Robot Task Planning

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Robot task planning studies how a robot can turn an instruction or mission into ordered actions that fit its abilities, surroundings, and physical constraints. Approaches range from symbolic planners such as PDDL, behavior trees, and temporal logic to language- and vision-language models, learned skills, and world models; many combine these with motion planning or formal verification. Hierarchical plans, scene representations, and feedback-driven replanning are used across household tasks, navigation, manipulation, and assembly, with benchmarks increasingly testing long task sequences and changing environments. A central challenge is making flexible plans reliably executable: systems must ground language in physical state, recover from errors, and satisfy safety constraints without excessive computation or human intervention.

Latest papers

242 papers45 papers in the last four weeks, up 55% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Mar 9, 2026

Bilevel Planning with Learned Symbolic Abstractions from Interaction Data

Intelligent agents must reason over both continuous dynamics and discrete representations to generate effective plans in complex environments. Previous studies have shown that symbolic abstractions can emerge from neural effect predictors trained with a robot's unsupervised exploration. However, these methods rely on deterministic symbolic domains, lack mechanisms to verify the generated symbolic plans, and operate only at the abstract level, often failing to capture the continuous dynamics of the environment. To overcome these limitations, we propose a bilevel neuro-symbolic framework in which learned probabilistic symbolic rules generate candidate plans rapidly at the high level, and learned continuous effect models verify these plans and perform forward search when necessary at the low level. Our experiments on multi-object manipulation tasks demonstrate that the proposed bilevel method outperforms symbolic-only approaches, reliably identifying failing plans through verification, and achieves planning performance statistically comparable to continuous forward search while resolving most problems via efficient symbolic reasoning.

Fatih Dogangun, Burcu Kilic, Serdar Bahar +1

Department of Computer Engineering, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Türkiye. · Department of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Türkiye.

Hierarchical Planning Symbolic Planning Robotic Manipulation Robot Task Planning Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning Neuro-Symbolic Planning

Mar 9, 2026

MoMaStage: Skill-State Graph Guided Planning and Closed-Loop Execution for Long-Horizon Indoor Mobile Manipulation

Long-horizon indoor mobile manipulation (MoMa) requires robots to execute extended navigation-manipulation sequences whose feasibility depends on state changes induced by preceding skills. Vision-language models (VLMs) can decompose instructions into plausible skill sequences, but they do not reliably track such cumulative embodiment constraints or revise a plan when execution deviates from expectation. We present MoMaStage, a map-light framework for state-consistent planning and closed-loop execution in long-horizon indoor MoMa. MoMaStage couples a frozen VLM with robot execution through three mechanisms: (i) a hierarchical library of grounded, executable skills and a topology-only projection of a Skill-State Graph (SSG) that constrains the VLM's planning space; (ii) an SSG verifier that propagates scene-region and gripper-occupancy state to reject infeasible plans before execution; and (iii) an event-driven monitor that triggers graph-grounded repair only when an observed outcome invalidates the remaining plan. The SSG captures the compact embodiment state needed for skill sequencing without requiring a dense scene map, while geometric and contact-level conditions remain within the underlying controllers. Experiments in physics-rich simulation and on a real mobile manipulator show that MoMaStage improves planning validity and long-horizon execution survival over the evaluated baselines, while reducing latency and model token consumption.

Chenxu Li, Zixuan Chen, Yetao Li +5

All authors are with Nanjing University, China.

Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation Mobile Manipulation Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Robot Task Planning Model-Based Planning

Mar 9, 2026

Long-Short Term Agents for Pure-Vision Bronchoscopy Robotic Autonomy

Accurate intraoperative navigation is essential for robot-assisted endoluminal intervention, but remains difficult because of limited endoscopic field of view and dynamic artifacts. Existing navigation platforms often rely on external localization technologies, such as electromagnetic tracking or shape sensing, which increase hardware complexity and remain vulnerable to intraoperative anatomical mismatch. We present a vision-only autonomy framework that performs long-horizon bronchoscopic navigation using preoperative CT-derived virtual targets and live endoscopic video, without external tracking during navigation. The framework uses hierarchical long-short agents: a short-term reactive agent for continuous low-latency motion control, and a long-term strategic agent for decision support at anatomically ambiguous points. When their recommendations conflict, a world-model critic predicts future visual states for candidate actions and selects the action whose predicted state best matches the target view. We evaluated the system in a high-fidelity airway phantom, three ex vivo porcine lungs, and a live porcine model. The system reached all planned segmental targets in the phantom, maintained 80% success to the eighth generation ex vivo, and achieved in vivo navigation performance comparable to the expert bronchoscopist. These results support the preclinical feasibility of sensor-free autonomous bronchoscopic navigation.

Junyang Wu, Mingyi Luo, Fangfang Xie +7

Institute of Medical Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China. · Shanghai Chest Hospital, Shanghai, 10587, China.

Robot Navigation Robotic Endoscopy Vision-Based Robot Control Endoscopy Robot Task Planning

Mar 8, 2026

Knowing When to Ask: Resolving Uncertainty in Human-Robot Joint Planning via Explicit Dialogue and Implicit Intent Cues

Effective human-robot collaboration in open-world environments requires joint planning under uncertainty about the task, the environment, and the human teammate. Communication is the most direct means of resolving such uncertainty, yet most existing systems support only one-way communication: robots listen and act, treating humans as passive supervisors rather than conversational teammates capable of two-way dialogue. We propose a unified human-robot joint planning system in which the robot actively resolves uncertainty through two complementary communication channels. When uncertainty is decision-critical, an uncertainty-mitigation joint planning module engages the human in clarification dialogue: it grounds ambiguous instructions via an LLM-assisted active elicitation mechanism, enumerates traversability hypotheses through a hypothesis-augmented A* search, and computes a cost-optimal querying policy via dynamic programming, so that the robot asks only the questions whose answers actually matter for the plan. When explicit dialogue is unnecessary or impractical, a real-time intent-aware collaboration module instead reads implicit, nonverbal cues, maintaining a probabilistic belief over the human's latent task intent from spatial and directional signals to enable coordination-aware task selection without any communication overhead. We validate the proposed system in both Gazebo simulations and real-world UAV deployments, integrated with a voice dialogue interface and a Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based 3D semantic perception pipeline. Experimental results show that cost-optimal clarification dialogue cuts the interaction cost by 51.9% while maintaining a 100% task success rate, and implicit intent reading reduces the cooperative task execution time by 25.4% compared to the baselines.

Zeyu Fang, Yuxin Lin, Cheng Liu +6

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, George Washington University · the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University · the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, George Washington University

Human-Robot Collaboration Robot Task Planning Human-Robot Interaction

Mar 6, 2026

Unified Learning of Temporal Task Structure and Action Timing for Bimanual Robot Manipulation

Bimanual manipulation requires both temporal task structure - which actions precede or overlap others - and concrete timing - when each action starts and how long it takes. Symbolic relations enable high-level reasoning about task structure and alternative execution sequences, while concrete timing parameters are essential for coordinating two hands at the execution level. Existing approaches address these two levels in isolation, leaving a gap between task planning and movement synchronization. This work presents an approach for learning symbolic and subsymbolic temporal task constraints from human demonstrations and deriving executable, temporally parametrized plans for bimanual manipulation. Specifically, our contributions are (i) a 3-D representation of timings with methods based on multivariate Gaussian Mixture Models to represent temporal relationships between actions on a subsymbolic level, (ii) a method based on the Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland algorithm that finds and ranks all contradiction-free Allen relation assignments of a task, representing its modes, and (iii) an optimization-based planning system combining the identified symbolic and subsymbolic temporal task constraints to derive parametrized plans for robot execution. We quantitatively evaluate our approach and show that the inferred symbolic task constraints are more accurate than those of prior heuristic approaches and that the generated plans are temporally closer to human demonstrations than the most characteristic demonstration. Additionally, we qualitatively demonstrate its applicability through orchestrated task executions in simulation and on real robots.

Christian Dreher, Patrick Dormanns, Andre Meixner +1

Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

Bimanual Robotic Manipulation Temporal Reasoning Robot Task Planning Robot Imitation Learning

Mar 6, 2026

STL-SVPIO: Signal Temporal Logic guided Stein Variational Path Integral Optimization

Signal Temporal Logic (STL) enables formal specification of complex spatiotemporal constraints for robotic task planning. However, synthesizing long-horizon continuous control trajectories from complex STL specifications is fundamentally challenging due to the nested structure of STL robustness objectives. Existing solver-based methods, such as Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP), suffer from exponential scaling, whereas sampling methods, such as Model-Predictive Path Integral control (MPPI), struggle with sparse, long-horizon costs. We introduce Signal Temporal Logic guided Stein Variational Path Integral Optimization (STL-SVPIO), which reframes STL as a globally informative, differentiable reward-shaping mechanism. By leveraging Stein Variational Gradient Descent and differentiable physics engines, STL-SVPIO transports a mutually repulsive swarm of control particles toward high robustness regions. Our method transforms sparse logical satisfaction into tractable variational inference, mitigating the severe local minima traps of standard gradient-based methods. We demonstrate that STL-SVPIO significantly outperforms existing methods in both robustness and efficiency for traditional STL tasks. Moreover, it solves complex long-horizon tasks, including multi-agent coordination with synchronization and queuing while baselines either fail to discover feasible solutions, or become computationally intractable. Finally, we use STL-SVPIO in agile robotic motion planning tasks with nonlinear dynamics, such as 7-DoF manipulation and half cheetah back flips to show the generalizability of our algorithm.

Hongrui Zheng, Zirui Zang, Ahmad Amine +2

Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. · Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics Department, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA.

STL Motion Planning Trajectory Optimization Robot Task Planning Motion Planning

Mar 4, 2026

OmniPlanner: Universal Exploration and Inspection Path Planning Across Robot Morphologies

Autonomous robotic systems are increasingly deployed for mapping, monitoring, and inspection in complex and unstructured environments. However, most existing path planning approaches remain domain-specific (i.e., in the air, on land, or at sea), limiting their scalability and cross-platform applicability. This article presents OmniPlanner, a unified planning framework for autonomous exploration and inspection across aerial, ground, and underwater robots. The method integrates volumetric exploration and viewpoint-based inspection, alongside target reach behaviors within a single modular architecture, complemented by a platform abstraction layer that captures morphology-specific sensing, traversability and motion constraints. This enables the same planning strategy to generalize across distinct mobility domains with minimal retuning. The framework is validated through extensive simulation studies and field deployments in underground mines, industrial facilities, forests, submarine bunkers, and structured outdoor environments. Across these diverse scenarios, OmniPlanner demonstrates robust performance, consistent cross-domain generalization, and improved exploration and inspection efficiency compared to representative state-of-the-art baselines. Videos presenting the OmniPlanner framework and demonstrating its field deployments across aerial, ground, and underwater robots are available at https://ntnu-arl.github.io/omniplanner, and the source code is publicly available at https://github.com/ntnu-arl/gbplanner_ros/tree/gbplanner3.

Angelos Zacharia, Mihir Dharmadhikari, Mohit Singh +1

Department of Engineering Cybernetics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), 7034 Trondheim, Norway

Robotic Inspection Robot Task Planning Robot Motion Planning Autonomous Robot Exploration

Mar 3, 2026

Retrieval-Augmented Robots via Retrieve-Reason-Act

To achieve general-purpose utility, we argue that robots must evolve from passive executors into active Information Retrieval users. In strictly zero-shot settings where no prior demonstrations exist, robots face a critical information gap, such as the exact sequence required to assemble a complex furniture kit, that cannot be satisfied by internal parametric knowledge (common sense) or past internal memory. While recent robotic works attempt to use search before action, they primarily focus on retrieving past kinematic trajectories (analogous to searching internal memory) or text-based safety rules (searching for constraints). These approaches fail to address the core information need of active task construction: acquiring unseen procedural knowledge from external, unstructured documentation. In this paper, we define the paradigm as Retrieval-Augmented Robotics (RAR), empowering the robot with the information-seeking capability that bridges the gap between visual documentation and physical actuation. We formulate the task execution as an iterative Retrieve-Reason-Act loop: the robot or embodied agent actively retrieves relevant visual procedural manuals from an unstructured corpus, grounds the abstract 2D diagrams to 3D physical parts via cross-modal alignment, and synthesizes executable plans. We validate this paradigm on a challenging long-horizon assembly benchmark. Our experiments demonstrate that grounding robotic planning in retrieved visual documents significantly outperforms baselines relying on zero-shot reasoning or few-shot example retrieval. This work establishes the basis of RAR, extending the scope of Information Retrieval from answering user queries to driving embodied physical actions.

Izat Temiraliev, Diji Yang, Yi Zhang

University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, California, USA

Robotics Robot Task Planning Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

Mar 3, 2026

IMR-LLM: Industrial Multi-Robot Task Planning and Program Generation using Large Language Models

In modern industrial production, multiple robots often collaborate to complete complex manufacturing tasks. Large language models (LLMs), with their strong reasoning capabilities, have shown potential in coordinating robots for simple household and manipulation tasks. However, in industrial scenarios, stricter sequential constraints and more complex dependencies within tasks present new challenges for LLMs. To address this, we propose IMR-LLM, a novel LLM-driven Industrial Multi-Robot task planning and program generation framework. Specifically, we utilize LLMs to assist in constructing disjunctive graphs and employ deterministic solving methods to obtain a feasible and efficient high-level task plan. Based on this, we use a process tree to guide LLMs to generate executable low-level programs. Additionally, we create IMR-Bench, a challenging benchmark that encompasses multi-robot industrial tasks across three levels of complexity. Experimental results indicate that our method significantly surpasses existing methods across all evaluation metrics.

Xiangyu Su, Juzhan Xu, Oliver van Kaick +2

Shenzhen University. · SpeedBot Robotics Co., Ltd. · Carleton University. +1

Robot Task Planning Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Multi-Robot Systems Industrial Robotics LLM-Based Program Synthesis

Feb 28, 2026

Planning Method for Skill-Based Control of Robots Using a PLC as Skill Trigger

Skill-based programming of robots provides a flexible approach for automation. Existing solutions neglect the optimization of motion sequences, leading to inefficiencies in execution. This work introduces a planning method that enhances skill-based robot programming by integrating motion sequence optimization. This optimization leads to a new MoveContinuousSkill. The software for executing the MoveContinuousSkill is implemented on a Programmable Logic Controller and applied across multiple robotic systems. Experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement in execution time through optimized motion sequence.

Andreas Gaugenrieder, Hari Hara Balasubramaniam, Jannik Möhrle +1

Fraunhofer Institute for Casting, Composite and Processing Technology IGCV · Fraunhofer Institute for Casting, Composite and Processing Technology IGCV, Am Technologiezentrum 10, 86159 Augsburg, Germany · Institute for Machine Tools and Industrial Management, Technical University of Munich +1

Robotic Control Robot Task Planning Robot Motion Planning

Feb 27, 2026

SafeGen-LLM: Enhancing Safety Generalization in Task Planning for Robotic Systems

Safety-critical task planning in robotic systems remains challenging: classical planners suffer from poor scalability, Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based methods generalize poorly, and base Large Language Models (LLMs) cannot guarantee safety. To address this gap, we propose safety-generalizable large language models, named SafeGen-LLM. SafeGen-LLM can not only enhance the safety satisfaction of task plans but also generalize well to novel safety properties in various domains. We first construct a multi-domain Planning Domain Definition Language 3 (PDDL3) benchmark with explicit safety constraints. Then, we introduce a two-stage post-training framework: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on a constraint-compliant planning dataset to learn planning syntax and semantics, and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) guided by fine-grained reward machines derived from formal verification to enforce safety alignment and by curriculum learning to better handle complex tasks. Extensive experiments show that SafeGen-LLM achieves strong safety generalization and outperforms frontier proprietary baselines across multi-domain planning tasks and multiple input formats (e.g., PDDLs and natural language).

Jialiang Fan, Weizhe Xu, Mengyu Liu +3

University of Notre Dame · Washington State University · University of Pennsylvania

Formal Methods for RL Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Robot Task Planning Robot Safety

Feb 25, 2026

Enhancing Cellular-enabled Collaborative Robots Planning through GNSS data for SAR Scenarios

Cellular-enabled collaborative robots are becoming paramount in Search-and-Rescue (SAR) and emergency response. Crucially dependent on resilient mobile network connectivity, they serve as invaluable assets for tasks like rapid victim localization and the exploration of hazardous, otherwise unreachable areas. However, their reliance on battery power and the need for persistent, low-latency communication limit operational time and mobility. To address this, and considering the evolving capabilities of 5G/6G networks, we propose a novel SAR framework that includes Mission Planning and Mission Execution phases and that optimizes robot deployment. By considering parameters such as the exploration area size, terrain elevation, robot fleet size, communication-influenced energy profiles, desired exploration rate, and target response time, our framework determines the minimum number of robots required and their optimal paths to ensure effective coverage and timely data backhaul over mobile networks. Our results demonstrate the trade-offs between number of robots, explored area, and response time for wheeled and quadruped robots. Further, we quantify the impact of terrain elevation data on mission time and energy consumption, showing the benefits of incorporating real-world environmental factors that might also affect mobile signal propagation and connectivity into SAR planning. This framework provides critical insights for leveraging next-generation mobile networks to enhance autonomous SAR operations.

Arnau Romero, Carmen Delgado, Jana Baguer +2

AI-driven Systems, i2CAT Foundation, Barcelona, Spain · Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, UPC, Barcelona, Spain · Pompeu Fabra University, UPF, Barcelona, Spain +2

Search-and-Rescue Robotics Robot Task Planning Multi-Robot Exploration Multi-Robot Motion Planning

Feb 25, 2026

SPOC: Safety-Aware Planning Under Partial Observability And Physical Constraints

Embodied Task Planning with large language models faces safety challenges in real-world environments, where partial observability and physical constraints must be respected. Existing benchmarks often overlook these critical factors, limiting their ability to evaluate both feasibility and safety. We introduce SPOC, a benchmark for safety-aware embodied task planning, which integrates strict partial observability, physical constraints, step-by-step planning, and goal-condition-based evaluation. Covering diverse household hazards such as fire, fluid, injury, object damage, and pollution, SPOC enables rigorous assessment through both state and constraint-based online metrics. Experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs reveal that current models struggle to ensure safety-aware planning, particularly under implicit constraints. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/khm159/SPOC

Hyungmin Kim, Hobeom Jeon, Dohyung Kim +2

ETRI School, University of Science and Technology, South Korean · Social Robotics Laboratory, Electronics and Telecommunication Research Institute, South Korea

Robot Task Planning Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning LLM Safety Benchmarks

Feb 23, 2026

NovaPlan: Zero-Shot Long-Horizon Manipulation via Closed-Loop Video Language Planning

Solving complex long-horizon robotic tasks requires joint reasoning over abstract task structure and low-level physical interaction. While combining Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and video generation models offers a promising path for zero-shot planning, their individual tendencies to hallucinate physics or violate geometric consistency often compound over time, preventing reliable real-world execution. We introduce NovaPlan, a hierarchical framework that enables robust, zero-shot long-horizon manipulation by systematically proposing, verifying, and repairing visual plans. At the high level, a VLM planner decomposes tasks and filters out dynamically inconsistent futures by verifying multiple candidate video rollouts. To translate these imagined futures into reliable physical actions, NovaPlan utilizes a hybrid geometric representation that adaptively switches between object-centric flow and human hand flow. Finally, NovaPlan closes the loop by continuously monitoring execution to verify outcomes and synthesize local, non-prehensile corrective behaviors, such as fingertip poking, when failures occur. Across diverse multi-stage tasks, NovaPlan substantially outperforms prior zero-shot systems, achieving complex assembly and dexterous error recovery entirely without task-specific training or demonstrations. Please visit our project website for additional results: https://nova-plan.github.io/

Jiahui Fu, Junyu Nan, Lingfeng Sun +7

Robotics and AI Institute · Carnegie Mellon University · Brown University +1

Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation Robot Task Planning Robot Motion Planning VLMs for Robotics

Feb 23, 2026

Anticipate, Adapt, Act: A Hybrid Framework for Task Planning

Anticipating and adapting to failures is a key capability robots need to collaborate effectively with humans in complex domains. This continues to be a challenge despite the impressive performance of state of the art AI planning systems and Large Language Models (LLMs) because of the uncertainty associated with the tasks and their outcomes. Toward addressing this challenge, we present a hybrid framework that integrates the generic prediction capabilities of an LLM with the probabilistic sequential decision-making capability of Relational Dynamic Influence Diagram Language. For any given task, the robot reasons about the task and the capabilities of the human attempting to complete it; predicts potential failures due to lack of ability (in the human) or lack of relevant domain objects; and executes actions to prevent such failures or recover from them. Experimental evaluation in the VirtualHome 3D simulation environment demonstrates substantial improvement in performance compared with state of the art baselines.

Nabanita Dash, Ayush Kaura, Shivam Singh +4

Robotics Research Center, IIIT Hyderabad, India · TCS Research, Tata Consultancy Services, India · School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK

Robot Task Planning Human-Robot Collaboration Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning

Feb 12, 2026

TGPO: Trace-Guided Policy Optimization for Robot Task Planning via Verifiable Subgoal Generation

Robot task planning in real-world environments requires mapping abstract natural language instructions to executable action sequences under long horizons and complex constraints. While large language models (LLMs) provide strong commonsense reasoning, they often fail to generate reliable and feasible plans. In contrast, symbolic planners ensure feasibility and optimality but require well-specified goals and cannot directly interpret high-level human intent.We formulate robot task planning as learning to generate verifiable subgoals in the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), bridging language understanding and symbolic planning. To address the challenges of sparse and noisy supervision, we propose Trace-Guided Policy Optimization (TGPO), a reinforcement learning framework that improves structured subgoal generation through (i) verifier-grounded rewards, (ii) external correction of intermediate reasoning traces, and (iii) constrained policy updates that incorporate corrected traces into training.We evaluate TGPO on large-scale household planning tasks with long horizons, abstract instructions, and complex constraints. TGPO significantly outperforms prompting-based and reinforcement learning baselines, with the largest gains on abstract tasks. Furthermore, TGPO integrates naturally with symbolic planners and language-conditioned executors, enabling robust long-horizon planning and combinatorial generalization in realistic environments.

Zhihong Liu, Yang Li, Renming Huang +3

Shanghai Innovation Institute · Xi’an Jiao Tong University · Nankai University +1

Robot Task Planning Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Long-Horizon Planning RL for Language Model Reasoning Symbolic Planning

Feb 12, 2026

Scene2Demo: Self-Evolving Embodied Data Generation via Object-Action Graph

We present Scene2Demo, an automated framework for offline embodied data generation. Given a single RGB scene image and a user query, Scene2Demo constructs an interactive simulated scene and generates executable task configurations, primitive action flows, multi-view execution videos, and offline robot-learning datasets. Its five role-specialized generation modules perform task understanding, symbolic decomposition, BDDL configuration generation, object-size adjustment, and action-flow planning. The resulting object-centric task specifications and action transitions are organized as path search over a scene-conditioned object-action graph. Failed or incomplete executions are refined by two feedback agents: a Robotic Safety Inspector that produces step-wise visual critiques and a Robotic Task Supervisor that revises action sequences or parameters using the rollout and previous evolution history. Across 102 automatically generated primitive scene-task pairs, Scene2Demo achieves a 71.6% execution success rate; on four representative long-horizon tasks, feedback-driven refinement improves both task success and subtask-level execution quality over primitive-only execution. Comparisons with RoboGen and GenSim2 show stronger execution performance under automated data-generation settings. Finally, behavior cloning policies achieve 96.0% and 92.0% success on two representative tasks, showing that the generated data supports downstream policy learning. Our project page is available at https://scene2demo-anon.github.io/.

Xiang Liu, Sen Cui, Guocai Yao +4

Robot Demonstration Generation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Robot Manipulation Datasets Robot Task Planning

Feb 5, 2026

Affordance-Aware Interactive Decision-Making and Execution for Ambiguous Instructions

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 thirsty") remains challenging for existing vision-language model (VLM)-based methods, due to inefficient reasoning and limited environmental interaction. These factors hinder real-time task planning and execution. To address this, we propose Affordance-Aware Interactive Decision-Making and Execution for Ambiguous Instructions (AIDE), a human-inspired dual-stream framework that integrates interactive exploration with vision-language reasoning: mirroring the complementary deliberative and intuitive processes of human cognition, Multi-Stage Inference (MSI) serves as the decision-making stream and Accelerated Decision-Making (ADM) as the execution stream, enabling zero-shot affordance analysis and interpretation of ambiguous instructions. Experiments in simulation and real-world settings show that AIDE achieves over 80% task planning success rate and more than 95% closed-loop continuous execution accuracy at 10 Hz, surpassing existing VLM-based methods in diverse open scenarios.

Hengxuan Xu, Fengbo Lan, Zhixin Zhao +5

Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shanghai, China · Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China +1

Robotics Robot Task Planning VLMs for Robotics Active Vision for Robot Manipulation

Jan 29, 2026

From Instruction to Event: Sound-Triggered Mobile Manipulation

Current mobile manipulation research predominantly follows an instruction-driven paradigm, where robots rely on predefined textual commands to execute tasks. However, this setting confines robots to a passive role, limiting robotic autonomy and the ability to react to dynamic environmental events. To address these limitations, we introduce Sound-Triggered Mobile Manipulation (STMM), where robots must actively perceive and interact with sound-emitting objects without explicit action instructions. To support STMM, we develop Habitat-Echo, a simulation platform that integrates sound rendering with physical interaction. We further propose a hierarchical baseline that translates high-level planning into low-level executions, where a task planner predicts a skill chain for policy models to execute sequentially. Experiments indicate the feasibility of perceiving auditory events and executing corresponding physical interactions without explicit instructions. Notably, in challenging multi-event scenarios, the robot successfully isolates the primary sources from overlapping acoustic interference to execute the first interactions, and subsequently proceeds to manipulate the secondary objects. These new challenges of planning-to-execution position STMM as a measurable research direction.The code and datasets will be released upon acceptance.

Hao Ju, Shaofei Huang, Hongyu Li +4

University of Macau · Beihang University · Hefei University of Technology

Robotics Simulation Mobile Robotics Robotic Manipulation Robot Task Planning Robot Manipulation Benchmarks

Jan 2, 2026

From Perception to Symbolic Task Planning: Vision-Language Guided Human-Robot Collaborative Structured Assembly

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) in structured assembly requires reliable state estimation and adaptive task planning under noisy perception and human interventions. To address these challenges, we introduce a design-grounded human-aware planning framework for human-robot collaborative structured assembly. The framework comprises two coupled modules. Module I, Perception-to-Symbolic State (PSS), employs vision-language models (VLMs) based agents to align RGB-D observations with design specifications and domain knowledge, synthesizing verifiable symbolic assembly states. It outputs validated installed and uninstalled component sets for online state tracking. Module II, Human-Aware Planning and Replanning (HPR), performs task-level multi-robot assignment and updates the plan only when the observed state deviates from the expected execution outcome. It applies a minimal-change replanning rule to selectively revise task assignments and preserve plan stability even under human interventions. We validate the framework on a 27-component timber-frame assembly. The PSS module achieves 97% state synthesis accuracy, and the HPR module maintains feasible task progression across diverse HRC scenarios. Results indicate that integrating VLM-based perception with knowledge-driven planning improves robustness of state estimation and task planning under dynamic conditions.

Yanyi Chen, Min Deng

Department of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409, USA

Human-Robot Collaboration Robotic Assembly Robot Task Planning Symbolic Planning Multi-Robot Coordination

Oct 20, 2025

Video Replanning via Latent Embedding Refinement and Rejection-Based Sampling

Video planning has emerged as a flexible framework for robot manipulation, in which a generative model predicts a video of task completion, and a downstream module translates the predicted frames into actions. However, existing methods typically ignore information from past interactions, limiting their ability to adapt to latent physical properties that can only be revealed through trial and error, such as whether a door should be pushed or pulled, or how friction affects object dynamics. When a plan fails, these methods usually replan from scratch without leveraging the information revealed by the failure. To address this limitation, we introduce RELIC, REplanning with Latent embedding refInement and Candidate rejection, a video planning framework that adapts to hidden physical properties from test-time failures. RELIC optimizes a latent embedding that captures the environment's hidden physical properties from interaction videos and introduces a rejection-based sampling mechanism that filters out hypotheses inconsistent with prior failures. Across eight tasks in two simulation suites, RELIC consistently reduces the number of replanning steps required for success, and linear probes show that its embedding captures the hidden parameters from the interaction itself rather than from scene appearance. Across four challenging real-world robotic manipulation tasks involving hidden interaction modes, e.g., friction, center of mass, and object mass, RELIC raises the one-shot replanning success rate of a video planning baseline from 30.0% to 63.8% after a single physical interaction.

Po-Chen Ko, Yu Chan, Yu-Hsiang Fu +7

National Taiwan University · MIT CSAIL · Cornell University +1

Robot System Identification Robot Failure Recovery Robotic Manipulation Robot Task Planning Rejection Sampling Dynamic Replanning

Sep 30, 2025

RoboPilot: Generalizable Dynamic Robotic Manipulation with Dual-thinking Modes

Despite rapid progress in robotics, complex or long-horizon tasks remain a fundamental challenge. Most current approaches follow an open-loop paradigm with limited reasoning and no feedback, resulting in poor robustness to environmental changes and severe error accumulation. We present RoboPilot, a dual-thinking closed-loop agentic framework for robotic manipulation that supports adaptive reasoning for complex tasks in real-world dynamic environments. RoboPilot leverages primitive actions for structured task planning and flexible action generation as a agentic system, while introducing feedback to enable replanning from dynamic changes and execution errors. Chain-of-Thought reasoning further enhances high-level task planning and guides low-level action generation. The agentic system dynamically switches between fast and slow thinking to balance efficiency and accuracy. To systematically evaluate the robustness of RoboPilot in diverse robot manipulation scenarios, we introduce RoboPilot-Bench, a benchmark spanning 21 tasks across 10 categories, including infeasible-task recognition and dynamic recovery. Experiments show that RoboPilot outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 11% in task success rate, and the real-world deployment on an industrial robot further demonstrates its robustness.

Xinyi Liu, Mohammadreza Fani Sani, Zewei Zhou +3

Microsoft, Denmark · Technical University of Denmark · University of California, Los Angeles

Robotic Manipulation Dynamic Robotic Manipulation Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation Robot Task Planning Generalization in Robotic Manipulation Robot Manipulation Benchmarks

Sep 25, 2025

Self-CriTeach: LLM Self-Teaching and Self-Critiquing for Improving Robotic Planning via Automated Domain Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown strong promise for robotic task planning, particularly through automatic planning domain generation. However, prior approaches largely treat generated planning domains as planning utilities, which are brittle under imperfect logical states and perception noise, overlooking their potential as scalable sources of reasoning supervision and structured reward signals. At the same time, reasoning LLMs depend on chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision that is expensive to collect for robotic tasks, and reinforcement learning (RL) faces challenges in reward engineering. We propose Self-CriTeach, an LLM self-teaching and self-critiquing framework in which an LLM autonomously generates symbolic planning domains that serve a dual role: (1) enabling large-scale generation of robotic planning problem-plan pairs, and (2) providing structured reward functions. First, the self-written domains enable large-scale generation of symbolic task plans, which are automatically transformed into extended CoT trajectories for supervised fine-tuning. Second, the self-written domains are reused as structured reward functions, providing dense feedback for reinforcement learning without manual reward engineering. This unified training pipeline yields a planning-enhanced LLM with higher planning success rates, stronger cross-task generalization, reduced inference cost, and resistance to imperfect logical states. GitHub Page: https://markli1hoshipu.github.io/Plan_LLM/

Jinbang Huang, Zhiyuan Li, Yuanzhao Hu +4

Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab · University of Toronto · University of British Columbia +1

Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics LLM-Guided RL Robot Task Planning

Sep 21, 2025

IDfRA: Self-Verification for Iterative Design in Robotic Assembly

Design for Robotic Assembly (DfRA) remains largely dependent on manual planning and heuristic simulation, limiting scalability and robustness in complex industrial settings. Although large language models (LLMs) show promise for semantic reasoning and task planning, most approaches remain tightly coupled to pre-built simulators that assume an accurate world model. We introduce Iterative Design for Robotic Assembly (IDfRA), a closed-loop framework that combines an LLM for plan generation with a vision-language model (VLM) for execution assessment. Given a target structure and a partial environmental signature, the LLM proposes an assembly plan, the robot executes it once at test time, and the VLM evaluates the resulting state to provide feedback for replanning. Through this iterative planning-execution-verification loop, the system progressively improves semantic fidelity and physical feasibility. Crucially, IDfRA does not require an accurate a priori world model before deployment. Instead, physical constraints are discovered online through interaction, enabling adaptation to under-specified environments. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that IDfRA attains 73.3% top-1 accuracy in semantic recognisability, surpassing the baseline on this metric. Moreover, the resulting assembly plans exhibit robust physical feasibility, achieving an overall 86.9% construction success rate, with design quality improving across iterations, albeit not always monotonically. Pairwise human evaluation further corroborates the advantages of IDfRA relative to alternative approaches. By integrating self-verification with context-aware adaptation, the framework evidences strong potential for deployment in unstructured manufacturing scenarios.

Nishka Khendry, Christos Margadji, Sebastian W. Pattinson

Institute for Manufacturing, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge

Robotic Assembly Robot Task Planning Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning

Aug 26, 2025

Real-Time Model Checking for Closed-Loop Robot Reactive Planning

Reactive obstacle avoidance methods often cause agents to become trapped in local minima, because they can often only reason one step ahead (i.e., the next action based on the current state). In this paper, we use model checking to achieve reactive multi-step planning and obstacle avoidance on an autonomous robot. Our small, purpose-built model checking algorithm generates plans in situ (within the robot's code) based on ``core'' knowledge and attention as found in biological agents. This is achieved in real-time using no pre-computed data on a low-powered device. Our approach is based on chaining temporary control systems that are spawned to counteract disturbances in the local environment which disrupt an autonomous agent from its preferred action (or resting state). We mitigate state-space explosion by relying on temporary snapshots of the immediate environment, restricting the number of states. Multi-step planning using counter-examples generated by depth-first search and a negated LTL path property is applied to scenarios involving a cul-de-sac and a free-standing obstacle. Empirical results and informal proofs of two fundamental properties demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for the creation of efficient multi-step plans for local obstacle avoidance. We significantly improve performance compared to a purely reactive agent that can only plan one step ahead. Our approach is an instructional case study for the development of safe and reliable navigation in the context of autonomous vehicles. We believe it also has general application in navigation for mission-critical mobile robots.

Christopher Chandler, Bernd Porr, Giulia Lafratta +1

Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, UK · School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK · School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK

Safe Robot Navigation Formal Verification Robot Task Planning Robot Collision Avoidance

Aug 9, 2025

$\mathcal{P}^3$ : Toward Versatile Embodied Agents

Embodied agents have shown promising generalization capabilities across diverse physical environments, making them essential for a wide range of real-world applications. However, building versatile embodied agents poses critical challenges due to three key issues: dynamic environment perception, open-ended tool usage, and complex multi-task planning. Most previous works rely solely on feedback from tool agents to perceive environmental changes and task status, which limits adaptability to real-time dynamics, causes error accumulation, and restricts tool flexibility. Furthermore, multi-task scheduling has received limited attention, primarily due to the inherent complexity of managing task dependencies and balancing competing priorities in dynamic and complex environments. To overcome these challenges, we introduce

\mathcal P^3

, a unified framework that integrates real-time perception and dynamic scheduling. Specifically,

\mathcal P^3

enables agents to perceive task-relevant information actively from the environment, plug and utilize tools without feedback requirements, and plan multi-task execution by prioritizing urgent tasks and dynamically adjusting task order based on dependencies. Extensive real-world experiments show that our approach bridges the gap between benchmarks and practical deployment, delivering highly transferable, general-purpose embodied agents. Code and data are available at https://github.com/fz-zsl/P3.

Shengli Zhou, Xiangchen Wang, Jinrui Zhang +4

Southern University of Science and Technology · Spatialtemporal AI · MBZUAI

Robot Task Planning Embodied AI Robotic Perception

Jul 31, 2025

Simulation-based planning of Motion Sequences for Automated Procedure Optimization in Multi-Robot Assembly Cells

Reconfigurable multi-robot cells offer a promising approach to meet fluctuating assembly demands. However, the recurrent planning of their configurations introduces new challenges, particularly in generating optimized, coordinated multi-robot motion sequences that minimize the assembly duration. This work presents a simulation-based method for generating such optimized sequences. The approach separates assembly steps into task-related core operations and connecting traverse operations. While core operations are constrained and predetermined, traverse operations offer substantial optimization potential. Scheduling the core operations is formulated as an optimization problem, requiring feasible traverse operations to be integrated using a decomposition-based motion planning strategy. Several solution techniques are explored, including a sampling heuristic, tree-based search and gradient-free optimization. For motion planning, a decomposition method is proposed that identifies specific areas in the schedule, which can be solved independently with modified centralized path planning algorithms. The proposed method generates efficient and collision-free multi-robot assembly procedures that outperform a baseline relying on decentralized, robot-individual motion planning. Its effectiveness is demonstrated through simulation experiments.

Loris Schneider, Marc Ungen, Elias Huber +1

Institute for Material Handling and Logistics (IFL), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 76131, Germany · Bosch Corporate Research, Robert Bosch GmbH, 71272 Renningen, Germany

Multi-Robot Motion Planning Multi-Robot Coordination Robot Task Planning

Jun 12, 2025

Gondola: Grounded Vision Language Planning for Robotic Manipulation

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promising progress in robotic manipulation. However, directly mapping visual observations and language instructions to low-level actions often results in limited interpretability and weak robustness in complex, long-horizon tasks. To address these challenges, we employ a modular manipulation framework that separates high-level planning from low-level control. At its core is Gondola, a grounded vision-language planning model that generates structured plans with explicit pixel-level object grounding before action execution. Given multi-view observations and planning history, Gondola predicts the next-step plan as interleaved textual instructions and multi-view segmentation masks corresponding to target objects and goal locations. To train Gondola, we construct synthetic datasets that provide explicit supervision for short-horizon grounded planning, multi-view referring expression, and long-horizon compositional reasoning. By coupling grounded plan generation with a 3D-based execution policy, our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the challenging GemBench benchmark. The system further demonstrates promising transfer to real robots. Ablation studies confirm that pixel-level grounding and the proposed planning-oriented supervision are critical for effective high-level reasoning. Project webpage: https://cshizhe.github.io/projects/robot_gondola.html

Shizhe Chen, Ricardo Garcia, Paul Pacaud +1

Inria, École normale supérieure, CNRS, PSL Research University

Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation Robot Task Planning Visually Grounded Reasoning Visual Grounding VLMs for Robotics Visual Grounding for Robotics

Apr 23, 2025

MuTRAP: Multi-trigger Trojans Attacking Robot Task Planning Systems

Robots need task planning methods to achieve goals that require more than one action. Recently, large pretrained models have demonstrated impressive performance in task planning. For instance, large language models (LLMs) can generate task plans using action and goal descriptions. Despite the rapid progress of large models in robot intelligence, their security implications remain only partially understood, leaving important gaps in the exploration of potential vulnerabilities in LLM-driven robotic planning systems. To investigate such risks, in this paper, we develop MuTRAP, the first multi-trigger trojan attack specifically designed and targeted for LLM-assisted robot task planners. MuTRAP follows the standard practice of LLM usage in robotics where the backbone LLM is typically frozen and hosted in a central server limiting attacker's reach. In contrast, MuTRAP injects backdoor using a small set of task-specific parameters. In addition, we develop a trigger optimization method for selecting multiple-trigger words that are most effective for different robot applications. For instance, one can use unique trigger word "herical" to activate a specific malicious behavior, e.g., cutting hand on a kitchen robot. Through MuTRAP that demonstrates the vulnerability of current LLM-based planners, our goal is to promote the development of secured robot intelligence. Details and demos are provided in: https://mutrap.github.io/MuTRAP/

Mohaiminul Al Nahian, Zainab Altaweel, David Reitano +3

Binghamton University (SUNY)

LLM Backdoor Attacks Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Robot Task Planning

Apr 23, 2025

MOSAIC: Skill-Centric Manipulation Planning with Physics Simulation

Planning long-horizon manipulation motions using a set of predefined skills is a central challenge in robotics; solving it efficiently could enable general-purpose robots to tackle novel tasks by flexibly composing generic skills. Solutions to this problem lie in an infinitely vast space of parameterized skill sequences -- a space where common incremental methods struggle to find sequences that have non-obvious intermediate steps. Some approaches reason over lower-dimensional, symbolic spaces, which are more tractable to explore but may be brittle and are laborious to construct. In this work, we introduce MOSAIC, a skill-centric, multi-directional planning approach that targets these challenges by reasoning about which skills to employ and where they are most likely to succeed, by utilizing physics simulation to estimate skill execution outcomes. Specifically, MOSAIC employs two complementary skill families: Generators, which identify ``islands of competence'' where skills are demonstrably effective, and Connectors, which link these skill-trajectories by solving boundary value problems. By focusing planning efforts on regions of high competence, MOSAIC efficiently discovers physically-grounded solutions. We demonstrate its efficacy on complex long-horizon problems in both simulation and the real world, using a diverse set of skills including generative diffusion models, motion planning algorithms, and manipulation-specific models. Visit skill-mosaic.github.io for demonstrations and examples.

Itamar Mishani, Yorai Shaoul, Maxim Likhachev

Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, United States

Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation Robot Task Planning