3D Scene Understanding: Build and ship the perception pipeline across the lab's platforms: object detection, instance segmentation, terrain classification, traversability estimation. Real-time C++ on edge compute, with clean interfaces to downstream mapping, planning, and control.
Terrain Perception and Traversability: Own the terrain understanding layer: elevation mapping, traversability scoring, and the integration of classical geometric methods with learned approaches (foundation-model features, self-supervised traversability). Different platforms have different mobility envelopes; the traversability layer must account for this.
Cooperative Perception: Drive the lab's multi-robot cooperative perception work: shared scene representations, distributed inference, bandwidth-aware feature sharing across heterogeneous platforms. This is a core research direction with our academic partners.