Place recognition is an important technique for autonomous mobile robotic applications. While single-modal sensor-based approaches have shown satisfactory performance, cross-modal place recognition remains underexplored due to the challenge of bridging the cross-modal heterogeneity gap. In this work, we introduce an instance-aware cross-modal place recognition approach, named InsCMPR. We design a novel instance-aware modality alignment module, which aligns multi-modal data at both pixel-level and instance-level by leveraging a pre-trained vision foundation model SAM. Then a novel dual-branch hybrid Mamba-Transformer network is proposed to efficiently enhance the distinctiveness of the produced descriptors by integrating global features with local instance features. Experimental results on the KITTI, NCLT, and HAOMO datasets show that our proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art performance while operating in real time. We will open source the implementation of our method at: https://github.com/nubot-nudt/InsCMPR.

As lunar exploration missions grow increasingly complex, ensuring safe and autonomous rover-based surface exploration has become one of the key challenges in lunar exploration tasks. In this work, we have developed a lunar surface simulation system called the Lunar Exploration Simulator System (LESS) and the LunarSeg dataset, which provides RGB-D data for lunar obstacle segmentation that includes both positive and negative obstacles. Additionally, we propose a novel two-stage segmentation network called LuSeg. Through contrastive learning, it enforces semantic consistency between the RGB encoder from Stage I and the depth encoder from Stage II. Experimental results on our proposed LunarSeg dataset and additional public real-world NPO road obstacle dataset demonstrate that LuSeg achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance for both positive and negative obstacles while maintaining a high inference speed of approximately 57 Hz. We have released the implementation of our LESS system, LunarSeg dataset, and the code of LuSeg at: https://github.com/nubot-nudt/LuSeg.

Multimodal 3D object detectors leverage the strengths of both geometry-aware LiDAR point clouds and semantically rich RGB images to enhance detection performance. However, the inherent heterogeneity between these modalities, including unbalanced convergence and modal misalignment, poses significant challenges. Meanwhile, the large size of the detection-oriented feature also constrains existing fusion strategies to capture long-range dependencies for the 3D detection tasks. In this work, we introduce a fast yet effective multimodal 3D object detector, incorporating our proposed Instance-level Contrastive Distillation (ICD) framework and Cross Linear Attention Fusion Module (CLFM). ICD aligns instance-level image features with LiDAR representations through object-aware contrastive distillation, ensuring fine-grained cross-modal consistency. Meanwhile, CLFM presents an efficient and scalable fusion strategy that enhances cross-modal global interactions within sizable multimodal BEV features. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and nuScenes 3D object detection benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. Notably, our 3D object detector outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods while achieving superior efficiency. The implementation of our method has been released as open-source at: https://github.com/nubot-nudt/ICD-Fusion.