many cases, it was shown that specific handcrafted redundant constraints are required to obtain tight relaxations, and thus global optimality. These constraints are formulation-dependent and typically identified through a lengthy manual process. Instead, the present article suggests an automatic method to find a set of sufficient redundant constraints to obtain tightness, if they exist. We first propose an efficient feasibility check to determine if a given set of variables can lead to a tight formulation. Second, we show how to scale the method to problems of bigger size. At no point of the process do we have to find redundant constraints manually. We showcase the effectiveness of the approach, in simulation and on real datasets, for range-based localization and stereo-based pose estimation. We also reproduce semidefinite relaxations presented in recent literature and show that our automatic method always finds a smaller set of constraints sufficient for tightness than previously considered.

A self-driving vehicle (SDV) must be able to perceive its surroundings and predict the future behavior of other traffic participants. Existing works either perform object detection followed by trajectory forecasting of the detected objects, or predict dense occupancy and flow grids for the whole scene. The former poses a safety concern as the number of detections needs to be kept low for efficiency reasons, sacrificing object recall. The latter is computationally expensive due to the high-dimensionality of the output grid, and suffers from the limited receptive field inherent to fully convolutional networks. Furthermore, both approaches employ many computational resources predicting areas or objects that might never be queried by the motion planner. This motivates our unified approach to perception and future prediction that implicitly represents occupancy and flow over time with a single neural network. Our method avoids unnecessary computation, as it can be directly queried by the motion planner at continuous spatio-temporal locations. Moreover, we design an architecture that overcomes the limited receptive field of previous explicit occupancy prediction methods by adding an efficient yet effective global attention mechanism. Through extensive experiments in both urban and highway settings, we demonstrate that our implicit model outperforms the current state-of-the-art. For more information, visit the project website: https://waabi.ai/research/implicito.

We present a self-supervised learning approach for the semantic segmentation of lidar frames. Our method is used to train a deep point cloud segmentation architecture without any human annotation. The annotation process is automated with the combination of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and ray-tracing algorithms. By performing multiple navigation sessions in the same environment, we are able to identify permanent structures, such as walls, and disentangle short-term and long-term movable objects, such as people and tables, respectively. New sessions can then be performed using a network trained to predict these semantic labels. We demonstrate the ability of our approach to improve itself over time, from one session to the next. With semantically filtered point clouds, our robot can navigate through more complex scenarios, which, when added to the training pool, help to improve our network predictions. We provide insights into our network predictions and show that our approach can also improve the performances of common localization techniques.