Overview

Robot foundation models aim to transfer capabilities across tasks, environments, and robot bodies by learning from large collections of robot demonstrations, human videos, and other multimodal data. Common approaches include vision-language-action policies, world-action models that predict how actions change scenes, and motion or tactile models, trained with imitation and self-supervision and often adapted through reinforcement learning or human feedback. Researchers evaluate them on manipulation and navigation benchmarks such as LIBERO and RoboTwin, as well as on real robots and humanoids, with growing attention to long-horizon behavior and cross-embodiment transfer. Broad generalization remains difficult: data must align with each robot’s actions and sensors, while robustness, safety, latency, and the work needed for deployment are not yet resolved by strong benchmark results alone.

Latest papers

CardsList

138 papers35 papers in the last four weeks, up 75% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. Vesta: A Generalist Embodied Reasoning Model

    Jun 18, 2026Johan Bjorck, Zhiqi Li, Yunze Man +29Embodied ReasoningRobot Foundation Models

  2. ROBOSHACKLES: A Safety Dataset for Human-Injury Prevention in Embodied Foundation Models

    Jun 17, 2026Zhuowen Yin, Chongyang Liu, Wenzhang Yang +2Robot Foundation ModelsSynthetic Data Generation for Robotics

  3. SC3-Eval: Evaluating Robot Foundation Models via Self-Consistent Video Generation

    Jun 17, 2026Wei-Cheng Tseng, Gashon Hussein, Yuzhu Dong +9Action-Conditioned Video GenerationPhysical Consistency in Video Generation

  4. Geometric Action Model for Robot Policy Learning

    Jun 15, 2026Jisang Han, Seonghu Jeon, Jaewoo Jung +7World Models for RoboticsLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

  5. SoK: Security and Privacy of Foundation-Model-Powered Robots

    Jun 15, 2026Xueluan Gong, Chen Chen, Jinxin Liu +2Robot Foundation ModelsAI Agent Security

  6. FTP-1: A Generalist Foundation Tactile Policy Across Tactile Sensors for Contact-Rich Manipulation

    Jun 11, 2026Chengbo Yuan, Zicheng Zhang, Mingjie Zhou +14Robot Skill LearningContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

  7. Embodied-R1.5: Evolving Physical Intelligence via Embodied Foundation Models

    Jun 9, 2026Yifu Yuan, Yaoting Huang, Xianze Yao +20Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobot Foundation Models

  8. OMG: Omni-Modal Motion Generation for Generalist Humanoid Control

    Jun 9, 2026Siqiao Huang, Kun-Ying Lee, Dongming Qiao +5Robot Foundation ModelsHumanoid Robot Control

  9. Exploration of Foundation Model-Based Robots in Patient and Elderly Care

    Jun 8, 2026Zhiwen Qiu, Wei Liu, Yuexing HaoHealthcare RoboticsRobot Foundation Models

  10. Ego-Pi: VLA Fine-Tuning for Ego-Centric Human and Robot Data

    Jun 6, 2026Ji Woong Kim, Ke Wang, Zipeng Fu +4Robot Skill LearningRobot Foundation Models

  11. Perceptive Behavior Foundation Model: Adapting Human Motion Priors to Robot-Centric Terrain

    Jun 6, 2026Zifan Wang, Yizhao Li, Teli Ma +5Humanoid Robot LocomotionRobot Foundation Models

  12. Robots Need More than VLA and World Models

    Jun 4, 2026Elis Karcini, Faisal Mehrban, Quang Nguyen +6Robot Foundation ModelsCross-Embodiment Robot Learning

  13. Humanoid-GPT: Scaling Data and Structure for Zero-Shot Motion Tracking

    Jun 2, 2026Zekun Qi, Xuchuan Chen, Dairu Liu +10Zero-Shot LearningTransformer

  14. AFUN: Towards an Affordance Foundation Model for Functionality Understanding

    Jun 1, 2026Zhaoning Wang, Yi Zhong, Jiawei Fu +2Generalization in Robotic ManipulationLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

  15. PEACE: A Planner-Executor Agent with Constraint Enforcement for UAVs

    May 26, 2026Erdem Uysal, Timo Kehrer, Sebastiano PanichellaLarge Language Model-Based Robot PlanningRobot Foundation Models

  16. HoloMotion-1 Technical Report

    May 14, 2026Maiyue Chen, Kaihui Wang, Bo Zhang +7Robot Foundation ModelsImitation Learning

  17. AttenA+: Rectifying Action Inequality in Robotic Foundation Models

    May 13, 2026Daojie Peng, Fulong Ma, Jiahang Cao +7Robot Policy LearningLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

  18. HeteroGenManip: Generalizable Manipulation For Heterogeneous Object Interactions

    May 11, 2026Zhenhao Shen, Zeming Yang, Yue Chen +5Robotic GraspingRobot Foundation Models

  19. LaST-R1: Reinforcing Robotic Manipulation via Adaptive Physical Latent Reasoning

    Apr 30, 2026Hao Chen, Jiaming Liu, Zhonghao Yan +10RL for RoboticsRobot Foundation Models

  20. PokeVLA: Empowering Pocket-Sized Vision-Language-Action Model with Comprehensive World Knowledge Guidance

    Apr 22, 2026Yupeng Zheng, Xiang Li, Songen Gu +12Robot Foundation ModelsEfficient VLA Models