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 storiesScensory: Real-Time Robotic Olfactory Perception for Joint Identification and Source Localization
arXiv:2509.19318v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Olfaction offers robots access to chemical information that is largely inaccessible to vision, touch, …
HumanEgo: Zero-Shot Robot Learning from Minutes of Human Egocentric Videos
arXiv:2605.24934v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Human egocentric video captures rich manipulation demonstrations without any robot hardware, yet transferrin…
Quantifying Motion Excitation for Metric Scale Observability in Monocular Visual-Inertial Odometry
arXiv:2603.26740v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Monocular visual-inertial odometry (VIO) cannot recover metric scale from vision alone; scale must be resolv…
SafeFlow: Real-Time Text-Driven Humanoid Whole-Body Control via Physics-Guided Rectified Flow and Selective Safety Gating
arXiv:2603.23983v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in real-time interactive text-driven motion generation have enabled humanoids to perform div…
Mind the Gap: Rethinking I/O Design for Contact-Rich Visuomotor Policy Learning
arXiv:2602.08776v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Contact-rich teleoperation logs expose a policy I/O design choice: demonstrations may contain the robot exec…
TARC: Time-Adaptive Robotic Control
arXiv:2510.23176v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most robotic systems rely on fixed-frequency discrete-time controllers, creating a trade-off between the eff…
SlotDiT: Object-Centric Representations for Diffusion Transformers
arXiv:2609.17414v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-conditioned latent diffusion models perform strongly in video generation and are promising backbones for …
Machine Zygote: Causal Biparental Heredity Before Learning in a Germline--Soma Artificial Agent
arXiv:2609.17300v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial ontogeny, developmental encodings, robot reproduction, and inherited controllers are established re…
Learning Options for Compositional Motor Control with Adapter Banks
arXiv:2609.17042v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning flexible motor primitives is a hallmark of skilled motor control. Recent neuroscience theory proposes…
sensVLA: Spatially-Grounded Vision-Language-Action Model for Autonomous Wheel Loader
arXiv:2609.17021v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous wheel-loader control requires joint reasoning over task semantics, egocentric vision, proprioceptio…
Bridging Learned Visual Perception and Symbolic Belief-Space Planning
arXiv:2609.16884v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In partially observable settings, agents must act without full knowledge of the world state and rely on uncert…
Beyond Gestures: Estimating Full Hand Pose and Contact Forces from Wrist-Worn Pressure Sensor Array
arXiv:2609.16518v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Capturing hand motion and interaction forces is critical for interactive computing, VR, and high-fidelity tact…
A Programmable Optics Cloud Laboratory
arXiv:2609.16413v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Laboratory automation can improve experimental throughput, accessibility, and reproducibility, but many roboti…
Autonomous Droplet Navigation via Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2609.16369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Precise manipulation of liquid droplets underpins lab-on-a-chip platforms for diagnostics, chemical synthesis,…
Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability for Hybrid Systems: Unified Goal-Driven Control with Safety Guarantees
arXiv:2609.17430v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hybrid dynamical systems provide a powerful modeling framework for robotic systems, particularly in contact-rich…
Online Geometric Change Detection via Scene Decomposition
arXiv:2609.17302v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous robots are increasingly deployed on long duration single- and multi-session missions in dynamic envir…
Escape-Aware Control Barrier Functions for Quadrotor Safety under Body-Rate Limits
arXiv:2609.17292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Control barrier functions for input-constrained systems place the admissible input set inside the definition of …
Fleet-To-Lab: A Transfer Learning Framework For Lunar Rover Slippage Estimation Via Model Fusion
arXiv:2609.17187v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate wheel slip estimation is essential for autonomous lunar rover mobility and navigation. Machine Learning…
HuMemSLAM: Efficient Human-Inspired Semantic Place Recognition for Robust Visual SLAM
arXiv:2609.17168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous systems require reliable place recognition for efficient and effective simultaneous localisation and …
Kernel-Based Metrics Learning for Uncertain Opponent Vehicle Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Racing
arXiv:2609.17147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous racing confronts significant challenges in safely overtaking Opponent Vehicles (OVs) that exhibit unc…
LiLi: Lie Theory Based 3D LiDAR Scan Alignment Degeneracy Detection
arXiv:2609.17145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study 3D LiDAR scan alignment in challenging scenarios with degeneracies, such as straight cor…
LOTUSim-Energy: A Maritime Simulator for Human-Drone Interaction in Autonomous Offshore Operation \& Maintenance
arXiv:2609.17124v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offshore maintenance requires operations in the air, the surface, and the subsea domain and include human superv…
Intrinsic Robot Rewarding: Reusing VLA Representations for Autonomous Evaluation and Policy Improvement
arXiv:2609.17115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) systems already bring together two valuable resources for robot learning: rich visu…
Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Space Robot Operations: Technologies, Challenges and Prospects
arXiv:2609.16880v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Space robots are increasingly expected to perform long-duration, contact-rich, and multi-stage operations with l…
TEMPO: Learning Temporal Context for Dynamic Robot Manipulation
arXiv:2609.16864v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have achieved impressive performance in quasi-static manipulation, but strug…
Optimal Excitation Trajectories for System Identification of Underwater Vehicles
arXiv:2609.16786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we propose a structured methodology for the system identification of underwater vehicles through t…
Seeing What Matters: Visual Cue Guided Video Planning for Generalizable Robot Navigation
arXiv:2609.16737v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative video models can serve as a promising backbone for robot navigation by predicting future observations…
WholeBodyWAM: Generalizing Pre-trained World-Action Priors to Humanoid Loco-Manipulation via WBC-Grounded Coordination
arXiv:2609.16644v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) offer a promising approach to general-purpose robot manipulation by jointly modeling …
The Neverwhere Visual Parkour Benchmark Suite
arXiv:2609.16443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: State-of-the-art visual locomotion controllers are increasingly capable at handling complex visual environments,…
ManiSkillFormer: Demonstration-Free Compositional Manipulation via Task-Conditioned Geometric Contracts
arXiv:2609.16331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present ManiSkillFormer, a neuro-symbolic framework for demonstration-free and compositional robotic manipula…