Bootstrap Perception Under Hardware Depth Failure for Indoor Robot Navigation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Pushparaju, Nishant, Mattam, Vivek, Arab, Aliasghar
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Pushparaju, Nishant
Mattam, Vivek
Arab, Aliasghar
author_facet Pushparaju, Nishant
Mattam, Vivek
Arab, Aliasghar
contents We present a bootstrap perception system for indoor robot navigation under hardware depth failure. In our corridor data, the time-of-flight camera loses up to 78% of its depth pixels on reflective surfaces, yet a 2D LiDAR alone cannot sense obstacles above its scan plane. Our system exploits a self-referential property of this failure: the sensor's surviving valid pixels calibrate learned monocular depth to metric scale, so the system fills its own gaps without external data. The architecture forms a failure-aware sensing hierarchy, conservative when sensors work and filling in when they fail: LiDAR remains the geometric anchor, hardware depth is kept where valid, and learned depth enters only where needed. In corridor and dynamic pedestrian evaluations, selective fusion increases costmap obstacle coverage by 55-110% over LiDAR alone. A compact distilled student runs at 218\,FPS on a Jetson Orin Nano and achieves 9/10 navigation success with zero collisions in closed-loop simulation, matching the ground-truth depth baseline at a fraction of the foundation model's cost.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_28890
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bootstrap Perception Under Hardware Depth Failure for Indoor Robot Navigation
Pushparaju, Nishant
Mattam, Vivek
Arab, Aliasghar
Robotics
We present a bootstrap perception system for indoor robot navigation under hardware depth failure. In our corridor data, the time-of-flight camera loses up to 78% of its depth pixels on reflective surfaces, yet a 2D LiDAR alone cannot sense obstacles above its scan plane. Our system exploits a self-referential property of this failure: the sensor's surviving valid pixels calibrate learned monocular depth to metric scale, so the system fills its own gaps without external data. The architecture forms a failure-aware sensing hierarchy, conservative when sensors work and filling in when they fail: LiDAR remains the geometric anchor, hardware depth is kept where valid, and learned depth enters only where needed. In corridor and dynamic pedestrian evaluations, selective fusion increases costmap obstacle coverage by 55-110% over LiDAR alone. A compact distilled student runs at 218\,FPS on a Jetson Orin Nano and achieves 9/10 navigation success with zero collisions in closed-loop simulation, matching the ground-truth depth baseline at a fraction of the foundation model's cost.
title Bootstrap Perception Under Hardware Depth Failure for Indoor Robot Navigation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28890