Graduate Student Presentations
Fall 2025 archive. CS498GC Mobile Robotics ran in Fall 2025 (Prof. Girish Chowdhary; TA Kulbir Singh Ahluwalia). Deadlines, office hours and course links on this page are from that semester and are kept as a reference.
For CS498GC 4-credit students (Fall 2025): each student gave a 15-minute presentation + 5-minute Q&A on an assigned, state-of-the-art SLAM paper.
Fall 2025 graduate presentation papers and dates are listed below (presenter names removed).
Fall 2025 graduate presentation papers and dates are listed below (presenter names removed).
TL;DR - Key Requirements
- Slides due exactly 1 week before your presentation date (see deadlines below)
- Mandatory TA office hours for slides feedback: attend one week prior to your talk
- Talk length: 15 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A (strict timing; 4 talks/day)
Deadlines at a Glance
| Presentation Date | Slides Due (1 week prior) |
|---|---|
| Fri, Nov 21 | Fri, Nov 14 |
| Wed, Dec 3 | Wed, Nov 26 |
| Fri, Dec 5 | Fri, Nov 28 |
| Wed, Dec 10 | Wed, Dec 3 |
What We Want You to Learn (and Show)
- Methodology & architecture: explain the system diagram and motivate each design choice
- Novelty: what's truly new and why it matters
- Limitations: be specific and evidence-based (failure cases, assumptions, compute/data constraints)
- Improvements: concrete ideas to address those limitations
Prof. Girish's suggested questions for a compelling talk:
- Why is it important?
- Why is it hard?
- How is it novel?
- Why does it work?
Suggested Slide Outline (Target: 15 minutes)
- Problem & motivation (tie explicitly to mobile robotics/SLAM)
- Prior art (2–3 key related works; cite fairly but highlight shortcomings)
- Key contribution & approach (detailed system/architecture diagram with time estimates)
- Technical depth (walk us through the math/algorithms; highlight novel formulations)
- Results (datasets, metrics, comparison tables, visualizations; be critical)
- Demo/video (if available - real-world robot footage is gold!)
- Limitations (specific failure cases from the paper or your analysis)
- Future work & your ideas (thoughtful proposals for addressing those limitations)
- Q&A prep (anticipate technical questions on losses, hyperparameters, training)
Target: ~15 slides for 15 minutes
Grading Rubric
- Technical Understanding (40%)
- Accurate explanation of algorithms
- Depth of insight into methodology
- Critical analysis (not just summary)
- Clarity & Organization (30%)
- Logical flow and narrative
- Clear, uncluttered slides
- Effective diagrams & figures
- Critical Analysis (20%)
- Thoughtful limitations discussion
- Creative future work ideas
- Connecting to broader SLAM/robotics context
- Q&A Performance (10%)
- Demonstrating deep understanding
- Handling questions thoughtfully
- Admitting unknowns gracefully
Paper Assignments
| # | Paper Title | Paper Link | Submission Deadline | Presentation Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | MASt3R-SLAM: Real-Time Dense SLAM with 3D Reconstruction Priors | CVPR 2025 | Nov 14 | Nov 21 (Fri) |
| 2 | cuVSLAM: CUDA Accelerated Visual Odometry and Mapping | NVIDIA arXiv Preprint | Nov 14 | Nov 21 (Fri) |
| 3 | Open-Vocabulary Online Semantic Mapping for SLAM | arXiv Preprint 2024 | Nov 26 | Dec 3 (Wed) |
| 4 | VSS-SLAM: Voxelized Surfel Splatting for Geometrically Accurate SLAM | ICRA 2025 | Nov 26 | Dec 3 (Wed) |
| 5 | SCE-LIO: An Enhanced Lidar Inertial Odometry by Constructing Submap Constraints | IEEE RAL | Nov 26 | Dec 3 (Wed) |
| 6 | FMCW-LIO: A Doppler LiDAR-Inertial Odometry | IEEE RAL | Nov 26 | Dec 3 (Wed) |
| 7 | WildGS-SLAM: Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM in Dynamic Environments | CVPR 2025 | Nov 28 | Dec 5 (Fri) |
| 8 | DRAWER: Interactive 3D Scene Generation from a Single Image | CVPR 2025 | Nov 28 | Dec 5 (Fri) |
| 9 | GS-SLAM: Dense Visual SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting | CVPR 2024 | Nov 28 | Dec 5 (Fri) |
| 10 | RTG-SLAM: Real-time 3D Reconstruction at Scale using Gaussian Splatting | ACM SIGGRAPH 2024 | Nov 28 | Dec 5 (Fri) |
| 11 | Wheat3DGS: In-field 3D Reconstruction, Instance Segmentation and Phenotyping of Wheat Heads with Gaussian Splatting | CVPR 2025 Workshops (arXiv) | Dec 3 | Dec 10 (Wed) |
| 12 | Adaptive Mobile Manipulation for Articulated Objects In the Open World | arXiv Preprint 2024 | Dec 3 | Dec 10 (Wed) |
| 13 | SplaTAM: Splat, Track & Map 3D Gaussians for Dense RGB-D SLAM | CVPR 2024 | Dec 3 | Dec 10 (Wed) |
| 14 | Multimodal Spatial Language Maps for Robot Navigation and Manipulation | IJRR 2025 | Dec 3 | Dec 10 (Wed) |
Paper Categories Summary
The graduate students were assigned state-of-the-art papers from CVPR 2025, SIGGRAPH 2024, ICRA 2024/2025, and IJRR 2025, covering:
- Visual SLAM: VSS-SLAM
- Neural SLAM & 3D Gaussian Splatting: WildGS-SLAM, GS-SLAM, RTG-SLAM
- LiDAR SLAM: SCE-LIO, FMCW-LIO
- Semantic SLAM: Open-Vocabulary Online Semantic Mapping
- 3D Gaussian SLAM: SplaTAM
- Multimodal Language Navigation: Spatial Language Maps
- Robotic Applications: DRAWER, Adaptive Mobile Manipulation
- Specialized Applications: Wheat3DGS, cuVSLAM
- Real-Time Systems: MASt3R-SLAM
Presentation Schedule Summary
November 21 (Friday) - Before Thanksgiving
2 Presentations:
- MASt3R-SLAM
- cuVSLAM
December 3 (Wednesday)
4 Presentations:
- Open-Vocabulary Online Semantic Mapping
- VSS-SLAM
- SCE-LIO
- FMCW-LIO
December 5 (Friday)
4 Presentations:
- WildGS-SLAM
- DRAWER
- GS-SLAM
- RTG-SLAM
December 10 (Wednesday) - Last Day of Instruction
4 Presentations:
- Wheat3DGS
- Adaptive Mobile Manipulation
- SplaTAM
- Multimodal Spatial Language Maps
Quick Links & Resources
- Presentations Table: papers, dates, deadlines (above)
- Syllabus & weekly schedule (presentation weeks noted)
- Policies (integrity, AI-assistant use, late policy)
- Logistics (meeting times, platforms, grade distribution)
- TA Office Hours (Fall 2025): Wed 1:30-2:30 PM @ SC 4407
- Questions (Fall 2025): Campuswire or email ksa5@illinois.edu
Fall 2025 schedule. 14 papers were assigned for presentations between November 21 and December 10, 2025. Students were asked to read their paper early, with a focus on methodology, loss functions and novel contributions, and to attend TA office hours one week before their talk for slide feedback.