Robotic Perception

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Overview

Robotic perception studies how robots use sensory data to estimate what is around them, how it is arranged, and how it may change. Approaches include neural networks and vision-language models for recognition and segmentation; SLAM, depth estimation, and 3D maps for geometry; and fusion of cameras with LiDAR, radar, tactile, or proprioceptive sensors. Active viewpoint selection and interaction help resolve occlusion and ambiguity, while scene graphs and affordance models connect perception to navigation and manipulation. A central challenge is making systems reliable outside curated benchmarks—under changing lighting, clutter, unfamiliar environments, and tight limits on latency and onboard computing—while representing uncertainty well enough for safe action.

Latest papers

CardsList

324 papers28 papers in the last four weeks, down 52% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. UA-Depth: Uncertainty-Aware Depth Restoration for Material-Agnostic Object Manipulation

    Nov 1, 2026Rui Cao, Jia-Hui Pan, Yin Zhang +8Depth EstimationMetric Depth Estimation

    Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. · The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. +1

  2. CalibSwitch: Observation-Driven Camera-LiDAR Extrinsic Recovery and Selective Maintenance for Multimodal Perception

    Oct 30, 2026Haifa Zhang, Yijing Wang, Zhiqiang ZuoLidar-Camera Extrinsic CalibrationRobotic Perception

    School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

  3. SSQA: Sibling-Selective Quadtree Attention for Hierarchical Modeling in Perception Tasks

    Oct 28, 2026Yufan Chen, Arnav Bali, Angela Liu +2Efficient ViTsHierarchical Representation Learning

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA. · South River High School, Edgewater, MD, USA. · Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.

  4. Predict the Swing, Match the Speed: Robotic Pipe Stabbing With Learned Stereo Vision and Residual Reinforcement Learning

    Oct 27, 2026Mohamed Ashraf Mostafa, Taher El-Fakharany, Samir KhaledDynamic Robotic ManipulationVision-Based Robot Control

    Mining and Petroleum Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt · Petroleum Department, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Future University in Egypt (FUE), Cairo, Egypt

  5. Leveraging Distributed Sensing and Hyperdimensional Computing for Non-Line-of-Sight Passive Object Sensing

    Oct 27, 2026Placido Mursia, Marco Rossanese, Francesco Devoti +4Robotic PerceptionVirtual Sensing

    NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH, Heidelberg, Germany. · Univeristy of Bedfordshire, Luton, United Kingdom. · NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH, Heidelberg, Germany, i2CAT Foundation, Barcelona, Spain, and ICREA Foundation, Barcelona, Spain.

  6. Camera-to-Quadruped Robot Pose Estimation from Sequential Images

    Oct 27, 2026Seobin Hwang, Ji-Seong Beom, Yeong-Jun ChoRobot State EstimationRobotic Perception

    Department of Artificial Intelligence Convergence, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, Republic of Korea

  7. TrySee: Modular Perception-Enhanced VLM Grounding for Closed-Loop Robot Task Planning in Specialized Domains

    Oct 26, 2026Elias Hofele, Thomas Trapp, David Timmermann +3Robot Task PlanningVLMs for Robotics

    FZI Research Center for Information Technology · Machine Intelligence and Robotics Lab (MaiRo), Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT)

  8. Thermal-Headroom Routing for Efficient Robot Perception in Extreme Heat

    Oct 26, 2026Sparsh Roy, Kevin Zhou, Arhaan Shah +4Power-Efficient InferenceAdaptive Inference

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA · Hopewell Valley Central High School, Pennington, NJ, USA · Paradise Valley High School, Phoenix, AZ, USA

  9. Semantic-Coupled Perception Framework for Autonomous Laparoscope Control

    Oct 25, 2026Enduo Zhao, Fangzhou Li, Yujie Zhu +4Surgical RoboticsRobotic Perception

    School of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. · School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.

  10. Cut a Wall, See a Wall: Identity Substitution in Occluded Point-Cloud Perception for Construction Robots

    Oct 25, 2026Tsung-Lung Yang3D Point Cloud Segmentation3D Semantic Segmentation

    National University

  11. POD-RoPE: Rotary Position Encoding over Physical Observation Distributions for Embodied AI

    Oct 24, 2026Xiaodi Huang, Zilin Wang, Jinpeng Liu +3Positional EncodingRotary Positional Embeddings

    Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Sharpa +1

  12. Object- and Task-Aware Active Perception for Safe Navigation of Mobile Manipulators in Semi-Static Environments

    Oct 21, 2026Jingxing Qian, Xintong Du, Jun Yang +3Safe Robot NavigationRobot Navigation

    University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) and the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Canada. · Epson Canada Ltd., Toronto, ON L3R 6G3, Canada. · Learning Systems and Robotics Lab at the Technical University of Munich and the Munich Institute for Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), Germany. +2

  13. Vision as Proprioception: Estimating Humanoid Robot Pose from Video

    Oct 18, 2026Jiaxi Jiang, Matthias Heyrman, René Zurbrügg +2Robotic PerceptionCross-Embodiment Robot Learning

    ETH Zürich

  14. Foundation Models for Autonomous Space Robotics: Architectures, Physical Adaptation, and Validation

    Oct 16, 2026Zizhe Wang, Jia Deng, Xin Lu +4Space RoboticsRobot Foundation Models

    Astroup Lab, Beijing, China · Harbin Institute of Technology, Beijing Research Institute · Peking University

  15. RoPE-Flow: Monocular Vision-based Robot Pose Estimation via 2D Graph-Conditioned 3D Flow Matching

    Oct 15, 2026Liangjing Shao, Wanhao Liu, Zhiwei Fang +6Robot State EstimationRobotic Perception

    Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong · EACV Research Center, Shenzhen Loop Area Institute · Xi’an Jiaotong University

  16. Receding-Horizon Next-Best-View Planning for Highly Occluded Target Perception

    Oct 13, 2026Ayse Gul Yildiz, Rekha RajaNext-Best-View PlanningRobotic Perception

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Donders Centre for Cognition, Department of Human-Centred Intelligent Systems, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

  17. Perception Beyond the Visible: Incompleteness-Aware Scene Understanding for Robot Autonomy

    Oct 13, 2026Rohit MohanRobotic Perception4D Scene Understanding

  18. LynxScenes: A Large-Scale Real-World Benchmark for Outdoor Wheel-Legged Robot Perception, Navigation, Imagination and Reconstruction

    Oct 13, 2026Jun Tian, Hao Wu, Ruo Chen +5Robot Navigation BenchmarksRobot Navigation

    Deep Robotics · University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology +3

  19. ReAP: From Visual Failure Recognition to Action-Conditioned Risk Prediction for Runtime Failure Monitoring

    Oct 12, 2026Jingyuan Liu, Yunpeng Qing, Changxu Wei +1Robot Failure DetectionRobotic Perception

    ACE Robotics · Fudan University · Zhejiang University +1

  20. Edge-Native Temporal--Graph Dual-Expert Inference for Dexterous Grasp Classification

    Oct 10, 2026Jiajian Zheng, Bin Zhang, Wen Fan +1Robotic GraspingRobotic Perception

    School of Microelectronics Shanghai University Shanghai, 201800, China · Department of Bioengineering Imperial College London London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom

  21. Toward Lunar Legged Robots: Field Deployment Lessons at LUNA

    Oct 8, 2026Adrian Fuhrer, Joseph Church, Oliver Fischer +6Lunar RoboticsRobotics

    ETH Zurich, Robotics Systems Lab; Leonhardstrasse 21, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland

  22. 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

  23. SenseWeather: Multimodal Sensing for Robust Robotic Perception under Extreme Conditions

    Oct 8, 2026Fucai Ke, Sukai Huang, Junyi Hao +4Robotic PerceptionMultimodal Robustness

    Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia

  24. Neural Networks for Temporal Pattern Recognition and Dynamic Arm Gesture Speed Estimation for Robot Control

    Oct 8, 2026Milán Zsolt Bagladi, László GulyásRecurrent Neural NetworksRobotic Perception

    Department of Artificial Intelligence ELTE Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, Hungary

  25. Agentic RSR: Real-to-Sim-to-Real through Scene Reconstruction and Execution-Grounded Robot Policies

    Oct 7, 2026Yihan Li, Yating Feng, Shengjiu Sun +7Sim-to-Real TransferRobotic Manipulation

    Sun Yat-sen University · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

  26. Argos: Adapt Rich Geometric Priors for Generalizable Online Scene-Change-Detection

    Oct 7, 2026Ruihan Xu, Jiae Yoon, Kaichen Zhou +23D Scene Change DetectionRobotic Perception

    MIT

  27. Enhancing Robotic Perception and Adaptability through Sensor Fusion and Origami-Inspired Designs

    Oct 7, 2026Namai Chandra, Jaison Jose, Kavi Arya +1Robotic PerceptionMobile Robotics

    IIT Madras · e-Yantra, IIT Bombay

  28. End-to-End Safe Social Navigation via Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning and Probabilistic Perception

    Oct 5, 2026Tommaso Van Der Meer, Andrea Garulli, Antonio Giannitrapani +3Robotic RLSafe Robot Navigation

    Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione e Scienze Matematiche, Universit`a di Siena, Siena, Italy · Uninettuno University, Rome, Italy · Visual Intelligence for Transportation (VITA) Lab, ´Ecole Polytechnique F´ed´erale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland

  29. Deep Prior Learning for Embodied Perception

    Oct 4, 2026Yimou Wu, Jiaxin Guo, Yun-hui Liu +13D ViTsCamera Pose Estimation

    The Chinese University of Hong Kong

  30. ROMA: LLM System for Real-World Object-Centric Multi-Sensory Active Perception

    Oct 3, 2026Ruoxuan Feng, Yutong Chen, Ruihua Song +4Robotic PerceptionMultimodal Sensor Fusion

    Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China · Beijing Key Laboratory of Research on Large Models and Intelligent Governance · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence +3