MEKAWIRE
Research

Papers

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

86 papers
TopicAllManipulation · 96VLA · 70Navigation · 52General robotics · 41Robot learning · 32Simulation · 24Perception · 23Humanoid · 20Locomotion · 16Safety · 13Aerial · 4World Action Models · 4World-action model · 3Aerial manipulation · 2Dexterous manipulation · 2Sim-to-Real Manipulation · 2Social Navigation · 2Vision-Language Navigation · 23D Assembly · 13DGS dataset · 15G Simulation · 1AMR Operations · 1Active vision manipulation · 1Adaptive MPC · 1Adaptive action horizons · 1Adaptive intervention · 1Aerial Manipulation · 1Aerial navigation · 1Agricultural Robotics · 1Articulation Estimation · 1Autonomous Driving · 1Autonomous Exploration · 1Battery-aware RL · 1Belief-space planning · 1Benchmark for adding wrist force sensing to VLA manipulation policies · 1Bimanual Manipulation · 1Byzantine localization · 1Canal inspection · 1Co-speech Humanoid · 1Compositional Manipulation · 1Construction navigation · 1Contact-Rich Manipulation · 1Contact-rich Manipulation · 1Continual reinforcement learning on top of robot foundation models · 1Continuum sensing · 1Controlled comparison of how to add world models to VLA robot policies · 1Cross-embodiment transfer of humanoid whole-body controllers · 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 · 1Evaluating robot world models against real executions · 1Event-camera VO · 1Exoskeletons · 1Failure recovery · 1Faster on-device inference for flow-matching vision-language-action models · 1Federated 3D Perception · 1Fisheye detection · 1Floorplan SLAM · 1Force-aware robot foundation model pretrained on 2,000 hours of human tactile-glove data · 1Geometry-aware manipulation · 1Grasping · 1Grounding · 1Humanoid Control · 1Humanoid RL · 1Humanoid Tool Use · 1Humanoid loco-manipulation · 1Humanoid safety · 1Humanoid whole-body control · 1Humanoid whole-body training data from robot-specific video generation · 1Imitation Learning · 1JEPA World Models · 1Lab automation · 1Laboratory Manipulation · 1Latent World Models · 1Legged Manipulation · 1LiDAR Security · 1Lifelong RL · 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 Optimization · 1Preference Learning · 1Quadruped locomotion · 1Real-time VLA · 1Real-to-sim · 1Reinforcement learning for industrial assembly · 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 · 1Surgical robotics · 1Tactile Exploration · 1Tactile VLA · 1Temporal manipulation · 1Terrain traversability · 1Text-to-3D Policy · 1Tool Co-Design · 1Trajectory Correction · 1Traversability · 1Turning phone-recorded human demonstrations into per-robot post-training data by retargeting object motion · 1Two Unitree G1 humanoids playing table-tennis doubles with learned collision-risk filtering · 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 · 1Vision-language-action models without wrist cameras (learned foveation) · 1Visual Generalization · 1Visual Grounding · 1Visual Reward Models · 1Visuomotor Fusion · 1Visuotactile manipulation · 1World Models · 1World models · 1World-Action Models · 1compliant humanoid whole-body control · 1data engine converting egocentric human video into replayable bimanual dexterous robot demonstrations · 1dexterous in-hand manipulation with learned world models · 1humanoid learning from human video · 1humanoid teleoperation with heavy unknown payloads · 1humanoid whole-body manipulation · 1large-scale tactile demonstration dataset and robot-free data collection · 1open vision-language-action model with register-token memory · 1real-world reinforcement learning for robot policies · 1robot foundation model training · 1robot learning from human video · 1tactile pretraining for vision-language-action models · 1terrain-aware behavioral foundation model for humanoid whole-body control · 1training-signal allocation for vision-language-action robot policies · 1vision-language-action models · 1world models for dexterous manipulation · 1
LevelAnyBeginnerIntermediateExpert
Filtered by technology vla · clear
arXiv
VLAExpert

WayFinder: Hierarchical Visual-Language-Action for Zero-Shot Waypoint Generation and Low-Level Kinematic Control

Timothy K Johnsen, Marco Levorato

Visual Language Action (VLA) models offer unprecedented generalization for autonomous robots; however, their real-world deployment is frequently bottlenecked by unreliable execution and the prohibitive computational cost of fine-tuning for specific robot embodiments and tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose WayFinder, an end-to-end, closed-loop hierarchical VLA framework that circumvents the need for fine-tuning by decoupling high-level task reasoning from low-level kinematic control.

VLA
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arXiv
VLA robustnessExpert

Taming VLAs under Robot Execution Errors: Self-Compensation and Stress Testing

Sohyun Lee, Yoonjae Baek, Jaesang Won, Jinnyeong Kim, Kang Hyunwoo, Seung-Hwan Baek, Ivan Laptev, Suha Kwak

This arXiv preprint introduces self-compensating VLA, a deployment-time adaptation method that updates a robot policy online using the residual between commanded and executed motion, plus RoboStress, a simulation benchmark for joint-level execution errors. On two physical Piper arms, it improves average task success by more than 30 percentage points per arm, and on RoboStress it beats base policies and training-time robustness methods. The work matters because mechanical wear, payload, and thermal drift cause real execution errors that standard VLA training does not address.

VLA
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arXiv
VLAExpert

Urgent Actions Go First: Urgency-Aware Denoising for Real-Time VLA Control

Zibo Wang, Haochen Han, Pengzhen Ren, Mingtong Dai, Fangming Liu

Diffusion and flow-matching Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies generate action chunks through iterative denoising, incurring substantial inference latency that severely limits real-time robotic control. Existing acceleration methods treat an action chunk as a monolithic computational unit, ignoring a crucial physical reality of receding-horizon control: actions are generated jointly but consumed sequentially, resulting in inherently heterogeneous execution urgencies.

VLA
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arXiv
VLAExpert

Faster and Better? Benchmark Bugs and Design Limitations Distort the Evaluation of Vision-Language-Action Acceleration

Qiwei Chen, Kaijun Zhou, Nuohui Shi, Zhiyang Li, Yuxuan Feng, Jinyu Gu

Simulated manipulation benchmarks are the standard tool for evaluating vision-language-action (VLA) policies and the acceleration methods that reduce their inference latency for on-robot deployment. On these benchmarks, we observe that some training-free acceleration methods, which approximate the baseline policy's computation, achieve higher measured success rates than the baseline itself.

VLA
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arXiv
VLAExpert

RawVLA: Embodied Neural Image Signal Processor For Robotic Manipulation

Shuhong Liu, Heng Zhou, Lingfeng Qian, Yuhao Fang, Xianbao Hou, Qianyu Zhou, Lin Gu, Wei Sui, Jianfei Yang, Ziteng Cui

Vision-language-action (VLA) models typically operate on RGB images produced by a fixed camera image signal processor (ISP), leaving the imaging pipeline outside the learning and evaluation loop. We systematically examine the consequences of this overlooked design choice across five fundamental ISP dimensions: gain, sensor noise, chromatic response, tonal response, and bit depth.

VLA
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arXiv
VLAExpert

Rho: A Foundation for Efficiently Adaptable VLA Models

Rho Team, Simran Bagaria, Daphne Chen, Dean Fortier, Jianlong Fu, Michael Harrison, Tess Hellebrekers, Neel Joshi, Andrey Kolobov, Dalton Moore, Galen Mullins, Michael Murray, Eduardo Salinas, Reuben Tan

General-purpose physical AI models must combine broad visual and linguistic capabilities with precise control across robot embodiments and efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. We introduce Rho, a family of open-weights VLA models for bimanual manipulation designed for data-light task adaptation on 3 embodiments representative of dual-arm robots across research labs and the industry -- YAM Box, UR AI Trainer, and FR3 Duo.

VLA
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Topic pages

Manipulation · 96VLA · 70Navigation · 52General robotics · 41Robot learning · 32Simulation · 24Perception · 23Humanoid · 20Locomotion · 16Safety · 13Aerial · 4World Action Models · 5World-action model · 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.