Robotics & Automation
Robotics & Automation news — Friday 16 October 2026
120 stories from 3 sources, every one in English. Each links to its publisher.
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Why opportunity charging is winning as robot fleets scale
The Robot Report
The Robot Report Podcast · Why Opportunity Charging Is Winning as Robot Fleets Scale Ben Waters, CEO of Wibotic. In Episode 266 of The Robot Report Podcast, our guest is Ben Watters is the CEO and co-founder of WiBotic, a company that…
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MassRobotics opens applications for Healthcare Robotics Startup Catalyst Program
The Robot Report
Startups in the MassRobotics healthcare catalyst cohort will have an opportunity to showcase their technology at the Robotics Summit & Expo. | Source: MassRobotics MassRobotics this week opened its call for applicants for Cohort 6 of its…
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Video Friday: When Two Robots Become One
IEEE Spectrum Robotics
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for…
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Slip-Induced Fall Suppression During Cornering for a Remotely Operated Motorcycle with a Rear-Wheel-Swing Mechanism
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21089v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Slip-induced falls when riding motorcycles are difficult to avoid even for expert riders and represent a major cause of single-vehicle accidents. Despite their prevalence, no practical…
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When to Ask for Help: A Decision-Theoretic Account and Measurement Standard for Slow-Module Scheduling in Dual-System Vision-Language-Action Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dual-system vision-language-action (VLA) models pair a high-frequency fast policy with a slow, expensive module, and published trigger mechanisms for invoking it lack a shared objective…
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A Black-Box Positioning Solution for Effortless Integration in Wearable Navigation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21353v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate localization is critical for a wide range of applications, including navigation, augmented reality, safety management, and healthcare. However, achieving accurate positioning remains…
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De-Risking Robotic Welding for In-Space Metal Joining Through Physics-Grounded Digital Twins
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21939v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Growing interest in in-space servicing, manufacturing, and assembly has renewed attention on reliable metal joining for modular construction and on-orbit repair. Robotic welding is promising…
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When a robot can trust reversing wind to find an odour source
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20970v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A wind-derived heading can guide a robot towards an odour source even after the wind reverses, but its reliability depends on the plume's transport history. On a quadruped initially facing…
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LICOA: Learning Instruction-Conditioned Optical Actions for Mobile Spatial Augmented Reality
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial augmented reality (SAR) augments physical environments with projected content, but most systems assume that the projector pose, target region, or motion path has been fixed or…
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VP-EVT: Active Visibility Preservation for Embodied Visual Tracking
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied Visual Tracking (EVT) is an essential capability for intelligent robots in human-robot collaboration, requiring an agent to follow a designated target person in dynamic environments…
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DemoStream: Batched Task-and-Motion-Plan Optimization for Automated Learning from Demonstration
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from demonstration is an effective strategy for endowing robots with manipulation capabilities but requires training on datasets comprised of massive amounts of demonstrations…
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CF-Splat: Closed-Form Triangle Splatting with Mesh Priors
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Splatting-based radiance-field representations have recently gained popularity in robotic perception, enabling high-quality novel-view synthesis (NVS) through explicit scene primitives…
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Onboard Lightweight LLM Reasoning for Human-Aware Safe UAV Navigation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aerial robots operating near people must treat a pedestrian, a parked car, and a wall differently, yet conventional perception--planning stacks reduce all of them to occupied geometry---a…
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Inertially Significant Humanoid Teleoperation via Whole Body Model Predictive Control and Online Parameter Estimation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The effective deployment of humanoid robots in practical tasks of interest will require a capability of sensing and adapting to variations in inertial parameters, as occurs during heavy tool…
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Dexterity from Supervised Play
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How can robots autonomously collect the contact-rich experience needed to learn dexterous manipulation? We present DSP: Dexterity from supervised play, a framework in which a robot learns a…
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Value as Memory: Online Value-Guided Post-training for General Robot Policies
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world post-training of generalist robot policies faces two challenges: partial observability makes action selection ambiguous, while offline post-training methods delay feedback from…
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IDfRA: Self-Verification for Iterative Design in Robotic Assembly
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2509.16998v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Design for Robotic Assembly (DfRA) remains largely dependent on manual planning and heuristic simulation, limiting scalability and robustness in complex industrial settings. Although…
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Affordance-Aware Interactive Decision-Making and Execution for Ambiguous Instructions
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2602.05273v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling robots to explore and act in unfamiliar environments under ambiguous human instructions by interactively identifying task-relevant objects (e.g., cups or beverages for "I'm…
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Evaluating Multimodal LLMs as Generalist Vision-Language-Action Agents for Drone Control: Commanding, Approaching, Tracking and Searching
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2609.01404v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly used to make decisions for drones, but existing evaluations are mostly limited to simulation, to a single drone, and to targets…
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X-Fly: Learning to Reach and Stop in Full-Chunk Aerial Vision-Language Navigation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21450v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aerial vision-language navigation (VLN) agents built on large vision-language models are expensive to query. Executing a complete predicted action chunk before replanning amortizes this cost…
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Attribution-Gated Joint Estimation of Intention and Capability for Assist-as-Needed Upper-Limb Robots
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21534v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Assist-as-needed (AAN) control must distinguish between changes in intended motion and changes in effective voluntary torque capability, even though both can produce similar kinematic and…
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Planning to Learn: Real-Time Robust Adaptive Control on the GPU with Guaranteed Future Learning
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust adaptive control is vital for keeping robots safe while actively reducing uncertainty in unfamiliar settings. However, traditional methods are often conservative since they fail to…
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An Introduction to Zero-Order Optimization Techniques for Robotics
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2506.22087v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Zero-order optimization techniques are becoming increasingly popular in robotics due to their ability to handle non-differentiable functions and escape local minima. These advantages make…
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Interaction Forces and Internal Loads in Parallel Manipulators with Actuation Redundancy
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2604.27095v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper discusses null-space wrench components in parallel manipulators. We examine the adaptation of the two most common characterizations of these components in grasp-like systems…
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Causal Analysis of Robot Foundation Models Enables Efficiency Gains
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20750v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models are a promising approach to general purpose robot manipulation. While the internal computation of vision-language models, which compose the backbone of…
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Geometry-Aware Control Barrier Functions for Collision Avoidance via Bernstein Polynomial Approximations
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2605.30696v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Safe navigation often relies on well-defined conditions based on the shape of robots and obstacles, and can be challenging when they have irregular geometries. While Control Barrier…
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KODA: Kinematics--Observation Data Alignment for Humanoid Learning from Human Egocentric Demonstration
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training humanoid whole-body vision-language-action (VLA) policies requires costly robot demonstrations with aligned robot-view observations and controller-compatible whole-body state-action…
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Sub-Millisecond Reflexes for Continuous Physical Human-Robot Interaction
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous physical human-robot interaction requires robots to rapidly adapt their control behaviour without interrupting task execution. However, existing ROS 2 control architectures rely on…
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REKI: Registering Knowledge in VLAs
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce REKI, a 2.4B vision-language-action model (VLA) pretrained exclusively on public data that sets a new Pareto frontier between performance and model size: on LIBERO-Plus, RoboTwin…
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Robotic-supported Data Loss Detection in Android Applications
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20807v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Smartphones have become integral to modern life due to their diverse applications. However, the development of applications for these devices faces significant challenges, primarily due to…
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LoopWAM: Closed-Loop Generalist Policy Improvement from Deployment Rollouts
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.18873v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling expert demonstrations alone does not enable generalist robot policies to improve from deployment. Real-world rollouts contain successes, suboptimal behavior, and failures…
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CarryOn: A Dual-Loop Harness for Personalized and Reliable Robot Assistance
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21453v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While generalist vision-language-action (VLA) models have enabled diverse open-world manipulation, real-world robotic assistance requires two critical capabilities they currently lack…
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One-Shot Learning for Double-Shot Latte Art: Adapting Cobot Pouring Skills with Dynamic Movement Primitives
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.16179v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Latte art is a complex task requiring dexterity and precision, making it a challenging and commercially relevant task. A one-shot learning system is employed in which a single barista…
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Optimally Trading Energy for Information through Speed Trajectory Optimization of Sustainably Powered Mobile Robots
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20875v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sustainably powered mobile robots enable long-duration observational missions by harvesting energy from the environment. However, effective autonomy requires the robots to make decisions as…
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LIN-SLAM: Lightweight LiDAR--Inertial Neural SLAM for Real-Time Onboard Navigation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geometric light detection and ranging (LiDAR)--inertial simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) provides efficient state estimation but lacks the continuous map representation and global…
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Modular Inverse Dynamics and Wrench Recovery for Closed-Chain Mechanisms Using Path Assembly
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rigid closed chains can admit indeterminate internal reactions even when their motion is fully specified. This paper develops a modular inverse-dynamics workflow that combines path-based…
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Training-Free Target-Aware Refinement of 3D Gaussian Language Map
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21619v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distilling vision-language features into 3D Gaussian Splatting yields a language map that can be queried with arbitrary text. In deployment, however, a small set of user-specified targets…
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TS-WAM: Temporal Latent Actions and World-Action Coupling for Vision-Language Robot Control
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21922v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many vision-language-action policies rely on action-labeled robot demonstrations and lack an explicit mechanism for predicting future visual states. These limitations hinder learning from…
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Perceptual Comparisons of Viscoelastic Renderings: Fractional- vs Integer-Order Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Realistic haptic rendering of viscoelastic materials requires reproducing time-dependent behaviors such as creep and stress relaxation, which arise from the material's inherent memory…
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Towards bio-inspired visual navigation: a neuromorphic navigation paradigm for MAVs
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Biological visual navigation achieves remarkable robustness at extremely low power, whereas frame-based robotic systems relying on artificial neural networks remain limited in both respects…
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VeriVLA: Adaptive Test-Time Verification for Flow-Based VLAs with Latent World Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21985v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies are inherently stochastic: different noise seeds can produce action chunks of varying quality from the same observation. At test time…
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LIBERO-PeRM: Benchmarking Personalized Robotic Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22372v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalization is essential for general-purpose robots to transition into household environments and achieve true practicality. While general robotic manipulation has been extensively…
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A Response to the Reply Presented in "A Fair Comparison of Sliding-Mode and Immersion-and-Invariance Observers"
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20815v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In response to the reply presented in [Mu\~noz-V\'azquez and S\'anchez-Torres(2026)], this technical report extends the experimental evaluation of position-feedback velocity observers and…
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DGS-Net: Learning Dexterous Grasps from Single-View Point Clouds via a Multi-Object Scene Dataset
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2603.15410v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Dexterous grasping in multi-object scene constitutes a fundamental challenge in robotic manipulation. Current mainstream grasping datasets predominantly focus on single-object scenarios…
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RM-WAM: Reliable Memory-Augmented World Action Models for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.15305v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) improve robotic manipulation by jointly predicting future visual states and actions, yet most existing methods make decisions primarily from the current…
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CoDA: Co-Evolution of Data Engines and Action Policies
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative simulation can automate robot environment construction, but physically valid environments are not necessarily useful for training. The challenge is to identify environments that…
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Evo-DexBench: Benchmarking Generalization across Related Tasks for Dexterous Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21180v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General-purpose dexterous manipulation requires policies to transfer knowledge from related tasks to new tasks with only a few target demonstrations. Existing benchmarks often provide too…
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GeoState: Learning View-Decoupled Geometry States for 3D World Modeling
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22343v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent 3D world models increasingly use features from geometry foundation models (GFMs) as predictive world states, benefiting from their rich geometric priors. However, the view dependence…
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LEAP: Gradient Flow Augmented Lagrangian Trajectory Optimization for Contact Constrained Robots
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20936v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generating dynamically feasible motions for legged and manipulating robots requires solving a large, nonlinear, non-convex optimal control problem (OCP) in which contact wrenches must satisfy…
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What Should Robot Policies Learn to Predict? Rethinking Supervision Targets in Vision-Language-Action Learning
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies are typically trained with action prediction as the primary supervision signal, since robots ultimately execute actions. Auxiliary objectives such as…
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GRID-Planner: Graph-Structured Relational Reward Shaping for Diffusion Planning
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous driving planning requires selecting trajectories that remain safe, rule-compliant, and comfortable under complex multi-agent interactions, yet robust closed-loop decision making in…
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Path Planning on Multi-level Point Cloud with a Weighted Traversability Graph
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2504.21622v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This article proposes a new path planning method for addressing multi-level terrain situations. The proposed method includes innovations in three aspects: 1) the pre-processing of point…
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Clarity-Driven Adaptive Mission Planning for a Solar-Powered Autonomous Surface Vessel
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a comprehensive methodology, backed by simulation and experimental results, for an adaptive mission planning strategy that is mathematically grounded in the maximization…
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Adaptive Prescribed Performance Trajectory Tracking for Uncertain Autonomous Underwater Vehicles With Input Saturation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20957v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate trajectory tracking is essential for autonomous underwater vehicles operating with uncertain hydrodynamics and limited thruster authority. This paper develops a low-complexity…
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CLIS-MPPI: Closed-Loop Model Predictive Path Integral Control With Initial-State Sampling Under Execution Delay
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sampling-based motion planning such as Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control has become attractive for robotics due to its ability to handle nonlinear dynamics and non-smooth…
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Time-Optimal Ergodic Retrieval
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval tasks are a form of search task where a robot must explore, find an object, and return with it as quickly as possible. Recent work in ergodic control has demonstrated time-optimal…
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RoPE-Flow: Monocular Vision-based Robot Pose Estimation via 2D Graph-Conditioned 3D Flow Matching
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21086v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Camera-to-robot pose estimation from a monocular image is significant for vision-based robot navigation and control. However, recovering 3D structural features from 2D observations remains…
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Compliant GMT: Making General Motion Tracking Compliant via Residual Reference Adaptation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose Compliant GMT (C-GMT), a modular framework for full-body compliant responses in general motion tracking. As humanoid robots move into real world deployment, they not only need to…
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Whole-Body Dexterity
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current humanoid dexterous manipulation remains largely confined to end-effectors and simple grasps, falling short of humans' ability to engage the entire body by bracing and sliding bulky…
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A 2D Image Feedback-Based Autonomous Endovascular Navigation Method: A Perception and Control Framework
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In endovascular interventions, physicians rely on planar DSA and X-ray fluoroscopy to interpret vessel anatomy and device motion, yet converting these images into feedback for autonomous…
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Multi-Dimensional Featurizers Yield Fine-Grained Steering and Data Shaping in Robot Foundation Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20767v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can better feature discovery improve control over robot behavior through internal interventions and training data? Recent work in vision and language models reveals multidimensional features…
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Navigation by Skylight Polarization via Rayleigh Model Optimization on a Road Vehicle
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable absolute heading estimation is critical for road-vehicle navigation, particularly when magnetic, inertial, or GNSS-based references are degraded. This paper presents a skylight…
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AVALON: Zero-Shot Indoor Navigation with Human-Seeded Topological Memory
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21586v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Indoor service robots often enter unmapped buildings whose layouts and task constraints are already familiar to users. We address this human-familiar, robot-unseen setting with AVALON, a…
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Hierarchical Building-Floo-Room Framework for Privacy-Preserving Autonomous Delivery in Large-Scale Buildings
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21361v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous delivery in large scale buildings requires coordinated planning across multiple spatial levels, including building, floor, and room, while ensuring scheduling efficiency. Existing…
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Cross-Embodiment Causal Transfer from Human Videos to Robot Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling robot manipulation models requires large amounts of interaction data, yet collecting diverse real-robot experience remains costly. Human manipulation videos, in contrast, provide…
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Plans Are Not Executions: Adapting Frozen World-Model Planners to Controller-Induced Execution Shift
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22041v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World-model planners evaluate candidate trajectories by predicting their future consequences, implicitly relying on the plan-to-motion relationship learned during training. At deployment, a…
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Mem4Act: Learning Effective Latent Memory for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22323v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon robotic manipulation fundamentally requires memory: agents must retain task-relevant information from past observations and interactions and use it to guide future actions…
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SHRED: Self-Play for Heterogeneous Road-Users without Expert Demonstrations
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20866v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Realistic traffic simulation and autonomous planning both depend on modeling interactions among heterogeneous road users whose dynamics, constraints, and behaviors differ fundamentally…
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DeciCAD: Harness-Grounded Learning of Action Policies for CAD Agents
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model agents operate through closed-loop action policies whose decision space is defined by an agent harness. We investigate how this operating space shapes agent behavior…
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Self-Refining Vision Language Model for Robotic Failure Detection and Reasoning
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2602.12405v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reasoning about failures is crucial for building reliable and trustworthy robotic systems. Prior approaches either treat failure reasoning as a closed-set classification problem or assume…
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Race to Recovery: Designing Advanced Safety Systems for Autonomous Driving via Learning Autonomous Racing
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vehicles that lose control at the handling limit through icing, hydroplaning, or an abrupt evasive maneuver fall outside the operating envelope of production safety systems such as electronic…
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Comfortably Stuck: Evaluation Pitfalls in Bench2Drive's Closed-Loop Protocol
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Closed-loop evaluation is widely regarded as a more faithful way to assess end-to-end (E2E) driving models than open-loop evaluation, and Bench2Drive, built on the CARLA simulator, has become…
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Asking Smarter Questions: Targeted Active Preference Learning for Underspecified Rewards
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22285v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reward learning typically assumes the human's input covers everything that matters for the task. In practice, humans can only attend to so much at once, so their teaching naturally captures…
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BubbleCBF: Constructive Safety for Second-Order Systems and Application to Autonomous Robot Navigation in Unknown Environments
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20895v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Satisfying safety constraints for systems with second-order dynamics is challenging because a position constraint may require infeasible deceleration. Higher-order control barrier functions…
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Line-Augmented cuVSLAM: Robust Visual Odometry in Low-Texture Environments
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20958v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous mobile robots in warehouses and production facilities operate in precisely the environments that defeat point-feature visual odometry: featureless aisles, uniform walls, repetitive…
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EgoJEPA: Beyond Retargeting for Dexterous Manipulation from Egocentric Videos
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20904v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Egocentric human videos offer a scalable alternative to costly robot demonstra- tions, yet transferring their manipulation priors to robot control remains chal- lenging. The commonly adopted…
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MR-MPCC: Model Predictive Contouring Control for Robotic Manipulator Tracking under Moving Reference Frames
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Maintaining small path-tracking errors under moving reference frames is essential for robotic manipulation tasks with tight execution tolerances, such as machining and surgical automation…
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CQDC-Warp: GPU-Accelerated Differentiable Quasi-Dynamic Simulation for Contact-Rich Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21349v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient synthesis of contact-rich manipulation trajectories is essential for downstream robot learning. Gradient-based planning offers a promising approach, but jointly optimizing motion…
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From Optical Flow to Safety: Visual Safety Certification via Scale-Free Relative Motion
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21374v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe autonomous navigation using monocular vision remains challenging because explicit obstacle states are not directly observable. This letter introduces a visual safety-certification…
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MuSTMM: Learning Sound-Triggered Mobile Manipulation across Multiple Scenes
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sound-Triggered Mobile Manipulation (STMM) requires robots to respond to sound events by navigating to the associated objects and performing appropriate physical interactions. Existing STMM…
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Location-Based Safety Management with Wearable Seamless Indoor-Outdoor Positioning
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable worker localization is essential for real-time industrial safety management, but seamless outdoor-indoor positioning remains challenging. GNSS performs well outdoors yet degrades…
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Unified Perceptive Fall Safety for Humanoids
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2602.16511v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reliable fall recovery is critical for humanoids operating in cluttered environments. Unlike quadrupeds or wheeled robots, humanoids undergo high-energy impacts, complex whole-body…
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CLAD: Keypoint Matching Using Global Line Correspondences
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional keypoint descriptors, such as SIFT (Scale-Invariant Feature Transform) and ORB (Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF), are computed from local image patches. They may be unreliable…
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Auditable and Deployable Multi-Agent Motion Planning via Posetal Games from Legal Guidelines
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When robots are deployed in the real-world, they must interact with other agents and accomplish their own goals while adhering to legal constraints. These potentially conflicting objectives…
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SPEAR: Selective Preference Elicitation with Adaptive Rewards for VLM-Guided Robotic Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable automated preference labeling for robotic manipulation, yet their deployment remains impractical since each query incurs substantial inference…
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MOSS: Mode-Oriented Source Shaping for Robot Flow Matching Policies
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22193v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In robotic manipulation, the same observation often admits multiple feasible actions. Generative policies such as diffusion and flow matching naturally capture such multimodal behaviors, yet…
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Perceive, Predict, and Plan: a Unified World Action Model for Egocentric Dexterous Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22363v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce P$^{3}$-WAM, a unified world action model for egocentric dexterous manipulation that learns 3D perception, action-conditioned prediction, and goal-directed planning through…
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BD-HazardVLM: Probing Vision-Language Models for Latent Defensive-Driving Hazards in Bangladesh Road Scenes
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models are increasingly used for driving-scene understanding, yet their defensive reasoning under weakly structured Global South traffic remains unclear. We introduce…
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Diffeomorphic Hidden-State Steering: Improving Imitation Learning Policy Robustness through Expert Hidden-State Geometry
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21666v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Small observation or action errors can compound during closed-loop execution and disrupt a trained imitation learning policy. We study whether the original expert demonstrations can improve…
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Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Path-Safe Target Reaching in Robotic Harvesting of Hydroponic Lettuce
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22337v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic harvesting requires precise manipulation to ensure accurate positioning of the end-effector, especially in a constraint workspace. This study introduces the Path-Safe Approach…
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TRACE: Typed Reference-Aware Conversational Editing for Humanoid Motion Diffusion
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-conditioned humanoid motion generation enables users to create and refine robot movements through natural language. The central challenge is to connect an underspecified request to…
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Persistent Profile-Guided Reset-Free Recovery Improves Final Gait Selection after Irreversible Leg Damage
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20838v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Damage-recovery algorithms often rank gaits from short trials, yet a gait that performs well briefly may not remain effective during continued execution. In reset-free recovery, each trial…
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Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation for Flow-Based Vision-Language-Action Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Specialized vision-language-action (VLA) policies acquire strong domain-specific skills, yet consolidating these skills into one shared policy remains challenging. On-policy distillation…
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MAIA: Anticipating Interaction Anomalies in Contact-Rich Manipulation via Multimodal World Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21686v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable contact-rich manipulation requires detecting execution deviations early enough for corrective action. Yet most monitoring methods are reactive, identifying anomalies only after they…
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CBF-Based Control Allocation for Omnidirectional Tiltrotor Aerial Robots
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22057v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Actively tilting aerial robots can generate six-dimensional wrenches, but slow servo response can make a desired wrench infeasible during reconfiguration. This paper develops a control…
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FastVLA: Task-Conditioned and Temporally Adaptive Visual Token Compression for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models present a promising paradigm for general-purpose robot manipulation, but closed-loop deployment is often limited by inference efficiency: at each timestep…
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Illumination-Aware Active Perception for Spacecraft Inspection
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22335v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Harsh and rapidly varying orbital illumination introduces failure modes during spacecraft inspection. Existing planners rely on line-of-sight inspection metrics which perform occlusion checks…
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T2-z: Test-Time Optimization of Environment Latents for Robotic World Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting how the world responds to an action requires more than what can be seen: robots must account for environmental factors that are neither directly observable nor explicitly…
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Manifold Generative Annealing for Contact Constraint-aware Impedance Control with Reinforcement Learning Prior
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich robotic tasks require coordinated motion and impedance under uncertain interaction dynamics and physical constraints. While recent methods on learned policies provide useful…
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Does Peer Observation Help? Vision-Sharing Collaboration for Vision-Language Navigation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2603.20804v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) systems are fundamentally constrained by partial observability, as an agent can only accumulate knowledge from locations it has personally visited…
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SOMA: Stack-of-Objects Manipulation using a Quadruped Robot
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Executing heavy-duty physical manipulation in unpredictable environments remains a major challenge for quadrupedal robots lacking dedicated manipulators. This paper presents SOMA, a…
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Bi-Level Optimization for Contact and Motion Planning in Rope-Assisted Legged Robots
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2604.26910v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents a planning pipeline framework for locomotion in rope-assisted robots climbing vertical surfaces. The proposed framework is formulated as a bi-level optimization scheme…
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Robust Multi-Agent Pursuit with Preemptive Communication via Reachability-Based Control Barrier Functions
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22198v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safe multi-agent coordination typically assumes what real-world, deployed, resource-constrained robots cannot provide: continuous, perfect state sharing. Robust control strategies must be…
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TGrasp6D: Task-Informed Vision-Language Priors and Pose Refinement enable Zero-Shot Task-Oriented 6DoF Grasping
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20901v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Task-Oriented Grasping (TOG) has emerged as an important skill for purposeful robotic manipulation. Given the task of using a knife to "slice bread," a robot must choose to grasp from the…
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When Reality Outpaces Cognition: A New Scaling Principle for Reliable Intelligence
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20764v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper challenges the understanding capabilities of existing AI paradigms and emerging world models by asking a fundamental question: How quickly can reality change before an…
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Do VLAs Really Follow Instructions? Diagnosing How-Level Instruction Following in Vision-Language-Action Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models are expected to follow instructions like their language backbones, yet prior work has focused on What-level instructions that specify the task rather…
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Uni-PNP: Unified Prehensile and Non-prehensile Policy Learning for Generalizable Object Pose Reaching
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Object manipulation often requires combining non-prehensile actions with grasping. However, existing approaches typically develop these capabilities separately and integrate them by…
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A Flow-Theoretic Multimodal Control Framework Fusing Mental and Physical Engagement for Upper-Limb Rehabilitation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21590v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Assist-as-Needed (AAN) control aims to maximize user participation in robot-assisted training, existing methods relying solely on physical metrics cannot distinguish muscular inability…
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Vision-Guided Closed-Loop Autonomous Navigation of Light-Driven Janus Microbots
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial microbots capable of precise and autonomous navigation could provide versatile platforms for microscale transport, manipulation, and task execution in complex environments…
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Trajectory-based Diffusion from One-shot Human Video for Generalizable Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21792v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Imitation learning enables robots to perform complex tasks by leveraging human-collected demonstrations. However, most existing approaches require labor-intensive data collection with…
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A Phenomenology of Neural Geometry in Vision-Language-Action Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20840v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic manipulation is inherently geometric, but what shape does the world take inside the policy that performs it? Prior work on vision-language-action (VLA) policies establishes that…
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LTM: Latent Transition Based In-Context Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic manipulation often requires remembering interactions that are no longer visible. We introduce Latent Transition Memory (LTM), which stores history as compact latent transitions…
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MAGMA: Multiplier-Augmented Geometric Motion Algorithm
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Solving optimal control problems for high-dimensional mechanical systems subject to constraints remains challenging due to nonlinear dynamics and non-convex feasible sets. This paper…
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An Agentic Framework for Proactive Robots with Procedural Assistance Memory
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proactive robots should anticipate user needs and provide assistance before being explicitly asked. A straightforward approach is to infer human intentions from commonsense knowledge, but the…
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Fast-VLA: You Only Think Once for Robot Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21389v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies commonly place a multi-billion-parameter model inside the feedback loop, repeatedly recomputing task context whenever they predict a new action chunk…
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Spark-0: Scaling Spatially Aligned Tactile Pretraining for Robot Dexterous Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalist robot policies benefit from large-scale visual pretraining but often struggle with contact-rich dexterous manipulation, where force, compliance, and incipient slip are hard to…
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MoCaP: Mobile Code-as-Policies for Zero-Shot Mobile Manipulation from Passive Human Videos
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Passive human videos of everyday activity offer robots access to a massive amount of human experience without requiring a demonstration for each task. However, using this experience requires…
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Safe and Fuel-Efficient Motion Planning for Lunar Propulsive Drones
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.22225v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Propulsive drones are a promising new technology for generating high-resolution terrain models of the Moon. In future lunar missions, propulsive drones will complete a series of hops across…
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Policy-Aligned Predictive Verification for Adaptive VLA Action-Chunk Execution
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.21434v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies generate action sequences that reduce repeated inference, but deciding how much of each sequence to execute is critical to task success. Existing…
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Feasibility Ceilings Before Learning: Sizing and Timing Bounds for Drone-Mesh Interception
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.20823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A mesh of interceptors defending a fixed site must spread over the predicted arrival point of an approaching object. This is a recurring task in multi-agent robotics: N agents, each covering…