Robotics & Automation
Robotics & Automation news — Monday 28 September 2026
131 stories from 4 sources, every one in English. Each links to its publisher.
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A Day in the Life of a Roboticist: Charlie Kemp
IEEE Spectrum Robotics
Building useful robots starts with understanding the people who use them. For Charlie Kemp, cofounder and chief technology officer of Hello Robot, that means developing assistive robots that can help people with everyday tasks and support…
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Gecko Robotics works with NVIDIA to add AI agent security and control
The Robot Report
Gecko is using NVIDIA’s new agentic AI security layer in its inspection robots. Source: Gecko Robotics NVIDIA Corp. today announced its Open Agent Safety Platform, which consists of the OpenShell open-source software and Sentry reference…
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Gecko Robotics works with NVIDIA to add AI agent security and control
Robotics Business Review
Gecko is using NVIDIA’s new agentic AI security layer in its inspection robots. Source: Gecko Robotics NVIDIA Corp. today announced its Open Agent Safety Platform, which consists of the OpenShell open-source software and Sentry reference…
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Robonomics on the threshold: Economic autonomy, smart cities, and crypto wallets for humanoids
The Robot Report
From smart cities to cryptocurrency, economic factors will determine how robot fleets scale. Source: Lmi Stock Studio AI, via Adobe Stock Capital itself is a sufficient form of robot governance, hypothesized analysts at the AI Robotics…
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Robonomics on the threshold: Economic autonomy, smart cities, and crypto wallets for humanoids
Robotics Business Review
From smart cities to cryptocurrency, economic factors will determine how robot fleets scale. Source: Lmi Stock Studio AI, via Adobe Stock Capital itself is a sufficient form of robot governance, hypothesized analysts at the AI Robotics…
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Raise Robotics to discuss scaling field robots at RoboBusiness
The Robot Report
The Autonomous Mobile Fabricator operates as a ground-level AGV or mounts directly onto any Genie MEWP platform. | Source: Raise Robotics Most autonomous systems work in the lab and stall in the field. An early-stage construction robot…
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Raise Robotics to discuss scaling field robots at RoboBusiness
Robotics Business Review
The Autonomous Mobile Fabricator operates as a ground-level AGV or mounts directly onto any Genie MEWP platform. | Source: Raise Robotics Most autonomous systems work in the lab and stall in the field. An early-stage construction robot…
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Learning Vision-Based Agile Gap Traversal: Differentiable Simulation with a Warm-Started Critic
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30696v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traversing narrow gaps is challenging for autonomous quadrotors, especially when control commands come directly from high-dimensional visual observations. Existing end-to-end methods often…
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VisTacAlign: Co-Training Dexterous Policies on Tactile Human and Robot Demonstrations
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human demonstrations are a cheap source of data for dexterous manipulation, but co-training a robot policy on them requires closing the human--robot gap in every modality the policy consumes…
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FRESHLATENT: Channel-Aware Latent Adaptation for Resource-Constrained Embodied VLM Perception
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mission-critical UAVs increasingly rely on split vision-language model (VLM) perception under tight onboard-resource and wireless-communication constraints. However, corruption of…
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RECAST: From Log Replay to Closed-Loop Driving Simulation with View-Complete Actors
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31374v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Closed-loop driving simulation requires rendered observations to remain reliable as the ego vehicle and surrounding actors move beyond their recorded trajectories, exposing views absent from…
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DGT-Map: Directional Global Traversability Mapping Utilizing Multi-Task Learning for Heterogeneous Vehicles
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Off-road traversability is direction-dependent and vehicle specific, yet most global maps assign a single isotropic cost to each location. Existing learned estimators are also commonly…
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NavGen: Visual Generative Models as a Scalable Data Engine for Embodied 3D Navigation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General-purpose robot models increasingly rely on large and diverse datasets. For embodied 3D navigation, however, existing data sources face a fundamental trade-off: simulated data can be…
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Vision-Based 6-DoF Grasp Pose Estimation for Robot Cloth Unfolding
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cloth manipulation is a challenging task due to the deformable and high-dimensional nature of cloth, which leads to complex interaction dynamics and perceptual ambiguity arising from frequent…
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Imp-ACT: Adaptive Impedance Control and Action Chunking with Transformers to Learn Contact-Rich Manipulation from Demonstrations
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31225v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation requires robots to balance accurate motion tracking with compliant interaction, yet most visual-action policies leave compliance fixed at the controller level. We…
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Generate, Track, Improve: Perceptive Multi-Skill Humanoid Locomotion with RL-Fine-Tuned Motion Generators
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General purpose humanoids require locomotion controllers that are multi-skill, perceptive, dynamic, and robust enough to go anywhere humans can. In this work, we present a two layer…
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A Long-Legged, Direct-Drive Monopedal Robot Achieves Exceptional Jump Height
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate a jumping robot that reaches high (7.6 m) and fast (190 ms stance time) jumps from a single long leg driven by a direct-drive transmission, without elastic energy storage. At…
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GraspTwin: Zero-Shot Task-Oriented Grasp Optimization via a Digital Twin
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30543v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As robots transition from structured factory settings into homes, they are required to interact with an ever-increasing variety of objects. Many tasks require grasping, and often it is not…
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Privacy-Preserving Prompted Policy Search for Robotic Control
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30554v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated promising capabilities as in-context policy optimizers for Reinforcement Learning (RL), enabling policy search driven by both numerical…
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Kintsugi-VLA: Turning Failed Robot Rollouts into Recovery Data through Interventional Recoverability
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31048v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation enables scalable training of Vision-Language-Action policies by using privileged experts to generate visual demonstrations without requiring every trajectory to be collected…
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AuthGuard-R: Safety-Compliant Mission Hijacking and Dual-Gate Defense for LLM-Controlled Robots
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used as high-level planners for mobile robots, robot manipulators, and autonomous vehicles. Recent studies show that these systems can be influenced…
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CoralPlan: Observation Skill Selection and Execution for Underwater Robotic Inspection
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Underwater robotic inspection depends on acquiring views that reveal task-relevant structure. For a structurally complex coral colony, recognising the target is only the starting point: the…
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The N-5 Scaling Law: Topological Dimensionality Reduction in the Optimal Design of Fully-actuated Multirotors
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2512.23619v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the topological structure of the optimal actuation landscape for fully-actuated N-rotor aerial vehicles. By formulating the design problem on the 2N-dimensional product…
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Grounded Action Model: 3D Grounding as a Foundation for Robotics
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.23863v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Manipulation policies must know which objects matter and where they are, yet the pretrained backbones that current robot foundation models build on, from language in…
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Accuracy Evaluation of INS/ZUPT Filtering Methods Based on Different Geometric Error Definitions
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31057v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geometric filters have recently been introduced to improve the accuracy and consistency of inertial-based integrated navigation systems. Error states were defined through specific group…
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Cybflight: An Embedded Rust Autopilot for Aerial Robotics Research
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bringing an aerial robotics method from simulation to flight should not require rebuilding a mature autopilot or adding a companion computer. Cybflight is an open-source embedded Rust…
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From Visual Search to Movement Control: A Priority Field for Artificial Agents
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30704v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human spatial attention is widely conceptualized as being guided by a priority map that integrates perceptual salience, current goals, and past experiences. Here, we extend priority-based…
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Evaluation Is All You Need for Multi-Modal Autonomous Driving
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30818v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-modal planning is promising for autonomous driving by representing multiple plausible behaviors in ambiguous and long-tail scenarios. Existing methods mainly focus on improving…
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INTERACT: Interactive Planning for Autonomous Driving via Anchor-Conditioned Prediction and Trust-Region Refinement
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31137v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Driving in dense urban traffic is interactive: whether a merge or an unprotected turn succeeds depends on how surrounding agents respond to the ego vehicle. Conventional planners predict…
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Onboard Wind-Preview Model Predictive Control Using Pitot-Static Sensing for Multirotor UAVs
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective wind gust rejection and stable hovering are critical for the outdoor operation of autonomous drones. However, existing gust rejection methods are primarily reactive, inferring the…
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Guiding End-to-End Driving Models with Endpoint-Constrained Trajectory Optimization
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: End-to-end driving policies are commonly trained through open-loop behavior cloning, yet they must ultimately operate in closed-loop when deployed on a vehicle, creating a fundamental…
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CognitiveReality: Robot-Agnostic Semantic Gaussian Mapping with an LLM Agent for Immersive Collaborative VR Teleoperation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A photorealistic 3D view tells a teleoperator where a robot is, but not what the scene contains, how well each object has been observed, or how to turn pointing and speech into robot action…
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Safety-Constrained Reinforcement Learning with Post-Training Reachability Verification for Robot Navigation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2605.14174v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Safe navigation for mobile robots demands policies that remain reliable under the high-consequence perception uncertainty of cluttered environments. Yet most existing safe reinforcement…
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Beyond End-Task Success: How to Audit Visual Experience Retrieval in Robotics
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.26567v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robots that store past experiences must select which one to reuse in a new scene. Most systems select by visual similarity, and most evaluations report only the success of the selected…
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Free-Init: Scan-Free, Motion-Free, and Correspondence-Free Initialization for Doppler LiDAR-Inertial Systems
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.29375v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robust initialization is crucial for online systems. In the letter, a high-frequency and resilient initialization framework is designed for LiDAR-inertial systems, leveraging both…
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Aim Short to Reach Far: Your Frozen World Model Can Plan Better Than You Think
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30036v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Planners built on visual world models commonly score each predicted outcome by its distance to the encoded goal image. We show that this target can limit control even with exact…
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InternW0-$\Delta$: A World Action Model Bridging Predictive Dynamics and Actions with 20K+ Hours of Open Data
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31394v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) jointly model visual dynamics and action generation for generalist robot manipulation. A central challenge is to integrate priors from large-scale pretrained…
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WALT: Learning World-Model-Aligned Latent Trajectories for Autonomous Driving
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30436v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Driving world models learn rich predictive representations of the surrounding environment from visual observations, yet accurate visual prediction does not necessarily translate into…
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VkVIO: Cross-platform GPU Acceleration for Visual-Inertial Odometry with Vulkan
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Perception in robotics and XR fundamentally relies on good state estimation. Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (VI-SLAM) are proven ways of achieving…
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Tactile Sensing Array for Multi-Phalanx Sensing in Humanoid Hands
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid hands require tactile feedback across the whole finger, not just the fingertip, to grasp and manipulate objects properly. Vision and proprioception alone cannot reliably provide this…
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Aerial Manipulation in the Wild with Onboard Perception, Policy Learning, and Whole-Body Control
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aerial manipulation in outdoor environments remains challenging due to the simultaneous requirements of reliable state estimation, stable aerial motion, and precise manipulation under…
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Transformer-based Monte Carlo Localization in Construction Meshes
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To be able to perform inspection or digitization tasks, mobile robots on construction sites must be able to localize themselves reliably with respect to a global reference frame that is…
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Structured Multitask Gaussian Processes for Probabilistic Full-Body Human Motion Prediction
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2603.07096v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robots that share space with people need human motion predictions with reliable uncertainty, not just accurate means. This paper presents a structured multitask variational Gaussian…
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A Taxonomy of Construction Task Activities for Robot Workers
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2608.25395v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent vision-language-action models offer a path toward robots with broader capabilities than conventional task-specific systems. Deploying such systems in construction, however…
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Memory-Aware Multi-Sensor Perception for Efficient and Safe Navigation in Dynamic Environments
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30495v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous navigation in previously unseen environments requires effective perception, persistent environmental representation, and collision avoidance while maintaining progress toward a…
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Praxis: Distilling Physical Interaction Priors from Egocentric Videos for Generalizable Whole-Body Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mobile humanoid manipulation requires both reaching a usable workspace and preserving precise hand-object interactions as object poses and contact conditions change. Learning these behaviors…
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Auditing Latent-Space Monitors for Autonomous Driving
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Runtime failure monitors can use a model's internal representations to anticipate failures. We audit this monitoring strategy across two autonomous-driving tasks: online vectorized map…
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Realizability Is Not Enough: Encoding, Liveness, and Auditing of Synthesized Robot Supervisors
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30460v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-level robotic supervisors coordinate capabilities whose reported outcomes determine the robot's next action. Reactive synthesis can generate such supervisors with formal guarantees, but…
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FRAM: Trajectory-Guided Visual Feature Selection for Compact Language-Conditioned Robot Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models achieve strong performance in robot manipulation, but often require large numbers of parameters. In this work, we propose the Future Representation Action Model…
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Tensegrity Continuum Robots Enable Task-Adaptive Morphologies for Cooperative Behaviors
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2608.27221v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robots that can change their morphologies and behaviors for different tasks and environments hold great promise for adaptable, multifunctional systems. Modular reconfigurable robots…
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Containing Behavioral Cascades from Manipulated Claims in LLM-Powered Multi-Robot Systems
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30523v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-powered multi-robot systems are vulnerable to semantic manipulation: an accepted false world-state claim can trigger a fleet-wide behavioral cascade, causing…
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MOCHA: Multi-Objective Co-Design using Hypernetwork Architectures
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we present MOCHA, the first, to our knowledge, reinforcement learning based approach to computing a family of Pareto-optimal policies across the design space of a robot using a…
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Audit Before You Commit: Locating Belief Failures in Active Identification for One-Shot Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A robot that probes a few times before one irreversible action, such as tapping a surface before inserting a peg, must decide when the evidence is enough to commit. We argue that this…
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MR. POP: Multi-Robot Parallel Optimizing Planner for Almost-Surely Asymptotically Optimal Planning
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30644v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Finding globally optimal paths remains a fundamental challenge in multi-robot motion planning. Despite acceleration of almost-surely asymptotically optimal (a.s.a.o.) planners via CPU-based…
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Multi-Objective Human-in-the-Loop Bayesian Optimization of a Lower-Limb Exoskeleton
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30695v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human-in-the-loop optimization (HILO) is a common approach for optimizing the control of assistive devices to account for the wearer's unique biomechanics and subjective preferences. However…
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Anatomy-Aware Dexterity-Driven Design Optimization of Surgical Continuum Robots
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30745v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Performing complex medical procedures with continuum robots requires careful selection of their geometric design parameters. The robot should have high dexterity in the specific anatomical…
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Design and Characterization of a Variable-Length Continuum Mechanism with Force Locking
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The utility of flexible continuum mechanisms for dexterous navigation is often impaired by their low stiffness, making them ineffective at manipulation in high-force scenarios. To address…
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Precision at Speed: Sample-Efficient Online Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Hydraulic Excavator Control
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Precise, high-speed control remains challenging for robots with complex actuation dynamics. Learning directly on hardware is further constrained by the cost of real-world interaction. We…
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Enabling a Unified Cross-Domain Representation for Two-Finger Gripper Manipulation via Interaction-Centric Modeling
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving robust cross-embodiment generalization in imitation learning demands overcoming a critical representation flaw that inextricably entangles task semantics with hardware-specific…
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Augmented Reality Interfaces for Human-Robot Collaboration: Development of a ROS 2-Based Sensor Streaming Framework and Validation via SLAM Algorithms
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31396v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) has taken on a central role in Industry 4.0 and collaborative robotics, demanding communication channels that are increasingly bidirectional…
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TRACKGRAPH: Online Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs via Image-Space Tracking
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-vocabulary 3D maps enable robots to reason about previously unknown environments using natural language. However, existing systems typically segment every incoming image, associate…
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SANDO: Safe Autonomous Trajectory Planning for Dynamic Unknown Environments
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2604.07599v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents SANDO, a safe trajectory planner for 3D dynamic unknown environments. Existing soft-constraint planners are fast but do not guarantee collision-free paths, while…
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Topology-Driven Anti-Entanglement Control for Soft Robots
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2605.05236v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the field of precision manufacturing in complex constrained environments, the role of soft robots is increasingly prominent, and the realization of anti-winding control based on…
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Towards VLA-Dreamer: Refining VLA Behavior Using World Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs), while showing strong potential for robot control, require massive amounts of high-quality imitation learning data. Moreover, the absence of an explicit…
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Hide-and-Seek in Trajectories: Discovering Failure Signals for VLA Runtime Monitoring
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2605.30834v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable robots to follow natural language instructions and generalize across diverse tasks, but they remain vulnerable to execution failures that…
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VLANeXt Family: A Systematic Study of VLA Models from Core Recipes to Emerging Paradigms
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2602.18532v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Following the rise of large foundation models, Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) emerged, leveraging strong visual and language understanding from Vision-Language Models for…
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HuGo: LLMs as Whole-Body Policy Code Designers for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30594v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For humanoids to be useful in everyday environments, they must perform a wide range of tasks that couple locomotion and manipulation. Existing approaches commonly acquire a loco-manipulation…
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History-Conditioned Spatio-Temporal Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language Navigation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2603.06480v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables robots to follow natural-language instructions in visually grounded environments, serving as a key capability for embodied robotic systems. Recent…
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EmbodiedSWE: Coding Agents for Long Horizon Dexterous Robotics
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.27308v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study coding agents for long-horizon, dexterous robotics and ask whether their solutions can provide scalable supervision for learning general robot policies. To test this, we develop…
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GPT-6-Astra Lights Up Embodied Navigation: Evaluation in Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.29861v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate whether GPT-6-Astra, a general-purpose foundation model, can navigate unfamiliar environments using its own perception, reasoning, and decision-making capabilities. Our…
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SimpleMemVLA: A Simple but Effective Native-Video Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.05533v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long-horizon manipulation is partially observable: the information needed to choose the next action may appear only in observations from minutes earlier. Existing memory mechanisms…
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Co-design of trajectory and morphology for a vertical jump-climbing robot
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31014v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Animals such as squirrels and even bears have adapted to rapidly climb up trees and other complex vertical terrain, but achieving comparable agility has been a challenge for climbing robots…
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Can a Robot Read Braille? - Learning to Adapt Contact via Imitation Learning for Tactile Braille Recognition
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30676v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For people who are blind, touch provides an essen-tial channel for accessing written information through Braille. Bringing a similar capability to robots requires them not only to recognize…
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Fast Plans, Faithful Actions: Closing the Planning-Execution Gap in Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hierarchical vision-language-action (VLA) systems consist of a high-level vision-language planner and a low-level action expert that generates continuous actions. This hierarchical design has…
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Impedance Cloning: Learning Equilibrium Point Parameters for Contact-Rich Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30842v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation requires robots to regulate force against surfaces whose geometry deviates unpredictably from training conditions. Trajectory-based imitation learning, which…
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PHASE: Compliance-Enabled Tactile Phase Retrieval for Few-Shot Insertion Learning
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30889v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich assembly tasks such as peg-in-hole insertion remain difficult to learn from limited demonstrations. While retrieval-augmented imitation learning, which augments target…
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CoFL-S: Spatially Queryable Sector Flow Fields for Local Language-Conditioned Navigation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2607.02222v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation has increasingly emphasized high-level instruction reasoning, memory, global map construction, and instruction decomposition, while the low-level action…
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EAGOR: Embodied Reasoning in Omni-direction
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2607.06165v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Omni-directional (360{\deg}) cameras provide embodied agents with a holistic view of their surroundings, making them suited for directional reasoning in tasks such as navigation and…
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Keep the Future, Drop the Rollout: RIFT for World Action Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2608.11521v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World action models (WAMs) condition robot actions on predicted futures, but iterative video rollout increases deployment latency. We ask whether action generation requires the evolving…
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Latent Policy Steering: An Efficient and Flexible Framework for Cross-Embodiment Transfer
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.22521v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The performance of learned robot visuomotor policies depends heavily on the size and quality of their training data, yet collecting high-quality demonstrations remains costly for robots…
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Learning Robot Policies from Sparse Success Signals via STL-Guided Stein Variational Policy Gradient
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31606v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning robot policies for tasks with sparse success signals is challenging when completion depends on coordinated actions, precise contact outcomes, or satisfying several conditions…
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See to Reach, Feel to Grasp: Learning A Blind Grasp Reflex for Anthropomorphic Robotic Hands
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31323v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work we study if a robotic hand using proprioception alone can grasp diverse objects with no visual observation. We present a modular dexterous grasping architecture that separates…
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dRVG: Quadtree-Guided, Resolution-Complete Online Motion Planning for Polygonal Robots in Unknown Environments
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the dynamic rotation-stacked visibility graph (dRVG), an online motion planner that guides polygonal robots to specified goals in initially unknown, static environ- ments. It…
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Flatness-Preserving Residual Learning for Real-Time Tight Quadrotor Formation Flight
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2607.12275v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quadrotors flying in tight formations are severely affected by turbulent aerodynamic interactions, such as downwash, that can cause catastrophic collisions if left unmodeled. To…
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Time-To-Reach Separation and Safety Filtering for Safe, Fair, and Efficient Multi-Agent Coordination
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2605.20625v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Advanced Air Mobility operations are expected to significantly increase aerial traffic in urban airspace, requiring autonomous traffic management systems to ensure collision-free…
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Critic Architecture Matters: Dual vs. Unified Critics for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2606.11891v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-objective reinforcement learning for humanoid robots must coordinate locomotion and manipulation within one policy. A natural design choice is between a single (unified) critic that…
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AD-WM: Action-Discriminative World Models for Counterfactual Model Predictive Control
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30264v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Latent world models are typically trained to predict factual transitions, whereas model predictive control (MPC) must compare alternative actions from the same state. A model can…
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Comparative Evaluation of an XR Pen-based Control Interface for Semi-Autonomous Mobile Robot Navigation in Service Environments
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31117v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Service robots remain difficult to deploy in domestic environments, partly because fully autonomous operation is not yet reliable in unpredictable surroundings, and partly because…
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Policy-Calibrated DAgger: Offline Calibrated Noise Injection for Imitation Learning
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Policies trained with imitation learning can accumulate errors over time, causing the robot to drift outside the training distribution. Existing methods mitigate this covariate shift by…
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SatNav: A Scalable Benchmark for Long-Horizon UAV Vision-Language Navigation from Satellite Imagery
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31507v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) vision-language navigation (VLN) requires agents to follow instructions across extended urban spaces, inherently demanding long-term memory and…
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TAGA: Terrain-aware Active Gaze Learning for Generalizable Agile Humanoid Locomotion
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2606.05880v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agile humanoid locomotion across diverse challenging terrain demands both wide perceptual coverage and precise local geometry understanding. Motivated by the way humans selectively look…
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Cloak: Zero-Shot Cross-Embodiment Manipulation by Masking the End-Effector from the VLA
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2606.22836v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present Cloak, a training recipe that endows a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model with zero-shot cross-embodiment transfer by cloaking the end-effector from its own wrist camera. The…
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Decoupling Intention from Trajectory: A Representational Deduction Framework for World Action Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2608.06994v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) aim to construct a unified architecture capable of understanding world state evolution and guiding to generative motion planning. However, existing visual…
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SUN: Agentic Robot Policy Learning with Persistent Task Programs
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2608.31167v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Model-based control can directly execute specified objectives, while learning can amortize such behaviors into reactive policies, making their combination a natural solution to…
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Geometric-Photometric Event-based 3D Gaussian Ray Tracing
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2512.18640v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Event cameras offer a high temporal resolution over traditional frame-based cameras, which makes them suitable for motion and structure estimation. However, it has been unclear how…
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POIL: Point-based One-Shot Imitation Learning with Stable Dynamical Systems
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30404v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present POIL, a point-based one-shot imitation learning framework with stable dynamical systems. While one-shot imitation avoids collecting extensive demonstrations, successful one-shot…
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Learning-Accelerated Narrow-Phase Collision Detection via Check Ordering for Sampling-Based Motion Planning
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30599v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collision detection is critical for ensuring the safety of planned paths. However, it imposes a non-negligible computational burden on motion planners, motivating extensive studies on…
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ExoLaN: Physics-Consistent Context-Aware Dynamics Learning for Exoskeletons
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31434v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Task-agnostic assistive exoskeleton control based on human intention offers greater flexibility than conventional approaches that rely on predefined tasks or motion patterns. Human joint…
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Learning-Based Pressure Predictive Control of a Vertebraic Soft Robotic Tail
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soft robots have attracted much attention for their safe human-robot interaction and flexibility, but the typical continuum structure and nonlinear material behavior make the kinematics…
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Moving Horizon Estimation for Quadrotors: An $\mathcal{L}_1$ Adaptive Optimizer Approach
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30777v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Moving Horizon Estimation (MHE) is a state estimation method based on finite-horizon optimization that can offer higher accuracy at the cost of increased computation compared to Kalman…
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Quadruped Obstacle Avoidance and Footstep Planning with Distributed Low-cost Time-of-Flight Sensors
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31008v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quadruped robots typically rely on depth cameras and LiDAR sensors to map their local environment. However, these sensors have limited close-range coverage, are relatively expensive, and…
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Compact Force Sensor for Dual-UAV Cable-Suspended Payload Transport with Tension-Aware Outer-Loop Control
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cooperative payload transportation using multiple \textit{Unmanned Aerial Vehicles} (UAVs) poses challenges in stability, coordination, and robustness, especially under external disturbances…
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Representation-Guided Generation and Integration of Executable Programs for Robot Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31337v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Building a robotic manipulation system requires connecting perception, planning, and control through carefully designed representations and interfaces. VLM code generation offers a way to…
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Modeling and Generative-AI-Based Design of Load-Adaptive Gravity Balancing Mechanisms
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Load-adaptive gravity balancing mechanisms (LA-GBMs) can accommodate various loading conditions by passively changing their characteristics in response to payload variations. However, their…
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Air-Ground Collaborative Robots for Fire and Rescue Missions: A Survey from the Mapping and Navigation Perspective
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2412.20699v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Air-ground collaborative robots have shown great potential in the field of fire and rescue. Mapping and navigation, as the key foundation for air-ground collaborative robots to achieve…
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ScaRF-SLAM: Scale-Consistent Reconstruction with Feed-Forward Models and Classical Visual SLAM
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2606.00307v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent works have explored unifying SLAM with geometric foundation models (GFMs). However, directly using GFM predictions for tracking is highly sensitive to model capability and…
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EgoSpeedUp: Transferring Human Manipulation Tempo to Robot Policies
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.29310v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robot manipulation policies trained through imitation learning inherit not only the demonstrated behavior but also the conservative execution tempo of robot demonstrations. Existing…
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Frequency-Modulated Piezoelectric Haptic Display
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30626v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a frequency-modulated (FM) haptic display based on piezoelectric vibrating actuators. Existing haptic displays commonly encode haptic intensity through the deformation amplitude of…
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SeA-RVINS: Semantic-Aware Tightly Coupled RTK-Visual-Inertial System with Correlation-Preserving Robust Estimation for Urban Navigation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30814v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable absolute pose estimation in urban environments is undermined by outlier measurements and incorrect temporal associations that can persist in tightly coupled estimators. Global…
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TACTIC: Understanding Tactile Encoders and Conditioning for Contact-rich Robot Manipulation Policies
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30969v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile information is essential for contact-rich manipulation tasks in robotics. Vision-based tactile sensors make it particularly easy to design end-to-end manipulation policies with…
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A Support-Enhanced Granular-Jamming Gripper for RL-based Grasping with Continuum Manipulators
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.29093v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continuum manipulators provide dexterous motion in confined spaces, but structural compliance, hysteresis, and load-dependent deformation leave residual position and orientation errors…
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ST-pRRTC: Parallel Space-Time RRT-C with Adaptive Goal-Time Forests
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose ST-pRRTC, a GPU-parallel space- time RRT-Connect motion planner for problems with known obstacle trajectories and unspecified arrival time. Searching over many arrival times…
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RoboMonitor: Label-Efficient Runtime Monitoring of Robot Task Execution via Predictive Representation Learning
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30715v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned robot policies produce actions, but their outputs alone do not establish whether execution is progressing as intended. Robot execution monitoring requires identifying the current…
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HIRE: History-Conditioned Interaction Reasoning and High-Rate Execution for Visually Aliased Precision Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30828v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Precision manipulation with contact-critical interactions is often history-dependent: visually similar observations can correspond to different latent interaction states and therefore require…
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DualManip: Agentic Dynamic Manipulation via Dual-Path Semantic Reasoning and Geometric Adaptation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31112v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) enable open-vocabulary reasoning for robot manipulation, but their high inference latency limits responsiveness in dynamic scenes. Many scene changes, however…
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SoGuDiff: Socially Guided Diffusion for Steerable, Norm-Grounded Robot Navigation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Beyond collision avoidance, socially competent robot navigation requires adherence to implicit social conventions that vary across contexts, cultures, and deployment requirements. Many…
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SASI: Leveraging Sub-Action Semantics for Robust Early Action Recognition in Human-Robot Interaction
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2604.27508v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding human actions is critical for advancing behavior analysis in human-robot interaction. Particularly in tasks that demand quick and proactive feedback, robots must recognize…
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NAC: Neural Action Codec for Vision-Language-Action Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2606.21372v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models rely on discrete action tokenizers to bridge continuous robot control and autoregressive sequence modeling, yet existing tokenizers often trade off…
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Bundled Contact Gradients: Stabilizing Differentiable Simulation for Deployable Dynamic Tasks
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30951v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Differentiable simulation provides analytic gradients of robot dynamics, enabling fast and sample-efficient first-order policy optimization. However, obtaining smooth and informative…
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Evaluating the Impact of Adaptive Extended Reality on Human-Robot Interaction Across the Reality-Virtuality Continuum
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31138v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As populations in developed countries age and labor shortages intensify, Cybernetic Avatars (CAs) are proposed to extend human capabilities through robotic embodiments, requiring effective…
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Structured-Diffuser: Diffusion with Task-Conditioned Structured Priors for Motion Planning
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2509.25685v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose Structured-Diffuser, a diffusion planner that embeds task and motion structure directly into the noise model. Unlike standard diffusion-based planners that rely on zero-mean…
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Learning to Leverage Compliance: A Policy-Admittance Learning Framework for Robotic Insertion
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.31439v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Policy learning and compliant control offer a promising route to reliable autonomous assembly under pose errors and contact uncertainty. However, combining them does not ensure coordination…
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Actively Resolving Contextual Uncertainty for Underspecified Tasks in Natural Language
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30428v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation models provide robots with the ability to interpret natural language and reason about environmental context, yet most language-conditioned policies assume that goals are…
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A Second Torque Port for Series Elastic Actuators: Parallel-Integrated Design and Time-Scale Torque Allocation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A series elastic actuator has a single torque port and pays for it twice: the geared motor must swing its own reflected inertia through the spring, so the amplitude it delivers collapses as…
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Gait-Level Motion Design and Evaluation Framework for Grasp-Based Dynamic Locomotion in Microgravity
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2605.21704v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Locomotion in microgravity often relies on sparsely and irregularly arranged anchors, motivating grasp-based mobility with multiple limbs. In this setting, dynamic traversal requires…
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Measurement and Potential Field-Based Patient Modeling for Model-Mediated Tele-ultrasound
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2509.15325v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Teleoperated ultrasound can improve diagnostic medical imaging access for remote communities. Having accurate force feedback is important for enabling sonographers to apply the…
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TinyCVIO: A Constellation-Aided Visual-Inertial Odometry System for Nanodrones
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30358v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Nanodrones require accurate, real-time state estimation under severe sensing and computational constraints. We present TinyCVIO, a visual-inertial odometry system that co-designs miniature…
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VLaRL: Augmenting Vision-Language-Action Models with Simulation-Trained Latent-Conditioned Residual RL
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide broad, instruction-conditioned manipulation behaviors, but their physical execution can remain imprecise during contact-rich interaction. Residual…
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Causeway: Restoring Task Accessibility for Instruction Switching in VLA Policies
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies can execute many tasks from standard initial states, yet a new instruction may fail after another task has altered the robot's physical state. We study…
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FMCW-LIO: A Doppler LiDAR-Inertial Odometry
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.29374v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conventional LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO) or simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods heavily rely on geometric features of environments, as LiDARs primarily provide range…
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LiTe-GS: Oracle-Efficient Next Best View Selection for 3D Gaussian Splatting
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.30393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Selecting informative camera views is critical for efficient training and adaptive refinement in 3D Gaussian Splatting, where each observation significantly influences model parameters…