RadarSplat-RIO: Indoor Radar-Inertial Odometry with Gaussian Splatting-Based Radar Bundle Adjustment

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kung, Pou-Chun, Tian, Yuan, Li, Zhengqin, Liu, Yue, Whitmire, Eric, Kienzle, Wolf, Benko, Hrvoje
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Kung, Pou-Chun
Tian, Yuan
Li, Zhengqin
Liu, Yue
Whitmire, Eric
Kienzle, Wolf
Benko, Hrvoje
author_facet Kung, Pou-Chun
Tian, Yuan
Li, Zhengqin
Liu, Yue
Whitmire, Eric
Kienzle, Wolf
Benko, Hrvoje
contents Radar is more resilient to adverse weather and lighting conditions than visual and Lidar simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). However, most radar SLAM pipelines still rely heavily on frame-to-frame odometry, which leads to substantial drift. While loop closure can correct long-term errors, it requires revisiting places and relies on robust place recognition. In contrast, visual odometry methods typically leverage bundle adjustment (BA) to jointly optimize poses and map within a local window. However, an equivalent BA formulation for radar has remained largely unexplored. We present the first radar BA framework enabled by Gaussian Splatting (GS), a dense and differentiable scene representation. Our method jointly optimizes radar sensor poses and scene geometry using full range-azimuth-Doppler data, bringing the benefits of multi-frame BA to radar for the first time. When integrated with an existing radar-inertial odometry frontend, our approach significantly reduces pose drift and improves robustness. Across multiple indoor scenes, our radar BA achieves substantial gains over the prior radar-inertial odometry, reducing average absolute translational and rotational errors by 90% and 80%, respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_13492
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RadarSplat-RIO: Indoor Radar-Inertial Odometry with Gaussian Splatting-Based Radar Bundle Adjustment
Kung, Pou-Chun
Tian, Yuan
Li, Zhengqin
Liu, Yue
Whitmire, Eric
Kienzle, Wolf
Benko, Hrvoje
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Radar is more resilient to adverse weather and lighting conditions than visual and Lidar simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). However, most radar SLAM pipelines still rely heavily on frame-to-frame odometry, which leads to substantial drift. While loop closure can correct long-term errors, it requires revisiting places and relies on robust place recognition. In contrast, visual odometry methods typically leverage bundle adjustment (BA) to jointly optimize poses and map within a local window. However, an equivalent BA formulation for radar has remained largely unexplored. We present the first radar BA framework enabled by Gaussian Splatting (GS), a dense and differentiable scene representation. Our method jointly optimizes radar sensor poses and scene geometry using full range-azimuth-Doppler data, bringing the benefits of multi-frame BA to radar for the first time. When integrated with an existing radar-inertial odometry frontend, our approach significantly reduces pose drift and improves robustness. Across multiple indoor scenes, our radar BA achieves substantial gains over the prior radar-inertial odometry, reducing average absolute translational and rotational errors by 90% and 80%, respectively.
title RadarSplat-RIO: Indoor Radar-Inertial Odometry with Gaussian Splatting-Based Radar Bundle Adjustment
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13492