MEKAWIRE
Research

Papers

New robotics and physical-AI papers, with what each one means for the industry.

199 papers
TopicAllManipulation · 27VLA · 22Perception · 12Robotics · 11Navigation · 10Humanoid · 9Learning · 8Safety · 5World Action Models · 4Simulation · 3Aerial manipulation · 2Dexterous manipulation · 2Sim-to-Real Manipulation · 2Social Navigation · 2Vision-Language Navigation · 2World models · 2World-action model · 23D Assembly · 13DGS dataset · 15G Simulation · 1AMR Operations · 1Active vision manipulation · 1Adaptive MPC · 1Adaptive action horizons · 1Adaptive intervention · 1Aerial · 1Aerial Manipulation · 1Aerial navigation · 1Agricultural Robotics · 1Articulation Estimation · 1Autonomous Driving · 1Autonomous Exploration · 1Battery-aware RL · 1Belief-space planning · 1Bimanual Manipulation · 1Byzantine localization · 1Canal inspection · 1Co-speech Humanoid · 1Compositional Manipulation · 1Construction navigation · 1Contact-Rich Manipulation · 1Contact-rich Manipulation · 1Continuum sensing · 1Curriculum RL · 1Dexterous Manipulation · 1Distributed Manipulation · 1Distribution Shift · 1Driving Simulation · 1Efficient VIO · 1Egocentric data · 1Egocentric video · 1Embodied Agents · 1Embodied policy · 1Empowerment MPC · 1Endoscopic navigation · 1Endovascular robotics · 1Event-camera VO · 1Exoskeletons · 1Failure recovery · 1Federated 3D Perception · 1Fisheye detection · 1Floorplan SLAM · 1Geometry-aware manipulation · 1Grasping · 1Grounding · 1Humanoid Control · 1Humanoid RL · 1Humanoid Tool Use · 1Humanoid control · 1Humanoid loco-manipulation · 1Humanoid safety · 1Imitation Learning · 1JEPA World Models · 1Lab automation · 1Laboratory Manipulation · 1Latent World Models · 1Legged Manipulation · 1LiDAR Security · 1Lifelong RL · 1Locomotion · 1MAPF · 1MAV guidance · 1Manipulation LfD · 1Manipulation Safety · 1Marine simulation · 1Memory-centric VLA · 1Miniature Locomotion · 1Mining Perception · 1Mobile manipulation · 1Model-based RL · 1Monocular SSC · 1Motion Planning · 1Multi-Agent RL · 1Multi-Robot Exploration · 1Multi-Robot Manipulation · 1Multi-UAV Exploration · 1Multi-UAV State Estimation · 1Multi-agent RL · 1Multi-agent motion planning · 1Multi-camera odometry · 1Multi-fidelity RL · 1Multi-robot manipulation · 1Multi-skill Manipulation · 1Multi-view perception · 1Multimodal simulation · 1Navigation & Mapping · 1Object Pose Estimation · 1Object Search · 1Panoramic 3D Detection · 1Panoramic segmentation · 1Pedestrian tracking · 1PersonNav · 1Planning · 1Policy · 1Policy Optimization · 1Preference Learning · 1Quadruped locomotion · 1Real-time VLA · 1Real-to-sim · 1Representation alignment · 1Robot-Use Agents · 1Runtime Verification · 1Safe Generative Planning · 1Safe RL-MPC · 1Safe VLA · 1Safety monitoring · 1Safety-critical control · 1Sim-to-real Navigation · 1Sim-to-real manipulation · 1Simulation geometry · 1Skill Discovery · 1Social navigation · 1Soft Pneumatic Actuators · 1Soft manipulation · 1Sonar SLAM · 1Streaming 3D reconstruction · 1Submovement decomposition · 1Surgical robotics · 1Tactile · 1Tactile Exploration · 1Tactile VLA · 1Temporal manipulation · 1Terrain traversability · 1Text-to-3D Policy · 1Tool Co-Design · 1Trajectory Correction · 1Traversability · 1UAV Navigation · 1UAV Swarms · 1UAV traffic monitoring · 1Underwater Robotics · 1Underwater active mapping · 1Underwater perception · 1Unified world-action model · 1VLA Conditioning · 1VLA Defense · 1VLA Robustness · 1VLA evaluation · 1VLA manipulation · 1VLA robustness · 1Video world models · 1Visual Generalization · 1Visual Grounding · 1Visual Reward Models · 1Visuomotor Fusion · 1Visuotactile manipulation · 1World Models · 1World-Action Models · 1
LevelAnyBeginnerIntermediateExpert
arXiv
RoboticsExpert

MC-EvoBench: Auditing Experience-Driven Self-Improvement in Minecraft Agents

Jingwei Song, Zhisheng Chen, Bingfan Zeng, Jing Tang, Yubo Hou, Jinhao Jing, Zhengwei Xie, Linfeng Zhang

A central challenge in embodied recursive self-improvement is enabling agents to convert interaction history into capabilities that persist beyond one world and transfer to later tasks. A saved memory or successful final action does not by itself establish that a reusable capability was acquired; evaluation must separate capability change from carried-over resources, unequal source exposure, and early execution failures.

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arXiv
ManipulationExpert

Cooperative Aerial Transportation of a Payload with a Sliding Cable Attachment

Sebastian Tilaguy Lezama, Diego S D'Antonio

This paper presents a dual-quadrotor hook- suspended transport system for cooperative aerial manipulation of a payload that is not rigidly attached to a fixed point along the cable. Two quadrotors are connected by a single inextensible cable that passes through a frictionless hook mounted on the payload, allowing the cable to slide between its two segments.

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arXiv
ManipulationExpert

AlphaNIST: Emergent Assembly Skills from Binary Task Rewards

Octi Zhang, Iretiayo Akinola, Rosario Scalise, Mateo Guaman Castro, Patrick Yin, Tobias Widmer, Miles Macklin, Chris Amevor, Dylan Turpin, Dirk Van Gelder, Jan Carius, Ankur Handa, Gavriel State, Yunrong Guo, Yashraj Narang

The NIST Assembly Task Board #1 remains a challenging benchmark for learning-based methods in robotic manipulation. Over short horizons, it demands precise, contact-rich control of small, tight-fitting parts.

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arXiv
ManipulationExpert

ReAT: Residual Action Tokenization for Autoregressive Robot Policies

Dijia Zhan, Zhuo Li, Xuemiao Xu, Sun Zheng, Jinyi Li, Wenjun Wang, Jie Tang

Autoregressive robot policies rely on action tokenizers to convert continuous action chunks into compact sequences of discrete prediction targets. Existing tokenizers can reconstruct action chunks from discrete codes, but often leave implicit what each individual token contributes to the reconstructed action.

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arXiv
VLAExpert

Dual-Stream Memory for Vision-Language-Action Policies

Yang Wang, Ping Liu, Ruiyu Wang, Xuhua Chen, Lingfeng Zhang, Tao Zhang

Memory-dependent manipulation requires a policy to track execution state and recover visual evidence that is no longer observable. We propose dual-stream memory for vision-language-action policies, assigning these requirements to complementary representations.

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arXiv
ManipulationExpert

Human2Dex: Dexterous Robot Learning from Wrist-Centric Human Demonstrations

Jiachen Zhang, Yuanyuan Li, Shaqi Luo

Collecting dexterous manipulation demonstrations for each robot hand requires repeated task-specific data acquisition. We ask whether one shared corpus of natural human demonstrations can instead serve as a reusable data interface for different dexterous hands, without collecting task demonstrations on each target robot.

Dexterous Manipulation
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arXiv
VLAExpert

RARA: Robust Policy Fine-Tuning through Retrieval-Anchored Representation Alignment for Robotic Manipulation

Xuhui Kang, Sung-Wook Lee, Yan Zhuang, Tianle Zhong, Yen-Ling Kuo

Pre-trained robot policies, such as Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, provide a strong foundation for generalist robotic manipulation, but adapting them to new tasks with only a few demonstrations remains challenging. Directly fine-tuning a pre-trained policy often achieves strong in-distribution performance, yet it can distort the representations learned during pre-training and weaken the model's generalization ability under out-of-distribution shifts.

VLA
Foundation
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arXiv
NavigationExpert

When LiDAR Fades, Radar Takes Over: LiDAR Reliability-Aware Adaptive Localization Under Airborne Obscurants

Moumita Mukherjee, Avijit Banerjee, Anton Koval, George Nikolakopoulo

LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO) is widely used for real-time localization and mapping, but its reliability can degrade substantially in subterranean environments affected by smoke, dust, and other airborne obscurants, whereas radar remains comparatively robust. This article presents a one-class temporal learning framework for LiDAR degradation detection and reliability-aware localization under such conditions.

LiDAR
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arXiv
LearningExpert

Dream to Remember: Continual Steering of Generalist Robot Policies with World Models

Bahey Tharwat, Iman Nematollahi, Marvin Alles, Xingyuan Zhang, Akshay L Chandra, Abhinav Valada

Generalist robot policies are trained with imitation learning and are bounded by the quality and coverage of their demonstrations. Reinforcement learning can improve and extend them, either by fine-tuning the policy weights or by training a small module to steer the input noise of a frozen generative policy.

World ModelsImitation LearningRL
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arXiv
ManipulationExpert

Beyond Successful Robot Demonstrations: Learning from Human Interactions and Modeling Failure Dynamics

Peiyan Tu, Cong Wang, Hanxin Zhu, Xin Jin, Zhibo Chen

Action-conditioned world models offer a promising foundation for generalist robotic intelligence by predicting the consequences of actions. However, existing robotic datasets provide limited coverage of the diverse interaction dynamics required for generalizable world modeling.

World Models
Foundation
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arXiv
SafetyExpert

EndoRSI: Physical-Evidence-Driven Recursive Improvement of Endoscopic Robot Policies

Chi Kit Ng, Yidong Zhang, Tianchun Wu, Siu Hing Lui, Hanlin Zhao, Huxin Gao, Hongliang Ren

Artificial intelligence is beginning to automate scientific discovery, yet physical robot-policy research still relies on scientists and engineers to interpret experimental failures and decide how controllers should be revised. We present EndoRSI (Endoscopic Recursive Self-Improvement), a human-governed, self-improving robotic research system in which the embedded EndoForge coding agent iteratively develops and refines endoscopic robot policies using evidence from physical experiments.

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arXiv
PerceptionExpert

NovaSplat: Model-Free 6D Object Pose Estimation via 3D Gaussian Splatting Onboarding and Refinement

Georgios Floros, Evangelos Sartinas, Orestis Vangelis, Maria Pateraki

6D pose estimation of novel objects without CAD models remains an open challenge: model-free methods must build the object representation from scratch during onboarding and have long trailed their model-based counterparts. We present NovaSplat, a model-free pipeline that closes this gap.

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arXiv
LearningExpert

MARGoS: A Configuration-Driven Platform for Reproducible MARL Experiments in ARGoS

Tom Philipp Backert, Mohammad D. Soorati, Javad Ghofrani

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has become a prominent research direction, particularly within collective robotics, where the ARGoS simulator is widely used to study emergent swarm behavior. Yet despite this growth, systematic support for reuse and reproducibility in MARL-based swarm robotics remains limited and insufficiently standardized: a single experiment is assembled from manually aligned simulator files, training scripts, configuration values, paths, seeds, and environment details, so reuse and reproduction stay fragile even within one research group.

RL
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arXiv
HumanoidExpert

PATACON: GPU-Parallel Tangent-Bundle RRT-Connect for Constrained Motion Planning

Gahyun Oh, Junho An, Suhyun Jeon, Suhan Park

Fast whole-body motion planning enables continuous replanning for humanoid robots in dynamic environments while satisfying collision avoidance and kinematic constraints. However, constrained motion planning incurs substantial computational cost due to repeated constraint projection in addition to collision checking and nearest-neighbor search.

Humanoid
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arXiv
VLAExpert

Noise Space Learning for VLA Adaptation

Junjie Lu, Chuheng Zhang, Yucen Wang, Yuhua Jiang, Xinyao Qin, Min Xu, Li Zhao

Pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models encode broad manipulation priors, yet adapting them to specific tasks requires balancing limited robot interaction, computational resources, and safety constraints. Noise space learning (NSL) adapts flow-matching-based VLAs by learning a context-conditioned distribution over noise while keeping the pretrained VLA fixed.

VLA
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arXiv
VLAExpert

Beyond Actions: Learning Future Operation Targets for Vision-Language-Action Models

Min Lin, Bokai Zhou, Jianqi Lin, Kaiyuan Yang, Yicheng Chang, Junjie Yu, Xiaofan Liu, Jianhua Han, Rui Li, Shen Zhao, Xiaodan Liang

Actions specify what a robot should execute, but do not describe what those commands will achieve. Vision-language-action (VLA) policies nevertheless learn primarily by predicting action chunks from images, language, and state.

VLADexterous Manipulation
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Topic pages

Manipulation · 27VLA · 21Perception · 12General robotics · 11Navigation · 10Humanoid · 9Robot learning · 8Safety · 5World Action Models · 5Simulation · 3Aerial manipulation · 3Dexterous manipulation · 3Sim-to-Real Manipulation · 3Social Navigation · 3

Papers come from arXiv robotics feeds. Where our summary is not written yet, you see the opening lines of the abstract.