Collaborative Dynamic 3D Scene Graphs for Open-Vocabulary Urban Scene Understanding

Mapping and scene representation are fundamental to reliable planning and navigation in mobile robots. While purely geometric maps using voxel grids allow for general navigation, obtaining up-to-date spatial and semantically rich representations that scale to dynamic large-scale environments remains challenging. In this work, we present CURB-OSG, an open-vocabulary dynamic 3D scene graph engine that generates hierarchical decompositions of urban driving scenes via multi-agent collaboration. By fusing the camera and LiDAR observations from multiple perceiving agents with unknown initial poses, our approach generates more accurate maps compared to a single agent while constructing a unified open-vocabulary semantic hierarchy of the scene. Unlike previous methods that rely on ground truth agent poses or are evaluated purely in simulation, CURB-OSG alleviates these constraints. We evaluate the capabilities of CURB-OSG on real-world multi-agent sensor data obtained from multiple sessions of the Oxford Radar RobotCar dataset. We demonstrate improved mapping and object prediction accuracy through multi-agent collaboration as well as evaluate the environment partitioning capabilities of the proposed approach. To foster further research, we release our code and supplementary material atthis https URL.

@article{steinke2025_2503.08474,
  title={ Collaborative Dynamic 3D Scene Graphs for Open-Vocabulary Urban Scene Understanding },
  author={ Tim Steinke and Martin Büchner and Niclas Vödisch and Abhinav Valada },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.08474},
  year={ 2025 }
}