MEKAWIRE
Research

Papers

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

33 papers
TopicAllManipulation · 56VLA · 33Navigation · 24Robotics · 20Learning · 19Perception · 17Humanoid · 14Locomotion · 8Safety · 8Simulation · 8World Action Models · 4Aerial 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 · 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 · 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
Filtered by technology reinforcement-learning · clear
arXiv
LearningExpert

OneDemo: Unified Policy Learning and Data Generation from a Single Demonstration

Ying Qian, Jianshu Hu, Han Fang, Shuguang Li, Yutong Ban

Learning robot policies from demonstrations is often limited by the cost of collecting diverse, high-quality expert data. While an appealing alternative is to expand a single successful demonstration into a diverse set of successful trajectories, existing augmentation methods typically rely on manually designed transformation rules or complex trajectory planning, requiring substantial task-specific engineering and human effort.

RL
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arXiv
HumanoidExpert

TRACE: Efficient Transfer Learning for Neural Whole-Body Control Across Humanoid Embodiments

Qingyu Lan, Zhihao Tian, Zifan Wang, Junwei Liang

Humanoid behavior foundation models (BFMs) enable diverse whole-body control, but adapting a pretrained controller to a new embodiment remains challenging because of kinematic and dynamic mismatch. We present TRACE, a framework for efficient cross-embodiment adaptation that preserves pretrained motion representations while specializing feedback control to the target robot.TRACE first injects kinematic priors into input and output projection layers and aligns nominal joint dynamics to reduce embodiment mismatch and support stable fine-tuning.

RL
HumanoidFoundation
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arXiv
LearningExpert

DriveWLA: Unifying Future Dynamics and Scene Semantics through World-Language-Action Modeling for Autonomous Driving

Shuzheng Wang, Haoxuan Li, Shengzhen Li, Chenxi Wu, Yajing Sun, Lu Hou, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang Wang

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and world models have demonstrated strong capabilities in semantic understanding and future scene evolution for autonomous driving. However, effectively integrating both capabilities for trajectory generation remains challenging.

World ModelsImitation LearningRL
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arXiv
ManipulationExpert

CALM: Decentralized Control of Cooperative Aerial Manipulation with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Jiaxi Huo, Petre Ricioppo, Fausto Francesco Lizzio

Cooperative aerial manipulation is difficult under wind, payload motion, and noisy goal broadcasts because multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are coupled through a shared payload. We present CALM (Cooperative Aerial Learned Manipulation), a decentralized controller for aerial manipulators carrying a basket while tracking a moving ground robot.

RL
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arXiv
VLAExpert

WoVR+: World Model as Reliable Simulator for Versatile VLA Policy Optimization with RL

Shangqing Zhou, Zhennan Jiang, Ning Ma, Xin Fu, Yupeng Zheng, Shuai Tian, Huangrui Li, Jiahao Liu, Chao Yu, Zhongpu Xia, Haoran Li, Dongbin Zhao

Action-conditioned world models can reduce costly real-robot interaction in reinforcement learning for Vision-Language-Action models (VLA-RL), but hallucinations can mislead policy optimization. Extending them to richer VLA interfaces and long-horizon tasks raises challenges in spatiotemporal and cross-modal consistency, exploration-reliability balance in RL, and compounding rollout errors.

VLAWorld ModelsRL
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arXiv
HumanoidExpert

Walk Like This: Stylized Locomotion for Physics-Based Characters through Example-Driven Diffusion

Joshua Aurand, Agon Serifi, Sammy Christen, Ruben Grandia, Espen Knoop, Marco Hutter, Moritz Bächer

We present a real-time framework for expressive legged locomotion that enables independent control over velocity and style. Unlike existing data-driven controllers, which typically require explicit style labels for training, our method efficiently leverages large-scale unstructured motion data and generalizes to unseen styles.

RL
Humanoid
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arXiv
LearningExpert

MSC: Multi-Stage Caster-aware Control Framework with Uncertainty-Aware NMPC and RL-based Execution Layer

Jinho Park, Jeongtae Lee, Jeonghyeok Lim, Keun Ha Choi, Kyung-Soo Kim

Freely swiveling casters are widely adopted in industrial AMRs/SDVs for their mechanical simplicity and load capacity. However, caster misalignment during low-speed or high-curvature maneuvers induces strong contact nonlinearities, widening the planning-execution gap between commanded $(v, ω)$ and realized motion.

RL
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arXiv
SimulationExpert

SIGN-MAPPO: State-Intent-Aware Graph Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Driving under Imperfect V2X

Zide Fan, Jiahui Yuan, Kaixin Zhang, Junhao Fan, Xiaohe Li, Yiru Wang

Cooperative driving at mixed-traffic unsignalized intersections is challenged by imperfect vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, human-driven vehicle (HV) intentions that cannot be directly communicated, and the potential incompatibility of independently generated crossing decisions. This paper proposes State-Intent-Aware Graph Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Driving under Imperfect V2X (SIGN-MAPPO) to address these challenges through three coordinated mechanisms.

RL
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arXiv
LocomotionExpert

Learning Safety-Constrained Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation for Lunar Surface Operations

Alvaro Belmonte-Baeza, Miguel Cazorla, Gabriel J. García, Carlos J. Pérez-Del-Pulgar, Jorge Pomares

Robotic systems for lunar surface operations must act autonomously and preserve their own integrity in an environment where failures are unrecoverable and continuous supervision is impossible. This paper presents a Constrained Reinforcement Learning framework for quadrupedal mobile manipulators that learns a single whole-body policy for tracking a 6D end-effector pose specified in task space, with operational limits enforced during learning through a constrained learning mechanism.

RL
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arXiv
VLAExpert

Recovering Low-Bit Failures in Vision-Language-Action Policies via Quantization-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Seongmin Park, Jaewon Lee, Yujun Heo, Yoonsik Kim, Seheon Choi, Hyoung-rock Kim, Jungwook Choi

Quantization lowers deployment costs of vision-language-action (VLA) policies but can compromise task completion. Across five VLA models and 4,050 real-world trials, we systematically reveal that quantization-aware training (QAT) generally improves on post-training quantization (PTQ) but leaves substantial gaps to full precision (FP) on long-horizon tasks and under visual and semantic shifts, while its imitation-based objective does not explicitly use rollout success or partial completion.

VLARL
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arXiv
LocomotionExpert

PointWalker: Mapless Quadruped Locomotion Directly From Raw LiDAR Point Clouds

Sicen Li, Zhen Chu, Chao Li, Jun Zheng, Qiuguo Zhu, Jun Wu

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.

RLLiDAR
DEEP Robotics
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arXiv
HumanoidExpert

P-BFM: Perceptive Behavioral Foundation Models for Humanoid Control via Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning

Xue Wang, Yitang Li, Yiming Zhang, Siqin Wang, Junhan Sun, Zhihao Liu, Yaojie Shen, Jingbo Yuan, Hao Zhao, Qingdu Li

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.

RL
HumanoidFoundation
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arXiv
LearningExpert

Reinforcement Learning Based Heterogeneous Task Allocation Under Spatio-Temporal Environmental Uncertainty for Multi-Robot Teams

Xi Lin, Yaxuan Li, Paul Szenher, Brendan Englot

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.

RL
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arXiv
LearningExpert

Phase-Gated Constrained Reinforcement Learning for End-to-End Capture and Detumbling of Non-Cooperative Targets

Álvaro Belmonte-Baeza, Celia Redondo-Verdú, José L. Ramón, Miguel Cazorla, Leonard Felicetti, Jorge Pomares

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.

RL
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arXiv
VLAExpert

Reflect-VLA: Internalizing Reflective Guidance via Dual-Path On-Policy Self-Distillation for Autonomous Driving

Yuechen Luo, He Chong, Fang Li, Shaoqing Xu, Hexin Zhang, Ruiqi Zhang, Ziying Song, Lei Yang, Zhi-Xin Yang, Fuxi Wen

Reinforcement Learning (RL) substantially improves planning performance in autonomous-driving Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, existing RL methods rely on scalar trajectory rewards that measure overall quality but fail to identify specific planning errors or provide actionable correction signals.

VLARL
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arXiv
ManipulationExpert

Evo-RL: Iterative Robot Reinforcement Learning from Selective Experience

Kai Ye, Yifan Jin, Qianhang Luo, Hongru Zhang, Jiedong Zhang, Shuyuan Hu, Song-Yuan Wu, Jihai Xu, Jie Zhao, Bo Zhao

Existing real-world reinforcement learning methods improve robot policies by combining human corrections with autonomous rollouts. However, accumulated experience varies in its value for policy improvement, and even successful trajectories can contain inefficient or redundant behavior, motivating more selective experience reuse.

RL
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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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Topic pages

Manipulation · 56VLA · 32Navigation · 24General robotics · 20Robot learning · 19Perception · 17Humanoid · 14Safety · 8Simulation · 8Locomotion · 7World Action Models · 5Aerial 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.