Impact hammers, also known as rock-breakers, are essential machines in mining operations, where they perform secondary reduction. In underground mining, these machines are typically teleoperated, limiting operational efficiency. This paper presents a real-time RGB-D perception pipeline as a step towards automating the operation of hydraulic impact hammers used in mining. The proposed system simultaneously generates operationally feasible rock-breaking poses and a robot-free 3D representation of the workspace. The proposed approach combines image-based instance segmentation with geometric point cloud processing, and operates on embedded hardware at approximately 10 Hz with a total latency of around 675 ms, enabling responsive closed-loop behavior when integrated with a control system. Experimental results in a representative scaled scenario demonstrate that the proposed system is suitable for real-time autonomous impact hammer operation.
Existing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) systems distribute representation capacity uniformly across a scene, ignoring the fact that many downstream robotic tasks engage only a fraction of the reconstructed geometry. This causes valuable onboard compute to be allocated towards optim…
Autonomous drones are rapidly transforming modern warfare and civil applications alike. This paper presents the development of an integrated intelligent drone system designed to serve as a personal assistant. Leveraging the DJI Tello drone platform, we implemented a modular archi…
Existing Gaussian-splatting-based monocular Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems are either tailored to short sequences, are not real-time, or suffer from prohibitive GPU memory requirements, limiting their applicability in realistic, long-horizon scenarios. To ad…
We present a real-time LiDAR-based framework for Gaussian Splatting SLAM that tightly couples fast G-ICP registration with spherical rasterization-based dense mapping for large-scale sequences. Leveraging LiDAR geometry rather than appearance, we reuse tracking-estimated local co…
On-the-fly reconstruction is a key requirement for many applications in robotics and autonomous navigation. Variational Bayes Gaussian Splatting (VBGS) enables continual learning without replay buffers using Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference (CAVI), but its per-frame iterat…
Autonomous flight in cluttered environments requires a robot to build a geometric map of its surroundings and plan safe, dynamically feasible trajectories, all onboard and in real time. Conventional approaches treat mapping and planning as separate stages and often rely on binary…