Robotics

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82 papers in the last four weeks, up 413% on the four weeks before. 0.8% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 488

Aug 5, 2026cs.RO

Sliding Sensors: Configurable Confidence in State Estimation for Continuum Robots

Continuum robots often operate in uncertain environments, where accurate state estimation is essential for safe interactions. Estimate uncertainty is inherently spatially non-uniform: confidence varies depending on where measurements are available. Global estimation accuracy is not always the top priority, but rather achieving sufficient confidence at task-relevant locations along the robot. This extended abstract introduces mechanically reconfigurable sensing enabling uncertainty-shaping in state estimation for continuum robots. We present a concept hardware design demonstrating the feasibility of longitudinal translation of a sensor within a continuum robot. We demonstrate that state estimation confidence can be reconfigured by varying the sensor location, and show a reduction of full-body shape estimation errors when sliding the sensor back and forth over time, compared to a single fixed tip sensor.

Ella Walsh, Spencer Teetaert, Eric Diller +2

University of Toronto Robotics Institute, Toronto, ON, Canada

Robotics Robot State Estimation

Aug 5, 2026cs.RO

Failing Gracefully: Mitigating Impact of Inevitable Robot Failures

Service robots operate in household environments shared with humans, pets, and everyday objects, where they are highly susceptible to failures such as software crashes, hardware degradation, or unpredictable interactions. While roboticists strive to minimize failures, some remain inevitable, making it critical to mitigate their potential consequences for safe and reliable deployment. This paper introduces a novel safety formulation that evaluates both the probability of impactful interactions between robots and surrounding entities during failures, and the severity of their outcomes. By quantifying the impact of failures on different entities, our approach enables robots to make informed planning decisions that balance safety with task efficiency. To support systematic evaluation, we also present FailBench, a MuJoCo-based simulation framework for studying robot-environment interactions under diverse failure modes, including sensing issues and actuator malfunctions. Together, our safety formulation and FailBench provide a foundation for developing safer and more robust motion plans and learned policies in real-world household environments.

Duc M. Nguyen, Saad A. Ghani, Andrew Marshall +3

Department of Computer Science, George Mason University · RobotiXX Lab, George Mason University

Robotics Simulation Robotics Robot Task Planning Safe Motion Planning

Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

Embedding Large Language Models into Flow Controls: An Agentic Framework for Adaptive and Trustworthy Automated Cooking

Automated cooking robots have traditionally relied on predefined procedures and rule-based control, ensuring stable execution but offering limited personalization, whereas recent large-model approaches support natural language interaction but often suffer from opaque decision making and unreliable execution in real kitchens. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an agentic framework that systematically decomposes personalized cooking requirements into structured and verifiable control programs rather than directly mapping language to actions. Multiple AI agents collaboratively transform user intents into canonical recipes, workflow programs with explicit flow control, and executable Python code grounded in an atomic action library. The system consists of three tightly coupled stages: offline recipe-to-code generation through multiple agents, online closed-loop execution with supervisory intervention enabled by multimodal perception, and post-run adaptation that updates user preference models for long-term personalization. Real-world experiments on a physical cooking platform demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves reliable task completion, transparent execution logic, and effective anomaly handling across diverse personalized scenarios, validating its practicality for trustworthy automated cooking in real environments.

Zihan Song, Hongwei Huang, Yueshuo Sun +3

College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China · School of Information and Electronic Engineering, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, China · State Key Laboratory for Management and Control of Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China

Language Model-Based Control Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Robotics

Aug 5, 2026cs.RO

Enabling Urgency-aware Robot Swarm Intralogistics using Smart IoT Tags

Warehouse items differ in how urgently they must be moved: perishable goods, pharmaceutical shipments, and just-in-time production materials must be delivered sooner than the rest of the stock. Decentralised robot swarms suit warehouses that cannot justify fixed automation infrastructure, but current swarm controllers treat all items alike or rely on an external scheduler to set priorities, so urgent items wait as long as ordinary ones. This paper presents a swarm logistics system in which each warehouse carrier holds an ultra-low-power Internet-of-Things (IoT) tag that broadcasts the urgency of its item over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Robots read these broadcasts directly and weigh urgency against travel distance when choosing which carrier to serve, so prioritisation happens at the item level without central scheduling. The system is evaluated in simulation and validated on real robots and IoT-tagged carriers against a proximity-only baseline. In the physical trials, priority alignment (i.e. proportion of urgent items served first), improved from 0.41 to 0.64, with a nonsignificant trend toward lower 95th-percentile (P95) delivery latency and throughput within 1.2% of the baseline. In simulation, the benefit grew with system size: across three larger configurations, P95 latency fell by 5.2% to 11.8% and priority alignment improved by 41.7% to 51.6%. Attaching urgency to the items themselves therefore allows a decentralised swarm to serve time-critical stock sooner while keeping the low infrastructure requirements that make swarm systems attractive for warehouse automation.

Youssef Alboraei, Murray Groves, Shane Wen +6

School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology · Bristol Robotics Laboratory · University of Bristol, UK +5

Swarm Robotics Robotics Multi-Robot Task Allocation

Aug 4, 2026cs.RO

Stochastic Multiple Shooting Trajectory Optimization via Sequential Local Policy Evaluation

Stochastic single shooting trajectory optimization methods such as Model Predictive Path Integral control (MPPI) have been widely adopted in robotics due to their ability to reason about probabilistic dynamics and provide solutions where model gradients are noisy, costly to evaluate, or unavailable. However, satisfaction of terminal constraints when shooting over long action sequences is often sample inefficient, requiring a large number of iterations for convergence. In this paper, we present a stochastic multiple shooting method that optimizes short control action sequences connected via local feedback policies to improve sample efficiency and convergence to a terminal set. Additionally, we show that we are able to synthesize approximate system Jacobians purely from rollouts, making the method suitable for model-based reinforcement learning with black-box dynamics. We demonstrate the algorithm has improved sample efficiency and terminal set convergence for three nonlinear, underactuated optimization problems: a classic cartpole swingup task with analytical dynamics, a cartpole swingup task with learned neural network dynamics, and a VTOL quadplane performing a high angle-of-attack, precision post-stall landing maneuver.

Ashwin Gupta, Joseph Moore

Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering

Trajectory Optimization Stochastic Optimal Control Robotics Model-Based RL

Aug 4, 2026cs.RO

Principles of Robot Autonomy

Autonomous robots are moving rapidly from research labs into everyday life - on roads, in the air, in warehouses, and in space. Robot autonomy is no longer solely an academic pursuit, but a collection of mature, field-tested methods and tools that practitioners rely on in real-world deployments. This book offers a clear, unified introduction to the methods that make this possible. Built on decades of teaching at Stanford, the text develops the core elements of modern autonomy stacks within a single conceptual framework, bridging classical robotics and modern physical AI. Every major topic is paired with hands-on Jupyter notebooks and implementation-driven exercises, so readers build practical intuition alongside theoretical understanding. The result is a principled, accessible, and deployment-aware foundation for anyone seeking to design, analyze, or contribute to the next generation of autonomous systems. This is a comprehensive resource for students, engineers, and researchers entering one of today's fastest-growing fields.

Daniele Gammelli, Joseph Lorenzetti, Katie Luo +2

Robotic Control Robot Navigation Robotics

Aug 3, 2026cs.RO

Contact-Driven Localization in a Freeform Robotic Self-Assembled Structure

Accurate localization remains a key challenge in swarm robotics, particularly for self-reconfigurable systems that must identify relative positions to form diverse structures. Most existing approaches rely on external tracking infrastructure or high-cost sensors, which limit scalability and deployment in unstructured environments. In this paper, we propose a novel contact-driven localization method for modular robots that leverages only local communication through binary contact information (whether two robots are physically connected or not). To exploit these contact cues, we introduce a virtual-force framework in which robots iteratively refine their poses attracting toward dock-connected neighbors and repelling from non-connected ones. The method requires no external infrastructure and relies only on minimal onboard sensing. Simulations show effective localization during the assembly of towers and cantilevers, enabling accurate, scalable, free-form self-assembly.

Mohammadali Rashidioun, Michael Sosa, Petras Swissler

Institute of Technology · Industrial and Mechanical Engineering Department, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Modular Robotics Swarm Robotics Robotics Cooperative Localization Robotic Assembly Robot Localization

Aug 3, 2026cs.RO

Toward Certified Functional Safety for Industrial Humanoid Robots: The Fail-Passive Gap and a Feasibility Study

Industrial humanoid robots are constrained less by locomotion or manipulation capability than by the immaturity of functional safety certification for legged platforms. The root difficulty is that the safe state of a legged robot is an actively-controlled state, which violates the fail-passive assumption underlying ISO~~13849-1 / EN~~60204-1: removing power from a walking biped causes an uncontrolled fall, so classical de-energization is itself a hazard. We term this the fail-passive gap and use a certified external safety chain (light curtain, emergency stop, fail-safe input, fail-safe PLC, and wireless PROFIsafe) as an instrument to locate it precisely: because the external chain is closed and quantifiable with established methods (PFHD, DC, CCF, PL/SILCL), the residual uncertifiable element is pinpointed to the robot-side reaction chain. Using a Siemens fail-safe S7-1500 emergency-stop reference, we show its certifiable Reaction subsystem is contactor-based power removal (Stop Category~~0)---exactly the element a balancing humanoid cannot have. We deliberately do not claim end-to-end certified PL~~e / SIL3. We validate the approach on a Unitree G1 EDU pick-and-place cell in a 3m x 1.5m semi-enclosed workspace, and contribute a humanoid-specific analysis of the active safe state (fall-as-hazard, single-support stop bounds, balancing-policy residual risk, ISO13855 separation) and a provenance-labeled timing budget. Hosting an industrial software-defined automation (SDA) controller on the robot, co-located with the balancing policy, moves robot-side PROFINET/PROFIsafe reception onto a standardized IEC~61131-3 interface; because the G1's onboard compute is not safety-rated hardware, this endpoint is not a certified safety runtime, which reinforces rather than resolves the fail-passive gap and localizes it to the SDA-to-balancing-policy interface.

Caiwu Ding, Tao Cui, Lingyun Wang +1

Siemens Foundational Technologies, Siemens Corporation, Princeton, NJ, USA

Legged Robotics Safety-Critical Control Robotics Industrial Robotics Humanoid Robotics

Aug 3, 2026cs.RO

Situation Aware Frontier Prioritization for Quadruped Search and Rescue

Quadruped robots are a promising platform for search and rescue missions because they can navigate cluttered indoor environments that may be restrictive for wheeled systems. However, in unknown rescue scenarios, autonomous exploration must balance map expansion with the likelihood of finding victims, which is not explicitly addressed by clas- sical frontier selection strategies. This paper presents a situation aware frontier prioritization method for single robot quadruped search and rescue. The proposed approach preserves the frontier exploration framework, but extends frontier ranking with information gain, observation deficit, rescue relevance, terrain penalty, and travel cost. The method is eval- uated in Gazebo simulation with a quadruped robot in two indoor rescue scenarios with different levels of difficulty. The first scenario is used as a sanity check, while the second introduces stronger clutter and frontier ambiguity. Experimental results show that all methods perform reliably in a simple scenario, whereas in a complex scenario is different. In that setting, the proposed method achieves the highest completion rate and the highest victim recovery among the evaluated approaches. These results indicate that situation aware frontier prioritization is beneficial when frontier choice becomes nontrivial and rescue utility must be balanced against generic exploration objectives.

Kevin Farias, Santiago Martin, Barbara Flores +5

Robotics and AI Lab, Technological University of Uruguay, Rivera, Uruguay

Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoff Robotics Frontier-Based Exploration Search-and-Rescue Robotics

Aug 3, 2026cs.RO

Human-Centered Reflections on Care Robots: A Comparative Study of Caregiver Perspectives

Care robots are increasingly being introduced into healthcare settings, raising important questions about their acceptance and ethical implementation. To better understand these challenges, this study investigates caregivers' perceptions of four categories of care robots: delivering supplies, helping patients into bed, monitoring vital signs, and assisting with mobility. We conducted a mixed-methods study employing a mixed-factorial design in which 298 caregivers from the United States, Mexico, and Chile evaluated all four robot categories. Quantitative measures integrated constructs from the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, the Cognitive-Affective-Normative model, and overall acceptance ratings. Qualitative data were collected through open-ended questions and analyzed using a literature-informed ethical framework. The results indicate that participants across countries generally evaluated care robots positively, particularly for logistical and physically demanding tasks rather than those requiring intensive interpersonal interaction. The qualitative findings provide further insight into stakeholders' views of the ethical implications of care robot use. Participants emphasized potential benefits such as reduced workload, lower risk, and greater patient autonomy, while also expressing concerns about dependability, the need for human oversight, and potential job displacement. Although many ethical concerns were shared across countries, participants differed in how they interpreted and prioritized them. These findings advance a context-sensitive and socially informed understanding of responsible design and implementation of care robots.

Laura Londoño, Klaus Baumann, Abhinav Valada +1

Department of Psychology, University of Freiburg, Germany. · Department of Computer Science, University of Freiburg, Germany. · Department of Theology, University of Freiburg, Germany.

Robotics Assistive Robotics Human-Robot Interaction

Aug 3, 2026cs.RO

Environmental resilience via morphological diversity within machines

Organisms contain diverse, sensorimotor parts across size scales and rapidly adapt to new environments, while machines contain only inert materials at smaller scales and struggle with surprise. We hypothesize that this agents-within-agents quality of organisms may aid their resilience: increasing experiences with internal physical adversity may pre-train organisms and machines to handle external adversity, such as encounters with new environments. Not only has this hypothesis not yet been articulated, mechanisms enabling this phenomenon have yet to be proposed. Here we show a mechanism by which this can occur: we found that physical connectors, in learning to restore behavior to previously independent, morphologically diverse agents they disrupted by tethering them together, trigger and tame sufficiently diverse disruptions that later encounters with new environments trigger disruptions that fall within this manageable range, enabling the collective to continue behaving properly without any additional learning or adaptation. Further, we found that building collectives from more agents, or more diverse agents, further increases the collective's resilience to new environments. This suggests that not just taming but intentionally creating internal physical adversity may indeed prepare organisms for external adversity, and could do so for machines, if they were built from smaller machines.

Alice Hein, Josh Bongard

Department of Computer Science, University of Vermont, Burlington VT & 05405, USA.

Aug 3, 2026cs.RO

ProtoAct: Turning Wet-Lab Protocols into Embodied Robotic Actions

Biological wet-lab protocols are written for trained researchers and often leave routine operations, state-dependent conditions, and contextual parameters implicit, making them difficult to translate into robot-executable actions. We present ProtoAct, a structured protocol-grounding framework that converts free-form biological procedures into state-aware, embodiment-ready action sequences. ProtoAct uses ProtoRAG to retrieve manually annotated examples for context-sensitive parsing, employs RefineChecker to detect and revise missing or inconsistent steps, and applies ActSchema to map the refined procedure into constrained JSON function sequences. We further introduce BioP2E, for which we manually annotate 22 cell-culture protocols into 258 monitoring conditions, 910 executable subtasks, and 962 grounded action calls. Evaluation across seven large language models demonstrates that ProtoAct can be effectively instantiated with different backbones. Ablations confirm that retrieval, posterior checking, and schema constraints make complementary contributions. The parsed subtasks further support demonstration collection and VLA model training, enabling successful execution in both simulation and real-robot settings. ProtoAct thus provides a practical interface between biological protocol understanding and embodied robotic execution.

Zhe Liu, Jiaming Gu, Zhaohui Du +7

Key Laboratory of Smart Manufacturing in Energy Chemical Process, Ministry of Education, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China · Department of Laboratory Medicine, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China +1

Robotics Laboratory Automation Language-Conditioned Robot Control Scientific Workflow Automation

Aug 2, 2026cs.RO

Diffusion-Based Body Schema Learning Enabling Abnormal-State Adaptation in Musculoskeletal Robots

Musculoskeletal robots require an internal body schema that remains consistent under a wide range of physical state changes, including abnormalities such as muscle rupture and actuator jamming. Conventional approaches based on autoencoders or variational autoencoders learn average behaviors by projecting sensor and actuator signals into a low-dimensional latent space; however, exploration within the latent space alone has limited capability to handle out-of-distribution or abnormal states that are not included in the training data. To address this limitation, this study proposes a diffusion-based framework for body schema learning in musculoskeletal robots. Unlike generative models that operate through low-dimensional latent spaces, diffusion models can directly and iteratively estimate physically consistent sensor and actuator values in the high-dimensional space through a denoising process, even under partial observations and constraints, without requiring retraining. By formulating body schema adaptation as a gradient-guided denoising process, the proposed method enables adaptive estimation of appropriate muscle lengths and muscle tensions even under abnormal conditions such as muscle rupture and actuator jamming. The validity of the proposed framework is verified through simulation experiments using a musculoskeletal robot model.

Kento Kawaharazuka, Shuhei Ikemoto

Department of Mechano-Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-8656, Japan. · Graduate School of Life Science and Systems Engineering, Kyushu Institute of Technology, 7230, Hibikino 2-4, Wakamatsu, Kitakyushu, Fukuoka, 808-0135, Japan.

Robotics Diffusion Models Robot Learning

Aug 2, 2026cs.RO

KING: Embodiment-Aware Kinematic Graph Neural Network for Unified Motion Representation of Legged and Wheeled Robots

Kinematic models provide reliable motion constraints for odometry estimation in featureless environments, where exteroceptive sensing degrades and IMU integration drifts. Learning-based kinematic models can achieve more accurate odometry estimation than model-based methods by capturing nonlinear effects; however, most existing learning-based models are trained on a single embodiment and generalize poorly to new embodiments. This generalization is difficult because the meanings and structures of proprioceptive measurements vary across embodiments, including the number of joints and ground-contact elements (e.g., wheels, feet). To address this challenge, we propose KING, a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based kinematic model that explicitly incorporates robot embodiments by representing them as a common graph. We show that wheel and leg kinematic models can be expressed by a unified representation, enabling a single model for both wheeled and legged robots. Trained on datasets spanning diverse embodiments, KING provides a unified representation of wheeled and legged kinematics and achieves high-accuracy odometry estimation in real environments. KING estimates accurate odometry using only an embodiment description (e.g., a URDF file) and on-board proprioception (encoders and an IMU) and can be adapted to new robot embodiments through few-shot learning with only one minute of data, avoiding retraining from scratch on a new dataset for each robot. The project page is available at: https://smrg-aist.github.io/king_project_page/

Taku Okawara, Aoki Takanose, Kenji Koide +2

Department of Information Technology and Human Factors, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

Graph Neural Networks Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning Robotics Robot State Estimation

Aug 2, 2026cs.RO

RL Bootstrapping of OpenVLA-OFT for a Novel Robot Embodiment

Adapting a pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) policy to a new robot usually assumes embodiment-specific demonstrations. This assumption is especially restrictive for custom robots whose morphology differs strongly from the manipulators seen in large robot datasets. We study a harder setting: zero-demo embodiment alignment of OpenVLA-OFT on a cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) with a simple gripper and a previously unseen control interface. Instead of supervised fine-tuning, we use reinforcement learning in simulation with dense geometric rewards computed from simulator state. The training is performed in two stages: a PPO stage for directional motion primitives, followed by GRPO continuation from the PPO checkpoint with an expanded instruction space that includes object-conditioned commands. On the four shared directional instructions, the average held-out success rate improves from 34.25% after PPO to 53.50% after PPO

\rightarrow

GRPO, with especially large gains on \texttt{move left} and \texttt{move backward}. In the GRPO stage we additionally introduce \texttt{move to <object>} over eight target objects and obtain 39/400 = 9.75% strict success, while qualitative rollouts frequently show correct target-directed approach behavior before late-stage instability. Compared with prior OpenVLA and OpenVLA-OFT results, which rely on demonstration datasets and mostly standard rigid-arm embodiments, our method uses no embodiment-specific dataset at all. The results do not yet establish robust manipulation, but they provide stronger evidence that RL-only bootstrapping can create the first usable language-conditioned controller for a genuinely novel embodiment.

Damir Nurtdinov, Alexei Kornaev, Alexander Maloletov

Research Center of the Artificial Intelligence Institute Innopolis University Innopolis, Russia

Robot Skill Learning Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning Robotic RL Robotics Language-Conditioned Robot Control RL for VLMs

Aug 2, 2026cs.RO

You Don't Need To Stay in The Loop: An Agentic Robotics Loop for Robot-Policy Improvement

Coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex close the software loop: a main agent manages the loop, subagents analyze and execute, tools do the work. We port this architecture to robot-policy improvement, where one difference dominates the design: robotic tools---trained policies, training pipelines, data collection---fail routinely, so a tool's quality must be measured, recorded at every call, and expired when the artifact behind it changes. AgenticRobotics is a backend-independent control plane in which an LLM controller drives disposable workers through durable train--evaluate--improve transactions: an immutable objective, controller-owned measurement, commit-keyed crash recovery, an evidence-graded skill library, and a tool registry with a standardized, recorded call surface. The title is an operational claim, not a selection claim: the operator can leave because promotion is evidence-gated, state is recoverable, and capability quality is derived from records---not because the loop picks better checkpoints than a human; on the one lineage we measured, it does not. The gates measurably buy false-promotion control (0.001 per run hardened versus 0.005--0.021 shipped), anytime-valid decisions under optional stopping, zero lost or duplicate effects under kill injection, and six of six artifact-tampering classes caught by a signed verifier.

Hang Yu

Independent Researcher, United States.

Robot Policy Adaptation Robotic Policy Evaluation Robotics AI Agent Governance LLM Agent Reliability

Aug 1, 2026cs.RO

Bicycle Acrobatics with Reinforcement Learning

Bicycle robots are fast and energy efficient, but their simple mechanical design and their underactuated and non-holonomic dynamics make highly agile maneuvers difficult to achieve. Here, we use Reinforcement Learning (RL) to enable a bicycle robot to learn and compose a diverse repertoire of dynamic acrobatic stunts. Using different RL formulations such as waypoint following, pose reaching, twist tracking, guided tracking, and motion imitation, the robot acquires autonomous single and multi-table forward and lateral jumps, steerable jumps, front flips, kip-ups, kip-downs, driving, wheelies, bunny hops, and three-point turns. To coordinate these behaviors, we introduce an orchestrator that transitions between policies using state-dependent triggers, enabling robust long-horizon acrobatic stunts. We validate the approach on the Ultra Mobility Vehicle (UMV), a custom bicycle robot, in simulation and hardware. The robot repeatedly traverses tables up to 1 m high, performs more than 15 consecutive autonomous jumps while following waypoints, handles previously unseen multi-table configurations, executes continuous repertoires of kipups, jumps, flips, kip-downs, over more than 20 consecutive trials, and performs more than 10 consecutive autonomous and steerable repertoires of wheelies, lateral jumps, and single-wheel jump downs. These results demonstrate that RL can endow bicycle robots with levels of agility previously associated primarily with legged platforms while preserving the speed and efficiency of wheeled locomotion, establishing a foundation for bicycle acrobatics.

Shamel Fahmi, Arianna Ilvonen, Samuel Zapolsky +8

1Robotics and AI Institute (RAI), Cambridge, MA, USA.

Robot Skill Learning Robotic RL Robotics Robot Locomotion

Aug 1, 2026cs.RO

GeminiPainter's sequence-formed pipeline comprised of perception, cognition, planning, and action stages

We present an autonomous robotic portrait-generation system combining real-time face detection, AI-based sketch generation, and robotic drawing. The system captures video frames, extracts facial regions, converts them into minimalist single-line sketches using the Gemini Vision API, optimizes stroke order through graph-based path planning, and executes smooth trajectories on a 6-DoF collaborative manipulator. This perception-cognition-action pipeline integrates computer vision, neural artistic abstraction, motion optimization, and robot control. User ratings on a 5-point scale were high for sketch quality 4.33, perceived execution 4.53, and user experience 4.65, indicating recognizable, appealing, and engaging robotic portraits.

Miguel Altamirano Cabrera, Aleksey Fedoseev, Iana Zhura +1

Intelligent Space Robotics Lab, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow, Russian Federation

Jul 31, 2026cs.RO

Automated Straight-line Sewing of Stretchable Fabrics with Different Lengths

Different Length Alignment Sewing (DLAS), which involves stretching the shorter fabric to match the longer one and sewing them together in a straight line, is a challenging task that needs to satisfy several requirements when automating the sewing process. To address the challenges, this research proposes a novel robotic sewing system, Different Length Robotic Sewing System (DLRoSS), which consists of a roller type end-effector, attached to a 6-DoF manipulator. The end-effector composed of active shorter and longer fabric rollers, and a passive press-roller attached to the shorter-fabric roller. Assuming that one end of the two fabric layers are initially positioned under the sewing machine's presser foot, the system automates DLAS by operating in four distinct phases. (P1) Fabric wrapping: Individual fabric layers are picked, held, and wrapped from the other end onto the feed rollers. (P2) Sewing: During the sewing, the shorter fabric is stretched and aligned with the longer fabric in real-time using roller velocity control based on the sewing speed and apriori known length ratio. (P3) Sewing completion: In the final sewing round on the fabric rollers, the press roller is engaged to prevent the stretched fabric from slipping off due to internal tension. (P4) Sewing fabric release: At the end of sewing, the fabric edge moves past the press roller, and the fabric releases from the rollers. Experimental results demonstrate that DLRoSS achieves consistent, high-quality sewing of stretchable fabrics of different materials and lengths.

Bingchen Jin, Akinari Kobayashi, Dipankar Bhattacharya +4

JC STEM Lab of Robotics for Soft Materials, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · Centre for Transformative Garment Production, Hong Kong Science Park, Hong Kong SAR, China · Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

Deformable Object Manipulation Robotics Robotic Manipulation Industrial Robotics

Jul 31, 2026cs.RO

AquaJEPA: An Action-Conditioned Multimodal JEPA Family for Underwater Robot Dynamics

Underwater robots rely on complementary sensors whose reliability changes abruptly with water visibility and vehicle motion. We introduce AquaJEPA, a sensor-configurable family of action-conditioned joint-embedding predictive models spanning full multimodal, camera-only, sonar-only, and sensor-dropout configurations. Its members share a latent objective and receding-horizon control interface that predict future representations and physical dynamics from camera, forward-looking sonar, proprioception, and thruster commands. Trained from scratch on one hour of action-labelled data, the family is evaluated in Stonefish on 120 fresh paired scenarios spanning unseen layouts, visibility changes, dynamics shifts, and scheduled DVL loss. AquaJEPA-base achieves the strongest aggregate closed-loop performance, improving success over state-only by 12.5 percentage points and reducing final error by 0.189 m; both paired 95% intervals exclude zero. In a separate three-seed evaluation, it reduces paired final error relative to AquaJEPA-S by 0.118 m, with the same direction for every seed. AquaJEPA-robust more than halves prediction error during camera and camera-DVL blackouts. These results show that full multimodal prediction improves over state-only control and the sonar-only family member in this benchmark, while sensor-dropout training provides robustness under sensor loss.

Alan-Barsag Gazzaev, Alexey Gavrilov, Sergey Muravyov

ITMO University

Multimodal Robustness Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture Robotics Underwater Robotics Autonomous Underwater Navigation Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 31, 2026cs.RO

Advances, challenges, and opportunities for legged robots

Humanoid and quadrupedal robots have the potential to revolutionize the way we work, interact, and coexist with intelligent machines. To understand their effects on society and how they can enable scientific discovery, we assess the current capabilities of these systems along hardware, locomotion, autonomy, data, and applications. We identify recent advances and key open challenges that must be overcome to enable widespread adoption and new use cases for legged robots. Last, we provide an outlook on the future of legged robots, exploring their ethical considerations, economic potential, policy implications, and broader societal effects.

Jonas Frey, Matías Mattamala, Hae-Won Park +5

ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland · Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA · UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA +9

Legged Robotics Humanoid Robot Locomotion Robotics Quadruped Locomotion

Jul 30, 2026cs.RO

RoboBRIDGE: A Modular Framework for Bridging Policies to Robust Real-World Robotic Agents

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have attracted growing interest as a scalable approach to robotic manipulation. While these models are effective action predictors, deploying them as robotic agents exposes critical gaps: no mechanism for failure recovery, inconsistent execution over long horizons, and limited robustness to shifts in observations, tasks, or embodiments. Existing solutions address these limitations individually through model retraining or environment-specific modules, yet what is needed is a general framework that systematically transforms a pretrained VLA into a robotic agent. We present RoboBRIDGE, a modular framework that provides an orchestration layer over five coordinated modules, namely Monitor, Perceptor, Planner, Controller, and Robot Interface, to compose robust robotic agents from off-the-shelf components, including pretrained VLAs. The Monitor pairs rapid failure detection with hierarchical recovery to correct errors before they cascade. When the environment diverges from the current plan, the Planner triggers replanning while the Perceptor updates scene understanding asynchronously, avoiding execution stalls. Within the Controller, primitive skill fine-tuning factors manipulation into domain-invariant primitives with dedicated LoRA adapters, reducing sensitivity to domain shifts when a VLA is used. Across LIBERO, RoboCasa, and real-world case studies spanning multiple robot platforms and VLA backbones, RoboBRIDGE consistently outperforms both standalone policies and prior augmented VLA deployments. These results suggest that reliable robotic agency does not arise from scaling action predictors alone, but from structured orchestration around them.

Sihyung Yoon, Minjong Yoo, Sanghyun Ahn +2

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University

Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation Robotics Vision-Language-Action Models Robustness of VLA Models

Jul 29, 2026cs.RO

BioVLN: A Simulation Platform for Visual Language Navigation in Biomedical Laboratories

Biomedical laboratory robots must navigate to instruments before performing experimental procedures. Existing embodied navigation platforms are designed for household environments and treat a target as an object center or an arbitrary nearby position. This representation is inadequate for laboratory instruments, which must be approached from their operating side while maintaining safe clearance from surrounding equipment. We introduce BioVLN, a simulation platform for developing and evaluating visual-language navigation agents in biomedical laboratories. BioVLN represents each instrument with three regions: its physical body, a surrounding clearance region, and an operation area in front of the usable side. This model is applied consistently to scene generation, target placement, navigation evaluation, and safety analysis, so success depends on reaching a position from which the instrument can be accessed. BioVLN supports procedural scene generation and manually designed environments, producing 47 scenes and 1667 episodes. Standardized navigation and reinforcement-learning interfaces enable trajectory collection and policy training. Experiments show that geometric exploration reaches 74.4--87.5% success, while sampling multiple valid positions in the operation area improves success to 83.3--92.5% and reduces unsafe proximity.

Zhe Liu, Quan Lu, Zhaohui Du +7

Key Laboratory of Smart Manufacturing in Energy Chemical Process, MoE, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China · Department of Laboratory Medicine, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China +1

Robotics Simulation Robot Navigation Robotics Safe Robot Navigation Vision-Language Navigation

Jul 29, 2026cs.RO

NeoRacer: An Open, Standardized 1:12 Scale Autonomous Race Car for Benchmarking and Education

Many scientific fields rely on standard benchmarks and shared platforms to improve review and reproducibility, but autonomous systems research still lacks widely accepted open hardware. Where standardization has emerged, progress has accelerated. This is especially evident in autonomous racing, where teams often build custom systems or buy niche, expensive vehicles, making control and robotics research and education hard to compare and reproduce. High costs also limit access outside well-funded labs, while affordable educational robots are often underpowered. To address this gap, we present NeoRacer, an open-source 1:12 scale autonomous racing platform. It is built around an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano (67 TOPS), a 270° LiDAR, a 120 fps global-shutter camera, and a 9-axis IMU. NeoRacer ships pre-assembled for USD 2,699, offering over 3x the compute of comparable platforms at less than half the cost of the nearest pre-assembled alternative. Co-developed by the Neobotics Foundation and Seeed Studio, and manufactured by Seeed Studio, NeoRacer combines open hardware and software design with scalable, repeatable production. The modular, extensible platform provides a standardized benchmarking environment for autonomous racing algorithms across institutions. We describe the hardware/software architecture, design decisions from two pilot deployments (MIT IAP, 15 students; BU CPS Lab, 10 students), and key cost-performance tradeoffs. Hardware is licensed under CERN-OHL-S v2 and software under GPLv3, with all design files, firmware, and ROS2 packages publicly accessible.

Koneshka Bandyopadhyay, Ansh Mehta, Bassel El Mabsout +1

Neobotics Foundation, Inc., Cambridge, MA, USA · Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

Benchmark Design Autonomous Racing Robotics Robotics Education

Jul 29, 2026cs.NE

An evolutionary model of animats with VLM-based subjective evaluation

In this study, we propose a framework that incorporates subjective evaluations provided by a Vision-Language Model (VLM) into the fitness evaluation and selection processes of a genetic algorithm. As the target of evolution, we employ virtual soft robots with flexible morphologies and locomotion and present the VLM with sequence images representing the locomotion of two individuals. Selection is performed via pairwise comparisons based on subjective evaluation terms such as adorably and weirdly. The outcomes of these comparisons are used as selection pressure within the genetic algorithm, enabling the simultaneous evolution of morphology and locomotion. Experimental results demonstrate that subjective selection by the VLM accelerates population convergence compared to random selection, while also giving rise to distinctive morphologies and motions corresponding to each evaluation term. An auxiliary experiment with human participants further showed that, although individual pairwise choices only partly agreed with the VLM selections, the resulting morphological and locomotion tendencies were qualitatively similar and repeated human evaluations imposed noticeable fatigue. Moreover, the observation that similar evolutionary outcomes emerged across different evaluation terms suggests that the VLM does not apply these terms in a purely literal manner but instead decomposes them into multiple internal evaluation criteria when making judgments. This work visualizes the evolutionary process through which subjective linguistic expressions are mapped onto embodied phenotypes and provides a foundational framework for analyzing the structure of subjective judgment in VLMs. The proposed approach is expected to contribute to new developments in evolutionary computation and artificial life research based on subjective evaluation.

Shota Miyazaki, Takaya Arita, Reiji Suzuki

Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University, Japan

VLM Evaluation Robotics Evolutionary Robotics Genetic Algorithms

Jul 28, 2026cs.RO

Transformer Transformer: A Unified Model for Motion-Conditioned Robot Co-design

An often overlooked factor of robot manipulation performance is the embodiment of the robot itself. Motivated by this problem, we study motion-conditioned robot co-design, where the goal is to generate complete robot designs that track target end-effector trajectories (from human demonstrations) while optimizing user-defined rewards. We introduce Transformer Transformer, a diffusion transformer trained on RoboTokens, a unified tokenization of robot embodiments, states, and actions. The same architecture can be used across embodiment spaces (e.g., wheeled bimanual, quadrupeds, humanoids) and use cases (embodiment generation, cross embodiment controller). Rather than overfitting to one reward function, Transformer Transformer is a dynamics model, whose reward-agnostic state and action predictions can be converted into reward-specific value predictions. These value predictions are used to steer embodiment diffusion towards high value robot designs, through a procedure we call Dynamics Self-Guidance. Experiments across multiple design spaces show zero-shot optimization of unseen rewards and trajectories, improving performance and runtime over the evolutionary baseline. Finally, we fabricated an optimized ALOHA design, which reduced tracking error by over 70% compared to the original design.

Huy Ha, C. Karen Liu, Shuran Song

Stanford University · Columbia University

Robot Morphology-Control Co-Design Diffusion Transformer Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning Robotics Robotic Manipulation

Jul 28, 2026cs.RO

Tripody: An Overconstrained 3-SPR-like Parallel Robot for High-Reach Construction Tasks

Many ceiling construction tasks still rely on heavy serial manipulators that are difficult to deploy in cluttered interiors, motivating lightweight, field-ready alternatives that reach ceiling height while maintaining millimeter-level accuracy and the stiffness demanded by overhead tool loads. We introduce Tripody, a wheeled 3-DoF parallel robot for high-reach tasks that replaces the base spherical joints of a classical 3-SPR (3 legs; S: base spherical joint; P: actuated prismatic joint; R: end-effector revolute joint) morphology with universal joints, intentionally overconstraining the mechanism; small, distributed elastic deflections absorb the resulting incompatibilities, preserving predominantly translational motion. The 33kg system extends from 1.7m to 3.4m in height, supports a continuous 32kg payload, and offers a modular end-effector interface for ceiling operations. We detail the mechanical design - including custom linear actuators and a kinematic-compatibility analysis - and a control stack for accurate positioning that combines SE(3) state estimation, forward kinematics, and task-space control. In experiments, Tripody exhibits similar in-plane stiffness to a spherical-base variant but substantially higher torsional stiffness - an increase of 67% at 1.7m, 196% at 2.6m, and 454% at 3.4m - while maintaining negligible cross-axis coupling. Closed-loop positioning with a total station converges below 0.6mm across the entire workspace; pure model extrapolation achieves a 95th-percentile error of 2.7mm (max 3.6mm). Finally, we demonstrate task-level ceiling-drilling feasibility in an open-loop study by drilling a 15-hole pattern with 4.5mm maximum relative hole-position error after rigid alignment. These results support overconstrained, compliance-absorbing 3-SPR-like architectures as a practical path to lightweight, high- reach, millimeter-accurate construction robots.

Julien Kindle, Jakub Raczy, Riccardo Balbi +3

Robotic Systems Lab, ETH Zurich, Switzerland · Hilti AG, Schaan, Liechtenstein

Robotic Construction Mechanism Design Robotics

Jul 28, 2026cs.CL

VisualPatchWorld: Code World Models as Latent Structured Representations for Planning

Different research lines use the term world model in different ways, yet they share a common aim: to capture how the world evolves under action in a form that supports perception, simulation, and planning. Two prominent realizations are neural predictors that learn dynamics in continuous vector spaces, and hand-built physics engines that expose explicit state and physical laws. Neural predictors scale from data but leave the form of the dynamics implicit; physics engines are inspectable and editable but difficult to construct at scale. We introduce VisualPatchWorld (VPW), which represents world dynamics as code. VPW first selects a qualitative dynamical form with short active probes, then fits that form's free parameters from recorded state-action traces by minimizing multi-step prediction error. The resulting programs can be rolled forward like a simulator, inspected in source form, and used inside model-predictive control; image-derived scene graphs can supply the live state at replan time. Across comparisons with prior code-based world models, VPW attains 69.0% mean planning success and exceeds the strongest code baseline by 23.5 points. The largest gains arise when choosing the correct qualitative dynamics is essential. Under the same planner, the induced models approach ground-truth engine success on navigation and grasp-rich control; a residual gap remains for contact-rich pushing, and checking a shortlist of promising plans in the engine closes most of that gap. These results establish a practical route toward automatically constructed code world models that are useful for planning. Code is available at https://github.com/HKBU-KnowComp/VisualPatchWorld/.

Jiaxin Bai, Jiaxuan Xiong

Hong Kong Baptist University Hong Kong, China

World Model Learning World Models World Model-Based Planning Robotics System Identification Model-Based Planning

Jul 27, 2026cs.RO

Development of a Handheld Actuation Mechanism for a Tendon-driven Robotically Steered Guidewire

An endovascular intervention begins with a skilled clinician manually navigating a long, slender wire, called a guidewire, to the target location within the vasculature. Due to factors, such as vessel tortuosity and lack of steerability at the guidewire tip, manual navigation of a guidewire could be challenging, potentially resulting in vessel damage, perforation, dissection, and occlusion, as well as postsurgical complications, such as thrombosis. This work details the development of a handheld actuation mechanism for tendon-driven robotic guidewires by utilizing the aforementioned spooling mechanism. Incorporating the compact spooling mechanism into a handheld device enables clinicians to leverage both motorized guidewire steering and manual rotation and translation, if desired. The proposed device is designed such that, while holding the device, the clinician can execute feeding, rotation, and bending motions for up to 1.5 m of the robotically steerable guidewire using a joystick and momentary switch on the handle. Furthermore, the proposed device is demonstrated through navigation in an anatomically accurate phantom aorta model.

Saima Chavenet, Timothy A. Brumfiel, Revanth Konda +1

Medical Robotics and Automation (Robomed) Laboratory · Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Robotic Endovascular Intervention Robotics Tendon-Driven Actuation Surgical Robotics

Jul 26, 2026cs.RO

LabRobFail: A Benchmark for Robotic Failure Analysis in Chemical Self-driving Laboratory

The deployment of embodied agents in self-driving laboratories could accelerate scientific discovery, yet their reliability is constrained by the irreversible and safety-critical nature of chemical experiments. Progress is further hindered by scarce failure data and the lack of fine-grained evaluation protocols. To address these challenges, we introduce LabRobFail, a failure-centric framework for learning and evaluating robotic failure analysis in chemical laboratories. LabRobFail-Sim injects controllable failures at the control, physics, and semantic levels, enabling the construction of LabRobFail-Data, which contains over 20,000 trajectories across 70+ task scenarios, five failure categories, and 11 fine-grained failure types. LabRobFail-Bench evaluates six capabilities spanning task understanding, failure detection, temporal localization, severity assessment, failure classification, and actionable correction. We further develop LabRobFail-VLM, a domain-specialized vision-language model that generates structured failure diagnoses and recovery instructions. On seen environments, it achieves 90.83% failure-detection accuracy and 77.21% temporal-localization accuracy, substantially outperforming general-purpose VLMs. When integrated as a real-time supervisor, it improves downstream task success rates by 4-16 percentage points, demonstrating the value of fine-grained failure understanding for closed-loop recovery and reliable laboratory autonomy. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Su-ISE-2001/SciRobo

Haobo Wang, Baoli Sun, Anqi Zou +8

School of Software, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China · Shenzhen Loop Area Institute-Hong Kong Science and Technology Innovation Cooperation Zone, Shenzhen, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China +3

Robot Failure Detection Robotics Laboratory Automation VLMs for Robotics Autonomous Experimentation