# RT-GuIDE: Real-Time Gaussian Splatting for Information-Driven Exploration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18122 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18122/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [ActiveSplat: High-Fidelity Scene Reconstruction through Active Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21955/) (2024)
- [FrontierNet: Learning Visual Cues to Explore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04597/) (2025)
- [Multimodal LLM Guided Exploration and Active Mapping using Fisher Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17422/) (2024)
- [Understanding while Exploring: Semantics-driven Active Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00225/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-driven 3D Gaussian Splatting Active Mapping via Anisotropic Visibility Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30342/) (2026)
- [Coverage Optimization for Camera View Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05259/) (2026)
- [Actively Resolving Contextual Uncertainty for Underspecified Tasks in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30428/) (2026)
- [Splatblox: Traversability-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Outdoor Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18525/) (2025)
- [Remember to be Curious: Episodic Context and Persistent Worlds for 3D Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22814/) (2026)
- [Semantic-Aware Guided Drone Exploration for Language-Conditioned 3D Indoor Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23160/) (2026)
- [Beyond Frontiers: Scene-Anomaly Guided Autonomous Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15828/) (2026)
- [DA-NBV: A Direction-Aware Next-Best-View Planner for Efficient 3D Reconstruction of Ships at Sea](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08025/) (2026)
- [GARO: Geometry-Aware Redundancy Optimization for Real-Time and High-Fidelity Dynamic Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23509/) (2026)
- [AGILE-GS: Anchor-Guided Fast Next-Best-View Selection for Active 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34176/) (2026)
- [VCURF: Virtual Camera-based Uncertainty of Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04076/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a framework for active mapping and exploration that leverages Gaussian splatting for constructing dense maps. Further, we develop a GPU-accelerated motion planning algorithm that can exploit the Gaussian map for real-time navigation. The Gaussian map constructed onboard the robot is optimized for both photometric and geometric quality while enabling real-time situational awareness for autonomy. We show through viewpoint selection experiments that our method yields comparable Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and similar reconstruction error to state-of-the-art approaches, while being orders of magnitude faster to compute. In closed-loop physics-based simulation and real-world experiments, our algorithm achieves better map quality (at least 0.8dB higher PSNR and more than 16% higher geometric reconstruction accuracy) than maps constructed by a state-of-the-art method, enabling semantic segmentation using off-the-shelf open-set models. Experiment videos and more details can be found on our project page: https://tyuezhan.github.io/RT GuIDE/