RL for Robotics

RL: Reinforcement Learning

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Overview

Reinforcement learning for robotics studies how robots can learn actions that achieve goals while coping with contact, uncertainty, and changing environments. Common methods include PPO, SAC, and TD3, often trained in parallel simulation with domain randomization; imitation learning, motion priors, and pretrained vision-language-action models increasingly provide useful starting points. Work spans humanoid locomotion, aerial and mobile navigation, and manipulation that uses tactile feedback, with safety filters and learned world models helping address risky or partially observed tasks. A central challenge is making learning more sample-efficient while ensuring that simulated skills and learned rewards remain reliable on real robots and unfamiliar situations.

Latest papers

CardsList

253 papers45 papers in the last four weeks, up 45% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

  1. ELEVATE: Agentic Controller Acquisition from Task Failure for Quadrupedal Manipulation

    Oct 28, 2026Shiqi Liu, Radu Corcodel, Ding ZhaoWhole-Body Robotic ManipulationRL for Robotics

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA-15213 USA · Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), Cambridge, MA-02139 USA

  2. Pushing Dexterity and Safety for In-Hand Object Pose Reaching That Works Remarkably Well

    Oct 27, 2026Ian Chuang, Hiya Shah, Vamsi Chilamkur +2Dexterous ManipulationSafe Robot Manipulation

    University of California, Berkeley. · University of California, Davis.

  3. Learning Dexterous Manipulation: Hands, Simulators, Training, and Evaluation

    Oct 24, 2026Luai AbuelsamenRobotic ManipulationRL for Robotics

    Independent Researcher

  4. Regularised RL improves sim-to-real transfer

    Oct 23, 2026Danilo Vucetic, Mohamad H. Danesh, Florence Clerc +2Regularized RLReinforcement Learning

    Université de Montréal · Mila - Québec AI Institute · McGill University +2

  5. Optimization, Optimal Control, and Reinforcement Learning for Robotics

    Oct 23, 2026Yonghyeon LeeOptimal ControlRL for Robotics

    Department of Artificial Intelligence, Yonsei University

  6. Geometry-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Close-Fitting Wearable Insertion

    Oct 23, 2026Takuma Tsukakoshi, Elle Miller, Tamon Miyake +5RoboticsRobotic Insertion

    Waseda University · University of Edinburgh · Microsoft Research Asia

  7. DiscoDemo: Discovering Efficient and Diverse Robot Demonstrations for Imitation Learning

    Oct 23, 2026Minho Park, Kinam Kim, Donghu Kim +6Robot Demonstration GenerationRobot Imitation Learning

    KAIST · Holiday Robotics

  8. Move, don't think: sample-efficient collision avoidance with lossy proximity sensors

    Oct 22, 2026Carson Kohlbrenner, Niraj Pudasaini, William Xie +3Robot Collision AvoidanceData-Efficient Robot Learning

    Human Interaction and Robotics Group, University of Colorado Boulder · Correll Lab, University of Colorado Boulder

  9. AtomicRL: Atomic Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

    Oct 21, 2026Likui Zhang, Zhe Zhu, Zhihao Zhan +7RL for RoboticsLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

    Sun Yat-sen University · JD Explore Academy · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

  10. Distance Field Driven Reinforcement Learning for Reactive and Robust Collision Avoidance

    Oct 21, 2026Taiga Ikeshima, Sheila Sutjipto, Lan Wu +5Robot Collision AvoidanceRL for Robotics

    Tokyo University of Science, Japan. · the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. · Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. +1

  11. Learning Adaptable Dexterous Skills via Hybrid Dexterous Mimicking

    Oct 20, 2026Yuxuan Kuang, Jiashun Wang, Yixuan Sun +5Robot Skill LearningRobotic Manipulation

    Carnegie Mellon University · NVIDIA

  12. AgenticRoboRL: Bringing Coding-Agent Post-Training to Agentic Robotics

    Oct 20, 2026Xinxin Liu, Bingxin Xu, Wenrui Bao +4Large Language Model-Based Robot PlanningRL for Robotics

    University of Central Florida · University of Southern California · Michigan State University

  13. DiPLO: Self-distilled Diffusion Planning for Loco-manipulation

    Oct 17, 2026Shafeef Omar, Sebastian Sanokowski, Elham Daneshmand +4Robotic Loco-ManipulationHumanoid Loco-Manipulation

    Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany. · Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany. · McGill University, Montreal, Canada. +1

  14. Towards Reinforcement Learning for Space Robotics: Fast Training and Reliable Real-World Transfer

    Oct 16, 2026Abhishek Naik, Michael Wu, Michael O'Sullivan +2RL for RoboticsRL for Legged Locomotion

    National Research Council Canada · University of Waterloo · University of Ottawa +1

  15. Blind Precise Assembly: Proprioceptive Sim-to-Real Peg-in-Hole for Diverse Parts

    Oct 16, 2026Antonia Bronars, Younghyo Park, Kushal Kedia +1Robotic AssemblyRobotic Manipulation

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  16. Not All Actions Contribute Equally: Learning Precise Progress Estimation from Imprecise Demonstrations

    Oct 16, 2026Huanqian Wang, Boshi Tang, Botong Xiao +5Robot Task Progress EstimationRL for Robotics

    BNRist, Tsinghua University

  17. Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Path-Safe Target Reaching in Robotic Harvesting of Hydroponic Lettuce

    Oct 15, 2026Al Bashir, Partho Ghose, Yibin Wang +4Robotic HarvestingRL for Robotics

    Department of Biological & Agricultural Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843, USA · Texas A&M AgriLife Research, Texas A&M University System, Dallas, TX, 75252, USA · Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843, USA +1

  18. Whole-Body Dexterity

    Oct 15, 2026Conor Mc Gartoll, An Dang, Pranay Thangeda +5Whole-Body Robotic ManipulationLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

    Amazon · University of California, San Diego · University of Michigan

  19. Uni-PNP: Unified Prehensile and Non-prehensile Policy Learning for Generalizable Object Pose Reaching

    Oct 15, 2026Wenxuan Zhu, Yuze Wang, Jiangran Lyu +6Robotic ManipulationNon-Prehensile Robotic Manipulation

    Peking University · Galbot · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences +2

  20. Instruction-Conditioned Motion Control for Robotic Arms: Language-to-Code Decomposition and Reinforcement Learning

    Oct 14, 2026Fan Huang, Dezhong Tong, Changyu Chen +2Language-Conditioned Robot ManipulationLanguage-Conditioned Robot Control

    Indiana University Bloomington · University of Michigan · Singapore Management University

  21. OneDemo: Unified Policy Learning and Data Generation from a Single Demonstration

    Oct 13, 2026Ying Qian, Jianshu Hu, Han Fang +2Robot Policy LearningLearning from Demonstration

    Stanford University · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Tsinghua University

  22. PrT-Flow: Probability-Tractable Flow Matching for Reinforcement Learning

    Oct 13, 2026Congzhong Sun, Ning TanFlow MatchingFlow-Based Generative Modeling

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University

  23. REFLEX: A Learned On-Board Reflex for Robust Autonomous Collision Recovery of Soft Quadrotors

    Oct 11, 2026Jakob Hermeler, Luca Girardi, Gabriel Maquignaz +2Robot Failure RecoveryQuadrotor Control

    Mobile Robotics Lab, Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. · Environmental Robotics Lab, Faculty of Agricultural, Nutritional and Engineering Sciences, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.

  24. Load-Aware Quadruped Navigation with Online Contact-based Geometry Estimation

    Oct 10, 2026Qi Yin, XiaoLi Zhang, Yangming ShiRobot NavigationQuadruped Robot Navigation

    Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO 80401, USA

  25. From Video to Vision: Learning Generalizable Humanoid Carrying from Human Motion

    Oct 10, 2026Jianming Lu, Ziluo Ding, Zhen Zhao +4RL for RoboticsGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    X-Humanoid

  26. OATH: Object-Agnostic Tracking for Dexterous Hands, Enabling Rapid Physics-based Retargeting

    Oct 9, 2026Solvin Sigurdson, Prasanna Sriganesh, Juan Borbon +3Motion RetargetingRobotic Manipulation

    Multiply Labs, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA · Department of Control and Dynamical Systems, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA · Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

  27. Noise Space Learning for VLA Adaptation

    Oct 9, 2026Junjie Lu, Chuheng Zhang, Yucen Wang +4VLA Model AdaptationVision-Language-Action Models

    University of Technology Sydney · Microsoft Research · Nanjing University +1

  28. JoyInside-VLM-Agent: Product-Conditioned Multimodal Policy Learning for Embodied Agents

    Oct 9, 2026Gangyi Li, LuYao Wang, Jingfu Sun +7Multimodal AgentsRobot Policy Learning

  29. Reflex: Visually Grounded Reactive Humanoid Control

    Oct 8, 2026Taoyang Jia, Weikai Huang, Linxin Song +6Humanoid Robot ControlVision-Based Robot Control

    University of Washington · Stanford University · University of Southern California +3

  30. Dex-One2Many: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from a Single Human Demonstration

    Oct 8, 2026Jusuk Lee, Sungha Kim, Yeonsoo Park +8Robotic ManipulationLearning from Demonstration

    Seoul National University · University of Maryland, College Park · All Purpose AI +1