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 304

64 papers in the last four weeks, up 191% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

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  1. AMP2026: A Multi-Platform Marine Robotics Dataset for Tracking and Mapping

    Mar 4, 2026Edwin Meriaux, Shuo Wen, David Widhalm +11Robotic Data CollectionRobotic Perception

    McGill University, Montreal, Canada. · MILA - Quebec AI Institute. · Universit´e Paris-Saclay, CentraleSup´elec. +4

  2. One-Shot Badminton Shuttle Detection for Mobile Robots

    Mar 4, 2026Florentin Dipner, William Talbot, Turcan Tuna +2Object DetectionRobotic Perception

    Authors are with Robotic Systems Lab (RSL), ETH Zurich, Zurich 8092, Switzerland.

  3. DISC: Dense Integrated Semantic Context for Large-Scale Open-Set Semantic Mapping

    Mar 4, 2026Felix Igelbrink, Lennart Niecksch, Martin Atzmueller +1Semantic MappingRobotic Perception

    the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Osnabrück, Germany · the Department of Computer Sciene, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany

  4. From Local Matches to Global Masks: Template-Guided Instance Detection and Segmentation in Open-World Scenes

    Mar 3, 2026Qifan Zhang, Sai Haneesh Allu, Jikai Wang +2Instance SegmentationObject Detection

    Intelligent Robotics and Vision Lab, The University of Texas at Dallas

  5. DINOv3 Visual Representations for Blueberry Perception Toward Robotic Harvesting

    Mar 2, 2026Rui-Feng Wang, Daniel Petti, Yue Chen +1Robotic PerceptionAgricultural Robotics

    Bio-Sensing, Automation, and Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA · Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA

  6. Pro-HOI: Perceptive Root-guided Humanoid-Object Interaction

    Mar 1, 2026Yuhang Lin, Jiyuan Shi, Dewei Wang +4Robotic ControlHumanoid Loco-Manipulation

    Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom · Zhejiang University · University of Science and Technology of China +1

  7. UniScale: Unified Scale-Aware 3D Reconstruction for Multi-View Understanding via Prior Injection for Robotic Perception

    Feb 26, 2026Mohammad Mahdavian, Gordon Tan, Binbin Xu +33D ReconstructionMulti-View 3D Reconstruction

    Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab · University of Toronto

  8. InCoM: Intent-Driven Perception and Structured Coordination for Mobile Manipulation

    Feb 26, 2026Jiahao Liu, Cui Wenbo, Zhongpu Xia +3Active PerceptionMobile Manipulation

    SKL-MAIS, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Anyverse Dynamics

  9. A Pairwise Human-Human Interaction Detection and Recognition Framework for Mobile Service Robots

    Feb 25, 2026Mengyu Liang, Iolanda Leite, Sarah GilletHuman Activity RecognitionMobile Robotics

    KTH Royal Institute of Technology · MIT Media Lab

  10. Multiview Progress Prediction of Robot Activities

    Feb 25, 2026Elena Zoppellari, Federico Becattini, Marco Fiorucci +1Robotic PerceptionRobotic Manipulation

    University of Padova, Italy · University of Siena, Italy

  11. Ori-Sense: origami capacitive sensing for soft robotic applications

    Feb 20, 2026Hugo de Souza Oliveira, Xin Li, Mohsen Jafarpour +1Soft RoboticsRobotic Perception

  12. Zero-shot Interactive Perception

    Feb 20, 2026Venkatesh Sripada, Frank Guerin, Amir GhalamzanRobotic PerceptionZero-Shot Robotic Manipulation

    University of Surrey · University of Sheffield

  13. GrandTour: A Legged Robotics Dataset in the Wild for Multi-Modal Perception and State Estimation

    Feb 20, 2026Turcan Tuna, Jonas Frey, Frank Fu +5Legged RoboticsSimultaneous Localization and Mapping

    Robotic Systems Lab, ETH Zurich, Zurich 8092, Switzerland · 1ETH Zurich, Switzerland · 2Stanford University, USA +1

  14. Reactive Motion Generation With Particle-Based Perception in Dynamic Environments

    Feb 18, 2026Xiyuan Zhao, Huijun Li, Lifeng Zhu +3Robot Motion GenerationDynamic Obstacle Avoidance

    The authors are with the State Key Laboratory of Digital Medical Engineering, Jiangsu Key Lab of Robot Sensing and Control, School of Instrument Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China.

  15. Real-time Monocular 2D and 3D Perception of Endoluminal Scenes for Controlling Flexible Robotic Endoscopic Instruments

    Feb 16, 2026Ruofeng Wei, Kai Chen, Yui Lun Ng +7Robotic PerceptionSurgical Robotics

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. · Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, China. · Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and also with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong.

  16. PokeNet: Learning Kinematic Models of Articulated Objects from Human Observations

    Feb 2, 2026Anmol Gupta, Weiwei Gu, Omkar Patil +2Articulated Object ManipulationRobotic Perception

    School of Computation and AI, ASU, Tempe · AI Institute, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

  17. DeFM: Learning Foundation Representations from Depth for Robotics

    Jan 26, 2026Manthan Patel, Jonas Frey, Mayank Mittal +5Representation LearningRobot Foundation Models

    Robotic Systems Lab (RSL), ETH Zurich, Switzerland · Stanford University, Stanford, USA · UC Berkeley, Berkeley, USA +1

  18. PUMA: Perception-driven Unified Foothold Prior for Mobility Augmented Quadruped Parkour

    Jan 22, 2026Liang Wang, Kanzhong Yao, Yang Liu +4Legged RoboticsTerrain-Aware Robot Locomotion

    Institute of Cyber-Systems and Control, Zhejiang University, 310027, China · Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom.

  19. Learning to Segment Liquids in Real-world Images

    Jan 2, 2026Jonas Li, Michelle Li, Luke Liu +2Image SegmentationBoundary-Aware Segmentation

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203, USA

  20. Learning to Feel the Future: DreamTacVLA for Contact-Rich Manipulation

    Dec 29, 2025Guo Ye, Zexi Zhang, Xu Zhao +4Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationWorld Models

    Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

  21. MobileOcc: A Human-Aware Semantic Occupancy Dataset for Mobile Robots

    Nov 21, 2025Junseo Kim, Guido Dumont, Xinyu Gao +3Mobile RoboticsSemantic Occupancy Mapping

    Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 5, 2628 CD Delft, Netherlands

  22. What Matters in RL-Based Methods for Object-Goal Navigation? An Empirical Study and A Unified Framework

    Oct 2, 2025Hongze Wang, Boyang Sun, Jiaxu Xing +5Robotic RLRobotic Perception

    Computer Vision and Geometry Group, ETH Zurich, Switzerland · Robotics and Perception Group, University of Zurich, Switzerland · Robotic Systems Lab, ETH Zurich, Switzerland +2

  23. Scensory: Real-Time Robotic Olfactory Perception for Joint Identification and Source Localization

    Sep 11, 2025Yanbaihui Liu, Erica Babusci, Claudia K. Gunsch +1Robot NavigationRobot Localization

    Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA. · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA. · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,Duke University, Durham, NC, USA. +1

  24. CoRe-GS: Coarse-to-Refined Gaussian Splatting with Semantic Object Focus

    Sep 5, 2025Hannah Schieber, Dominik Frischmann, Victor Schaack +43D Gaussian Splatting3D Reconstruction

    Technical University of Munich · Human-Centered Computing and Extended Reality Lab · TUM University Hospital, Clinic for Orthopedics and Sports Orthopedics +3

  25. Decentralized Vision-Based Autonomous Aerial Wildlife Monitoring

    Aug 20, 2025Makram Chahine, William Yang, Alaa Maalouf +6Multi-Robot CoordinationDrone-Based Wildlife Monitoring

    Project CETI, New York 10003, NY, USA · CSAIL MIT, Cambridge MA 02139, USA · SEAS Harvard University, Boston MA 02134, USA

  26. Visual Perception Engine: Fast and Flexible Multi-Head Inference for Robotic Vision Tasks

    Aug 15, 2025Jakub Łucki, Jonathan Becktor, Georgios Georgakis +2Efficient Neural Network InferenceRobotic Perception

    Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA. · Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich), Zürich, Switzerland.

  27. P3\mathcal{P}^3: Toward Versatile Embodied Agents

    Aug 9, 2025Shengli Zhou, Xiangchen Wang, Jinrui Zhang +4Robot Task PlanningEmbodied AI

    Southern University of Science and Technology · Spatialtemporal AI · MBZUAI

  28. VLEM: Real-Time 3D Vision-Language Embedding Mapping

    Aug 8, 2025Christian Rauch, Björn Ellensohn, Linus Nwankwo +2Open-Vocabulary 3D Segmentation3D Scene Representation

    Technical University of Leoben, Franz Josef-Straße 18, 8700 Leoben, Austria

  29. Multi-Class Human/Object Detection on Robot Manipulators using Proprioceptive Sensing

    Aug 4, 2025Justin Hehli, Marco Heiniger, Maryam Rezayati +1Time Series ClassificationHuman-Robot Collaboration

    Dep. of Informatics, University of Zurich, and MINDLab, Institute of Mechatronic Systems, ZHAW, Switzerland · Institute of Mechatronics system, ZHAW, Switzerland

  30. Look, Focus, Act: Efficient and Robust Robot Learning via Human Gaze and Foveated Vision Transformers

    Jul 21, 2025Ian Chuang, Jinyu Zou, Andrew Lee +2Visuomotor Policy LearningEfficient ViTs

    University of California, Berkeley · 2Tongji University · University of California, Davis