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arXiv:2609.20540v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous recovery of a small multirotor onto a hovering multirotor carrier differs from recovery onto ground or shipborne platforms because the recovery surface is itself an actively controlled, thrust-limited aerial vehicle. This paper presents a field-validated autonomy framework for a heterogeneous rover-mothership-child system executing rover supervision, mothership transit, child deployment and sortie, autonomous return, aerial recovery, and synchronized descent. The recovery stack combines jerk-bounded reference generation, disturbance-observer-augmented planar tracking, feasibility-aware vertical control, a discrete-time barrier-based safety filter for relative vertical geometry, and communication-aware carrier-state prediction. The contribution is the coordinated system-level integration of these methods for recovery onto a hovering multirotor and its full-scale outdoor validation. The framework is implemented on a PX4-ROS 2 arc

arXiv:2609.20499v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The paper presents a numerical approach for the end-effector trajectory smoothing of a parallel robot designed for minimally invasive pancreatic surgery. The approach is tailored for real-time master-slave control architecture and uses a 3D space mouse for command input for velocity control. The trajectory smoothing is achieved by generating S-curves in the end-effector velocity fields, thus controlling the accelerations, which in turn reduces tissue trauma in the minimally invasive procedures. Real-time control is enabled by segmenting the S-curves based on the command inputs from the 3D space mouse. A special case is considered where the acceleration time is constant for all command inputs. Numeric results demonstrate stable transitions (without abrupt changes) in both the end-effector parameter space and in the active joints parameters, thereby validating the proposed approach. Further work aims to test the approach on an experimental

arXiv:2609.20477v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rebar insertion is among the most repetitive and physically demanding tasks on construction sites, and a contact-rich problem at 1.4 mm clearance. The parts, however, vary at two levels: a nominal design per structural member, and fabrication tolerance around each nominal design. Real-world data therefore has to be re-collected as designs and batches change. We present RebarSim, a visual sim-to-real system trained entirely in simulation. A privileged state-based teacher is trained with reinforcement learning over procedurally generated rebar geometries, then distilled into a multi-view student that maps raw RGB and proprioception directly to actions under extensive domain randomization. The student transfers to the real world zero-shot, seating rebars taken from a real factory production run in 91.3% of real-robot rollouts. Underlying that result, geometry diversity and pretraining both bring benefits. Training across a diverse set of nom

arXiv:2609.20443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots searching for a target from a natural-language description must determine not only where to search, but also which observed candidate is the desired target. These decisions reflect two distinct sources of uncertainty - spatial uncertainty over candidate locations and semantic uncertainty over target identity - that are often conflated in VLM-based search systems. We introduce a spatial-semantic uncertainty formulation that maintains separate beliefs over each component and integrates probabilistic VLM evidence into a global target-identity posterior, including probability mass for undiscovered targets. This decomposition allows an information-theoretic planner to independently value candidate discovery and target disambiguation through spatial and semantic expected information gain (EIG), providing an explicit mechanism for trading broader exploration against earlier identification. We evaluate six VLM uncertainty-elicitation inter

arXiv:2609.20435v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous mobile robots require timeefficient planning and safety-critical dynamic obstacle avoidance under constrained onboard computation. While Iterative Learning Planning (ILP) offers lightweight and efficient traversal planning, it lacks explicit mechanisms for dynamic obstacle perception and avoidance. This article extends ILP to safety-critical navigation in dynamic environments by integrating an anticipatory risk-blended control barrier function (ARB-CBF). The extended ILP learns traversal-speed and steering-bias profiles via a fractionalpower update based on local obstacle risk, generating nominal control commands that ARB-CBF modifies at runtime for real-time safety guarantees. Algorithmic analysis demonstrates that the ILP replanning stage scales at O(kN) for k iterations and N waypoints, while ARB-CBF executes with linear complexity. Comprehensive simulations and real-world experiments validate the framework, demonstrating su

arXiv:2609.20407v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Free-flying robots rely on multiple thrusters to maneuver in space. If one or more of these thrusters fail, the robot may lose control authority and risk mission failure. At the same time, their free-flying nature implies that, even in the absence of actuation, they continue along (locally) straight-line trajectories. In this work we present a probabilistic, proactive, motion planning framework that explicitly accounts for actuator failures in space. We model actuator failure modes as a Markov chain and propagate the probability of successfully reaching the goal along the planning horizon. Precomputed reachable sets evaluate the robot's capabilities of reaching waypoints under potential failures and an RRT$^*$-based planner concatenates these waypoints. The resulting algorithm maximizes the overall target-reaching probability, providing maximally resilient motion plans utilizing free-flying properties. We validate our approach experimenta

arXiv:2609.20396v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots operating in cluttered environments must often manipulate objects whose locations are only partially observable. A central challenge is deciding whether to acquire another observation or to first manipulate objects that may occlude the target. Conventional task and motion planning (TAMP) approaches typically make this decision using symbolic action costs or expensive geometric planning, neither of which adequately captures how likely an observation is to reveal an occluded target. We introduce Imagine-TAMP, an interleaved planning and execution framework that uses semantic and geometric imagination to compare alternative task-level strategies under partial observability before committing to expensive motion planning. A vision-language model shapes a particle belief over target locations using commonsense relationships between the target and visible objects, while a generative scene model estimates plausible geometry in unobserved r

arXiv:2609.20330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Blind and low-vision users often need to locate a specific personal object rather than an arbitrary instance of the same category. The task calls for a robot that can move through the space and reach viewpoints the user cannot, and for an accessible interface where the user says which object is meant and learns whether the right one was found. We present RoboFind, a multi-agent framework in which a smartphone teaches the target and a quadruped robot carries out the search. A Target Teaching Agent converts guided smartphone recordings into a semantic target profile and a reusable multi-view reference bank through an accessible capture flow with AR guidance, speech and haptic feedback, and screen-reader support, so later missions refer to a stored object without repeating the teaching process. At runtime, a Navigation Agent explores the environment and proposes candidate targets, a Verification Agent checks each candidate against the stored

arXiv:2609.20321v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous vehicles depend entirely on Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) to navigate safely in unknown environments. However, relying on a single sensory modality introduces critical failure points: LiDAR systems degrade in featureless corridors, Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) accumulate mathematical drift, and GPS drops frequently in urban canyons. This paper presents the implementation of a tightly-coupled SLAM fusion architecture that integrates a Velodyne 3D LiDAR, a high-frequency IMU, and GPS to achieve continuous spatial awareness. Utilizing a phased development methodology, we establish a 2D baseline to validate hardware synchronization and transform geometries before upgrading to a full 3D architecture driven by FAST-LIO2. This advanced approach uses an Iterated Error-State Kalman Filter (IESKF) to process dense 3D laser points alongside continuous inertial data, eliminating motion blur at high speeds. To eradicate

arXiv:2609.20191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Running vision-language navigation fully onboard an aerial robot is hard, since grounding, planning, and control must share limited compute and a single-stage error is difficult to isolate in flight. End-to-end aerial policies fuse these stages into one network, giving up the observability and safety checks a modular stack keeps available. We propose VLN on the Fly, an onboard stack that keeps grounding, planning, and control as separate, inspectable stages. A quantized VLM grounds an instruction to a coarse image cell, depth lifts it to a 3D goal, a fast B-spline planner returns a feasible trajectory, and a pretrained reinforcement learning policy tracks it to motor commands across quadrotors. Across 15 onboard flights over three everyday referents in a controlled indoor volume, the stack reaches the target in 13 of 15 trials with 5.72 cm mean goal error and 39.3% average GPU utilization. In 6 additional cluttered-environment trials, the

arXiv:2609.20114v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collecting real-world navigation data for mobile robots typically requires platform-specific teleoperation, making large-scale collection expensive and difficult to scale. We introduce Universal Navigation Interface (UNI), a robot-free data collection paradigm that uses a four-wheeled rollator walker (rollator) and smartphone to collect physically constrained human demonstrations. Because the rollator cannot climb stairs, negotiate uncut curbs, or pass through narrow gaps, demonstrations are naturally biased toward wheeled-feasible routes. Using UNI, we collect 37.2 km of real-world navigation data and recover metric trajectories that directly supervise goal-conditioned navigation models. Fine-tuning visual-navigation models on UNI reduces trajectory prediction error by 17.4-24.8% on held-out UNI demonstrations. Evaluation on other navigation datasets shows benefits that vary by dataset and metric. We further demonstrate closed-loop trans

arXiv:2609.20107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visuomotor policies for multi-fingered dexterous manipulation are highly sensitive to camera viewpoint shifts. To achieve view invariance, recent methods increasingly rely on explicit 3D modalities like RGB-D or point clouds, which can introduce hardware dependencies, calibration requirements, and vulnerability to sensor noise during real-world deployment. In this work, we show that view-invariant control can be achieved without explicit test-time 3D sensing by encoding geometric knowledge into the visual representation during simulation. We present AnyViewDex, an asymmetric training pipeline that combines multi-view contrastive alignment with privileged 3D geometric supervision. By regressing absolute 3D object coordinates during simulated training, this auxiliary objective provides a geometric grounding signal that mitigates the spatial collapse of the globally pooled contrastive embedding. At deployment, the policy operates zero-shot u

arXiv:2609.20087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective manipulation across diverse objects is critical for applications ranging from agricultural harvesting to laboratory and domestic automation. While the inherent compliance of soft robotics is well suited to this challenge, designing grippers that generalize across tasks remains difficult due to the vast design space of continuum mechanics and the risk of overfitting to specific scenarios. We propose a graph-based design space for representing soft structures and mechanisms, coupled with a multi-objective, diversity-driven genetic optimization framework that explicitly promotes solution variety throughout the design process. Using multiple grasping scenarios during optimization, we study how task diversity influences the emergence of generalization to unseen objects and contact conditions. Our results show that optimization over a sufficiently diverse set of grasping cases leads to designs with emergent generalization, exhibiting

arXiv:2609.20078v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Active visual exploration of tabletop objects often requires reorienting an unknown resting object onto a different stable support face to expose occluded surfaces. To identify such placements without exhaustive physical search, we learn a probabilistic placement prior from a single-view point cloud. Stable placement prediction is inherently multimodal, and conventional 6-DoF regression introduces further ambiguity by modeling translation and in-plane yaw. We therefore propose FlipToSee, a probabilistic framework that removes this representational ambiguity by parameterizing placements as unit support normals on $S^2$ while modeling their multimodal conditional distribution via a von Mises--Fisher mixture density network. To decouple mode diversity from physical robustness, FlipToSee deterministically extracts a compact candidate set from the mixture components and applies robustness-aware reranking using an auxiliary head trained with ca

arXiv:2609.20048v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Herbicide-based weed control is increasingly unsustainable due to rising weed resistance and the adverse environmental impacts of chemical use. While mechanical weed control avoids these drawbacks, it is typically implemented using large machines that cause soil compaction. We propose a novel alternative based on small mobile robots for mechanical weeding. Compared with existing automated mechanical weeding approaches, the proposed method offers reduced soil compaction, simpler automation, and improved scalability. Our solution involves a Boston Dynamics Spot quadruped robot equipped with a custom weed removal tool featuring a milling bit at its end. The tool is rigidly attached to the robot and uses the degrees of freedom of the robot base by actuating the legs, while keeping the feet stationary. We develop a software architecture that enables autonomous weed removal and integrate this system with all other required components. We analyz