Research
Frontier robotics research: arXiv cs.RO papers, embodied AI, VLA models, manipulation, navigation and learning systems.
Frontier robotics research: arXiv cs.RO papers, embodied AI, VLA models, manipulation, navigation and learning systems.
Latest in Research
6171 storiesSCULPT-VLA: Learning Structured Control through Staged Action Grounding
arXiv:2609.23275v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies increasingly incorporate structured intermediate supervision beyond action…
Robot World Models Are Not Invariant to How the Actions Are Written
arXiv:2609.23252v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A robot policy is trained with one of two action parameterizations: absolute joint targets, or deltas relative t…
Tip Manipulation in Soft Everting Robots via Wall Retraction and Deployable Fingers
arXiv:2609.23132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soft everting robots can traverse long, confined paths by continuously growing, yet active interaction remains l…
DiagGen: Agentic Generation of Deformable Assets with Sim-based Diagnostics for Robotic Simulation
arXiv:2609.23103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While simulation-ready deformable assets are essential for in-silico robotic manipulation tasks, existing genera…
Anatomy of a Closed-Loop Collapse: A Causal Case Study of a Compressed VLA Policy
arXiv:2609.23048v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compressed manipulation policies can pass offline evaluation while failing in closed-loop execution; this dissoc…
Connectivity-Aware Exploration of Robotic Grasp Spaces
arXiv:2609.22983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic grasping is typically formulated as the problem of identifying successful actions from a space of candid…
Embodied Snap: Octopus-Inspired Distributed Reach-and-Attach with a Speed-Limited Soft Arm
arXiv:2609.22926v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reach-and-attach of soft robotic arms with passive suction requires accurate targeting and sufficient contact sp…
Barrier Certificate Synthesis for Non-Polynomial Robotic Dynamics via Polynomial Lifting
arXiv:2609.22885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe operation of robotic systems requires trajectories to remain within a prescribed safe set under admissible …
Physical-Touch Observability from Wrist Wrench in Granular Scooping
arXiv:2609.22852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mining and earthmoving are important real-world deployment settings for embodied intelligence. Autonomous transp…
Commonsense-Grounded Path Planning from Abstract Instructions
arXiv:2609.22813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present \emph{commonsense ranked search} (CoRS), a novel path planner that turns an abstract instruction into…
Expert-Play Contouring Control: Faster-than-Demonstration Planning from Slow Expert and Fast Play
arXiv:2609.22798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Expert demonstrations often specify what a robot should do, but not how fast it can do it. Imitation Learning (I…
Rapidly-Iterating Grid-Based Near-Optimal Kinodynamic Motion Planning
arXiv:2609.22733v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper develops the Rapidly-iterating kinoDynamic Grid (RDG) algorithm, an asymptotically near-optimal kinod…
Decentralized Multi-Robot Exploration with Probabilistic Peer Intent and Multi-hop Plan Propagation
arXiv:2609.22726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient coordination under limited communication remains a key challenge in decentralized multi-robot explorat…
Density-Driven Area Coverage for Nonholonomic Multi-Robot Systems with Safety Guarantee
arXiv:2609.22668v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Density-Driven Optimal Control (D2OC) provides a principled approach to distributing multi-robot teams over non-…
Simultaneous Forward and Inverse Human-in-the-Loop Optimization
arXiv:2609.22630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Subjective user experience is important to human-robot interaction, but the outcomes users value, and how those …
HIGenNTO: Scalable Humanoid Interaction Generation via Noise-Space Trajectory Optimization
arXiv:2609.22611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid robots can acquire complex skills by imitating kinematic humanoid motion references, yet reliable refer…
Becoming a Fruit Ninja: Real-Time Probabilistic Kinodynamic Planning for Manipulator Projectile Interception
arXiv:2609.22608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Projectile interception is a challenging dynamic manipulation problem. Intercepting a thrown object with a robot…
Characterizing Wildlife Response to Biomimetic and Conventional Underwater Vehicles
arXiv:2609.22594v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are a promising alternative to divers for scalable collection of natural o…
Tracker-Free Robotic Ultrasound Calibration with a Spherical-Marker Phantom and Threshold-Free Center Localization
arXiv:2609.22483v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic ultrasound (US) calibration is essential for accurately relating US images to the robot coordinate syste…
AffordanceWAM: Affordance-Aware Joint World-Action Modeling for Robot Manipulation
arXiv:2609.22332v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalizable robot manipulation requires predicting how a scene will evolve, identifying where interactions are…
Embedding Physics Priors in Robot Learning: A Survey
arXiv:2609.22319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid progress of artificial intelligence is reshaping robotics and accelerating the adoption of learning-ba…
DeViGrasp: Robust Visual Mobile Grasping for Quadruped Manipulators under Degraded Perception
arXiv:2609.22278v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quadruped manipulators enable mobile grasping in complex environments, yet their whole-body control policies rem…
WM-VS: Progress-Aligned World Models for Closed-Loop Visual Servoing
arXiv:2609.20892v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Closed-loop visual servoing requires predictions that indicate whether an action reduces task error, not only wh…
ForeTac-VLA: A Forecasting-Based Tactile-Vision-Language-Action Model for Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation
arXiv:2609.20980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation, yet their rel…
PIVOT: Physically Informed Vision-Language Off-Road Traversability for Field Robot Navigation
arXiv:2609.20983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Terrain assessment is a critical capability for off-road mobile robots, enabling safe and reliable navigation th…
Do Spinning Radar Doppler Velocity Measurements Improve Vehicle Detection and Tracking?
arXiv:2609.21000v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spinning frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radars have been gaining popularity in autonomous vehicle pe…
Project SCOUT: Interceptor Drone for Perimeter Defense
arXiv:2609.21005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid proliferation of unauthorized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has created a growing need for robust, j…
Towards Effective Visual-Inertial SLAM with Passive-Only Sensors for Low-Cost Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
arXiv:2609.21015v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improvements to Visual-Inertial Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (VI-SLAM) for low-cost autonomous underwat…
Catch Me If You Can: Real-Time Feedback Denoising for Responsive VLAs
arXiv:2609.21022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong generalization in robotic manipulation by combining semant…
Adapting Rigid-Body Dynamics Derivatives for Constraint Embedding Closed-Chain Models
arXiv:2609.21024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper extends an existing algorithm for the first-order derivatives of rigid-body dynamics to the case of c…