Ricerc@Sapienza

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is considered a mature research field with numerous applications and publicly available open-source systems. Despite this maturity,existing SLAM systems often rely on ad-hoc implementations or are tailored to predefined sensor setups. In this work, we tackle these issues, proposing a novel unified SLAM architecture specifically designed to standardize the SLAM problem and to address heterogeneous sensor configurations.

3D object detectors based only on LiDAR point clouds hold the state-of-the-art on modern street-view benchmarks. However, LiDAR-based detectors poorly generalize across domains due to domain shift. In the case of LiDAR, in fact, domain shift is not only due to changes in the environment and in the object appearances, as for visual data from RGB cameras, but is also related to the geometry of the point clouds (e.g., point density variations).

Preliminary analysis of an archaeological site requires the acquisition of information by several diverse diagnostic techniques. Remote sensing plays an important role especially in spatially ex-tended and not easily accessible sites for the purposes of preventive and rescue archaeology, landscape archaeology, and intervention planning. In this paper, we present a case study of a de-tailed topographic survey based on a light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensor carried by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV; also known as drone).

A-train satellite data, acquired during the Calbuco volcano (Chile) sub-Plinian eruption in April 2015, are discussed to explore the complementarity of spaceborne observations in the microwave (MW), thermal infrared (TIR), and visible wavelengths for both near-source plume and distal ash clouds. The analysis shows that TIR-based detection techniques are not suitable near the volcanic vent where rising convective columns are associated with large optical depths.

Powerline inspection is an important task for electric power management. Corridor mapping, i.e. the task of surveying the surroundings of the line and detecting potentially hazardous vegetation and objects, is performed by aerial LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) survey. To this purpose, main tasks are automatic extraction of the wires, and measurement of distance of objects close to the line.