arXiv subjects

Nader Motee

Publications and source records attributed to Nader Motee.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

From Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman to Riccati via Carleman: The Scalar Case

The Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation of a nonlinear system is a nonlinear partial differential equation, and in that form it gives little away. This paper shows that it hides a Riccati equation. Carleman linearization reveals this structure. For scalar input-affine systems with analytic data, the lifted HJB equation is a single infinite-dimensional Riccati equation in a lower-triangular Toeplitz matrix. Its first entry is the Riccati equation of the standard linearization at equilibrium. Its remaining entries hold the nonlinear terms. Nothing about this is an approximation. Under controllability of the standard linearization and detectability of the cost, the equation has exactly one solution with positive diagonal entries, and it can be computed one entry at a time. This solution is the derivative of the value function. We prove that finite-sections of the solution are exact and converge exponentially to the derivative of the value function near the origin. The scalar case has a closed-form solution. This closed form is our benchmark: every result on the lifted equation is checked against it. Nothing in this structure depends on the state dimension. Our methodology points to a general theory of optimal control in which the HJB equation of analytic nonlinear systems becomes an infinite-dimensional Riccati equation.

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arXiv2026

TRACE: Privacy-Preserving Next-Best-View Selection over Distributed 3D Gaussian-Splat Maps

Share the light, not the map. We study next-best-view selection for a team of robots, each of which builds its own 3D Gaussian Splatting map and keeps it private. A robot picks the view with the largest expected information gain (EIG) about the splats along its own path. This gain depends on the other maps. Their splats occlude its own and shine behind them, so the gain has to be evaluated against the pooled map. No robot has this map. We show that the coupling passes through only two ray quantities, the transmittance in front of a splat and the radiance behind it, and that both are sums over the hits of the ray. Hence, they decompose across the robots, and each robot sums them over depth bins in its own map, along the rays of a candidate view, and sends the sums with their pose derivatives. The robot planning the view turns them into its EIG and gradient on SO(3). Transmittance and Radiance Aggregates, communicated for the EIG, give the protocol its name: TRACE. No robot shares its splats, and the message size does not grow with a map. We prove that the reconstruction is exact unless a depth bin behind a splat mixes hits of two robots, and we bound the error otherwise. Over 100 next-best-view decisions in Habitat-Sim, TRACE picks a heading within 15 degrees of the centralized one in 83.3% of the cases, and its views reach 97.9% of the centralized EIG.

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arXiv2026

AGILE-GS: Anchor-Guided Fast Next-Best-View Selection for Active 3D Gaussian Splatting

Radiance fields need hundreds of views, and their placement matters as much as their number. Next-best-view (NBV) selection for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) usually scores every candidate in the pool and keeps one. Searching for information and choosing a camera, however, are separable problems. We present AGILE-GS, an anchor-guided NBV method that separates the two. A virtual anchor pose is optimized on SE(3) by Riemannian gradient ascent on expected information gain. It need not be reachable or in the pool; it marks where the model is most uncertain. Candidates are scored against the anchor's viewing geometry, and a greedy ridge-leverage step distills the pool into a small, non-redundant shortlist without rendering any candidate. The shortlist can be used in two ways. AGILE-GS takes the first view on it as the next view, so no Fisher information is computed for any candidate. AGILE-GS+ computes the Fisher information gain of each shortlisted view and picks the best, so the expensive evaluation runs on a handful of views rather than the whole pool. On standard benchmarks and in closed-loop embodied acquisition, both match or exceed existing baselines while cutting selection latency by one to two orders of magnitude.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

LiTe-GS: Oracle-Efficient Next Best View Selection for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Selecting informative camera views is critical for efficient training and adaptive refinement in 3D Gaussian Splatting, where each observation significantly influences model parameters. However, information-driven view-selection strategies can require repeated evaluations of expensive information-gain oracles as the number of candidate views increases. We propose LiTe-GS, an oracle-efficient method for next best view selection in 3D Gaussian Splatting. LiTe-GS reduces the number of information-oracle evaluations by performing randomized subset evaluation of candidate views rather than exhaustively scoring the full candidate pool. The resulting approach achieves expected $O(M\log(1/ε))$ oracle complexity with respect to the number of candidate views $M$, independent of the selection cardinality $K$, while providing an explicit trade-off between oracle efficiency and approximation quality through $ε$. We provide theoretical guarantees on oracle complexity and approximation performance under the proposed selection scheme. Experiments on Blender and Mip-NeRF 360 demonstrate that LiTe-GS maintains reconstruction quality comparable to Fisher-information-based baselines while substantially reducing the number of Fisher-oracle evaluations across different acquisition settings.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Splat-CBF: Safe Next-Best-View Control in 3D Gaussian-Splat Maps

Where to look and how to move? A robot navigating an unmapped environment must do both at once, and the two goals pull against each other. The regions most worth observing are the ones the map knows least about, and those are exactly where the robot cannot trust its collision margins. We resolve this tension by introducing Splat-CBF, an active perception control barrier function that steers the camera toward the next best view while collision avoidance is enforced as a hard constraint. Safety is enforced by a risk-aware control barrier function that turns the Average Value-at-Risk of the Gaussian field into a single smooth hard constraint. Perception is enforced by a second barrier that rewards camera orientations with high expected Fisher information gain near the robot's planned path. The two meet in a quadratic program where safety is hard and perception is soft, with a slack penalty that adapts to how often perception has already been relaxed and how close the robot is to an uncertain region. We verify the method in indoor simulations, a Isaac Kinova manipulator and in experiments on an Ackermann-drive robot. Our results assert that robot navigates faster, gathers more information, and runs faster online than safety-only and perception-only baselines, giving up informative motion only when safety requires it.

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arXiv2026

SemSafe-3DGS: Semantic Risk-Aware Active Navigation in Uncertain 3D Gaussian Splatting Maps

Autonomous robots operating in partially observed environments must navigate safely while acquiring observations that improve future planning. Existing safety formulations generally reason primarily about geometry. Consequently, geometrically similar scene elements may induce comparable control responses despite having different semantic consequences. We present a semantic risk aware safe-active perception framework for navigation in attributed 3D Gaussian maps. Semantic attributes modulate an Average Value-at-Risk collision clearance model through class dependent risk weights, allowing safety-critical Gaussian primitives to receive greater influence in the composite barrier. The resulting weighted clearances are aggregated into a control barrier function, while a trajectory-relevant active perception barrier promotes observations that reduce geometric map uncertainty along the robot's anticipated motion. Both objectives are integrated in a unified CBF-QP that enforces semantic risk-aware collision avoidance as a hard constraint while relaxing information acquisition when it conflicts with safety or task progress. Experiments demonstrate efficient safety constraint, improved navigation through active perception, semantic dependent trajectory adaptation, and real-robot execution under Ackermann dynamics.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Multi-Agent Next-Best-View Optimization for Risk-Averse Planning

Multi-agent Next-Best-View (NBV) selection for safe path planning in uncertain and unknown environments requires informative, safety-aware, and efficient coordination. Centralized approaches rely on sharing raw sensor data or significant communication overhead, resulting in limited scalability. We propose a distributed, risk-aware multi-agent NBV framework in which each robot maintains a private local 3D Gaussian Splatting map and the team jointly maximizes expected information gain (EIG) restricted to masked zones along planned trajectories. The resulting distributed objective is solved by Consensus ADMM (C-ADMM) over a communication graph, with each robot exchanging only candidate viewpoints, planned trajectory descriptors, and scalar EIG contributions. Collision risk along each trajectory is modeled via Average Value-at-Risk (AV@R) over the local 3DGS map and used both to shape the masking radius and to score planned paths. Experiments in Gibson environments at multiple team sizes show that the distributed formulation approaches the centralized baseline in mapping quality and trajectory safety while reducing communication by orders of magnitude.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Conflict-Aware Active Perception and Control in 3D Gaussian Splatting Fields via Control Barrier Functions

Active perception in uncertain environments requires robots to navigate safely while acquiring informative observations to reduce map uncertainty. These objectives inherently conflict, as informative viewpoints often lie near uncertain regions with higher collision risk. To address this challenge, we develop a conflict-aware active perception and control framework for robotic systems operating in environments represented by 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Safety is enforced using a Control Barrier Function (CBF) derived from an Average Value-at-Risk AV@R collision-risk metric that accounts for geometric uncertainty and guarantees forward invariance of a safe set. To improve perception, we propose a risk-aware Expected Information Gain (EIG) formulation for selecting the next-best-view and introduce perception barrier functions that align the camera orientation with the local information-ascent direction. To obtain a tractable formulation for these conflicting safety and perception objectives, we propose a unified safety-critical, perception-aware quadratic program that enforces safety as a hard constraint while relaxing perception constraints through slack variables. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method improves both safety and information acquisition compared to existing 3DGS-based approaches.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Entropic Value-at-Risk for Inter-Vehicle Collision in Platoons: Network- and Delay-Induced Bounds on Risk Due to Extreme Events

Safe operation of connected vehicle platoons under stochastic disturbances and time-delayed dynamics requires accurate quantification of rare but dangerous events, such as inter-vehicle collisions. We propose a rigorous framework for quantifying the risk of inter-vehicle collisions in connected vehicle platoons subject to time-delayed stochastic dynamics. We adopt the \emph{entropic value-at-risk} (EVaR) as a conservative metric to capture \emph{risk due to extreme events}, highlighting its advantages over conventional Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR). By expressing the inter-vehicle distance covariance in terms of the Laplacian eigenvalues of the communication network, we derive \emph{network-and time-delay-induced bounds} on both the minimum inherent risk and the worst-case risk. Specifically, the algebraic connectivity dictates the maximum EVaR, while the largest Laplacian eigenvalue determines the minimum risk inherently induced by the network structure. Numerical simulations illustrate how network topology and time delay shape collision risk, offering actionable insights for the safe design of vehicle platoons operating under stochastic disturbances.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Incremental Risk Assessment for Cascading Failures in Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems

We develop a framework for studying and quantifying the risk of cascading failures in time-delay consensus networks, motivated by a team of agents attempting temporal rendezvous under stochastic disturbances and communication delays. To assess how failures at one or multiple agents amplify the risk of deviation across the network, we employ the Average Value-at-Risk as a systemic measure of cascading uncertainty. Closed-form expressions reveal explicit dependencies of the risk of cascading failure on the Laplacian spectrum, communication delay, and noise statistics. We further establish fundamental lower bounds that characterize the best-achievable network performance under time-delay constraints. These bounds serve as feasibility certificates for assessing whether a desired safety or performance goal can be achieved without exhaustive search across all possible topologies. In addition, we develop an efficient single-step update law that enables scalable propagation of conditional risk as new failures are detected. Analytical and numerical studies demonstrate significant computational savings and confirm the tightness of the theoretical limits across diverse network configurations.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

Efficient Greedy Algorithms for Feature Selection in Robot Visual Localization

Robot localization is a fundamental component of autonomous navigation in unknown environments. Among various sensing modalities, visual input from cameras plays a central role, enabling robots to estimate their position by tracking point features across image frames. However, image frames often contain a large number of features, many of which are redundant or uninformative for localization. Processing all features can introduce significant computational latency and inefficiency. This motivates the need for intelligent feature selection, identifying a subset of features that are most informative for localization over a prediction horizon. In this work, we propose two fast and memory-efficient feature selection algorithms that enable robots to actively evaluate the utility of visual features in real time. Unlike existing approaches with high computational and memory demands, the proposed methods are explicitly designed to reduce both time and memory complexity while achieving a favorable trade-off between computational efficiency and localization accuracy.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Distributionally Robust Cascading Risk in Multi-Agent Rendezvous: Extended Analysis of Parameter-Induced Ambiguity

Ensuring safety in autonomous multi-agent systems during time-critical tasks such as rendezvous is a fundamental challenge, particularly under communication delays and uncertainty in system parameters. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework to analyze the \emph{distributionally robust risk of cascading failures} in multi-agent rendezvous, where system parameters lie within bounded uncertainty sets around nominal values. Using a time-delayed dynamical network as a benchmark model, we quantify how small deviations in these parameters impact collective safety. We introduce a \emph{conditional distributionally robust functional}, grounded in a bivariate Gaussian model, to characterize risk propagation between agents. This yields a \emph{closed-form risk expression} that captures the complex interaction between time delays, network structure, noise statistics, and failure modes. These expressions expose key sensitivity patterns and provide actionable insight for the design of robust and resilient multi-agent networks. Extensive simulations validate the theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

Beyond Carleman Linearization of Nonlinear Dynamical System: Insights from a Case Study

Nonlinear dynamical systems are widely encountered in various scientific and engineering fields. Despite significant advances in theoretical understanding, developing complete and integrated frameworks for analyzing and designing these systems remains challenging, which underscores the importance of efficient linearization methods. In this paper, we introduce a general linearization framework with emphasis on Carleman linearization and Carleman-Fourier linearization. A detailed case study on finite-section approximation to the lifted infinite-dimensional dynamical system is provided for the dynamical system with its governing function being a trigonometric polynomial of degree one.

math.DS↗

arXiv2025

Carleman-Fourier linearization of nonlinear real dynamical systems with quasi-periodic fields

This paper presents Carleman-Fourier linearization for analyzing nonlinear real dynamical systems with periodic vector fields. Using Fourier basis functions, this novel framework transforms such dynamical systems into equivalent infinite-dimensional linear dynamical systems. In this paper, we establish the exponential convergence of the primary block in the finite-section approximation of this linearized system to the state vector of the original nonlinear system. To showcase the efficacy of our approach, we apply it to the Kuramoto model, a prominent model for coupled oscillators. The results demonstrate promising accuracy in approximating the original system's behavior.

math.DS↗

arXiv2025

Active Next-Best-View Optimization for Risk-Averse Path Planning

Safe navigation in uncertain environments requires planning methods that integrate risk aversion with active perception. In this work, we present a unified framework that refines a coarse reference path by constructing tail-sensitive risk maps from Average Value-at-Risk statistics on an online-updated 3D Gaussian-splat Radiance Field. These maps enable the generation of locally safe and feasible trajectories. In parallel, we formulate Next-Best-View (NBV) selection as an optimization problem on the SE(3) pose manifold, where Riemannian gradient descent maximizes an expected information gain objective to reduce uncertainty most critical for imminent motion. Our approach advances the state-of-the-art by coupling risk-averse path refinement with NBV planning, while introducing scalable gradient decompositions that support efficient online updates in complex environments. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework through extensive computational studies.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Distributionally Robust Cascading Risk Quantification in Multi-Agent Rendezvous: Effects of Time Delay and Network Connectivity

Achieving safety in autonomous multi-agent systems, particularly in time-critical tasks like rendezvous, is a critical challenge. In this paper, we propose a distributionally robust risk framework for analyzing cascading failures in multi-agent rendezvous. To capture the complex interactions between network connectivity, system dynamics, and communication delays, we use a time-delayed network model as a benchmark. We introduce a conditional distributionally robust functional to quantify cascading effects between agents, utilizing a bi-variate normal distribution. Our approach yields closed-form risk expressions that reveal the impact of time delay, noise statistics, communication topology, and failure modes on rendezvous risk. The insights derived inform the design of resilient networks that mitigate the risk of cascading failures. We validate our theoretical results through extensive simulations, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

Beyond Uncertainty: Risk-Aware Active View Acquisition for Safe Robot Navigation and 3D Scene Understanding with FisherRF

The active view acquisition problem has been extensively studied in the context of robot navigation using NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting. To enhance scene reconstruction efficiency and ensure robot safety, we propose the Risk-aware Environment Masking (RaEM) framework. RaEM leverages coherent risk measures to dynamically prioritize safety-critical regions of the unknown environment, guiding active view acquisition algorithms toward identifying the next-best-view (NBV). Integrated with FisherRF, which selects the NBV by maximizing expected information gain, our framework achieves a dual objective: improving robot safety and increasing efficiency in risk-aware 3D scene reconstruction and understanding. Extensive high-fidelity experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating its ability to establish a robust and safety-focused framework for active robot exploration and 3D scene understanding.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Carleman-Fourier Linearization of Complex Dynamical Systems: Convergence and Explicit Error Bounds

This paper presents a Carleman-Fourier linearization method for nonlinear dynamical systems with periodic vector fields involving multiple fundamental frequencies. By employing Fourier basis functions, the nonlinear dynamical system is transformed into a linear model on an infinite-dimensional space. The proposed approach yields accurate approximations over extended regions around equilibria and for longer time horizons, compared to traditional Carleman linearization with monomials. Additionally, we develop a finite-section approximation for the resulting infinite-dimensional system and provide explicit error bounds that demonstrate exponential convergence to the original system's solution as the truncation length increases. For specific classes of dynamical systems, exponential convergence is achieved across the entire time horizon. The practical significance of these results lies in guiding the selection of suitable truncation lengths for applications such as model predictive control, safety verification through reachability analysis, and efficient quantum computing algorithms. The theoretical findings are validated through illustrative simulations.

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