Robotics & Automation
Robotics & Automation news — Friday 06 November 2026
60 stories from 3 sources, every one in English. Each links to its publisher.
-
How Point One turned GPS accuracy into a robotics platform
The Robot Report
The Robot Report Podcast · How Point One Turned GPS Accuracy Into a Robotics Platform Aaron Nathan, CEO of Point One Navigation. In Episode 269 of The Robot Report Podcast, our guest is Aaron Nathan, co-founder and CEO of Point One…
-
Boston Dynamics built Stretch Gen 2 for reliable, consistent performance
The Robot Report
The new Stretch features an updated modular design that enables “plug and play” part swaps. | Source: Boston Dynamics Boston Dynamics Inc. this week unveiled Stretch Gen 2, the latest generation of its autonomous mobile trailer unloading…
-
Industry experts discuss China blocking SoftBank acquisition of ABB Robotics
The Robot Report
ABB Robotics has integrated NVIDIA Omniverse libraries into RobotStudio. Source: ABB Robotics Yesterday, ABB Robotics confirmed to The Robot Report that China’s Office of the Working Mechanism for Foreign Investment Security Review has…
-
Video Friday: Room-Scale Cable-Driven Home Robot Tidies Up
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…
-
Reversible Dynamics, Asymmetric Actions: Parking as a Trajectory-Level Affordance
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07965v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Drivers are often told to back into a tight parking space, not drive in nose first. The advice looks paradoxical, because a slow car is dynamically reversible: reverse its speed and replay…
-
OopsieRecover: Learning Transferable VLA Corrections from Semantic Interventions
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models can perform a wide range of robotic manipulation tasks, but often fail during deployment. Teaching them to recover from these failures requires substantial…
-
A Multimodal Haptic Interface for Simultaneous Softness and Thermal Modulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Haptic interactions, such as touching an object in virtual reality, involve detecting a plethora of sensations through the skin. Whilst tactile displays exist to simulate and manipulate all…
-
SCALE: Real-Time Latent Communication for Cyber-Physical Agents
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08390v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent communication enables agents to collaborate efficiently by directly exchanging intermediate model representations rather than raw sensor data or text messages. Existing approaches…
-
SLA: Scaling Spatial-Language-Action Model via Continual Pre-training
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08373v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable robotic manipulation requires both semantic understanding and precise control in three-dimensional space. However, vision-language-action (VLA) foundations largely inherit visual…
-
GPWM: Modeling the World as 3D Particle Motion
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce GPWM, a Generative Particle World Model that predicts how 3D scenes evolve by generating the motion of particles and rigid bodies over time. Unlike video world models that…
-
Fault-Geometry-Aware Control Allocation for Emergency Quadrotor Landing under Single-Motor Loss of Effectiveness
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Partial single-motor loss of effectiveness (LoE) changes the remaining control-authority geometry of a quadrotor and can change which control allocator performs best during emergency…
-
H-TRIP: Exact Many-to-Many Distance Index for Multi-Robot Exploration
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08139v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frontier-based exploration systems repeatedly evaluate geodesic travel costs between robot poses and candidate viewpoints, and tour-based planners consume the full pairwise distance matrix…
-
H-BRICK: Hierarchical Boundary Reachability Index with Compressed Kleene Closure for Directed Grid Graphs
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Repeated directed reachability queries arise in online path planning, task-agent allocation, and swarm control on static grid maps, where reachability is asymmetric and full transitive…
-
An Integrated Open-Source Stack for Vision-Based Autonomous Navigation of Wheeled Rovers
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-based rover autonomy requires integrating perception, localization, planning and platform-specific control under limited sensing and computing resources. We present an open-source ROS…
-
Terrain-Indexed Motion Priors and Geometric Support for Extreme Humanoid Parkour
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a progressive imitation framework that learns terrain-appropriate humanoid parkour skills and subsequently adapts their hand--knee support. Human demonstrations provide traversal…
-
HITCH: Teaching a Vision-Language Model to Operate a Humanoid through a Whole-Body Harness
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08039v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enabling vision-language models (VLMs) to control humanoid robots requires both reliable whole-body interfaces and knowledge of how to use the body that carries over across tasks. We present…
-
Development of Anthropomorphic Arm for collaborative and Home Service Robot CHARMIE
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08013v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Service Robots are becoming a reality and are progressing by leaps and bounds. Alongside this avenue of robotics is also the field of prosthetics, which is evolving rapidly. These topics are…
-
Time-Indexed Skill Success Models for Latency-Aware Skill Selection and Timing in Dynamic Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07964v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots that manipulate moving objects act on observations that are outdated when the chosen skill starts, and the best skill can change within a few hundred milliseconds. Skill competence…
-
TactileLab: Sim-to-Real Dexterous Robot Manipulation with Efficient Shear-Sensitive Tactile Simulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07881v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic simulators that represent shear within tactile sensing are becoming increasingly important for contact-rich manipulation. However, simulating contact shear with high-fidelity…
-
Flexible Piezoelectric Tactile Sensing System for Intelligent Object Recognition
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile sensing provides information about object properties that can improve robotic grasping and manipulation. However, accurate object recognition during the early stages of grasping…
-
Wedge-Jamming Mechanism for String Configuration
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variable stiffness mechanisms that achieve both flexibility and rigidity are important technologies for robotic systems. Recently, wire-based jamming mechanisms have attracted significant…
-
AffectiveVLA: Safe and Intent-Aware VLA Control for Human-Humanoid Social Interaction
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Social touch interactions, such as handshakes, fist bumps, and hugs, require humanoid robots to infer human intent, generate contact-rich motions, and maintain safe physical contact. We…
-
Not Losing Your Way: Mitigating Visual-Inertial Odometry Drift through On-Demand Visual Feature Creation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07687v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) can degrade during aerial inspection in repetitive or poorly textured environments. We propose an active environment-modification framework for unmanned aerial…
-
PhySA: Decoupling Aesthetic and Physical Rewards for Humanoid Locomotion
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07679v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid locomotion policies trained without an explicit smoothness objective tend to produce jerky, high-energy gaits that stress actuators. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer an appealing…
-
Data-Driven Configuration of Protective Separation Zones in Collaborative Robot Cells from Operator Occupancy
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The protective separation zone of a collaborative robot cell is commonly dimensioned for a worst case that disregards where the operator is actually present during the task. This paper…
-
Whole-Body Elasto-Geometrical Calibration of Wheeled Humanoid Robots Using a Shared-Waist Dual-Chain Model
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wheeled humanoid robots carry both arms on one actuated waist, usually without torque sensors, so the accuracy of both end-effectors depends on a single waist model. After a first stage that…
-
Unified Overview of Safety Certificate Functions: Techniques from Hamilton--Jacobi Reachability and Control Barrier Functions
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety is a central concern in modern autonomous systems. Safety certificates---functions whose existence guarantees that a system meets its safety specification---have long been used as a…
-
Embodied RAG++: Retrieval-Augmented Generation From What Exists to What Works in Embodied Scenes
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To serve a request in a human environment, a robot system must find an object that satisfies a functional requirement and a robot that can feasibly reach it. Scene graphs record which objects…
-
LMGN: A Unified Policy Learning Model for Last-Mile Grasp-Navigation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legged robots equipped with manipulators have shown significant potential in the fields of daily life and industry in complex environments. However, existing methods mainly focus on global…
-
Kinematic analysis of a double-closed-loop four-bar chain-based leg for a multimodal quadruped-pentarotor robot
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents the kinematic modeling and singularity analysis of a three-degree-of-freedom, double four-bar closed-loop quadruped leg mechanism. This leg is essential for transitioning…
-
An Ordering Optimization for Fruit-Vegetable in High-Density Environment based on Genetic Algorithm
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07293v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a robotic harvesting method that combines RGB-D fruit localization, GA-based harvest ordering, and waypoint-based robot motion in dense and unstructured crop environments…
-
VREgo: Consumer VR Headsets for Learning Robot Manipulation from Egocentric Demonstrations
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07272v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: VREgo trains manipulation policies from demonstrations recorded on consumer VR headsets; we instantiate it with EgoKit on one such headset, the PICO 4 Ultra. On-device head and hand tracking…
-
An Empirical Study of Reinforcement Learning for Keypoint Positioning of Deformable Linear Objects
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07261v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deformable linear object (DLO) manipulation is challenging because high-dimensional configurations, nonlinear contact dynamics, and diverse material and geometric properties produce a broad…
-
Spatial-UMI-Dream: Scaling World Action Models with Metric Geometry for UMI Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07229v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) enables scalable demonstration collection independently of a specific robot. However, its moving, close-range gripper cameras entangle camera and…
-
CoDiMAD: Diffusion-Based Privileged Distillation for Communication-Free Multi-Robot Coordination
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2607.09587v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decentralized multi-robot coordination under partial observability remains challenging, especially when agents act solely on local sensing without communication. Privileged policy…
-
GUARD: Sensitivity-aware Uncertainty Attribution for Safe Traditional and Learning-based Robot Control
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2509.23312v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents the framework GUARD (Guided robot control via Uncertainty attribution and probAbilistic kernel optimization for Risk-aware Decision making) that combines a technique…
-
Distributed Geometric Optimization and Control of Rigid Differential-Drive Formations from Relative-Position Measurements
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07163v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distance based formation control fixes the shape of a robot team but leaves its position and orientation unconstrained. We regulate all three for differential drive robots that have only…
-
Latent RL Priors for Data-Efficient Dexterous Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08458v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning dexterous manipulation from limited visual demonstrations is challenging because policies must acquire both perceptual grounding and precise control, while reinforcement learning…
-
Radio-to-Pose Information for Gauge-Drift Correction in Cooperative Localization
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08361v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cooperative localization uses odometry and inter-robot measurements to estimate the motion of a robot team. These measurements describe only relative geometry, but the team's estimated…
-
RoboARCade: Benchmarking Agentic Robot Control
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improvements in multi-modal capabilities have enabled agents to act directly as robot policies, a setting we refer to as agentic robot control (ARC). We introduce RoboARCade, a benchmark of…
-
Educational robotics beyond ROS: a custom library for direct transfer of Webots controllers in the Turtlebot3
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08142v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot Operating System (ROS) is becoming a standard in robotics courses at higher education, but its installation, configuration and distributed programming model can introduce a significant…
-
STEP: Spatiotemporal Training with Explicit Prediction for Perceptive Humanoid Locomotion
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08097v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For perceptive humanoid locomotion, the relevance of terrain geometry depends on the robot's body state and how both evolve under its actions. Existing work has advanced terrain-aware sensory…
-
Leave It Better Than Found: Value-Guided Cooperation in Sequential Tasks
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08075v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the problem of sequential task continuation, where one robot acts in a workspace that has been affected by a previous robot. Current approaches in multi-robot cooperation rely…
-
A Unified Fractal Impedance Control Framework
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.08009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical human--robot interaction requires controllers capable of maintaining intrinsically bounded interactions with the environment. The Fractal Impedance Controller (FIC) has been proven…
-
AffordJEV: Affordance Grounding by Confirming Candidate Regions
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07896v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Affordance grounding asks which visible part of an object performs a requested operation, a basic capability for embodied manipulation and human--robot interaction. Most existing methods…
-
A Sequential Framework for Urban Drone Delivery: Network Design, Vehicle Sizing, and Energy and Cost Assessment
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A sequential engineering framework is presented for urban drone delivery, linking hub location, route planning, mission-specific vehicle sizing, and energy and operating cost assessment…
-
Dual-Arm Tabletop Rearrangement with Movable Stacking and Gap-Aware Push Transfers
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Object rearrangement in cluttered tabletop scenes is challenging, especially in wide workspaces where dual-arm systems improve coverage and efficiency. Limited free space often necessitates…
-
Real-Time Event-Based LED Tracking and Pose Estimation with PWM-Encoded Markers
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Event cameras are neuromorphic vision sensors with pixels that independently and asynchronously respond to brightness changes at microsecond resolution, supporting state estimation under…
-
Semantics-to-Contact: A Stagewise Framework for Robust Contact-Rich Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07532v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation requires precise control under complex contact dynamics while remaining robust to diverse visual conditions. However, real-world reinforcement learning often…
-
Training-Independent Validation of a Learning-Based Controller for Stunt Maneuvers
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07516v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned controllers for vehicle maneuvers are usually validated under the conditions and objective used to train them, where they appear highly reliable, yet the parameters that change on…
-
Fast and Reliable Open-Vocabulary Object Search with Absence Detection from Robot Memory
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07493v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mobile manipulators deployed in everyday human environments, such as homes for assistive care or flexible automation, often need to locate specific objects on demand from accumulated…
-
Closed-Loop Physics-Based Manipulation Evaluation at a Commodity Price: What 4.4 L4 GPU hours at $3.50 Buys You
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07441v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Running evaluations of contact-rich robotic manipulation at statistical scale has largely been possible only at well-resourced labs, highlighting the need for affordable and efficient options…
-
CRISP: Constraint-Resolved Interactions between Subsystems for Predictive Whole-Body Cooperation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a layered control framework that recasts high-dimensional system dynamics as a composition of dynamically interconnected subsystems, with dynamic dual-arm manipulation on…
-
Adaptive Hybrid Force-Vision Control with EMG-Derived References for Deformable Bottle Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07235v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic automation of laboratory tasks has become a growing interest to remove researchers from hazardous environments and repetitive procedures. However, even equipment as simple as squeeze…
-
Curvature by Design: A Support Structure for Continuum Robots
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.07091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constant- and piecewise-constant-curvature models are widely used to simplify the kinematics of continuum robots, although the assumed curvature profiles are not necessarily inherent…
-
Why Koopman Structure Does Not Help Differentiable World Models for Humanoid Whole-Body Tracking
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2611.00951v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We test whether Koopman structure helps a differentiable world model used to train a simulated Unitree G1 whole-body tracking policy by backpropagation through imagined rollouts…
-
PFM-HR: Pose Flow Matching for Humanoid Robots
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2608.03227v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motion priors improve reinforcement learning for physics-based humanoid tracking, but temporal priors require ordered motion clips, while pose priors provide limited guidance for…
-
SONIC-K1: Porting a Universal Humanoid Motion Tracker to a Small Humanoid on a Single GPU
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2610.39327v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present SONIC-K1, to our knowledge the first open-weights whole-body motion tracker for the Booster K1 humanoid, obtained by adapting the SONIC framework to this smaller robot. The…
-
DenseReward: Dense Reward Learning via Failure Synthesis for Robotic Manipulation
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2607.13033v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning holds great promise for improving robot policies beyond the limits of imitation learning. However, its practical adoption remains bottlenecked by the lack of…
-
AnyDexRT: Calibration-Efficient Dexterous Hand Retargeting with Few-Shot Human Guidance
arXiv cs.RO (Robotics)
arXiv:2607.08341v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Teleoperation is a key interface for controlling dexterous robotic hands and collecting demonstrations for imitation learning. Its effectiveness largely depends on kinematic retargeting…