Nachrichten & Forschung

arXiv:2601.15486v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence integrated with drone command and control (physical AI) offers a route to autonomy through large language models (LLMs), yet a unified LLM-to-drone interface has been missing. We present an LLM-agnostic command-and-control interface and agentic harness joining the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to MAVLink, the near-universal drone command-and-telemetry standard: "DroneServer" gives any MCP-capable LLM command, telemetry, mission, and safety functions over ArduPilot and PX4. Its 98 tools cover 223 of 238 client-side methods of MavSDK, MAVLink's library; 61 of the 98 were exercised in software-in-the-loop. We treat the LLM as an untrusted commander: zero public ports (externally verified); every command validated server-side (tiers, confirmation handshakes, independent geofence, audit log), exercised by an adversarial safety suite. Server-side mission state resolves the "fire-and-forget" mismatch: a scripted client

arXiv:2601.10814v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Localization and mapping are core perceptual capabilities for underwater robots. Stereo cameras provide a low-cost means of directly estimating metric depth to support these tasks. However, despite recent advances in stereo depth estimation on land, computing depth from image pairs in underwater scenes remains challenging. In underwater environments, images are degraded by light attenuation, visual artifacts, and dynamic lighting conditions. Furthermore, real-world underwater scenes frequently lack rich texture useful for stereo depth estimation and 3D reconstruction. As a result, stereo estimation networks trained on in-air data cannot transfer directly to the underwater domain. In addition, there is a lack of real-world underwater stereo datasets for supervised training of neural networks. Poor underwater depth estimation is compounded in stereo-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms, making it a fundamental c

arXiv:2512.24688v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Relative localization is essential for cooperation in autonomous multi-robot systems. Existing approaches either rely on shared environmental features or inertial assumptions, or they degrade under pairwise non-line-of-sight conditions and outliers in complex environments. Robustly and efficiently fusing inter-robot bearings, distances, and inertial measurements for tens of robots remains challenging. We present CREPES-X (Cooperative RElative Pose Estimation System with multiple eXtended features), a hierarchical relative localization framework that enhances speed, accuracy, and robustness under challenging conditions, without requiring any global information. The hardware packs infrared (IR) LEDs, an IR camera, an ultra-wideband module, and an IMU into a cube no larger than $6\,\text{cm}$ on each side. On this hardware, a two-stage hierarchical estimator meets different latency, accuracy, and robustness requirements. The single-frame

arXiv:2512.08661v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of trajectory planning for information gathering with a dynamic and resolution-varying sensor footprint. Ergodic planning offers a principled framework that balances exploration (visiting all areas) and exploitation (focusing on high-information regions) by planning trajectories such that the time spent in a region is proportional to the amount of information in that region. Existing ergodic planning often oversimplifies the sensing model by assuming a point sensor or a footprint with constant shape and resolution. In practice, the sensor footprint can drastically change over time as the robot moves, such as aerial robots equipped with downward-facing cameras, whose field of view depends on the orientation and altitude. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new metric that accounts for dynamic sensor footprints, analyze the theoretic local optimality conditions, and propose numerical trajectory opt

arXiv:2512.07673v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective motion representation is crucial for enabling robots to imitate expressive behaviors in real time, yet existing motion controllers often ignore inherent patterns in motion. Previous efforts in representation learning do not attempt to jointly capture human and animal movements through structured periodic patterns and variational aperiodic descriptions. To address this, we present Multi-Domain Motion Embedding (MDME), a motion representation that unifies the complementary embedding of structured and unstructured features using a wavelet-based encoder and a probabilistic embedding in parallel. This produces a rich representation of reference motions from a minimal input set that generalizes across diverse motion styles. We evaluate MDME on retargeting-free motion imitation at deployment by conditioning robot control policies on the learned embeddings to reconstruct ideal retargeted states on the robot, demonstrating accurate r

arXiv:2511.12101v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many recent Vision-Language-Action models employ diffusion or flow-matching backbones with hundreds of millions of parameters for action generation. However, unlike image synthesis where the output spans millions of diverse pixels, a manipulation policy generates only short sequences of low-dimensional, physically correlated action values, a far simpler target that may not require such capacity. We confirm this intuition and show that, in modulation-conditioned diffusion policies, task adaptation can be routed entirely through the conditioning pathway, leaving a frozen, observation-free backbone that serves as a reusable trajectory prior. To establish this, we introduce a decoupled training recipe: a general-purpose action head is first pretrained on observation-free forward-kinematics data, then frozen while only the conditioning pathway is trained for downstream tasks. Using Diffusion Policy as a testbed, we show that on both MimicG

arXiv:2511.11218v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Humanoid robots have demonstrated strong capabilities for interacting with static scenes across locomotion and manipulation, yet dynamic real-world interactions remain challenging. As a step toward fast-moving object interactions, we present an RL training pipeline that yields a unified whole-body controller for humanoid badminton, coordinating footwork and striking without motion priors or expert demonstrations. In badminton, locomotion and striking are tightly coupled, making the final hitting objective difficult to optimize directly due to sparse rewards and conflicting gradients. We address this with an annealed curriculum that first stabilizes learning through auxiliary locomotion objectives, then progressively removes them to focus optimization on the final hitting objective. For deployment, we use an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to estimate and predict shuttlecock trajectories for target striking, and also develop a prediction-

arXiv:2508.13488v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Loop closure detection is important for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), which associates current observations with historical keyframes, achieving drift correction and global relocalization. However, a falsely detected loop can be fatal, and this is especially difficult in repetitive environments where appearance-based features fail due to the high similarity. Therefore, verifying a loop closure is a critical step to avoid false-positive detections. Existing works in loop closure verification predominantly focus on learning invariant appearance features, neglecting the prior knowledge of the robot's spatial-temporal motion cue, i.e., trajectory. In this article, we propose ROVER, a loop closure verification method that leverages the historical trajectory as a prior constraint to reject false loops in challenging repetitive environments. For each loop candidate, it is first used to estimate the robot trajectory with pose-

arXiv:2505.12384v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Semantic SLAM holds promise for robust robot navigation in complex environments, but its practicality on embedded systems remains uncertain. This paper presents a comparative survey of existing semantic visual SLAM systems from an embedded-deployment perspective. Unlike recent surveys centered on implicit representations, NeRFs, or 3D Gaussian Splatting as scene representations, our scope is the deployability of complete Semantic SLAM pipelines on resource-constrained robotics platforms, with particular emphasis on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin. Three semantic-aware architectural approaches, namely Geometric SLAM, NeRF, and Gaussian Splatting-based SLAM, are evaluated with respect to accuracy, semantic reconstruction quality, memory footprint, power consumption, and throughput. Our Jetson measurements show that Semantic Geometric SLAM currently offers the most practical balance between accuracy and efficiency, whereas Gaussian Splatting-

arXiv:2410.24205v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Path planning in complex environments poses significant challenges, particularly in achieving time efficiency while maintaining a fair success rate and path cost. To address these issues, we introduce a novel path-planning algorithm, Zonal RL-RRT, that leverages kd-tree partitioning to segment the map into zones while addressing zone connectivity, ensuring seamless transitions between zones. By breaking down the complex environment into multiple zones and using Value Iteration as the high-level decision-maker, our algorithm achieves a 3x improvement in time efficiency compared to basic sampling methods such as RRT and RRT* in forest-like maps. Our approach outperforms heuristic-guided methods like BIT* and Informed RRT* by 1.5x in terms of runtime while maintaining robust and reliable success rates across 2D to 6D environments. Compared to learning-based methods like NeuralRRT* and MPNetSMP, as well as the heuristic RRT*J, our algorit

arXiv:2309.05955v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate disturbance estimation is essential for safe robot operations. The recently proposed neural moving horizon estimation (NeuroMHE), which uses a portable neural network to model the MHE's weightings, has shown promise in further pushing the accuracy and efficiency boundary. Currently, NeuroMHE is trained through gradient descent, with its gradient computed recursively using a Kalman filter. This paper proposes a trust-region policy optimization method for training NeuroMHE. We achieve this by providing the second-order derivatives of MHE, referred to as the MHE Hessian. Remarkably, we show that much of computation already used to obtain the gradient, especially the Kalman filter, can be efficiently reused to compute the MHE Hessian. This offers linear computational complexity relative to the MHE horizon. As a case study, we evaluate the proposed trust region NeuroMHE on real quadrotor flight data for disturbance estimation. Our

arXiv:2209.11097v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agile flights of autonomous quadrotors in cluttered environments require constrained motion planning and control subject to translational and rotational dynamics. Traditional model-based methods typically demand complicated design and heavy computation. In this paper, we develop a novel deep reinforcement learning-based method that tackles the challenging task of flying through a dynamic narrow gate. We design a model predictive controller with its adaptive tracking references parameterized by a deep neural network (DNN). These references include the traversal time and the quadrotor SE(3) traversal pose that encourage the robot to fly through the gate with maximum safety margins from various initial conditions. To cope with the difficulty of training in highly dynamic environments, we develop a reinforce-imitate learning framework to train the DNN efficiently that generalizes well to diverse settings. Furthermore, we propose a binary

arXiv:2609.14973v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present PhysBrain 1.5, a unified model for understanding physical environments, generating actions, and predicting future states. Motivated by the physical loop of observation, interaction, and environmental change, we bring these capabilities into a common learning framework. Starting from a general vision--language model, we encode language responses, end-effector motion, and dense visual targets as discrete sequences and jointly optimize them with autoregressive next-token prediction. Pre-training draws its embodied supervision entirely from human interaction videos, using task-centered episodes to pair semantic and spatial context with recovered motion and subsequent observations. We then adapt the model through supervised fine-tuning on a mixture of human demonstrations, robot trajectories, and simulated experience. Across 28 embodied understanding benchmarks, our 8B model achieves an average score of 72.5, setting a new open-so

arXiv:2609.14642v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generation of musculoskeletal gait trajectories conditioned on patient-specific parameters remains a key challenge for wearable robotics and rehabilitation. Assistive systems such as lower-limb exoskeletons require reference trajectories that adapt to individual morphology and therapeutic goals while preserving biomechanical realism. Traditional approaches rely on hand-crafted gait templates or optimization procedures that scale poorly across subjects and walking conditions. In this work, we explore conditional diffusion models for generating lower-limb joint-angle trajectories conditioned on gait parameters such as step length. We compare a baseline transformer diffusion model with a controllable diffusion transformer variant incorporating adaptive normalization and classifier-free guidance. Experiments on a dataset of 4,590 gait cycles show that diffusion models can generate realistic periodic gait trajectories while enabling some con

arXiv:2609.14313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robust point tracking in endoscopic videos is essential for computer-assisted intervention and autonomous robotic surgery, enabling continuous registration between intraoperative video and preoperative imaging despite soft tissue deformation. However, supervised tracking methods depend on large annotated datasets, while surgical conditions make reliable trajectory annotation challenging. We propose a self-supervised Track-Any-Point approach that learns from unlabeled surgical videos by establishing global pixel correspondences and inferring point trajectories through contrastive random walks. Trained without annotations, our method achieves performance comparable to existing semi-supervised approaches while implicitly handling tissue deformation. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of self-supervised point tracking in surgical environments and its potential to reduce reliance on annotated data.