Lauri Suomela

I am a doctoral student at Computer Vision Group, Tampere University, Finland. My work focuses on machine learning for autonomous robot navigation, which I investigate under the supervision of Prof. Joni Kämäräinen and Prof. Harry Edelman. The long-term goal of my research is to enable long-term autonomy for robots operating in GPS-denied environments.

News

Sep 6, 2025	Synthetic vs. Real Training Data for Visual Navigation accepted to CoRL 2025 workshop on Making Sense of Data in Robotics!
Jun 9, 2025	2nd Place in the 2025 Earth Rover Challenge!

Research

2026

Data Scaling for Navigation in Unknown Environments

Lauri Suomela, Naoki Takahata, Sasanka Kuruppu Arachchige, and 2 more authors

arXiv:2601.09444 (preprint), 2026

arXiv Bib Code Website

@misc{suomela2026data_scaling,
  title = {Data Scaling for Navigation in Unknown Environments},
  author = {Suomela, Lauri and Takahata, Naoki and Kuruppu Arachchige, Sasanka and Edelman, Harry and Kämäräinen, Joni-Kristian},
  journal = {arXiv:2601.09444},
  year = {2026},
}

2025

Synthetic vs. Real Training Data for Visual Navigation

Lauri Suomela, Sasanka Kuruppu Arachchige, German F. Torres, and 2 more authors

CoRL Robot Data Workshop (preprint), 2025

arXiv Bib Code Website

@misc{suomela2025synthetic,
  title = {Synthetic vs. Real Training Data for Visual Navigation},
  author = {Suomela, Lauri and Kuruppu Arachchige, Sasanka and Torres, German F. and Edelman, Harry and Kämäräinen, Joni-Kristian},
  journal = {CoRL Robot Data Workshop},
  year = {2025},
}

2024

PlaceNav: Topological Navigation through Place Recognition

Lauri Suomela, Jussi Kalliola, Harry Edelman, and 1 more author

In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024

arXiv Bib Code Website

@inproceedings{Suomela_2024_Placenav,
  author = {Suomela, Lauri and Kalliola, Jussi and Edelman, Harry and Kämäräinen, Joni-Kristian},
  title = {PlaceNav: Topological Navigation through Place Recognition},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year = {2024},
}

2023

Benchmarking Visual Localization for Autonomous Navigation

Lauri Suomela, Jussi Kalliola, Atakan Dag, and 2 more authors

In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), Jan 2023

arXiv Bib Code Website

@inproceedings{Suomela_2023_WACV,
  author = {Suomela, Lauri and Kalliola, Jussi and Dag, Atakan and Edelman, Harry and Kämäräinen, Joni-Kristian},
  title = {Benchmarking Visual Localization for Autonomous Navigation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)},
  month = jan,
  year = {2023},
  pages = {2945-2955},
}