Robotics & Automation
Robotics & Automation news — Thursday 05 November 2026
68 stories from 2 sources, every one in English. Each links to its publisher.
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How did Agility Robotics perform on its first day on the stock market?
The Robot Report
Agility says its Digit 5 humanoids can lift up to 50 lb. | Source: Agility Robotics Earlier today, Agility Robotics began trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker “AGLT.” The company claimed that it is “the first pure-play…
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How Ambi Robotics helps its customers prepare for peak season
The Robot Report
The AmbiSort B Series can streamline final-mile deliver operations with automated induction, scanning, and ‘end-to-end’ sortation. | Source: Ambi Robotics As Black Friday and the start of peak season draw near, logistics providers across…
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Chinese regulators block SoftBank’s $5.4B acquisition of ABB Robotics
The Robot Report
ABB Robotics has about 7,000 employees, and its U.S. headquarters and factory are in Auburn Hills, Mich. | Source: ABB Robotics It has been more than a year since ABB announced it singed an agreement to sell its robotics division to the…
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Agility Robotics begins trading on Nasdaq
The Robot Report
Agility Robotics began trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market this morning under the ticker “AGLT,” after the company completed its merger with special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, Churchill Capital Corp XI. Agility’s stock opened at…
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Compounding Physical RSI: Turning Execution Failure into Inherited Capability
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalist robot policies are trained on static offline datasets, yet physical manipulation unfolds sequentially across stages. Because a weakness in a downstream stage remains unobservable…
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FOSCo-Net: Ego-centric Voxel Completion for Forest LiDAR Occlusions
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06588v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ground robots operating in temperate forests suffer from systematic LiDAR occlusions caused by tree trunks, creating persistent blind regions that degrade traversability estimation. In this…
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Riemannian Optimization-based Whole-body Obstacle Avoidance for Mobile Continuum Robots in Cluttered Environments
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06214v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inspired by the coordination of global motion and local shape adaptation in snakes, elephant trunks, and octopus arms, we propose a unified planning and control framework for mobile continuum…
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Beyond Terminal Constraints: Reliable Robot Control with Learned Safe Sets
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06196v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ensuring safety in advanced robot control methods such as Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Reinforcement Learning remains an open challenge. A common approach relies on control-invariant…
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Can Astra Solve RoboMME without Breaking the Bank?
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic manipulation often requires remembering information that is no longer visible, such as an object's location before occlusion or the order of a demonstrated action sequence. A large…
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Online Adaptation to Latent Physical Properties for Learning from Demonstration
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06118v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Manipulating visually identical objects with different physical properties requires adapting actions based on information acquired through interaction. We address the problem of learning from…
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Learning Object-Centric Motion Priors from Human for Robotic Dexterous Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05979v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Manipulating diverse objects with multi-fingered dexterous hands is challenging due to the high dimensionality and complex dynamics. Human-Object Interaction (HOI) datasets provide rich…
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LumiTac: Compact, High-Rate Six-Axis Optical Tactile Sensing for Human-Robot Interaction
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05936v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Integrating six-axis tactile feedback into robotic interfaces requires compact sensors with accurate load measurement and rapid online reconstruction. This paper presents LumiTac, a…
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Diversity-Aware Experience Replay via Statistical Leverage Scores
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05929v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Off-policy deep reinforcement learning trains on random samples from a replay buffer of past experience. In physical robot settings, that buffer is dominated by routine: thousands of…
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Closed-Loop Adaptive Sampling on a Generative Ocean Model
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05776v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adaptive sampling can substantially improve the value of sparse ocean observations by directing mobile robots toward measurements that are most informative for an evolving environment. Recent…
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Contact-Implicit Whole-Body Trajectory Optimization for Dynamic Humanoid Locomotion on Parameterizable Uneven Terrain
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This letter presents a trajectory planner for humanoid robots to perform dynamic motions on complex, parameterizable terrains using a contact-implicit whole-body optimization framework. The…
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ELA: End-to-End Latent Action Policy Learning from Video Demonstrations
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05571v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot imitation learning is limited by the scarcity of action-labeled data, while action-free demonstrations such as videos are abundant. Recent latent-action methods learn action-relevant…
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Provably Safe, Yet Scalable Reinforcement Learning
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2606.14536v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that optimize rewards while satisfying constraints. Predominant approaches rely on soft-constrained policy optimization…
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Metamaterial tactile displays with programmable virtual pixels
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2606.05572v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tactile displays present information by supplying localized mechanical signals across their surface, but conventional approaches often require an actuator to be positioned at every…
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FLAG: Flow Policy MaxEnt-RL by Latent Augmented Guidance
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2605.30749v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Maximum entropy reinforcement learning (MaxEnt-RL) enables robust exploration, yet practical implementations often restrict policies to simple Gaussians. While recent approaches…
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Reality and Perceptual Gaps in Expressive Swarm Robotics
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05244v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Moving robot swarms from simulation into the physical world can be difficult because small discrepancies in hardware, timing and communication can cascade across interacting robots and…
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Future Representation Distillation for Imagination-free World Action Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.04527v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) use the predictive knowledge of pretrained video diffusion models for robot control through future video prediction. However, iterative video denoising is…
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When Robots Outweigh Objects: How Inertia Mismatch Shapes Robot Policy Learning
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.03501v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conventional robot arms can be extremely heavy compared with the everyday objects they manipulate, creating a significant inertia mismatch at contact. Even a small accidental bump from a…
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Myoelectric Control for Upper-Limb Exoskeletons: A Decoder-Shaper-Controller Framework, Design Guidelines, and Future Directions
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.03418v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Myoelectric Control Systems (MCSs) enable voluntary control of wearable robots through muscle activity. However, intention decoding, assistance shaping, and low-level actuator control are…
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Reverse to Advance: Teleoperation-Cost Effective Hard Policy Learning from Reversed Easy Tasks
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2607.13455v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: High-quality teleoperation datasets are costly to collect, particularly for hard tasks. We observe that many tasks exhibit directional asymmetry: completing the forward hard task is…
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Test-Time Improvement of VLA Policies via Selected Diffusion Noise for Spurious-Robust Action Smoothing
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2606.14084v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies have demonstrated strong generalization in robot manipulation, but their deployment can remain unreliable due to spurious visual…
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Back to the Familiar Future: Failure Recovery for VLA Policies via Pre-Imagined Milestone Selection
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2606.09258v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies can deviate from nominal trajectories during manipulation, even when tasks remain physically feasible. Recovering from these deviations is…
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AcroRL: Learning Aggressive Quadrotor Inversion using Bidirectional Thrust
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2605.24301v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Bidirectional thrust grants quadrotors a second equilibrium condition and increased control authority, expanding the envelope of possible aggressive maneuvers and enabling inverted…
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A Graph-Based Conceptual Modeling Framework to Design for Human-Robot Coordination
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2512.15282v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Studies of human-robot interaction in dynamic and unstructured environments show that as more advanced robotic capabilities are deployed, the need for cooperative competencies to support…
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SUPER - Sensitivity-based Uncertainty-aware Performance and Risk Assessment in Visual Inertial Odometry
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2512.14189v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents SUPER (Sensitivity-based Uncertainty-aware PErformance and Risk assessment), a bounded controller that adapts visual measurement information in visual-inertial…
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MARLIN: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Guided by Language-Based Inter-Robot Negotiation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2410.14383v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning is a key method for training multi-robot systems. Through rewarding or punishing robots over a series of episodes according to their performance, they…
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Reinforcement Learning Enables Scaling Generalist Robot Policy Improvement
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06905v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The introduction of generalist robot policies has enabled a single, large model to learn to perform a variety of tasks from a vast pre-training corpus. While these models often exhibit…
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Fluidic Body: Swarm Robots as a Fluid Extension of the Hand
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06068v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Swarm robots have attracted growing interest as a physical interface for human--computer interaction, since a swarm can reshape its formation to fit the objects and surroundings it works…
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Beyond Accuracy: Information-Theoretic Decoder Evaluation Under Latent Intent
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05658v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central challenge in assistive brain-to-robot control is decoding a user's latent intent from complex and noisy brain signals. Prior approaches evaluate decoders as single-trial…
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Representations of 3D Rotations: Mathematical Foundations and Comparative Analysis
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2605.08086v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rotation representations are foundational in fields such as computer graphics, robotics, and machine learning, where precise and efficient modeling of 3D orientations is critical. This…
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cuRoboV2-Fast: Fast Torque-Limited Collision-Free Motion Planning
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present cuRoboV2-Fast, a GPU-accelerated planner that reduces both planning latency and execution time for collision-free, payload-aware, torque-limited motions. B-spline trajectory…
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Rethinking Self-Repair in Code-as-Policy Agents: What Drives Retry Success?
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Code-as-policy agents often use execution feedback to retry failed programs. Additional sampling and task guidance can also improve success, leaving the contribution of failure-specific…
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ConDR: Conservative Reachability through Neural Hamilton-Jacobi Subsolutions
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) Reachability identifies the unsafe states of a dynamical system from which it can be forced into failure under worst-case disturbance. However, classical grid-based…
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PyRUA-REAL: Robot Exploration and Adaptive Learning through RSI in the Real World
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06768v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coding agents powered by models such as GPT-6-Astra connect spatial reasoning with executable robot behavior, raising the question of how such agents can produce lasting improvements in robot…
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When to Ask for Help: Uncertainty-Triggered Aerial Refinement for Off-Road Navigation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06702v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Heterogeneous air-ground teams can use aerial sensing to address the limited range and viewpoint of ground-vehicle sensors, but deciding when the UGV needs assistance and what information the…
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Cognitive and Behavioural Effects of Haptic Feedback for ROV Teleoperation in Hazardous Environments
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06689v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Teleoperating a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) in complex underwater environments presents unique challenges. Dynamic, three dimensional obstacles and unseen water currents pose real risks…
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Which Physical Tactile Cues Matter for Contact-Rich Imitation Learning? A Controlled Real-Robot Study
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-based tactile sensors capture multiple aspects of physical interaction within a single image stream, including contact appearance, geometry, indentation depth, and tangential…
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Detecting Silent Action-Interface Mismatch with Calibrated Relational World Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06653v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A robot action can satisfy shape and range constraints yet carry the wrong semantics: axes may be permuted, signs inverted, rotations rescaled, or gripper polarity reversed. We study learned…
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SCRUB: Contact-Based Surface-Frame Estimation for Force-Motion Control with an Armless Quadruped
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wiping, sanding, and inspection robots press a sliding tool on a surface with controlled force. Controlling that force needs the surface normal, which is unknown on real-world, unmapped…
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Dynamic Shape Control of Soft Trunk Robots
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Controlling the shape profile of soft trunk robots extends their reach into complex regions of the workspace and enhances their use in practical applications. Recent advances in soft robot…
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Playing Soccer Like Humans Do: Learning Versatile and Agile Humanoid Soccer via Latent Motion Priors
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid soccer requires a robot to seamlessly combine agile locomotion, ball manipulation, and impact-rich contact dynamics across a continuous, dynamic behavioral spectrum. Yet existing…
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H^2MARL: Hierarchical Heterogeneous Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Humanoid Robot Control
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06523v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coordinated whole-body control of humanoid robots remains challenging due to high-dimensional coupled dynamics and substantial physical heterogeneity across joint degrees of freedom (JDoFs)…
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Robocasa-Mem: Benchmarking Environment and Process Memory in Long-Horizon Mobile Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the real world, mobile manipulation robots must perform complex object interactions and make multi-step decisions, often relying on task-relevant information that is no longer observable…
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$A^3$-VLA: Automatic Perception-Guided Attention Alignment for Robot Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) enable robots to perform manipulation tasks by leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to process visual observations and language instructions. However…
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TwinBridge: Digital Twin-Driven Policy and Reward Transfer for Real-World Reinforcement Learning in Laboratory Robotics
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online reinforcement learning offers an effective approach to precise laboratory manipulation, yet costly real-world demonstrations and limited access to dense process rewards hinder its…
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Vortex-Induced Torque in Grasping Soft Objects: Influence of Geometry and Pneumatic Parameters
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vortex grippers are commonly integrated into automated systems for handling objects with complex geometries in packaging, sorting, and assembling. However, their interaction with compliant…
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Scale Anchoring via Implicit Semantics and Sequence-Consistent Loop Closure for VGGT-Based SLAM
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Feed-forward geometric foundation models enable dense monocular reconstruction without requiring camera calibration, but independently reconstructed submaps can accumulate scale drift, and…
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Corridor-Based Monitoring and Emergency Braking Decision for Automated Vehicle Safety
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper addresses emergency-braking decisions for a redundant safety channel in automated vehicles. The channel is responsible for identifying hazards from sensor data and determining…
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A Layered View of LLM Support in Underwater Robotics
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06162v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This extended abstract discusses a specific and, in our experience, practically relevant role for large language models (LLMs) in underwater robotics. Our main premise is that, in underwater…
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3D Pose Estimation in Projection Space via Pixel-level Visible Light Communication
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06121v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Projector-based augmented reality enables natural interaction between users and devices by overlaying digital information onto the physical world through projected imagery. A key technical…
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The Effectiveness of Sliding Mode Control for Robust Vision Stabilization under the Plant-Binding Condition
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06028v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Boundary-layer Sliding Mode Control (SMC) has been applied to vision-based stabilization, but identifying its activation condition against simpler causal baselines (LPF, PID) has been…
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Reflection-Robust Stereo Visual-Inertial Odometry via Kalman-Filtered Ground-Height Estimation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05938v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual-inertial odometry relies on visual features that correspond to 3D points with consistent projections across sequential frames. In reflective indoor-floor environments, however…
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FWIK: Multi-Waypoint IK Selection via Lookahead Graph Search
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05897v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An ordered sequence of end-effector poses can give a redundant robot arm multiple valid joint configurations at each waypoint. Inverse kinematics (IK) computes these configurations. Choosing…
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Does RRT* Work on Uneven Terrain Meshes?
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The optimal rapidly exploring random tree (RRT*) is proven asymptotically optimal on open subsets of Euclidean space with straight-line local planning. We ask whether it works on a…
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ZipDrift: Generating Multimodal Short-Horizon MPC Costs with One-Step Drifting Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05793v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Short-horizon model predictive control (MPC) is fast but myopic. ZipMPC compensates by learning a context-dependent correction of the short-horizon cost that imitates a long-horizon expert…
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Warp: Structured Output-Space Adaptation for Frozen Robot Policies
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2606.31043v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robot policies that remain broadly competent after deployment can degrade when dynamics, contact, geometry, actuation, or sensing differ from source conditions. We study post-hoc…
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OUCH: Objective, Uniform, Controlled Haptic Stimulation for Automated Neurological Assessment
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motor responses evoked by noxious stimulation are used to assess neurological function in hospitalized patients with disorders of consciousness. In standard bedside assessments, these stimuli…
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Correct Robots Before They Make Mistakes: Proactive Human-in-the-Loop Intervention via Preference Learning
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05667v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents Proactive Human-in-the-Loop (PHIL), a framework for proactive policy correction and preference-based post-training. PHIL enables operators to preview policy-predicted…
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$\mathcal{C}^\infty$ Smooth Trajectory Planning with Application to Soft Robots
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High motion performance and avoiding structural vibrations rely on smooth trajectory planning. The smoothness requirement depends on the robot's complexity in terms of the number of degrees…
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Ctrl-F: Force as an Interface for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid motion tracking has scaled to general policies that reproduce diverse human motion, but the resulting behavior is in free-space: the tracker knows where the body should be, not how…
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GRASP: Gradient-Guided Sampling for Contact-Rich Physics-Based Motion Retargeting
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.05754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study physics-based retargeting of human demonstrations for robot learning: finding robot controls that reproduce reference motions under contact dynamics. We propose GRASP (Gradient…
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AutoDex: An Automated Real-World System for Dexterous Grasping Data Collection
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2606.23689v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling real-world dexterous-grasp data collection is limited by the sustained human effort required to operate the robot, verify grasp outcomes, and reset objects between trials…
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VABAR: A Variational Automation Benchmark for Agentic Robotics
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06881v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For robots to operate reliably in commercial and industrial applications, they must persistently perform specific tasks with known variations in object shape and pose. We call this…
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Where Is VLA Inference Time Spent? Bottlenecks and Optimization Interactions Across GPUs
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.06710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models map camera observations and language instructions to robot actions. However, their large backbones and repeated action generation can make inference take…