Stony Brook Researchers Teach Robots to See Around Corners

Stony Brook researchers have developed the first navigation system that lets robots "see around corners" with commercially available, lightweight sensors. Their method, recently presented at ICRA 2025, is paving the way for safer robots, self-driving cars, and delivery systems operating in cluttered and unpredictable environments.

In a breakthrough that could transform the safety of autonomous robots, researchers from Stony Brook have developed a way for robots to "see around corners" using single-photon LiDAR technology.

The idea was inspired by something familiar: the convex mirrors mounted at blind intersections. Those mirrors let drivers glimpse what's otherwise invisible. "We asked ourselves, what if a robot could use walls the same way - by turning walls into mirrors?" said Akshat Dave, assistant professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook and former Postdoctoral Associate at MIT Media Lab, where he started the project. The team used single-photon LiDAR, a highly sensitive device that detects even the faintest traces of light after it bounces around corners.

"We want to take this project beyond navigation, to challenges that pose real Non-Line-of-Sight problems, like teaching robots to lift hidden objects, exploring and mapping unreachable areas, and conducting search and rescue operations," Dave said. "These systems will be able to see the world in ways we do not."

The project, titled Enhancing Autonomous Navigation by Imaging Hidden Objects using Single-Photon LiDAR, is supported by the National Science Foundation (CMMI-2153855) and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Read the full story by Ankita Nagpal on the AI Innovation Institute website.