MEKAWIRE
Research

Papers

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

12 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
PerceptionExpert

Towards Safer Cities: A Design Process for Perception Datasets in Urban Driving Scenarios

Alexander Kroth, Cristian Martinez, Steven Peters

Urban environments present significant challenges for the perception systems of automated driving due to their high complexity, characterized by dense traffic, diverse obstacles, or a wide range of possible scenarios. While numerous automotive datasets exist, few focus on urban settings, and the majority are acquired exclusively on passenger cars and overlook other transport modalities such as heavy-duty trucks, busses and trams.

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arXiv
PerceptionExpert

Tracking the Invisible: Self-Supervised Wheel Track Detection with Thermal-RGB Fusion

Yiming Yang, Jeremy P. Bos

Accurate detection of drivable area is essential for autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems. While state-of-the-art methods focus on general traversability estimation, they prove inadequate for snow-covered roads where following existing wheel tracks offers crucial advantages: improved traction, predictable vehicle dynamics, and verified path stability.

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arXiv
PerceptionExpert

Beyond the Snowflakes: Disentangling Weather Effects from Confounding Meta-Factors in LiDAR Object Detection

Yiming Yang, Jeremy P. Bos

Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) is critical for autonomous perception, yet its performance is known to degrade in adverse weather. While existing literature models snow as atmospheric noise that degrades performance, our granular evaluation on the WADS-3D and CADC datasets reveals a counter-intuitive phenomenon: detection accuracy consistently improves as snow intensity increases.

LiDAR
Intuitive
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arXiv
PerceptionExpert

MAGMA-Bench: Evaluating Long-Horizon Embodied Agents under Dynamic Tasks and Execution Failures

Loan Bernat, Matthieu Grard, Ariane Herbulot, Florent Lamiraux

Long-horizon embodied agents must maintain task-relevant information, coordinate heterogeneous robots, and adapt their decisions as execution unfolds. Existing benchmarks investigate dynamic task execution and embodied multi-agent coordination, but provide limited evaluation of their intersection.

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arXiv
PerceptionExpert

Towards a Unified Taxonomy of Agricultural Harvesting Technologies: Linking Physical Interaction, Automation, and Selectivity

Renato Cristiano Torres, Fabiano Mariath D Oliveira, Claudio Gottschalg Duque

Harvesting technologies have evolved from conventional mechanized systems based on bulk mechanical interaction toward increasingly automated and robotic systems capable of perception, decision-making, and localized actuation. This evolution has also created a classification problem, as harvesting systems are commonly described according to crop type, mechanical removal principle, sensing technology, robotic architecture, or degree of automation, making direct comparison difficult.

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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
PerceptionExpert

Does Local Video Understanding Transfer Across Encounters? The EgoGears Benchmark

Yuedong Tan, Lei Qi, Yu Liu, Di Wen, Ruiping Liu, Xiaoye Wang, Yufan Chen, Junwei Zheng, Chengzhi Wu, Chen Zhang, Zhihang Chen, Haiwen Sun, Zongwei Wu, Radu Timofte, Danda Pani Paudel, Kunyu Peng

Embodied systems must make knowledge acquired during one encounter usable in another despite changes in viewpoint, motion, and illumination. Yet aggregate cross-video accuracy conflates failures of local perception with failures to preserve observation identity, establish correspondence, and compose evidence, obscuring whether local video understanding actually transfers.

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arXiv
PerceptionExpert

PhysWAM: Physically Consistent World Action Model for Autonomous Driving

Dhruv Parikh, Fengcheng Yu, Quankai Gao, Jiawei Yang, Junjie Ye, Maulik Bhatt, Thang Vu, Charles Ochoa, Rowan McAllister, Igor Vasiljevic, Rajgopal Kannan, Viktor Prasanna, Vitor Guizilini, Yue Wang

World-action models (WAMs) jointly predict how a scene will evolve and how an agent should act, however joint generation alone does not necessarily impose a shared geometric constraint on these predictions. We present PhysWAM, a unified world-action model for autonomous driving that co-denoises multiview video, metric depth, and ego motion within a single flow-matching transformer.

LiDAR
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arXiv
PerceptionExpert

Recompositional Robotics: Cross-Domain, Open-set, and Lifelong Modularity Beyond Morphology

Steven Swanbeck, Jonathan Salfity, Corrie Van Sice, Robert Blake Anderson, Mitch Pryor

Research in modular robotics has produced capable approaches allowing a robot's morphology to change online, with recent efforts also developing approaches to decide which morphology to assume and automatically propagate that decision into the robot's motion planning and control. These approaches are powerful and increase adaptability in the field.

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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.