New robotics and physical-AI papers, with what each one means for the industry.
Quadruped robots deployed for inspection and field missions must cross heterogeneous terrain, from stairs, slopes, and gaps to high platforms, stepping stones, and balance beams, where safe support is sparse or see-through. Existing methods interpose a terrain map or a depth image between sensing and control.
Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and vision--language--action models have provided robots with new capabilities for long-horizon task understanding and planning. In surgical robotics, however, end-to-end prediction of low-level actions remains limited by insufficient precision, opaque decisions, and scarce data.
We present a low-cost miniature Ackermann vehicle for embedded neural-driving research, organized as a hardware-partitioned perceive-decide-act agent: an ESP32 camera node streams frames over Wi-Fi to a host computer, where neural inference and state estimation run, while an ESP32-S3 chassis controller executes safety-critical actuation in a 100 Hz per-wheel proportional-integral-derivative (PID) loop beneath a micro-ROS client. The partition isolates real-time control and safety on the vehicle while learning-based components run off-board, supervised by an operator from a gamepad.
Combining aerial robots with soft continuum manipulators promises safe, compliant interaction with the environment, but the coupled dynamics of a free-flying base and a highly deformable, underactuated arm are difficult to study without a suitable simulator. This paper describes an open-source simulation framework, built on the MuJoCo physics engine, for a quadrotor that carries a tendon-driven soft continuum arm underneath its body.
Behavioral foundation models (BFMs) provide humanoids with reusable repertoires of whole-body behaviors; in real-world humanoid control, the same behavioral intent may require fundamentally different motions under different terrain constraints. Covering such variation with terrain-matched demonstrations requires enumerating a combinatorial space of behaviors and terrain geometries.
Object Navigation in unseen environments remains a fundamental challenge in embodied AI, as it requires agents to generalize visual and spatial reasoning to novel layouts. While recent advances in large language model (LLM) and vision-language model (VLM) have enhanced semantic mapping, spatial memory, and waypoint selecting for navigation, successful navigation requires more than selecting the next promising waypoint.
Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) have been increasingly deployed to perform different kinds of maritime tasks in recent years, which motivates the need for a reliable task allocation policy that can adapt to heterogeneous tasks and maritime disturbances. In this work, we formulate a multi-robot task allocation problem in which a team of ASVs with heterogeneous capabilities needs to complete tasks of different types and appearance times under unknown stochastic spatio-temporal uncertainties from maritime disturbances.
Human demonstrations can capture task-relevant manipulation without using the target robot, but the recorded hand motions cannot directly serve as robot action supervision. Hand reconstruction and motion retargeting provide a direct route to such supervision, yet recovering hand motion alone does not ensure physically consistent hand-object interactions.
A deterministic method for the problem of distributed area coverage path planning subject to the inclusion of a headland path is presented. Given a, in general, non-convex area to be covered that may, in general, include obstacle areas, multiple robots, at least one robot depot, and constraints on each machinery such as a working width, work capacity limits, travel capacity limits, nonholonomic dynamical constraints and, possibly, a robot start and end depot assignment, distributed paths for each machinery are calculated that collectively enable full area coverage.
VLMs provide promising solutions to embodied reward design. Most current methods that train VLMs as reward regressors not only require extensive annotations but are also primarily designed for finetuning pretrained policies, and perform less well in the more challenging from-scratch RL setting.
Active debris removal requires a servicer spacecraft to approach a non-cooperative tumbling object, capture it, and arrest its rotation. This sequence is conventionally divided among phase-specific controllers, each depending on knowledge of the target's inertia, a dedicated grappling fixture, or a hand-designed switch at the contact-rich seam where such pipelines are most fragile.
Modern industrial automation demands autonomous collaborative systems capable of coordinated manipulation in workspaces with heterogeneous object arrangements. Existing systems rely on predetermined trajectories and rigid allocation strategies, causing suboptimal workspace utilization and collision risks.
Long-horizon robotic manipulation is inherently composed of semantically meaningful sub-tasks. While Movement Primitives (MPs) can model these components, their composition typically relies on manual engineering or sample-inefficient reinforcement learning.
Visual self-modelling lets robots learn body models from observations, but such models usually encode kinematics implicitly rather than exposing metric joint parameters for computation and control. Moreover, a good fit to images does not by itself establish accurate kinematics.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models commonly generate robot actions token by token through Large Language Model (LLM) decoders, causing inference latency to grow with action sequence length and limiting closed-loop control frequency. We present Goal-Conditioned Vision-Predictor-Action (VPA), which replaces autoregressive decoders with a lightweight latent control loop.
Open-world mobile manipulation requires a robot to find an object, approach it, and move it to a target receptacle from a language instruction. Training vision-language model (VLM) agents for these tasks requires demonstrations of both action selection and active vision.
General-purpose multimodal foundation models are increasingly capable of directly controlling robots, yet improving their manipulation capabilities through autonomous interaction remains challenging. A key challenge to such self-improvement is learning from failures in complex manipulation tasks involving cross-stage dependencies, where an action may succeed locally but cause a later stage to fail.
Safety Filters (SF) are leveraged to design certifiably safe controllers, which ensures forward invariance on a defined safe set when the filter is feasible. Predictive Safety Filters (PSF) embed these constraints to a closed-loop model-based optimization method to improve constraint satisfaction, and reduce feasibility loss caused by myopic, one-step filtering.
Runtime failure monitors for robot policies are typically evaluated by how accurately they distinguish failed from successful executions. Yet an accurate alarm may arrive too late for recovery, while an unnecessary intervention may disrupt an execution that would otherwise succeed.
Multi-robot coordination is essential in applications such as coverage, target tracking, and information gathering, where robots must jointly select actions to maximize team performance. Submodular maximization provides an effective framework for such coordination, and resilient variants further account for robot failures or adversarial removals.
Papers come from arXiv robotics feeds. Where our summary is not written yet, you see the opening lines of the abstract.