Papers

Modern engineering systems, such as autonomous vehicles, flexible robotics, and intelligent aerospace platforms, require controllers that are robust to uncertainties, adaptive to environmental changes, and safety-aware under real-time constraints. RL offers powerful data-driven adaptability for systems with nonlinear dynamics that interact with uncertain environments. RL, however, lacks built-in mechanisms for dynamic constraint satisfaction during exploration. MPC offers structured constraint handling and robustness, but its reliance on accurate models and computationally demanding online optimization may pose significant challenges. This paper proposes an integrated MPC-RL framework that combines stability and safety guarantees of MPC with the adaptability of RL. During training, MPC defines safe control bounds that guide the RL component and that enable constraint-aware policy learning. At deployment, the learned policy operates in real time with a lightweight safety filter based on Lipschitz continuity to ensure constraint satisfaction without heavy online optimizations. The approach, which is validated on a nonlinear aeroelastic wing system, demonstrates improved disturbance rejection, reduced actuator effort, and robust performance under turbulence. The architecture generalizes to other domains with structured nonlinearities and bounded disturbances, offering a scalable solution for safe artificial-intelligence-driven control in engineering applications.

We present SAGA, a versatile and adaptive framework for visuomotor control that can generalize across various environments, task objectives, and user specifications. To efficiently learn such capability, our key idea is to disentangle high-level semantic intent from low-level visuomotor control by explicitly grounding task objectives in the observed environment. Using an affordance-based task representation, we express diverse and complex behaviors in a unified, structured form. By leveraging multimodal foundation models, SAGA grounds the proposed task representation to the robot's visual observation as 3D affordance heatmaps, highlighting task-relevant entities while abstracting away spurious appearance variations that would hinder generalization. These grounded affordances enable us to effectively train a conditional policy on multi-task demonstration data for whole-body control. In a unified framework, SAGA can solve tasks specified in different forms, including language instructions, selected points, and example demonstrations, enabling both zero-shot execution and few-shot adaptation. We instantiate SAGA on a quadrupedal manipulator and conduct extensive experiments across eleven real-world tasks. SAGA consistently outperforms end-to-end and modular baselines by substantial margins. Together, these results demonstrate that structured affordance grounding offers a scalable and effective pathway toward generalist mobile manipulation.

This paper presents Vision-Language Global Localization (VLG-Loc), a novel global localization method that uses human-readable labeled footprint maps containing only names and areas of distinctive visual landmarks in an environment. While humans naturally localize themselves using such maps, translating this capability to robotic systems remains highly challenging due to the difficulty of establishing correspondences between observed landmarks and those in the map without geometric and appearance details. To address this challenge, VLG-Loc leverages a vision-language model (VLM) to search the robot's multi-directional image observations for the landmarks noted in the map. The method then identifies robot poses within a Monte Carlo localization framework, where the found landmarks are used to evaluate the likelihood of each pose hypothesis. Experimental validation in simulated and real-world retail environments demonstrates superior robustness compared to existing scan-based methods, particularly under environmental changes. Further improvements are achieved through the probabilistic fusion of visual and scan-based localization.

Ensuring the safety of Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) is a critical challenge in the development of advanced autonomous driving systems in smart cities. Among vulnerable road users, bicyclists present unique characteristics that make their safety both critical and also manageable. Vehicles often travel at significantly higher relative speeds when interacting with bicyclists as compared to their interactions with pedestrians which makes collision avoidance system design for bicyclist safety more challenging. Yet, bicyclist movements are generally more predictable and governed by clear traffic rules as compared to the sudden and sometimes erratic pedestrian motion, offering opportunities for model-based control strategies. To address bicyclist safety in complex traffic environments, this study proposes and develops a High Order Control Lyapunov Function High Order Control Barrier Function Quadratic Programming (HOCLF HOCBF QP) control framework. Through this framework, CLFs constraints guarantee system stability so that the vehicle can track its reference trajectory, whereas CBFs constraints ensure system safety by letting vehicle avoiding potential collisions region with surrounding obstacles. Then by solving a QP problem, an optimal control command that simultaneously satisfies stability and safety requirements can be calculated. Three key bicyclist crash scenarios recorded in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) are recreated and used to comprehensively evaluate the proposed autonomous driving bicyclist safety control strategy in a simulation study. Simulation results demonstrate that the HOCLF HOCBF QP controller can help the vehicle perform robust, and collision-free maneuvers, highlighting its potential for improving bicyclist safety in complex traffic environments.

CLIPS is a rule-based programming language for building knowledge-driven applications, well suited for the complex task of coordinating autonomous robots. Inspired by the CLIPS-Executive originally developed for the lesser known Fawkes robotics framework, we present an Integration of CLIPS into the ROS ecosystem. Additionally, we show the flexibility of CLIPS by describing a PDDL-based planning framework integration.

We address the problem of coordinating a team of robots to cover an unknown environment while ensuring safe operation and avoiding collisions with non-cooperative agents. Traditional coverage strategies often rely on simplified assumptions, such as known or convex environments and static density functions, and struggle to adapt to real-world scenarios, especially when humans are involved. In this work, we propose a human-aware coverage framework based on Model Predictive Control (MPC), namely HMPCC, where human motion predictions are integrated into the planning process. By anticipating human trajectories within the MPC horizon, robots can proactively coordinate their actions %avoid redundant exploration, and adapt to dynamic conditions. The environment is modeled as a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), representing regions of interest. Team members operate in a fully decentralized manner, without relying on explicit communication, an essential feature in hostile or communication-limited scenarios. Our results show that human trajectory forecasting enables more efficient and adaptive coverage, improving coordination between human and robotic agents.

Parameter tuning in real-world experiments is constrained by the limited evaluation budget available on hardware. The path-following controller studied in this paper reflects a typical situation in nonlinear geometric controller, where multiple gains influence the dynamics through coupled nonlinear terms. Such interdependence makes manual tuning inefficient and unlikely to yield satisfactory performance within a practical number of trials. To address this challenge, we propose a Bayesian optimization (BO) framework that treats the closed-loop system as a black box and selects controller gains using a Gaussian-process surrogate. BO offers model-free exploration, quantified uncertainty, and data-efficient search, making it well suited for tuning tasks where each evaluation is costly. The framework is implemented on Honda's AI-Formula three-wheeled robot and assessed through repeated full-lap experiments on a fixed test track. The results show that BO improves controller performance within 32 trials, including 15 warm-start initial evaluations, indicating that it can efficiently locate high-performing regions of the parameter space under real-world conditions. These findings demonstrate that BO provides a practical, reliable, and data-efficient tuning approach for nonlinear path-following controllers on real robotic platforms.

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) poses unprecedented traffic coordination challenges, especially with increasing UAV densities in dense urban corridors. This paper introduces a mathematical model using a control algorithm to optimize an Edge AI-driven decentralized swarm architecture for intelligent conflict resolution, enabling real-time decision-making with low latency. Using lightweight neural networks, the system leverages edge nodes to perform distributed conflict detection and resolution. A simulation platform was developed to evaluate the scheme under various UAV densities. Results indicate that the conflict resolution time is dramatically minimized up to 3.8 times faster, and accuracy is enhanced compared to traditional centralized control models. The proposed architecture is highly promising for scalable, efficient, and safe aerial traffic management in future UAM systems.

Embodied agents face a critical dilemma that end-to-end models lack interpretability and explicit 3D reasoning, while modular systems ignore cross-component interdependencies and synergies. To bridge this gap, we propose the Dynamic 3D Vision-Language-Planning Model (D3D-VLP). Our model introduces two key innovations: 1) A Dynamic 3D Chain-of-Thought (3D CoT) that unifies planning, grounding, navigation, and question answering within a single 3D-VLM and CoT pipeline; 2) A Synergistic Learning from Fragmented Supervision (SLFS) strategy, which uses a masked autoregressive loss to learn from massive and partially-annotated hybrid data. This allows different CoT components to mutually reinforce and implicitly supervise each other. To this end, we construct a large-scale dataset with 10M hybrid samples from 5K real scans and 20K synthetic scenes that are compatible with online learning methods such as RL and DAgger. Our D3D-VLP achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks, including Vision-and-Language Navigation (R2R-CE, REVERIE-CE, NavRAG-CE), Object-goal Navigation (HM3D-OVON), and Task-oriented Sequential Grounding and Navigation (SG3D). Real-world mobile manipulation experiments further validate the effectiveness.

Large Language Models (LLMs) act as powerful reasoning engines but struggle with "symbol grounding" in embodied environments, particularly when information is asymmetrically distributed. We investigate the Privileged Information Bias (or "Curse of Knowledge"), where a knowledgeable "Leader" agent fails to guide a sensor-limited "Follower" due to a lack of Theory of Mind. To quantify this phenomenon, we propose a novel Asymmetric Assistive Reasoning framework within AI2-THOR. Our experiments reveal a significant "Success Gap": while the Leader successfully perceives the target in 35.0% of episodes, the collaborative team succeeds only 17.0% of the time, implying that nearly 50% of feasible plans fail solely due to communicative grounding errors. We demonstrate that a "Pull-based" protocol (active querying) is significantly more robust than standard "Push-based" instruction, with successful episodes featuring 2x the frequency of clarification requests. This research isolates the mechanism of active uncertainty reduction as a prerequisite for safe human-AI and robot-robot collaboration.

Many cable management tasks involve separating out the different cables and removing tangles. Automating this task is challenging because cables are deformable and can have combinations of knots and multiple interwoven segments. Prior works have focused on untying knots in one cable, which is one subtask of cable management. However, in this paper, we focus on a different subtask called multi-cable unweaving, which refers to removing the intersections among multiple interwoven cables to separate them and facilitate further manipulation. We propose a method that utilizes visual feedback to unweave a bundle of loosely entangled cables. We formulate cable unweaving as a pick-and-place problem, where the grasp position is selected from discrete nodes in a graph-based cable state representation. Our cable state representation encodes both topological and geometric information about the cables from the visual image. To predict future cable states and identify valid actions, we present a novel state transition model that takes into account the straightening and bending of cables during manipulation. Using this state transition model, we select between two high-level action primitives and calculate predicted immediate costs to optimize the lower-level actions. We experimentally demonstrate that iterating the above perception-planning-action process enables unweaving electric cables and shoelaces with an 84% success rate on average.

This thesis work presents a more efficient and effective approach to training control-related tasks for humanoid robots using Reinforcement Learning (RL). The traditional RL methods are limited in adapting to real-world environments, complexity, and natural motions, but the proposed approach overcomes these limitations by using curriculum training and Adversarial Motion Priors (AMP) technique. The results show that the developed RL policies for kicking, walking, and jumping are more dynamic, and adaptive, and outperformed previous methods. However, the transfer of the learned policy from simulation to the real world was unsuccessful, highlighting the limitations of current RL methods in fully adapting to real-world scenarios.

Many aerial tasks involving quadrotors demand both instant reactivity and long-horizon planning for obstacle avoidance, energy efficiency, or trajectory tracking. High-fidelity models enable accurate control but are too slow for long horizons. Low-fidelity planners scale but cannot directly control the system, necessitating cascaded architectures. Prevailing hierarchical approaches plan with a simplified model and use a high-fidelity controller for tracking, yet this decomposition is inherently suboptimal. The controller is limited by the coarse plan, and conventional MPC alternatives shorten the horizon to stay real-time feasible. We present UNIQUE, an MPC architecture that replaces this hierarchical stacking with temporal cascading. The planning problem is formulated as the second-tail horizon of a single multi-phase MPC, rather than being solved separately. We align costs across horizons, derive feasibility constraints for the point-mass planning model, and introduce transition constraints that convert high-fidelity states into meaningful low-fidelity states. Parallel point-mass and mixed-integer solvers address nonconvexities while incorporating progressive 3D obstacle smoothing over the planning horizon. In simulations and real flights, under equal computational budgets, UNIQUE improves closed-loop tracking by up to 75% compared with standard MPC and hierarchical baselines. Ablations and Pareto analyses confirm performance gains across variations in horizon, constraint approximations, and smoothing schedules.

We present INDOOR-LIDAR, a comprehensive hybrid dataset of indoor 3D LiDAR point clouds designed to advance research in robot perception. Existing indoor LiDAR datasets often suffer from limited scale, inconsistent annotation formats, and human-induced variability during data collection. INDOOR-LIDAR addresses these limitations by integrating simulated environments with real-world scans acquired using autonomous ground robots, providing consistent coverage and realistic sensor behavior under controlled variations. Each sample consists of dense point cloud data enriched with intensity measurements and KITTI-style annotations. The annotation schema encompasses common indoor object categories within various scenes. The simulated subset enables flexible configuration of layouts, point densities, and occlusions, while the real-world subset captures authentic sensor noise, clutter, and domain-specific artifacts characteristic of real indoor settings. INDOOR-LIDAR supports a wide range of applications including 3D object detection, bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception, SLAM, semantic scene understanding, and domain adaptation between simulated and real indoor domains. By bridging the gap between synthetic and real-world data, INDOOR-LIDAR establishes a scalable, realistic, and reproducible benchmark for advancing robotic perception in complex indoor environments.

Conventional soft pneumatic actuators, typically based on hollow elastomeric chambers, often suffer from small structural support and require costly geometry-specific redesigns for multimodal functionality. Porous materials such as foam, filled into chambers, can provide structural stability for the actuators. However, methods to achieve programmable deformation by tailoring the porous body itself remain underexplored. In this paper, a novel design method is presented to realize soft porous actuators with programmable deformation by incising specific patterns into the porous foam body. This approach introduces localized structural anisotropy of the foam guiding the material's deformation under a global vacuum input. Furthermore, three fundamental patterns on a cylindrical foam substrate are discussed: transverse for bending, longitudinal for tilting, and diagonal for twisting. A computational model is built with Finite Element Analysis (FEA), to investigate the mechanism of the incision-patterning method. Experiments demonstrate that with a potential optimal design of the pattern array number N, actuators can achieve bending up to $80^{\circ}$ (N=2), tilting of $18^{\circ}$ (N=1), and twisting of $115^{\circ}$ (N=8). The versatility of our approach is demonstrated via pattern transferability, scalability, and mold-less rapid prototyping of complex designs. As a comprehensive application, we translate the human hand crease map into a functional incision pattern, creating a bio-inspired soft robot hand capable of human-like adaptive grasping. Our work provides a new, efficient, and scalable paradigm for the design of multi-functional soft porous robots.

While end-to-end autonomous driving has achieved remarkable progress in geometric control, current systems remain constrained by a command-following paradigm that relies on simple navigational instructions. Transitioning to genuinely intelligent agents requires the capability to interpret and fulfill high-level, abstract human intentions. However, this advancement is hindered by the lack of dedicated benchmarks and semantic-aware evaluation metrics. In this paper, we formally define the task of Intention-Driven End-to-End Autonomous Driving and present Intention-Drive, a comprehensive benchmark designed to bridge this gap. We construct a large-scale dataset featuring complex natural language intentions paired with high-fidelity sensor data. To overcome the limitations of conventional trajectory-based metrics, we introduce the Imagined Future Alignment (IFA), a novel evaluation protocol leveraging generative world models to assess the semantic fulfillment of human goals beyond mere geometric accuracy. Furthermore, we explore the solution space by proposing two distinct paradigms: an end-to-end vision-language planner and a hierarchical agent-based framework. The experiments reveal a critical dichotomy where existing models exhibit satisfactory driving stability but struggle significantly with intention fulfillment. Notably, the proposed frameworks demonstrate superior alignment with human intentions.

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) algorithms, including those for car-like robots and grid-based scenarios, face significant computational challenges due to expensive heuristic calculations. Traditional heuristic caching assumes that the heuristic function depends only on the state, which is incorrect in constraint-based search algorithms (e.g., CBS, MAPF-LNS, MAP2) where constraints from conflict resolution make the search space context-dependent. We propose CAHC (Conflict-Aware Heuristic Caching), a general framework that caches heuristic values based on both state and relevant constraint context, addressing this fundamental limitation. We demonstrate CAHC through a case study on CL-CBS for car-like robots, where we combine conflict-aware caching with an adaptive hybrid heuristic in CAR-CHASE (Car-Like Robot Conflict-Aware Heuristic Adaptive Search Enhancement). Our key innovations are (1) a compact conflict fingerprint that efficiently encodes which constraints affect a state's heuristic, (2) a domain-adaptable relevance filter using spatial, temporal, and geometric criteria, and (3) a modular architecture that enables systematic application to diverse MAPF algorithms. Experimental evaluation on 480 CL-CBS benchmark instances demonstrates a geometric mean speedup of 2.46$\times$ while maintaining solution optimality. The optimizations improve success rate from 77.9% to 84.8% (+6.9 percentage points), reduce total runtime by 70.1%, and enable solving 33 additional instances. The framework's general architecture makes it applicable as a reliable optimization technique for MAP2, MAPF-LNS, and other constraint-based MAPF algorithms.

Accurate underwater localization remains a challenge for inexpensive autonomous platforms that require highfrequency position updates. In this paper, we present a robust, low-cost localization pipeline for buoyancy-driven microFloats operating in coastal waters. We build upon previous work by introducing a bidirectional acoustic Time-of-Flight (ToF) localization framework, which incorporates both float-to-buoy and buoy-to-float transmissions, thereby increasing the number of usable measurements. The method integrates nonlinear trilateration with a filtering of computed position estimates based on geometric cost and Cramer-Rao Lower Bounds (CRLB). This approach removes outliers caused by multipath effects and other acoustic errors from the ToF estimation and improves localization robustness without relying on heavy smoothing. We validate the framework in two field deployments in Puget Sound, Washington, USA. The localization pipeline achieves median positioning errors below 4 m relative to GPS positions. The filtering technique shows a reduction in mean error from 139.29 m to 12.07 m, and improved alignment of trajectories with GPS paths. Additionally, we demonstrate a Time-Difference-of-Arrival (TDoA) localization for unrecovered floats that were transmitting during the experiment. Range-based acoustic localization techniques are widely used and generally agnostic to hardware-this work aims to maximize their utility by improving positioning frequency and robustness through careful algorithmic design.

Fall recovery is a critical skill for humanoid robots in dynamic environments such as RoboCup, where prolonged downtime often decides the match. Recent techniques using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have produced robust get-up behaviors, yet existing methods require training of separate policies for each robot morphology. This paper presents a single DRL policy capable of recovering from falls across seven humanoid robots with diverse heights (0.48 - 0.81 m), weights (2.8 - 7.9 kg), and dynamics. Trained with CrossQ, the unified policy transfers zero-shot up to 86 +/- 7% (95% CI [81, 89]) on unseen morphologies, eliminating the need for robot-specific training. Comprehensive leave-one-out experiments, morph scaling analysis, and diversity ablations show that targeted morphological coverage improves zero-shot generalization. In some cases, the shared policy even surpasses the specialist baselines. These findings illustrate the practicality of morphology-agnostic control for fall recovery, laying the foundation for generalist humanoid control. The software is open-source and available at: https://github.com/utra-robosoccer/unified-humanoid-getup

Mobile robots in large-scale indoor environments, such as hospitals and logistics centers, require accurate 3D spatial representations. However, 3D maps consume substantial memory, making it difficult to maintain complete map data within limited computational resources. Existing SLAM frameworks typically rely on geometric distance or temporal metrics for memory management, often resulting in inefficient data retrieval in spatially compartmentalized environments. To address this, we propose a semantic zone-based 3D map management method that shifts the paradigm from geometry-centric to semantics-centric control. Our approach partitions the environment into meaningful spatial units (e.g., lobbies, hallways) and designates these zones as the primary unit for memory management. By dynamically loading only task-relevant zones into Working Memory (WM) and offloading inactive zones to Long-Term Memory (LTM), the system strictly enforces user-defined memory thresholds. Implemented within the RTAB-Map framework, our method demonstrates substantial reductions in unnecessary signature load/unload cycles and cumulative memory utilization compared to standard approaches. The results confirm that semantic zone-based management ensures stable, predictable memory usage while preserving map availability for navigation. Code is available at: https://github.com/huichangs/rtabmap/tree/segment

Being able to anticipate the motion of surrounding agents is essential for the safe operation of autonomous driving systems in dynamic situations. While various methods have been proposed for trajectory prediction, the current evaluation practices still rely on error-based metrics (e.g., ADE, FDE), which reveal the accuracy from a post-hoc view but ignore the actual effect the predictor brings to the self-driving vehicles (SDVs), especially in complex interactive scenarios: a high-quality predictor not only chases accuracy, but should also captures all possible directions a neighbor agent might move, to support the SDVs' cautious decision-making. Given that the existing metrics hardly account for this standard, in our work, we propose a comprehensive pipeline that adaptively evaluates the predictor's performance by two dimensions: accuracy and diversity. Based on the criticality of the driving scenario, these two dimensions are dynamically combined and result in a final score for the predictor's performance. Extensive experiments on a closed-loop benchmark using real-world datasets show that our pipeline yields a more reasonable evaluation than traditional metrics by better reflecting the correlation of the predictors' evaluation with the autonomous vehicles' driving performance. This evaluation pipeline shows a robust way to select a predictor that potentially contributes most to the SDV's driving performance.

Understanding emotional responses in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) during social interaction remains a critical challenge in both developmental psychology and human-robot interaction. This study presents a novel deep learning pipeline for emotion recognition in autistic children in response to a name-calling event by a humanoid robot (NAO), under controlled experimental settings. The dataset comprises of around 50,000 facial frames extracted from video recordings of 15 children with ASD. A hybrid model combining a fine-tuned ResNet-50-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a three-layer Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) trained on both visual and geometric features extracted from MediaPipe FaceMesh landmarks. Emotions were probabilistically labeled using a weighted ensemble of two models: DeepFace's and FER, each contributing to soft-label generation across seven emotion classes. Final classification leveraged a fused embedding optimized via Kullback-Leibler divergence. The proposed method demonstrates robust performance in modeling subtle affective responses and offers significant promise for affective profiling of ASD children in clinical and therapeutic human-robot interaction contexts, as the pipeline effectively captures micro emotional cues in neurodivergent children, addressing a major gap in autism-specific HRI research. This work represents the first such large-scale, real-world dataset and pipeline from India on autism-focused emotion analysis using social robotics, contributing an essential foundation for future personalized assistive technologies.

As the popularity of on-orbit operations grows, so does the need for precise navigation around unknown resident space objects (RSOs) such as other spacecraft, orbital debris, and asteroids. The use of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms is often studied as a method to map out the surface of an RSO and find the inspector's relative pose using a lidar or conventional camera. However, conventional cameras struggle during eclipse or shadowed periods, and lidar, though robust to lighting conditions, tends to be heavier, bulkier, and more power-intensive. Thermal-infrared cameras can track the target RSO throughout difficult illumination conditions without these limitations. While useful, thermal-infrared imagery lacks the resolution and feature-richness of visible cameras. In this work, images of a target satellite in low Earth orbit are photo-realistically simulated in both visible and thermal-infrared bands. Pixel-level fusion methods are used to create visible/thermal-infrared composites that leverage the best aspects of each camera. Navigation errors from a monocular SLAM algorithm are compared between visible, thermal-infrared, and fused imagery in various lighting and trajectories. Fused imagery yields substantially improved navigation performance over visible-only and thermal-only methods.

Active robot exploration requires decision-making processes that integrate localization and mapping under tightly coupled uncertainty. However, managing these interdependent uncertainties over long-term operations in large-scale environments rapidly becomes computationally intractable. To address this challenge, we propose B-ActiveSEAL, a scalable information-theoretic active exploration framework that explicitly accounts for coupled uncertainties-from perception through mapping-into the decision-making process. Our framework (i) adaptively balances map uncertainty (exploration) and localization uncertainty (exploitation), (ii) accommodates a broad class of generalized entropy measures, enabling flexible and uncertainty-aware active exploration, and (iii) establishes Behavioral entropy (BE) as an effective information measure for active exploration by enabling intuitive and adaptive decision-making under coupled uncertainties. We establish a theoretical foundation for propagating coupled uncertainties and integrating them into general entropy formulations, enabling uncertainty-aware active exploration under tightly coupled localization-mapping. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated through rigorous theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on open-source maps and ROS-Unity simulations across diverse and complex environments. The results demonstrate that B-ActiveSEAL achieves a well-balanced exploration-exploitation trade-off and produces diverse, adaptive exploration behaviors across environments, highlighting clear advantages over representative baselines.

Thin dielectric elastomer actuator (DEA) features a unique in-plane configuration, enabling low-profile designs capable of accessing millimetre-scale narrow spaces. However, most existing DEA-powered soft robots require high voltages and wired power connections, limiting their ability to operate in confined environments. This study presents an untethered thin soft robot (UTS-Robot) powered by thin dielectric elastomer actuators (TS-DEA). The robot measures 38 mm in length, 6 mm in height, and weighs just 2.34 grams, integrating flexible onboard electronics to achieve fully untethered actuation. The TS-DEA, operating at resonant frequencies of 86 Hz under a low driving voltage of 220 V, adopts a dual-actuation sandwiched structure, comprising four dielectric elastomer layers bonded to a compressible tensioning mechanism at its core. This design enables high power density actuation and locomotion via three directional friction pads. The low-voltage actuation is achieved by fabricating each elastomer layer via spin coating to an initial thickness of 50 um, followed by biaxial stretching to 8 um. A comprehensive design and modelling framework has been developed to optimise TS-DEA performance. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the bare TS-DEA achieves a locomotion speed of 12.36 mm/s at resonance, the untethered configuration achieves a locomotion speed of 0.5 mm/s, making it highly suitable for navigating confined and complex environments.

Safely landing on the lunar surface is a challenging task, especially in the heavily-shadowed South Pole region where traditional vision-based hazard detection methods are not reliable. The potential existence of valuable resources at the lunar South Pole has made landing in that region a high priority for many space agencies and commercial companies. However, relying on a LiDAR for hazard detection during descent is risky, as this technology is fairly untested in the lunar environment. There exists a rich log of lunar surface data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which could be used to create informative prior maps of the surface before descent. In this work, we propose a method for generating stochastic elevation maps from LRO data using Gaussian processes (GPs), which are a powerful Bayesian framework for non-parametric modeling that produce accompanying uncertainty estimates. In high-risk environments such as autonomous spaceflight, interpretable estimates of terrain uncertainty are critical. However, no previous approaches to stochastic elevation mapping have taken LRO Digital Elevation Model (DEM) confidence maps into account, despite this data containing key information about the quality of the DEM in different areas. To address this gap, we introduce a two-stage GP model in which a secondary GP learns spatially varying noise characteristics from DEM confidence data. This heteroscedastic information is then used to inform the noise parameters for the primary GP, which models the lunar terrain. Additionally, we use stochastic variational GPs to enable scalable training. By leveraging GPs, we are able to more accurately model the impact of heteroscedastic sensor noise on the resulting elevation map. As a result, our method produces more informative terrain uncertainty, which can be used for downstream tasks such as hazard detection and safe landing site selection.

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) mitigates the difficulty of reward design by framing tasks as goal reaching rather than maximizing hand-crafted reward signals. In this setting, the optimal goal-conditioned value function naturally forms a quasimetric, motivating Quasimetric RL (QRL), which constrains value learning to quasimetric mappings and enforces local consistency through discrete, trajectory-based constraints. We propose Eikonal-Constrained Quasimetric RL (Eik-QRL), a continuous-time reformulation of QRL based on the Eikonal Partial Differential Equation (PDE). This PDE-based structure makes Eik-QRL trajectory-free, requiring only sampled states and goals, while improving out-of-distribution generalization. We provide theoretical guarantees for Eik-QRL and identify limitations that arise under complex dynamics. To address these challenges, we introduce Eik-Hierarchical QRL (Eik-HiQRL), which integrates Eik-QRL into a hierarchical decomposition. Empirically, Eik-HiQRL achieves state-of-the-art performance in offline goal-conditioned navigation and yields consistent gains over QRL in manipulation tasks, matching temporal-difference methods.

Parking a vehicle in tight spaces is a challenging task to perform due to the scarcity of feasible paths that are also collision-free. This paper presents a strategy to tackle this kind of maneuver with a modified Hybrid-A* path-planning algorithm that combines the feasibility guarantee inherent in the standard Hybrid A* algorithm with the addition of static obstacle collision avoidance. A kinematic single-track model is derived to describe the low-speed motion of the vehicle, which is subsequently used as the motion model in the Hybrid A* path-planning algorithm to generate feasible motion primitive branches. The model states are also used to reconstruct the vehicle centerline, which, in conjunction with an inflated binary occupancy map, facilitates static obstacle collision avoidance functions. Simulation study and animation are set up to test the efficacy of the approach, and the proposed algorithm proves to consistently provide kinematically feasible trajectories that are also collision-free.

The development of robust Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) is bottlenecked by the scarcity of "Long-Tail" training data. While fleets collect petabytes of video logs, identifying rare safety-critical events (e.g., erratic jaywalking, construction diversions) remains a manual, cost-prohibitive process. Existing solutions rely on coarse metadata search, which lacks precision, or cloud-based VLMs, which are privacy-invasive and expensive. We introduce Semantic-Drive, a local-first, neuro-symbolic framework for semantic data mining. Our approach decouples perception into two stages: (1) Symbolic Grounding via a real-time open-vocabulary detector (YOLOE) to anchor attention, and (2) Cognitive Analysis via a Reasoning VLM that performs forensic scene analysis. To mitigate hallucination, we implement a "System 2" inference-time alignment strategy, utilizing a multi-model "Judge-Scout" consensus mechanism. Benchmarked on the nuScenes dataset against the Waymo Open Dataset (WOD-E2E) taxonomy, Semantic-Drive achieves a Recall of 0.966 (vs. 0.475 for CLIP) and reduces Risk Assessment Error by 40% ccompared to the best single scout models. The system runs entirely on consumer hardware (NVIDIA RTX 3090), offering a privacy-preserving alternative to the cloud.

This paper proposes a novel Taylor-Lagrange Control (TLC) method for nonlinear control systems to ensure the safety and stability through Taylor's theorem with Lagrange remainder. To achieve this, we expand a safety or stability function with respect to time along the system dynamics using the Lie derivative and Taylor's theorem. This expansion enables the control input to appear in the Taylor series at an order equivalent to the relative degree of the function. We show that the proposed TLC provides necessary and sufficient conditions for system safety and is applicable to systems and constraints of arbitrary relative degree. The TLC exhibits connections with existing Control Barrier Function (CBF) and Control Lyapunov Function (CLF) methods, and it further extends the CBF and CLF methods to the complex domain, especially for higher order cases. Compared to High-Order CBFs (HOCBFs), TLC is less restrictive as it does not require forward invariance of the intersection of a set of safe sets while HOCBFs do. We employ TLC to reformulate a constrained optimal control problem as a sequence of quadratic programs with a zero-order hold implementation method, and demonstrate the safety of zero-order hold TLC using an event-triggered control method to address inter-sampling effects. Finally, we illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed TLC method through an adaptive cruise control system and a robot control problem, and compare it with existing CBF methods.