Publications

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

From Distances to Trajectories: Real-Time Signed Distance Function Mapping and Distance-Accelerated Motion Planning for UAVs

Jason Stanley*, Zhirui Dai*, Qihao Qian, Tzu-Chin Ho, Tianxing Fan, Siddharth Saha, Christopher Barngrover, Ki Myung Brian Lee, Nikolay Atanasov

arXiv, 2026

Co-designs online SDF mapping (OREN) with a bubble-based search planner, enabling real-time onboard navigation of a quadrotor in cluttered indoor environments.

OREN: Octree Residual Network for Real-Time Euclidean Signed Distance Mapping

Zhirui Dai*, Qihao Qian*, Tianxing Fan, Nikolay Atanasov

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026

A hybrid method combining explicit gradient-augmented octree interpolation with implicit neural residuals for efficient and accurate online SDF reconstruction.

RailYolact: A Yolact Focused on Edge for Real-Time Rail Segmentation

Qihao Qian

arXiv

Enhances Yolact instance segmentation with edge detection to improve rail mask precision for autonomous train obstacle avoidance.