News & Research

arXiv:2610.34059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Swarm robotics enables scalable inspection through collective perception, where robots infer environmental properties from distributed observations. A common benchmark considers robots exploring black-white tiled environments and determining the majority tile type. While most work studies static environments, dynamic environments remain underexplored. We study collective perception in dynamic environments where the tile proportion and the spatial correlation of surface patterns may change over time. To enable implementation on resource-constrained robots, we integrate a lightweight change detection mechanism into a Bayesian collective decision-making framework that resets robot beliefs when distribution shifts are detected. The proposed detector requires constant memory and constant per-sample computation, unlike two recent competitive approaches that store the full sample stream, making it suitable for memory-constrained robots. We furth

arXiv:2610.34054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper proposes a command-aligned sampling distribution that incorporates navigation commands directly into the exploration process to improve the efficiency of sampling-based motion planning for quadcopters in three-dimensional environments. Inspired by the Language-Aided Subset Sampling Motion Planner, this paper extends command-aware subset sampling to aerial systems. Subset sampling is generalized to command-aligned regions, enabling structured 3D exploration while preserving probabilistic completeness. Natural language instructions are grounded into yaw-conditioned and altitude-aware geometric constraints using a prompt-based large language model for entity extraction and instruction validation. Extensive simulations in complex environments demonstrate that the proposed method generates collision-free, consistent trajectories while significantly reducing sampling effort compared to uniform RRT-based planners.

arXiv:2610.34051v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot tasks require grounding spatial language in physical scenes, but task success alone cannot establish whether spatial instructions are followed. We present BEHAVIOR-Spatial, a benchmark built on BEHAVIOR-1K that measures spatial question answering, point-based target grounding, and robot action to examine how VLM spatial understanding relates to VLA behavior. It comprises 3,256 spatial questions across 49 activities, 1,240 grounding queries across 14 manipulation tasks, and action evaluations covering those 14 tasks and 10 navigation tasks. Our manipulation protocol evaluates held-out configurations and instruction following when the requested target changes within a fixed training layout. The baseline achieves 41.6% on held-out configurations but only 16.1% under changed instructions. VLM adaptation and robot-data pretraining provide limited improvements, whereas oracle visual target cues raise these rates to 60.3% and 38.0%, respec

arXiv:2610.34041v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamic and continuously evolving environments present significant challenges for robotic mapping and scene understanding, particularly on construction sites where moving agents, temporary obstacles, and persistent structural changes coexist. While dynamic and long-term SLAM methods can detect motion and environmental changes, their outputs are predominantly metric representations that provide limited structure for higher-level spatial and temporal reasoning. This paper presents a LiDAR-based real-time temporal construction scene graph (T-ConSG) that jointly represents free-space regions, static objects, dynamic objects, and environmental events with spatial-relational and event-participation edges. The proposed framework incrementally constructs the graph from LiDAR-derived geometric evidence, maintaining persistent free-space and static-object information while tracking dynamic objects. Changes in accumulated spatial evidence are furthe

arXiv:2610.34040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Construction robots must label building elements they can only partly see. We show that when occlusion at test time removes whole regions of a scene, rather than parts of an object as in training, point-cloud segmentation networks do not simply miss the hidden elements: they relabel them, and the errors collapse onto a single sink class. With fixed synthetic layouts the column absorbs up to 70% of all test points; with randomized layouts the sink moves to the stair, predicted at 4.5-5.4x its true share across three training seeds. Baseline mIoU falls to 0.15-0.27 (fixed) and 0.36-0.72 (randomized), and up to 269 whole objects vanish in a single test set. Appending 14 hand-computed geometric features per point (GPE) restores mIoU to 0.54-0.92 and removes 64-100% of whole-object losses in every run, for PointNet++ and a PTv3-style transformer in both layout regimes; on real S3DIS scans it removes every whole-wall loss (10 to 0). In an as-bu

arXiv:2610.34034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) enables fine-grained sensing of spatial relationships between wireless devices. The WiFi Sensor for Robotics (WSR) toolbox demonstrated that WiFi-CSI measurements collected during robot motion, combined with odometry, can be used to synthesize virtual antenna arrays, enabling motion-induced bearing estimation in multi-robot experiments. However, deploying the WSR approach has remained challenging due to its limited integration with standard robotics tools and reliance on deprecated WiFi-CSI acquisition hardware. This work presents an open-source simulation framework that integrates the WSR sensing pipeline within the robotic simulator Gazebo. The framework generates synthetic WiFi-CSI measurements with realistic physical signal properties and leverages realistic robot motion required for motion-induced sensing and downstream localization. It further supports processing both simulated and real WiFi-CSI

arXiv:2610.34031v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots that learn from people often see several valid ways to do the same task: pass an obstacle on the left or on the right, open the microwave or move the kettle first. A policy that re-decides at every step can waver between these ways mid-task. We ask when the action head (the part of a policy that turns the state into actions) matters, and how it should make this choice. On a controlled task, heads that sample one way succeed far more often than a head that averages the ways when the demonstrations contain several ways and the state gives no hint which to take (+0.72 success with two ways); this trend was not reproduced on the other tasks we ran. We then present ElevateHead, a head that decides once at a learned decision point, commits to that choice for the episode, and exposes the choice as an input a user can set. We designed it by diagnosis: each version was frozen and tested on tasks it had not seen, and the next version changed

arXiv:2610.33959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon manipulation often depends on object properties that cannot be reliably inferred from appearance alone. Physical interaction can reveal these properties, but it can also change the world in ways that invalidate subsequent actions. We present a task and motion planning (TAMP) framework that integrates task-directed interactive information-gathering with interleaved planning and execution. Building on PDDLStream, our framework plans optimistically with these interactive actions, verifies their outcomes during execution, and adapts the remaining plan by retaining still-applicable actions and replanning only the connections needed to continue execution. We evaluate the framework in simulation and on a real robot across tasks that require determining whether an object is movable, a pen has ink, a drawer can be opened, or a container is empty. These experiments demonstrate how interaction-driven state updates and recovery replannin

arXiv:2610.33947v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bimanual robotic control requires simultaneous management of distinct functional demands under motor noise, energetic costs, and communication delays. We investigate how learning responsibility should be organised across modular controllers and the two arms in a simulated musculoskeletal system with two communicating recurrent controllers. Using a 2 x 2 design, we compare differential versus shared controller objectives and fixed versus balanced hand-task assignments. Task-aligned functional specialisation was strongest when differential objectives were combined with a fixed assignment aligned with contralateral control routing. This condition achieved the highest canonical-task performance and control efficiency, reaching 81.33% bimanual success. Its advantage over shared objectives increased with motor noise but narrowed under stronger energy penalties. Stronger specialisation also reduced hand-role flexibility: reversing the hand roles

arXiv:2610.33916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting the short-term future trajectory of a person from RGB-D cameras is a key capability for mobile robots navigating in dynamic and human populated environment. The key challenge to deploying learned predictors on real robots is the train-deploy pipeline gap. Training data are often prepared with an idealized, smoothed ground truth, whereas at inference, the model is fed noisy estimates from pose detectors and depth sensors. The model is therefore evaluated on an input distribution it never encountered during training. Most existing models rely on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) or transformers, which either struggle to capture short-term temporal dependencies or suffer from computational cost. We present TrajMamba, a lightweight, bidirectional state space model for short-term human trajectory prediction using an RGB-D camera. The model uses a single shared processing path for both training and deployment, aligning human pose extr

arXiv:2610.33906v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a team of drones explores a building together, each drone tells the others which frontier it is going to and shares the map it has built. This avoids duplicated effort, but it also means that the team trusts every identity from which it receives messages. In a Sybil attack, one compromised drone creates fake identities, and these fake teammates claim frontiers and send fabricated scans, so the real drones leave parts of the building unexplored and end up with walls in their maps that do not exist. We study five such attackers, including one that seals off the openings between floors, and five levels of defence that need no security infrastructure, only the drones' own sensors and maps: an audit of received map data against what a drone sees itself, a check that a body is present where an identity claims to be, trust only for identities whose body has been seen, a quarantine for identities that no drone has observed, and a rule that b

arXiv:2610.33863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon manipulation requires actions whose validity depends on earlier interactions, yet visual progress can conceal missing task prerequisites. We propose RoboLongR, an offline-to-online framework that learns history-dependent rewards to guide policy adaptation to new tasks. Its central objective is causal consistency: aligning rewarded progress with prerequisites supported by execution history. Stage-shuffle supervision encourages execution-order sensitivity, recurrent memory preserves evidence of earlier interactions, and two-round training refines trajectory segments using predicted progress. The resulting rewards guide stage-conditioned policy refinement from behavior cloning to online reinforcement learning. Sparse terminal feedback connects policy experience to reward learning by triggering correction for repeated high-scoring failures. Pretrained on demonstrations from 88 RLBench tasks and Open-X data, RoboLongR achieves 31.

arXiv:2610.33852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language is a natural way to command robots, but converting a single instruction into a long-horizon, contact-rich hand-object interaction remains challenging: synthesized references are noisy, human-to-robot retargeting introduces embodiment bias, and fixed-reference tracking lets small errors snowball. We address this with AdaDexTrack, a modulator-in-the-loop framework for language-conditioned manipulation tracking. A distilled generalist tracker serves as the skill carrier, while a tightly aligned modulator performs three feedback corrections: reference modulation (continual adjustment of what to track), object-latent modulation (online adaptation of the object representation to recruit suitable skills), and positional-target modulation (small state-dependent refinements for execution). The tracker is learned via large-scale specialist to generalist distillation on a corpus of language-conditioned hand-object trajectories; the modulato

arXiv:2610.33807v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video world models (VWMs) are rapidly emerging as scalable neural simulators for robotic manipulation. However, most benchmarks only evaluate them as open-world video generators, using Vision-Language Models (VLMs) that lack strict 3D spatial and kinematic reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce RoboWorM, a comprehensive, deployment-aware benchmark that leverages known hardware priors such as robot kinematic trees and fixed camera configurations, to systematically examine structural and spatiotemporal fidelity. RoboWorM curates 1,605 episodes across single-arm, bimanual, and humanoid morphologies, spanning both Markovian and long-horizon non-Markovian tasks under single- and multi-view setups. To explicitly measure physical consistency, we propose two deterministic, VLM-free metrics: KIVA for intra-view kinematic stability, and RIGIS for multi-view geometric consistency. By exploiting intrinsic robotic invariants, KIVA improves halluc

arXiv:2610.33794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deploying a language-guided navigation policy in a new building usually means watching it fail. Public-benchmark VLAs degrade scene by scene as layout, appearance, and language drift, and the standard fix of teleoperating fresh trajectories on site does not scale. We replace human demonstration with a single brief iPhone scan. Scan2Instruction compiles that scan into a complete training environment, automatically synthesizing executable navigation episodes with grounded instructions. PRPT-KS then adapts the policy through a closed-form Pareto utility read directly off the reconstructed scene, with no learned critic and no human labels. Across five real environments, the two designs together drive our RealNav to an 85% real-robot success rate, compared with 49% for a RealNav baseline post-trained on human demonstrations, and still achieve 82% in unscanned regions of the same buildings, compared with 41% for the same baseline. Our work turn