Robot Motion Generation

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Overview

Robot motion generation studies how to turn goals, observations, language, or demonstrations into trajectories that robots can execute. Approaches range from optimization, model-predictive control, splines, and Dynamic Movement Primitives to learned policies using diffusion, flow matching, and video or vision-language models; many combine these with reinforcement learning or motion retargeting. Work spans manipulation, humanoid locomotion, navigation, and human-robot interaction, with evaluation on benchmarks such as LIBERO and CALVIN as well as real robots. A central challenge is balancing diverse, expressive motions and fast generation with physical feasibility, safety, smooth closed-loop execution, and transfer across robots and changing environments.

Latest papers

CardsList

198 papers40 papers in the last four weeks, up 60% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. Whole-Body Humanoid Control via Stochastic Motion Tokenization

    Oct 27, 2026Michael Drolet, Oleg Arenz, Jan PetersHumanoid Robot ControlHumanoid Motion Tracking

    Technical University of Darmstadt · German Research Center for AI (DFKI) · Robotics Institute Germany (RIG)

  2. Context-Aware Generation and Modulation of Expressive Motion Behavior using Multimodal Foundation Models

    Oct 26, 2026Till Hielscher, Fabio Scaparro, Kai O. ArrasRobot Motion Generation

    University of Stuttgart Stuttgart, Germany

  3. Whole-Body Motion Guided Reference Generation for Uncertainty-Aware Compliant Assistance

    Oct 22, 2026Muyuan Ma, Long Cheng, Lijun Han +5Assistive RoboticsRobot Motion Generation

  4. Demonstration-Based Robotic Feeding Using Dynamic Movement Primitives

    Oct 22, 2026Kenzhi Iskandar Wong, Kitti Thamrongaphichartkul, Sri Harsha Turlapati +10Robotic ManipulationHuman-to-Robot Motion Imitation

    Robotics Research Centre, School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. · School of Science and Technology, Singapore University of Social Sciences, Singapore. · Department of Mechano-Informatics, University of Tokyo, Japan. +1

  5. Robot Motion Transition with a Human Motion Prior

    Oct 22, 2026Taehyun Byun, Taemoon Jeong, Yoonbyung Chai +4Robot Motion GenerationHumanoid Motion Tracking

    Department of Artificial Intelligence, Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. · ROBOTIS · Department of Statistics, Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.

  6. Test-Time Motion Steering for Perceptive Humanoid Fall Recovery

    Oct 21, 2026Osher Azulay, Cheng-Lin Hsieh, Stella X. YuHumanoid Robot Fall RecoveryHumanoid Robot Control

    University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

  7. Spacetime Splines for Adaptive Robot Motions

    Oct 21, 2026Boxuan Zhang, Ante Marić, Sylvain CalinonRobot Motion GenerationTrajectory Representation Learning

    Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany. · Idiap Research Institute, Martigny, Switzerland.

  8. Make it Walk: Computational Design of LEGO Walkers

    Oct 21, 2026Siqi Li, Fancheng Gao, Chi-Wing Fu +1Robot LocomotionLegged Robotics

    Singapore University of Technology and Design · The Chinese University of Hong Kong

  9. S-Rolling: Steerable Rolling Gaits for Twistable Snake Robots in Low-Clearance Environments

    Oct 21, 2026Qingling Fan, Zhongqiang RenRobot LocomotionRobot Motion Generation

    Global College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

  10. Linear Twisting Sidewinding Gaits for Twistable Snake Robot Motion Planning on Complex Terrains

    Oct 21, 2026Qingling Fan, Zhongqiang RenRobot Motion GenerationRobot Locomotion

    Global College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

  11. RoboMMT: Learning Stable Tracking of Modulated Expressive and Interactive Robot Motion

    Oct 19, 2026Till Hielscher, Kai O. ArrasRobotic ControlRobot Motion Generation

    Socially Intelligent Robotics Lab, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, University of Stuttgart, Germany

  12. Beyond Human-Derived Motion: Exploring Robot-Specific Execution for Construction Humanoids

    Oct 16, 2026MinJun Chang, Taehyung Kim, Yong K. Cho +1Humanoid Robot ControlRobot Motion Generation

    School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA · Department of Mobility Systems Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea

  13. Robotic Spatiotemporal Editing: A Unified Interface for Controllable Action Generation via Masked Action Reconstruction

    Oct 16, 2026Yanbang Li, Bu He, Yi Tian +6Robot Motion GenerationRobotic Manipulation

    Tsinghua University · CocoMatrix · Shanghai Qizhi Institute +1

  14. TRACE: Typed Reference-Aware Conversational Editing for Humanoid Motion Diffusion

    Oct 15, 2026Zejian Kang, Yifu Luo, Boyang Shen +9Robot Motion GenerationDiffusion Models for Motion Generation

    Zhejiang University · Westlake University · Technical University of Munich +7

  15. KinoGen: Customizable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation References via Kinematically Grounded Video Generation

    Oct 14, 2026Qi Wu, Lulu Zhao, Sanghyun Hahn +6Humanoid Loco-ManipulationRobot Motion Generation

    Cornell University · Multiply Labs

  16. Eye, Robot: Learning Expressive Gaze Dynamics via a VLM-Guided Transformer-VAE

    Oct 14, 2026Yuhang Hu, Junlin Lyu, Yuan Fang +6Robot Motion GenerationHumanoid Robot Control

    Creative Machines Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Columbia University

  17. Agentic Robot Creation through Generation, Verification, and Revision

    Oct 13, 2026Xuebing Li, Yibo He, Sitong Liu +2Agentic AI for RoboticsRobotics

    ShanghaiTech University

  18. One-Shot Learning for Double-Shot Latte Art: Adapting Cobot Pouring Skills with Dynamic Movement Primitives

    Oct 12, 2026Zain Khan, Victor Hernandez Moreno, Dinh Tung LeRobot Skill LearningLearning from Demonstration

    UTS Robotics Institute, School of Electrical, Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

  19. Imitation Learning via Discrete and Rhythmic Primitive Composition

    Oct 11, 2026Rafid Saif, Auke Ijspeert, Hsiu-Chin LinRobot Imitation LearningRobot Motion Generation

    McGill University, and Mila - Quebec AI Institute, Canada. · École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.

  20. JitterVLA: A Replay Benchmark for Motion Quality in VLA-Driven Human-Robot Manipulation

    Oct 9, 2026Faith Ogunwoye, Didar Seyidov, Konstantin Gubernatorov +1Robotic ControlRobotic Policy Evaluation

    Intelligent Space Robotics Laboratory, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology Moscow, Russia

  21. PartiGen: Part-Aware Representations for Language-Conditioned Humanoid Motion Generation

    Oct 9, 2026Chuxuan Huang, Zhanxiang Cao, Tianyue Zhan +14Text-to-Motion GenerationHuman Motion Generation

    Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute · Shanghai Jiaotong University +5

  22. VICAR: Video Imitation with Contact-Aware Retargeting for Humanoid Interactive Skills

    Oct 9, 2026Dvij Kalaria, Bike Zhang, S. Shankar SastryStyle-Conditioned Motion GenerationRobot Imitation Learning

    University of California, Berkeley

  23. Cubic Spline Interpolation for Smooth Trajectory Generation in Autonomous Motion Systems

    Oct 9, 2026Aarush Mandayam, Sriram Aditya Gundla, Elliott TammaroTrajectory GenerationRobot Motion Generation

    110x Accel · Chestnut Hill College, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  24. Generative Neural Retargeting for Human-to-Robot Dexterous Manipulation

    Oct 8, 2026Dechen Gao, Yue Yang, Ben Abbatematteo +8Motion RetargetingRobotic Manipulation

    Meta Reality Labs Research · UC Davis · UNC Chapel Hill +3

  25. A Physics-Informed Collision Learning Framework for Collaborative Robot Motion Generation

    Oct 8, 2026Chen Cai, Steven LiuRobot Collision AvoidanceRobot Motion Generation

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Kaiserslautern Landau, Kaiserslautern, 67663, Germany

  26. From Language to Motion: Task-Conditioned Focal-Stack Trajectory Integration for Microscopic Robots

    Oct 8, 2026Junjie Xie, Chuxuan He, Junkai Huang +6RoboticsVision-Based Robot Control

    Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Zhejiang Gongshang University · Safe AI Lab, Carnegie Mellon University +1

  27. Robotic Boomerang Throwing via Model-Based Release Design

    Oct 7, 2026Yang Liu, Colin Jones, Aude BillardRobotic ManipulationDynamic Robotic Manipulation

    Learning Algorithms and Systems Lab (LASA), EPFL, Switzerland · Automatic Control Lab, EPFL, Switzerland

  28. Masked Generative Motion Planning with Geometry-Guided Token Search

    Oct 7, 2026Lipeng Zhuang, Yingdong Ru, Shiyu Fan +3Motion PlanningRobot Motion Planning

    University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom

  29. From Legs to Wheels: Embodiment-Aware Human Motion Retargeting for Mobile-Base Humanoids

    Oct 6, 2026Jiyeon Koo, Eunseom Pyo, Jeonghee Seo +2Cross-Embodiment Robot LearningMotion Retargeting

    iRASC Lab., School of Computing, Gachon University, Seongnam 13120, Republic of Korea

  30. Talk, Render, Act: Integrating Social Gesture and Digital Face with Synchronized Speech for Conversational Humanoid Robot

    Oct 5, 2026Jin Jiang, Kun Li, Jiancong Ma +1Robot Motion GenerationCo-Speech Gesture Generation

    College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence (CCAI), United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), Al Ain, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates