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Computer Science Robotics

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Saturday 27 December

Robotics

Asymmetric Friction in Geometric Locomotion

Ross L. Hatton, Yousef Salaman and Shai Revzen

Geometric mechanics models of locomotion have provided insight into how robots and animals use environmental interactions to convert internal shape changes into displacement through the world, encoding this relationship in a “motility map”. A key class of such motility maps arises from (possibly anisotropic) linear drag acting on the system's individual body parts, formally described via Riemannian metrics on the motions of the system's individual body parts. The motility map can then be generated by invoking a sub-Riemannian constraint on the aggregate system motion under which the position velocity induced by a given shape velocity is that which minimizes the power dissipated via friction. The locomotion of such systems is “geometric” in the sense that the final position reached by the system depends only on the sequence of shapes that the system passes through, but not on the rate with which the shape changes are made. In this paper, we consider a far more general class of systems in which the drag may be not only anisotropic (with different coefficients for forward/backward and left/right motions), but also asymmetric (with different coefficients for forward and backward motions). Formally, including asymmetry in the friction replaces the Riemannian metrics on the body parts with Finsler metrics. We demonstrate that the sub-Riemannian approach to constructing the system motility map extends naturally to a sub-Finslerian approach and identify system properties analogous to the constraint curvature of sub-Riemannian systems that allow for the characterization of the system motion capabilities.
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Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Pose-Guided Residual Refinement for Interpretable Text-to-Motion Generation and Editing

Sukhyun Jeong and Yong-Hoon Choi

Text-based 3D motion generation aims to automatically synthesize diverse motions from natural-language descriptions to extend user creativity, whereas motion editing modifies an existing motion sequence in response to text while preserving its overall structure. Pose-code-based frameworks such as CoMo map quantifiable pose attributes into discrete pose codes that support interpretable motion control, but their frame-wise representation struggles to capture subtle temporal dynamics and high-frequency details, often degrading reconstruction fidelity and local controllability. To address this limitation, we introduce pose-guided residual refinement for motion (PGR$^2$M), a hybrid representation that augments interpretable pose codes with residual codes learned via residual vector quantization (RVQ). A pose-guided RVQ tokenizer decomposes motion into pose latents that encode coarse global structure and residual latents that model fine-grained temporal variations. Residual dropout further discourages over-reliance on residuals, preserving the semantic alignment and editability of the pose codes. On top of this tokenizer, a base Transformer autoregressively predicts pose codes from text, and a refine Transformer predicts residual codes conditioned on text, pose codes, and quantization stage. Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML show that PGR$^2$M improves Fréchet inception distance and reconstruction metrics for both generation and editing compared with CoMo and recent diffusion- and tokenization-based baselines, while user studies confirm that it enables intuitive, structure-preserving motion edits.
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Robotics

Bugs with Features: Vision-Based Fault-Tolerant Collective Motion Inspired by Nature

Peleg Shefi, Amir Ayali and Gal A. Kaminka

In collective motion, perceptually-limited individuals move in an ordered manner, without centralized control. The perception of each individual is highly localized, as is its ability to interact with others. While natural collective motion is robust, most artificial swarms are brittle. This particularly occurs when vision is used as the sensing modality, due to ambiguities and information-loss inherent in visual perception. This paper presents mechanisms for robust collective motion inspired by studies of locusts. First, we develop a robust distance estimation method that combines visually perceived horizontal and vertical sizes of neighbors. Second, we introduce intermittent locomotion as a mechanism that allows robots to reliably detect peers that fail to keep up, and disrupt the motion of the swarm. We show how such faulty robots can be avoided in a manner that is robust to errors in classifying them as faulty. Through extensive physics-based simulation experiments, we show dramatic improvements to swarm resilience when using these techniques. We show these are relevant to both distance-based Avoid-Attract models, as well as to models relying on Alignment, in a wide range of experiment settings.
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Robotics

Emergence of Human to Robot Transfer in Vision-Language-Action Models

Simar Kareer, Karl Pertsch, James Darpinian et al. (+5 more)

Vision-language-action (VLA) models can enable broad open world generalization, but require large and diverse datasets. It is appealing to consider whether some of this data can come from human videos, which cover diverse real-world situations and are easy to obtain. However, it is difficult to train VLAs with human videos alone, and establishing a mapping between humans and robots requires manual engineering and presents a major research challenge. Drawing inspiration from advances in large language models, where the ability to learn from diverse supervision emerges with scale, we ask whether a similar phenomenon holds for VLAs that incorporate human video data. We introduce a simple co-training recipe, and find that human-to-robot transfer emerges once the VLA is pre-trained on sufficient scenes, tasks, and embodiments. Our analysis suggests that this emergent capability arises because diverse pretraining produces embodiment-agnostic representations for human and robot data. We validate these findings through a series of experiments probing human to robot skill transfer and find that with sufficiently diverse robot pre-training our method can nearly double the performance on generalization settings seen only in human data.
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All authors Simar Kareer, Karl Pertsch, James Darpinian, Judy Hoffman, Danfei Xu, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Suraj Nair

Friday 26 December

Robotics

A Unified AI, Embedded, Simulation, and Mechanical Design Approach to an Autonomous Delivery Robot

Amro Gamar, Ahmed Abduljalil, Alargam Mohammed et al. (+2 more)

This paper presents the development of a fully autonomous delivery robot integrating mechanical engineering, embedded systems, and artificial intelligence. The platform employs a heterogeneous computing architecture, with RPi 5 and ROS 2 handling AI-based perception and path planning, while ESP32 running FreeRTOS ensures real-time motor control. The mechanical design was optimized for payload capacity and mobility through precise motor selection and material engineering. Key technical challenges addressed include optimizing computationally intensive AI algorithms on a resource-constrained platform and implementing a low-latency, reliable communication link between the ROS 2 host and embedded controller. Results demonstrate deterministic, PID-based motor control through rigorous memory and task management, and enhanced system reliability via AWS IoT monitoring and a firmware-level motor shutdown failsafe. This work highlights a unified, multi-disciplinary methodology, resulting in a robust and operational autonomous delivery system capable of real-world deployment.
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All authors Amro Gamar, Ahmed Abduljalil, Alargam Mohammed, Ali Elhenidy, Abeer Tawakol

Robotics

VL-LN Bench: Towards Long-horizon Goal-oriented Navigation with Active Dialogs

Wensi Huang, Shaohao Zhu, Meng Wei et al. (+7 more)

In most existing embodied navigation tasks, instructions are well-defined and unambiguous, such as instruction following and object searching. Under this idealized setting, agents are required solely to produce effective navigation outputs conditioned on vision and language (VL) inputs. Real-world instructions, however, are often underspecified and require interaction to resolve ambiguity and infer user intent. To bridge this gap, we propose Interactive Instance Goal Navigation (IIGN), which extends Instance Goal Navigation (IGN) by allowing agents to freely consult an oracle in natural language while searching for a specific instance. IIGN requires agents to produce both Language and Navigation (LN) outputs, enabling interaction while moving in the environment. To support this task, we introduce VL-LN Bench, a benchmark with an automated data collection pipeline and over 41k collected long-horizon dialog-augmented trajectories for training, alongside an automatic evaluation protocol paired with a dedicated oracle for answering agent queries. Experiments reveal two core bottlenecks of IIGN: long-horizon exploration and fine-grained grounding of textual information to the correct instance among same-category distractors. Although active dialog partially alleviates these challenges, current models still lag far behind human performance. Further ablations validate the value of the data generated by our pipeline and show that the proposed oracle provides scalable assistance comparable to human support, proving VL-LN Bench as a practical testbed for dialog-enabled embodied navigation.
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All authors Wensi Huang, Shaohao Zhu, Meng Wei, Siqi Zhang, Jinming Xu, Xihui Liu, Hanqing Wang, Tai Wang, Feng Zhao, Jiangmiao Pang

Robotics

Bab_Sak Robotic Intubation System (BRIS): A Learning-Enabled Control Framework for Safe Fiberoptic Endotracheal Intubation

Saksham Gupta, Sarthak Mishra, Arshad Ayub et al. (+3 more)

Endotracheal intubation is a critical yet technically demanding procedure, with failure or improper tube placement leading to severe complications. Existing robotic and teleoperated intubation systems primarily focus on airway navigation and do not provide integrated control of endotracheal tube advancement or objective verification of tube depth relative to the carina. This paper presents the Robotic Intubation System (BRIS), a compact, human-in-the-loop platform designed to assist fiberoptic-guided intubation while enabling real-time, objective depth awareness. BRIS integrates a four-way steerable fiberoptic bronchoscope, an independent endotracheal tube advancement mechanism, and a camera-augmented mouthpiece compatible with standard clinical workflows. A learning-enabled closed-loop control framework leverages real-time shape sensing to map joystick inputs to distal bronchoscope tip motion in Cartesian space, providing stable and intuitive teleoperation under tendon nonlinearities and airway contact. Monocular endoscopic depth estimation is used to classify airway regions and provide interpretable, anatomy-aware guidance for safe tube positioning relative to the carina. The system is validated on high-fidelity airway mannequins under standard and difficult airway configurations, demonstrating reliable navigation and controlled tube placement. These results highlight BRIS as a step toward safer, more consistent, and clinically compatible robotic airway management.
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All authors Saksham Gupta, Sarthak Mishra, Arshad Ayub, Kamran Farooque, Spandan Roy, Babita Gupta

Robotics

StereoVLA: Enhancing Vision-Language-Action Models with Stereo Vision

Shengliang Deng, Mi Yan, Yixin Zheng et al. (+7 more)

While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel in generalist manipulation, they often lack fine-grained spatial awareness and show limited viewpoint robustness. This limitation largely stems from the reliance on pretrained RGB encoders, which lack explicit geometric cues and prioritize semantic alignment over geometric representation. We argue that effective visual representations for VLA models must jointly encode both semantic and geometric information. In this paper, we introduce StereoVLA, the first VLA model to incorporate rich geometric cues from large-scale synthetic stereo data. StereoVLA employs a Geometric-and-Semantic (GeoSem) vision encoder that extracts geometric cues from subtle stereo-view disparities for precise spatial perception, while simultaneously capturing semantic features from pixel observations to support language-conditioned manipulation. Additionally, we introduce two synergistic co-training objectives: Interaction-Region Depth Estimation for precise spatial reasoning, and Camera Parameter Estimation to implicitly align perception and action coordinate systems. Compared with baselines that employ various input modalities, StereoVLA achieves a 33.4% absolute gain in success rate in real-world experiments and demonstrates robustness to near-hemispheric camera perspectives. Project page: https://shengliangd.github.io/StereoVLA-Webpage.
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All authors Shengliang Deng, Mi Yan, Yixin Zheng, Jiayi Su, Wenhao Zhang, Yitao Zeng, Xiaoguang Zhao, Heming Cui, Zhizheng Zhang, He Wang

Robotics

Flexible Multitask Learning with Factorized Diffusion Policy

Chaoqi Liu, Haonan Chen, Sigmund H. Høeg et al. (+4 more)

Multitask learning poses significant challenges due to the highly multimodal and diverse nature of robot action distributions. However, effectively fitting policies to these complex task distributions is often difficult, and existing monolithic models often underfit the action distribution and lack the flexibility required for efficient adaptation. We introduce a novel modular diffusion policy framework that factorizes complex action distributions into a composition of specialized diffusion models, each capturing a distinct sub-mode of the behavior space for a more effective overall policy. In addition, this modular structure enables flexible policy adaptation to new tasks by adding or fine-tuning components, which inherently mitigates catastrophic forgetting. Empirically, across both simulation and real-world robotic manipulation settings, we illustrate how our method consistently outperforms strong modular and monolithic baselines.
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All authors Chaoqi Liu, Haonan Chen, Sigmund H. Høeg, Shaoxiong Yao, Yunzhu Li, Kris Hauser, Yilun Du

Robotics

Aerial World Model for Long-horizon Visual Generation and Navigation in 3D Space

Weichen Zhang, Peizhi Tang, Xin Zeng et al. (+12 more)

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as powerful embodied agents. One of the core abilities is autonomous navigation in large-scale three-dimensional environments. Existing navigation policies, however, are typically optimized for low-level objectives such as obstacle avoidance and trajectory smoothness, lacking the ability to incorporate high-level semantics into planning. To bridge this gap, we propose ANWM, an aerial navigation world model that predicts future visual observations conditioned on past frames and actions, thereby enabling agents to rank candidate trajectories by their semantic plausibility and navigational utility. ANWM is trained on 4-DoF UAV trajectories and introduces a physics-inspired module: Future Frame Projection (FFP), which projects past frames into future viewpoints to provide coarse geometric priors. This module mitigates representational uncertainty in long-distance visual generation and captures the mapping between 3D trajectories and egocentric observations. Empirical results demonstrate that ANWM significantly outperforms existing world models in long-distance visual forecasting and improves UAV navigation success rates in large-scale environments.
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All authors Weichen Zhang, Peizhi Tang, Xin Zeng, Fanhang Man, Shiquan Yu, Zichao Dai, Baining Zhao, Hongjin Chen, Yu Shang, Wei Wu, Chen Gao, Xinlei Chen, Xin Wang, Yong Li, Wenwu Zhu

Robotics

Online Inertia Parameter Estimation for Unknown Objects Grasped by a Manipulator Towards Space Applications

Akiyoshi Uchida, Antonine Richard, Kentaro Uno et al. (+2 more)

Knowing the inertia parameters of a grasped object is crucial for dynamics-aware manipulation, especially in space robotics with free-floating bases. This work addresses the problem of estimating the inertia parameters of an unknown target object during manipulation. We apply and extend an existing online identification method by incorporating momentum conservation, enabling its use for the floating-base robots. The proposed method is validated through numerical simulations, and the estimated parameters are compared with ground-truth values. Results demonstrate accurate identification in the scenarios, highlighting the method's applicability to on-orbit servicing and other space missions.
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All authors Akiyoshi Uchida, Antonine Richard, Kentaro Uno, Miguel Olivares-Mendez, Kazuya Yoshida

Robotics

Optimal Trajectory Planning for Orbital Robot Rendezvous and Docking

Kenta Iizuka, Akiyoshi Uchida, Kentaro Uno et al. (+1 more)

Approaching a tumbling target safely is a critical challenge in space debris removal missions utilizing robotic manipulators onboard servicing satellites. In this work, we propose a trajectory planning method based on nonlinear optimization for a close-range rendezvous to bring a free-floating, rotating debris object in a two-dimensional plane into the manipulator's workspace, as a preliminary step for its capture. The proposed method introduces a dynamic keep-out sphere that adapts depending on the approach conditions, allowing for closer and safer access to the target. Furthermore, a control strategy is developed to reproduce the optimized trajectory using discrete ON/OFF thrusters, considering practical implementation constraints.
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All authors Kenta Iizuka, Akiyoshi Uchida, Kentaro Uno, Kazuya Yoshida

Robotics

MoonBot: Modular and On-Demand Reconfigurable Robot Toward Moon Base Construction

Kentaro Uno, Elian Neppel, Gustavo H. Diaz et al. (+8 more)

The allure of lunar surface exploration and development has recently captured widespread global attention. Robots have proved to be indispensable for exploring uncharted terrains, uncovering and leveraging local resources, and facilitating the construction of future human habitats. In this article, we introduce the modular and on-demand reconfigurable robot (MoonBot), a modular and reconfigurable robotic system engineered to maximize functionality while operating within the stringent mass constraints of lunar payloads and adapting to varying environmental conditions and task requirements. This article details the design and development of MoonBot and presents a preliminary field demonstration that validates the proof of concept through the execution of milestone tasks simulating the establishment of lunar infrastructure. These tasks include essential civil engineering operations, infrastructural component transportation and deployment, and assistive operations with inflatable modules. Furthermore, we systematically summarize the lessons learned during testing, focusing on the connector design and providing valuable insights for the advancement of modular robotic systems in future lunar missions.
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All authors Kentaro Uno, Elian Neppel, Gustavo H. Diaz, Ashutosh Mishra, Shamistan Karimov, A. Sejal Jain, Ayesha Habib, Pascal Pama, Hazal Gozbasi, Shreya Santra, Kazuya Yoshida

Thursday 25 December

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Break Out the Silverware – Semantic Understanding of Stored Household Items

Michaela Levi-Richter, Reuth Mirsky and Oren Glickman

“Bring me a plate.” For domestic service robots, this simple command reveals a complex challenge: inferring where everyday items are stored, often out of sight in drawers, cabinets, or closets. Despite advances in vision and manipulation, robots still lack the commonsense reasoning needed to complete this task. We introduce the Stored Household Item Challenge, a benchmark task for evaluating service robots' cognitive capabilities: given a household scene and a queried item, predict its most likely storage location. Our benchmark includes two datasets: (1) a real-world evaluation set of 100 item-image pairs with human-annotated ground truth from participants' kitchens, and (2) a development set of 6,500 item-image pairs annotated with storage polygons over public kitchen images. These datasets support realistic modeling of household organization and enable comparative evaluation across agent architectures. To begin tackling this challenge, we introduce NOAM (Non-visible Object Allocation Model), a hybrid agent pipeline that combines structured scene understanding with large language model inference. NOAM converts visual input into natural language descriptions of spatial context and visible containers, then prompts a language model (e.g., GPT-4) to infer the most likely hidden storage location. This integrated vision-language agent exhibits emergent commonsense reasoning and is designed for modular deployment within broader robotic systems. We evaluate NOAM against baselines including random selection, vision-language pipelines (Grounding-DINO + SAM), leading multimodal models (e.g., Gemini, GPT-4o, Kosmos-2, LLaMA, Qwen), and human performance. NOAM significantly improves prediction accuracy and approaches human-level results, highlighting best practices for deploying cognitively capable agents in domestic environments.
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Robotics

HELP: Hierarchical Embodied Language Planner for Household Tasks

Alexandr V. Korchemnyi, Anatoly O. Onishchenko, Eva A. Bakaeva et al. (+2 more)

Embodied agents tasked with complex scenarios, whether in real or simulated environments, rely heavily on robust planning capabilities. When instructions are formulated in natural language, large language models (LLMs) equipped with extensive linguistic knowledge can play this role. However, to effectively exploit the ability of such models to handle linguistic ambiguity, to retrieve information from the environment, and to be based on the available skills of an agent, an appropriate architecture must be designed. We propose a Hierarchical Embodied Language Planner, called HELP, consisting of a set of LLM-based agents, each dedicated to solving a different subtask. We evaluate the proposed approach on a household task and perform real-world experiments with an embodied agent. We also focus on the use of open source LLMs with a relatively small number of parameters, to enable autonomous deployment.
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All authors Alexandr V. Korchemnyi, Anatoly O. Onishchenko, Eva A. Bakaeva, Alexey K. Kovalev, Aleksandr I. Panov

Robotics

MAction-SocialNav: Multi-Action Socially Compliant Navigation via Reasoning-enhanced Prompt Tuning

Zishuo Wang, Xinyu Zhang, Zhuonan Liu et al. (+4 more)

Socially compliant navigation requires robots to move safely and appropriately in human-centered environments by respecting social norms. However, social norms are often ambiguous, and in a single scenario, multiple actions may be equally acceptable. Most existing methods simplify this problem by assuming a single correct action, which limits their ability to handle real-world social uncertainty. In this work, we propose MAction-SocialNav, an efficient vision language model for socially compliant navigation that explicitly addresses action ambiguity, enabling generating multiple plausible actions within one scenario. To enhance the model's reasoning capability, we introduce a novel meta-cognitive prompt (MCP) method. Furthermore, to evaluate the proposed method, we curate a multi-action socially compliant navigation dataset that accounts for diverse conditions, including crowd density, indoor and outdoor environments, and dual human annotations. The dataset contains 789 samples, each with three-turn conversation, split into 710 training samples and 79 test samples through random selection. We also design five evaluation metrics to assess high-level decision precision, safety, and diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed MAction-SocialNav achieves strong social reasoning performance while maintaining high efficiency, highlighting its potential for real-world human robot navigation. Compared with zero-shot GPT-4o and Claude, our model achieves substantially higher decision quality (APG: 0.595 vs. 0.000/0.025) and safety alignment (ER: 0.264 vs. 0.642/0.668), while maintaining real-time efficiency (1.524 FPS, over 3x faster).
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All authors Zishuo Wang, Xinyu Zhang, Zhuonan Liu, Tomohito Kawabata, Daeun Song, Xuesu Xiao, Ling Xiao

Robotics

Structural Induced Exploration for Balanced and Scalable Multi-Robot Path Planning

Zikun Guo, Adeyinka P. Adedigba, Rammohan Mallipeddi et al. (+1 more)

Multi-robot path planning is a fundamental yet challenging problem due to its combinatorial complexity and the need to balance global efficiency with fair task allocation among robots. Traditional swarm intelligence methods, although effective on small instances, often converge prematurely and struggle to scale to complex environments. In this work, we present a structure-induced exploration framework that integrates structural priors into the search process of the ant colony optimization (ACO). The approach leverages the spatial distribution of the task to induce a structural prior at initialization, thereby constraining the search space. The pheromone update rule is then designed to emphasize structurally meaningful connections and incorporates a load-aware objective to reconcile the total travel distance with individual robot workload. An explicit overlap suppression strategy further ensures that tasks remain distinct and balanced across the team. The proposed framework was validated on diverse benchmark scenarios covering a wide range of instance sizes and robot team configurations. The results demonstrate consistent improvements in route compactness, stability, and workload distribution compared to representative metaheuristic baselines. Beyond performance gains, the method also provides a scalable and interpretable framework that can be readily applied to logistics, surveillance, and search-and-rescue applications where reliable large-scale coordination is essential.
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All authors Zikun Guo, Adeyinka P. Adedigba, Rammohan Mallipeddi, Heoncheol Lee

Robotics

AstraNav-Memory: Contexts Compression for Long Memory

Botao Ren, Junjun Hu, Xinda Xue et al. (+5 more)

Lifelong embodied navigation requires agents to accumulate, retain, and exploit spatial-semantic experience across tasks, enabling efficient exploration in novel environments and rapid goal reaching in familiar ones. While object-centric memory is interpretable, it depends on detection and reconstruction pipelines that limit robustness and scalability. We propose an image-centric memory framework that achieves long-term implicit memory via an efficient visual context compression module end-to-end coupled with a Qwen2.5-VL-based navigation policy. Built atop a ViT backbone with frozen DINOv3 features and lightweight PixelUnshuffle+Conv blocks, our visual tokenizer supports configurable compression rates; for example, under a representative 16$\times$ compression setting, each image is encoded with about 30 tokens, expanding the effective context capacity from tens to hundreds of images. Experimental results on GOAT-Bench and HM3D-OVON show that our method achieves state-of-the-art navigation performance, improving exploration in unfamiliar environments and shortening paths in familiar ones. Ablation studies further reveal that moderate compression provides the best balance between efficiency and accuracy. These findings position compressed image-centric memory as a practical and scalable interface for lifelong embodied agents, enabling them to reason over long visual histories and navigate with human-like efficiency.
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All authors Botao Ren, Junjun Hu, Xinda Xue, Minghua Luo, Jintao Chen, Haochen Bai, Liangliang You, Mu Xu

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.CV

SymDrive: Realistic and Controllable Driving Simulator via Symmetric Auto-regressive Online Restoration

Zhiyuan Liu, Daocheng Fu, Pinlong Cai et al. (+5 more)

High-fidelity and controllable 3D simulation is essential for addressing the long-tail data scarcity in Autonomous Driving (AD), yet existing methods struggle to simultaneously achieve photorealistic rendering and interactive traffic editing. Current approaches often falter in large-angle novel view synthesis and suffer from geometric or lighting artifacts during asset manipulation. To address these challenges, we propose SymDrive, a unified diffusion-based framework capable of joint high-quality rendering and scene editing. We introduce a Symmetric Auto-regressive Online Restoration paradigm, which constructs paired symmetric views to recover fine-grained details via a ground-truth-guided dual-view formulation and utilizes an auto-regressive strategy for consistent lateral view generation. Furthermore, we leverage this restoration capability to enable a training-free harmonization mechanism, treating vehicle insertion as context-aware inpainting to ensure seamless lighting and shadow consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SymDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance in both novel-view enhancement and realistic 3D vehicle insertion.
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All authors Zhiyuan Liu, Daocheng Fu, Pinlong Cai, Lening Wang, Ying Liu, Yilong Ren, Botian Shi, Jianqiang Wang

Robotics

World-Coordinate Human Motion Retargeting via SAM 3D Body

Zhangzheng Tu, Kailun Su, Shaolong Zhu et al. (+1 more)

Recovering world-coordinate human motion from monocular videos with humanoid robot retargeting is significant for embodied intelligence and robotics. To avoid complex SLAM pipelines or heavy temporal models, we propose a lightweight, engineering-oriented framework that leverages SAM 3D Body (3DB) as a frozen perception backbone and uses the Momentum HumanRig (MHR) representation as a robot-friendly intermediate. Our method (i) locks the identity and skeleton-scale parameters of per tracked subject to enforce temporally consistent bone lengths, (ii) smooths per-frame predictions via efficient sliding-window optimization in the low-dimensional MHR latent space, and (iii) recovers physically plausible global root trajectories with a differentiable soft foot-ground contact model and contact-aware global optimization. Finally, we retarget the reconstructed motion to the Unitree G1 humanoid using a kinematics-aware two-stage inverse kinematics pipeline. Results on real monocular videos show that our method has stable world trajectories and reliable robot retargeting, indicating that structured human representations with lightweight physical constraints can yield robot-ready motion from monocular input.
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All authors Zhangzheng Tu, Kailun Su, Shaolong Zhu, Yukun Zheng

Robotics

A Novel Robotic Variable Stiffness Mechanism Based on Helically Wound Structured Electrostatic Layer Jamming

Congrui Bai, Zhenting Du and Weibang Bai

This paper introduces a novel variable stiffness mechanism termed Helically Wound Structured Electrostatic Layer Jamming (HWS-ELJ) and systematically investigates its potential applications in variable stiffness robotic finger design. The proposed method utilizes electrostatic attraction to enhance interlayer friction, thereby suppressing relative sliding and enabling tunable stiffness. Compared with conventional planar ELJ, the helical configuration of HWS-ELJ provides exponentially increasing stiffness adjustment with winding angle, achieving significantly greater stiffness enhancement for the same electrode contact area while reducing the required footprint under equivalent stiffness conditions. Considering the practical advantage of voltage-based control, a series of experimental tests under different initial force conditions were conducted to evaluate the stiffness modulation characteristics of HWS-ELJ. The results demonstrated its rational design and efficacy, with outcomes following the deduced theoretical trends. Furthermore, a robotic finger prototype integrating HWS-ELJ was developed, demonstrating voltage-driven stiffness modulation and confirming the feasibility of the proposed robotic variable stiffness mechanism.
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Robotics

Spatiotemporal Tubes for Probabilistic Temporal Reach-Avoid-Stay Task in Uncertain Dynamic Environment

Siddhartha Upadhyay, Ratnangshu Das and Pushpak Jagtap

In this work, we extend the Spatiotemporal Tube (STT) framework to address Probabilistic Temporal Reach-Avoid-Stay (PrT-RAS) tasks in dynamic environments with uncertain obstacles. We develop a real-time tube synthesis procedure that explicitly accounts for time-varying uncertain obstacles and provides formal probabilistic safety guarantees. The STT is formulated as a time-varying ball in the state space whose center and radius evolve online based on uncertain sensory information. We derive a closed-form, approximation-free control law that confines the system trajectory within the tube, ensuring both probabilistic safety and task satisfaction. Our method offers a formal guarantee for probabilistic avoidance and finite-time task completion. The resulting controller is model-free, approximation-free, and optimization-free, enabling efficient real-time execution while guaranteeing convergence to the target. The effectiveness and scalability of the framework are demonstrated through simulation studies and hardware experiments on mobile robots, a UAV, and a 7-DOF manipulator navigating in cluttered and uncertain environments.
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Wednesday 24 December

Robotics

Embodied Intelligence for Flexible Manufacturing: A Survey

Kai Xu, Hang Zhao, Ruizhen Hu et al. (+4 more)

Driven by breakthroughs in next-generation artificial intelligence, embodied intelligence is rapidly advancing into industrial manufacturing. In flexible manufacturing, industrial embodied intelligence faces three core challenges: accurate process modeling and monitoring under limited perception, dynamic balancing between flexible adaptation and high-precision control, and the integration of general-purpose skills with specialized industrial operations. Accordingly, this survey reviews existing work from three viewpoints: Industrial Eye, Industrial Hand, and Industrial Brain. At the perception level (Industrial Eye), multimodal data fusion and real-time modeling in complex dynamic settings are examined. At the control level (Industrial Hand), flexible, adaptive, and precise manipulation for complex manufacturing processes is analyzed. At the decision level (Industrial Brain), intelligent optimization methods for process planning and line scheduling are summarized. By considering multi-level collaboration and interdisciplinary integration, this work reveals the key technological pathways of embodied intelligence for closed-loop optimization of perception-decision-execution in manufacturing systems. A three-stage evolution model for the development of embodied intelligence in flexible manufacturing scenarios, comprising cognition enhancement, skill transition, and system evolution, is proposed, and future development trends are examined, to offer both a theoretical framework and practical guidance for the interdisciplinary advancement of industrial embodied intelligence in the context of flexible manufacturing.
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All authors Kai Xu, Hang Zhao, Ruizhen Hu, Min Yang, Hao Liu, Hui Zhang, Haibin Yu

Robotics

Multi-Agent Formation Navigation Using Diffusion-Based Trajectory Generation

Hieu Do Quang, Chien Truong-Quoc and Quoc Van Tran

This paper introduces a diffusion-based planner for leader–follower formation control in cluttered environments. The diffusion policy is used to generate the trajectory of the midpoint of two leaders as a rigid bar in the plane, thereby defining their desired motion paths in a planar formation. While the followers track the leaders and form desired foramtion geometry using a distance-constrained formation controller based only on the relative positions in followers' local coordinates. The proposed approach produces smooth motions and low tracking errors, with most failures occurring in narrow obstacle-free space, or obstacle configurations that are not in the training data set. Simulation results demonstrate the potential of diffusion models for reliable multi-agent formation planning.
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Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Evaluating an Adaptive Multispectral Turret System for Autonomous Tracking Across Variable Illumination Conditions

Aahan Sachdeva, Dhanvinkumar Ganeshkumar, James E. Gallagher et al. (+2 more)

Autonomous robotic platforms are playing a growing role across the emergency services sector, supporting missions such as search and rescue operations in disaster zones and reconnaissance. However, traditional red-green-blue (RGB) detection pipelines struggle in low-light environments, and thermal-based systems lack color and texture information. To overcome these limitations, we present an adaptive framework that fuses RGB and long-wave infrared (LWIR) video streams at multiple fusion ratios and dynamically selects the optimal detection model for each illumination condition. We trained 33 You Only Look Once (YOLO) models on over 22,000 annotated images spanning three light levels: no-light (<10 lux), dim-light (10-1000 lux), and full-light (>1000 lux). To integrate both modalities, fusion was performed by blending aligned RGB and LWIR frames at eleven ratios, from full RGB (100/0) to full LWIR (0/100) in 10% increments. Evaluation showed that the best full-light model (80/20 RGB-LWIR) and dim-light model (90/10 fusion) achieved 92.8% and 92.0% mean confidence; both significantly outperformed the YOLOv5 nano (YOLOv5n) and YOLOv11 nano (YOLOv11n) baselines. Under no-light conditions, the top 40/60 fusion reached 71.0%, exceeding baselines though not statistically significant. Adaptive RGB-LWIR fusion improved detection confidence and reliability across all illumination conditions, enhancing autonomous robotic vision performance.
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All authors Aahan Sachdeva, Dhanvinkumar Ganeshkumar, James E. Gallagher, Tyler Treat, Edward J. Oughton

Robotics

Planetary Terrain Datasets and Benchmarks for Rover Path Planning

Marvin Chancán, Avijit Banerjee and George Nikolakopoulos

Planetary rover exploration is attracting renewed interest with several upcoming space missions to the Moon and Mars. However, a substantial amount of data from prior missions remain underutilized for path planning and autonomous navigation research. As a result, there is a lack of space mission-based planetary datasets, standardized benchmarks, and evaluation protocols. In this paper, we take a step towards coordinating these three research directions in the context of planetary rover path planning. We propose the first two large planar benchmark datasets, MarsPlanBench and MoonPlanBench, derived from high-resolution digital terrain images of Mars and the Moon. In addition, we set up classical and learned path planning algorithms, in a unified framework, and evaluate them on our proposed datasets and on a popular planning benchmark. Through comprehensive experiments, we report new insights on the performance of representative path planning algorithms on planetary terrains, for the first time to the best of our knowledge. Our results show that classical algorithms can achieve up to 100% global path planning success rates on average across challenging terrains such as Moon's north and south poles. This suggests, for instance, why these algorithms are used in practice by NASA. Conversely, learning-based models, although showing promising results in less complex environments, still struggle to generalize to planetary domains. To serve as a starting point for fundamental path planning research, our code and datasets will be released at: https://github.com/mchancan/PlanetaryPathBench.
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Robotics

EVE: A Generator-Verifier System for Generative Policies

Yusuf Ali, Gryphon Patlin, Karthik Kothuri et al. (+4 more)

Visuomotor policies based on generative such as diffusion and flow-matching have shown strong performance for robotics applications but degrade under distribution shifts, demonstrating limited recovery capabilities without costly finetuning. In the language modeling domain, test-time compute scaling has revolutionized the reasoning capabilities of modern LLMs by enabling candidate solution refinement. These methods typically leverage foundation models as verification modules in a zero-shot manner to score candidate solutions. We hypothesize that generative policies can similarly benefit from additional inference-time compute that employs zero-shot VLM-based verifiers in a generation-verification framework. To this end, we introduce EVE: a modular, generator-verifier interaction framework that boosts the performance of pretrained generative policies at test time, with no additional training. EVE wraps a frozen base policy with multiple zero-shot, VLM-based verifier agents. Each verifier proposes action refinements to the base policy candidate actions, while an action incorporator uses classifier guidance to fuse aggregated verifier feedback into action denoising. We study design choices for generator-verifier information interfacing across a system of verifiers with distinct capabilities. Across diverse simulated and real robotic tasks and embodiments, EVE consistently improves success rates without additional policy or verifier training. Through extensive ablations, we isolate the contribution of verifier capabilities and action incorporator strategies, offering practical guidelines to build scalable, modular generator-verifier systems for embodied control.
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All authors Yusuf Ali, Gryphon Patlin, Karthik Kothuri, Jeremiah Coholich, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Wuwei Liang, Zsolt Kira

Robotics

Developing Fundamental Diagrams for Urban Air Mobility Traffic Based on Physical Experiments

Hang Zhou, Yuhui Zhai, Shiyu Shen et al. (+3 more)

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is an emerging application of unmanned aerial vehicles that promises to reduce travel time and alleviate congestion in urban transportation systems. As drone density increases, UAM traffic is expected to experience congestion similar to that in ground traffic. However, the fundamental characteristics of UAM traffic, particularly under real-world operating conditions, remain largely unexplored. This study proposes a general framework for constructing the fundamental diagram (FD) of UAM traffic by integrating theoretical analysis with physical experiments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to derive UAM FDs using real-world physical experiment data. On the theoretical side, we design two drone control laws for collision avoidance and develop simulation-based traffic generation methods to produce diverse UAM traffic scenarios. Based on Edie's definition, traffic flow theory is then applied with a near-stationary traffic condition filtering method to construct the FD. To account for real-world disturbances and modeling uncertainties, we further conduct physical experiments on a reduced-scale testbed using Bitcraze Crazyflie drones. Both simulation and physical experiment trajectory data are collected and organized into the UAMTra2Flow dataset, which is analyzed using the proposed framework. Preliminary results indicate that classical FD structures for ground transportation, especially the Underwood model, are applicable to UAM systems. Notably, FD curves obtained from physical experiments exhibit deviations from simulation-based results, highlighting the importance of experimental validation. Finally, results from the reduced-scale testbed are scaled to realistic operating conditions to provide practical insights for future UAM traffic systems. The dataset and code for this paper are publicly available at https://github.com/CATS-Lab/UAM-FD.
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All authors Hang Zhou, Yuhui Zhai, Shiyu Shen, Yanfeng Ouyang, Xiaowei Shi, Xiaopeng Li

Robotics

Fast Navigation Through Occluded Spaces via Language-Conditioned Map Prediction

Rahul Moorthy Mahesh, Oguzhan Goktug Poyrazoglu, Yukang Cao et al. (+1 more)

In cluttered environments, motion planners often face a trade-off between safety and speed due to uncertainty caused by occlusions and limited sensor range. In this work, we investigate whether co-pilot instructions can help robots plan more decisively while remaining safe. We introduce PaceForecaster, as an approach that incorporates such co-pilot instructions into local planners. PaceForecaster takes the robot's local sensor footprint (Level-1) and the provided co-pilot instructions as input and predicts (i) a forecasted map with all regions visible from Level-1 (Level-2) and (ii) an instruction-conditioned subgoal within Level-2. The subgoal provides the planner with explicit guidance to exploit the forecasted environment in a goal-directed manner. We integrate PaceForecaster with a Log-MPPI controller and demonstrate that using language-conditioned forecasts and goals improves navigation performance by 36% over a local-map-only baseline while in polygonal environments.
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All authors Rahul Moorthy Mahesh, Oguzhan Goktug Poyrazoglu, Yukang Cao, Volkan Isler

Robotics

Safe Path Planning and Observation Quality Enhancement Strategy for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Water Quality Monitoring Tasks

Yuanshuang Fu, Qianyao Wang, Qihao Wang et al. (+4 more)

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) spectral remote sensing technology is widely used in water quality monitoring. However, in dynamic environments, varying illumination conditions, such as shadows and specular reflection (sun glint), can cause severe spectral distortion, thereby reducing data availability. To maximize the acquisition of high-quality data while ensuring flight safety, this paper proposes an active path planning method for dynamic light and shadow disturbance avoidance. First, a dynamic prediction model is constructed to transform the time-varying light and shadow disturbance areas into three-dimensional virtual obstacles. Second, an improved Interfered Fluid Dynamical System (IFDS) algorithm is introduced, which generates a smooth initial obstacle avoidance path by building a repulsive force field. Subsequently, a Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework is employed for rolling-horizon path optimization to handle flight dynamics constraints and achieve real-time trajectory tracking. Furthermore, a Dynamic Flight Altitude Adjustment (DFAA) mechanism is designed to actively reduce the flight altitude when the observable area is narrow, thereby enhancing spatial resolution. Simulation results show that, compared with traditional PID and single obstacle avoidance algorithms, the proposed method achieves an obstacle avoidance success rate of 98% in densely disturbed scenarios, significantly improves path smoothness, and increases the volume of effective observation data by approximately 27%. This research provides an effective engineering solution for precise UAV water quality monitoring in complex illumination environments.
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All authors Yuanshuang Fu, Qianyao Wang, Qihao Wang, Bonan Zhang, Jiaxin Zhao, Yiming Cao, Zhijun Li