University of Michigan Field Robotics Group

Welcome to the University of Michigan Field Robotics Group (FRoG)! Our research spans robotics, computer vision, and machine learning with a focus on enabling autonomy in dynamic, unstructured, or remote environments across field robotics applications.

Recent News

• Jingyu Song was selected to receive the Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship 🎉.

• Jingyu Song (FRoG PhD Candidate) gave a keynote presentation on "Scalable Underwater Perception: Building the Foundations for Embodied Marine Autonomy" for the 3rd Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) at WACV 2025.

• FRoG PhD Candidate Onur Bagoren's paper "PUGS: Perceptual Uncertainty for Grasp Selection" was accepted into ICRA 2025!

• FRoG's paper "VAIR: Visuo-Acoustic Implicit Representations for Low-Cost, Multi-Modal Transparent Surface Reconstruction in Indoor Scenes" was accepted into ICRA 2025! This work was done by Advaith Sethuraman and Onur Bagoren.

• FRoG PhD Candidate Jingyu Song's paper "MemFusionMap: Working Memory Fusion for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction" was accepted into WACV 2025!

• Onur Bagoren gave a lightning talk and poster presentation at IROS 2024 in Abu Dhabi.

• Anja Sheppard and Cale Colony presented posters at the AUV Symposium at Northeastern University in Boston, MA in September, 2024.

• FRoG's paper "TURTLMap: Real-time Localization and Dense Mapping of Low-texture Underwater Environments with a Low-cost Unmanned Underwater Vehicle " was accepted into IROS 2024! This work was collectively done by FRoG members (Jingyu Song, Onur Bagoren, Razan Andigani, Advaith Sethuraman).

• FRoG PhD Candidate Anja Sheppard's paper "Learning Surface Terrain Classifications from Ground Penetrating Radar" was accepted into CVPR Perception Beyond the Visible Spectrum Workshop 2024!

• FRoG PhD Candidate Jingyu Song's paper "CRKD: Enhanced Camera-Radar Object Detection with Cross-modality Knowledge Distillation" was accepted into CVPR 2024!

• FRoG PhD Candidate Jingyu Song's work "LiRaFusion: Deep Adaptive LiDAR-Radar Fusion for 3D Object Detection" was accepted to ICRA 2024!

• FRoG PhD Candidate Advaith Sethuraman's work "Learning Which Side to Scan: Multi-View Informed Active Perception with Side Scan Sonar for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles" was accepted to ICRA 2024!

• The lab's newest dataset was featured on the University of Michigan Library's blog, Bits & Pieces.

• The FRoG lab released the AI4SHIPWRECKS dataset, a new sidescan sonar dataset focused on the problem of object detection. The paper website, paper preprint, and dataset are online.

• FRoG PhD Candidate Anja Sheppard conducted field research at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah in January 2024.

• FRoG PhD Candidate Advaith Sethuraman presented "Integrating Machine Learning with GIS Tools for Automated Shipwreck Detection from Sonar Imagery" at the Society for Historical Archaology Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology 2024.

• Prof. Katie Skinner participated in several workshops and presentations at IROS 2023:

  • First Workshop on Photorealistic Image and Environment Synthesis for Robotics (PIES-Rob) (Full day workshop on Sunday, Oct. 1st)

  • Presentation on "Leveraging Synthetic Data for Learning-Based Marine Robot Perception" at the PIES-Rob Workshop

  • Workshop on Novel Sensors for Autonomous Vehicle Perception (Half-day workshop on Sunday, Oct. 1st)

  • Presentation at the Workshop on Robotic Perception and Mapping: Frontier Vision & Learning Techniques (ROPEM)

• FRoG PhD Candidate Advaith Sethuraman presented "STARS: Zero-shot Sim-to-Real Transfer for Segmentation of Shipwrecks in Sonar Imagery" at the 2023 British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC). *selected for oral presentation

• FRoG PhD Student Anja Sheppard presented "Automatic Data Processing for Space Robotics Machine Learning" at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) 2023.