Robotic Control

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Overview

Robotic control turns sensor readings and task goals into actions, from steering mobile robots to coordinating humanoid bodies and handling delicate contact. Methods range from feedback control, inverse kinematics, and model predictive control to reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and vision-language-action policies. Current work often combines these approaches, adding force or tactile feedback, safety constraints, and sim-to-real adaptation to improve performance on manipulation, locomotion, and human-robot interaction tasks. A central challenge is achieving safe, stable behavior that generalizes to unfamiliar conditions while meeting real-time limits and retaining task performance.

Latest papers

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587 papers95 papers in the last four weeks, up 10% on the four weeks before. 0.5% of all new papers.

  1. Path Planning and Reinforcement Learning-Driven Control of On-Orbit Free-Flying Multi-Arm Robots

    Mar 24, 2026Álvaro Belmonte-Baeza, José Luis Ramón, Leonard Felicetti +2Robotic ControlSpace Robotics

    University of Alicante, Spain · Cranfield University, UK

  2. Versatile Exoskeleton Control Supports Elderly Joint Energetics During Hip-Intensive Tasks

    Mar 23, 2026Jiefu Zhang, Nikhil V. Divekar, Chandramouli Krishnan +1Hip Exoskeleton ControlAssistive Robotics

    Robotics Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA

  3. Wake Up to the Past: Using Memory to Model Fluid Wake Effects on Robots

    Mar 23, 2026Luca Vendruscolo, Eduardo Sebastián, Amanda Prorok +1Multi-Robot SystemsRobot Dynamics Learning

    Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, UK.

  4. A Framework for Closed-Loop Robotic Assembly, Alignment and Self-Recovery of Precision Optical Systems

    Mar 23, 2026Seou Choi, Sachin Vaidya, Caio Silva +4Robotic AssemblyLaboratory Automation

    Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA 02139, USA · NSF Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI) and the Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA 02139, USA · Nokia Bell Labs +1

  5. KUKAloha: A General, Low-Cost, and Shared-Control based Teleoperation Framework for Construction Robot Arm

    Mar 20, 2026Yifan Xu, Qizhang Shen, Vineet Kamat +1Robot TeleoperationRobotic Control

    Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, United States of America · Department of Robotics, University of Michigan, United States of America

  6. Accurate Open-Loop Control of a Soft Continuum Robot Using Visually Learned Latent Dynamics

    Mar 20, 2026Henrik Krauss, Johann Licher, Naoya Takeishi +2Robotic ControlContinuum Robot Control

    Department of Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, 153-8904, Japan. · Institute of Assembly Technology and Robotics, Leibniz University Hannover, 30823 Germany. · Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, 153-8904, Japan.

  7. Speculative Policy Orchestration: A Latency-Resilient Framework for Cloud-Robotic Manipulation

    Mar 19, 2026Chanh Nguyen, Shutong Jin, Florian T. Pokorny +1Robotic ControlRobotics

    Department of Computing Science, Ume˚a University, 90187 Ume˚a, Sweden · School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 10044 Stockholm, Sweden

  8. Specification-Aware Distribution Shaping for Robotics Foundation Models

    Mar 18, 2026Sadık Bera Yüksel, Derya AksarayRobotic ControlRobot Safety

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University.

  9. Generative Control as Optimization: Time Unconditional Flow Matching for Adaptive and Robust Robotic Control

    Mar 18, 2026Zunzhe Zhang, Runhan Huang, Yicheng Liu +3Robotic ControlRobot Imitation Learning

    Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Galaxea Inc., Beijing, China · Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, New Jersey, US

  10. WINFlowNets: Warm-up Integrated Networks Training of Generative Flow Networks for Robotics and Machine Fault Adaptation

    Mar 18, 2026Zahin Sufiyan, Shadan Golestan, Yoshihiro Mitsuka +2Generative Flow NetworksRL for Robotics

    University of Alberta · Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) · Mitsubishi Electric Corporation

  11. CABTO: Context-Aware Behavior Tree Grounding for Robot Manipulation

    Mar 17, 2026Yishuai Cai, Xinglin Chen, Yunxin Mao +6Robotic ControlRobotic Manipulation

    National University of Defense Technology · PsiBot · PKU-Psibot Lab +1

  12. Reconciling distributed compliance with high-performance control in continuum soft robotics

    Mar 17, 2026Vito Daniele Perfetta, Daniel Feliu-Talegon, Ebrahim Shahabi +1Continuum Robot ControlSoft Robotics

    Cognitive Robotics Department, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft 2628 CD, The Netherlands.

  13. Sampling-Based MuJoCo MPC for Double-Pendulum Sway Suppression on a Shipboard Crane

    Mar 17, 2026Oscar Pang, Lisa Coiffard, Paul Templier +3Robotic ControlRobust Control

    Adaptive and Intelligent Robotics Lab, Department of Computing, Imperial College London, Exhibition Rd, London, SW7 2BX, United Kingdom

  14. Task-Specified Compliance Bounds for Humanoids via Lipschitz-Constrained Policies

    Mar 17, 2026Zewen He, Yoshihiko NakamuraCompliant Robot ControlRobotic Control

    Department of Robotics, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

  15. Optimal control of differentially flat underactuated planar robots in the perspective of oscillation mitigation

    Mar 16, 2026Stefano Lovato, Michele Tonan, Matteo Bottin +3Robotic ControlOptimal Control

    Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Padova, Via Venezia 1, Padova, Italy

  16. CycleRL: Sim-to-Real Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robust Autonomous Bicycle Control

    Mar 16, 2026Gelu Liu, Teng Wang, Zhijie Wu +3Robotic ControlRL for Robotics

    School of Electronics and Communication Engineering and Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Navigation and Communication Integration, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China

  17. Intelligent Control of Differential Drive Robots Subject to Unmodeled Dynamics with EKF-based State Estimation

    Mar 16, 2026Amos Alwala, Yuchen Hu, Gabriel da Silva Lima +1Robotic ControlRobot Trajectory Tracking

    With the Smart Systems, Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, Faculty of Technology, University of Turku, 20520 Turku, Finland.

  18. Dynamic Properties and Motion Reproducibility of a Compact Pneumatically Actuated Humanoid Upper Body for Data-Driven Control

    Mar 16, 2026Hiroshi Atsuta, Hisashi Ishihara, Minoru AsadaRobotic ControlRobot Trajectory Tracking

    Symbiotic Intelligent Systems Research Center, Institute for Open and Transdisciplinary Research Initiatives, The University of Osaka, Suita, Osaka, Japan · College of Arts and Design, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan · International Professional University of Technology in Osaka, Umeda, Kita-ku, Osaka, Japan +1

  19. SmallSatSim: A GPU-Accelerated Microgravity Robotics Toolkit for Planning, Control, and Policy Learning

    Mar 15, 2026David Schwartz, Alexander Hansson, Sabrina Bodmer +3Robotics SimulationSpace Robotics

    ETH Zürich, Rämistrasse 101, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland · Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91011, USA · University of Michigan, 500 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA +1

  20. Physics-Informed Policy Optimization via Analytic Dynamics Regularization

    Mar 15, 2026Namai Chandra, Liu Mohan, Zhihao Gu +1Physics-Informed RLRL Control

    Electronic Systems, IIT Madras, India · EmPACT Lab, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

  21. Semi-Automatic Flute Robot and Its Acoustic Sensing

    Mar 15, 2026Hikari Kuriyama, Hiroaki Sonoda, Kouki Tomiyoshi +1RoboticsRobotic Control

    Graduate School of Science and Technology, Kumamoto University, Kumamoto 860-8555, Japan · Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Kumamoto University, Kumamoto 860-8555, Japan

  22. See, Learn, Assist: Safe and Self-Paced Robotic Rehabilitation via Video-Based Learning from Demonstration

    Mar 15, 2026Ali Alabbas, Camillo Murgia, Joanne Regan +1Assistive RoboticsRobotic Control

    Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Atlantic Technological University, Galway, Ireland. · Department of Health and Nutritional Science, Atlantic Technological University, Sligo, Ireland.

  23. Ψ0Ψ_0: An Open Foundation Model Towards Universal Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

    Mar 12, 2026Songlin Wei, Hongyi Jing, Boqian Li +12Robot Foundation ModelsRobot Learning

    USC Physical Superintelligence (PSI) Lab · NVIDIA · WorldEngine

  24. A Generalized Theory of Load Distribution in Redundantly-actuated Robotic Systems

    Mar 12, 2026Joshua Flight, Clément GosselinRobotic ManipulationRobotic Control

    Département de génie mécanique et de génie industriel, Université Laval, Canada.

  25. Dynamic Modeling and Attitude Control of a Reaction-Wheel-Based Low-Gravity Bipedal Hopper

    Mar 11, 2026Shriram Hari, M Venkata Sai Nikhil, R Prasanth KumarRobot LocomotionLegged Robotics

    Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, Sangareddy, India

  26. DiT4DiT: Jointly Modeling Video Dynamics and Actions for Generalizable Robot Control

    Mar 11, 2026Teli Ma, Jia Zheng, Zifan Wang +4Robotic ControlVision-Based Robot Control

    Mondo Robotics · HKUST(GZ) · HKUST

  27. SteadyTray: Learning Object Balancing Tasks in Humanoid Tray Transport via Residual Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 11, 2026Anlun Huang, Zhenyu Wu, Soofiyan Atar +2Robotic ControlResidual Policy Learning

    UC San Diego

  28. Diff-Muscle: Efficient Learning for Musculoskeletal Robotic Table Tennis

    Mar 9, 2026Wentao Zhao, Jun Guo, Kangyao Huang +2Robotic Table TennisDifferential Flatness

    Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, China.

  29. An Open-Source Robotics Research Platform for Autonomous Laparoscopic Surgery

    Mar 9, 2026Ariel Rodriguez, Lorenzo Mazza, Martin Lelis +4Laparoscopic SurgerySurgical Robotics

    Department of Translational Surgical Oncology, NCT/UCC Dresden, a partnership between DKFZ, MF UKD, TUD, HZDR Dresden, Germany · Cluster of Excellence-CeTI, TUD, Germany · Department of Visceral, Thoracic and Vascular Surgery, Faculty of Medicine and University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus, TUD, Germany

  30. PhaForce: Phase-Scheduled Visual-Force Policy Learning with Slow Planning and Fast Correction for Contact-Rich Manipulation

    Mar 9, 2026Mingxin Wang, Zhirun Yue, Renhao Lu +7Robotic ControlContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation