News & Research

arXiv:2607.10655v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic foundation models have recently made substantial progress in multi-task capability, cross-embodiment transfer, and language-conditioned control. Yet robust deployment across diverse real-world settings remains difficult, in part because policies often fail to distinguish causally relevant visual structure from spurious scene-level correlations. We identify this failure mode as shortcut learning: the tendency to exploit predictive but non-causal correlations in the training distribution rather than the task-relevant visual evidence that determines successful action. Although shortcut learning has been extensively studied in computer vision and broader machine learning, its role in robotic foundation models remains comparatively underexplored. We propose Artificial Foveated Perception (AFP), a lightweight, policy-agnostic module that takes the same vision and language inputs as Vision-Language-Action and World Action Model pipelines

arXiv:2607.10649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coverage path planning (CPP) is a fundamental problem in robot motion planning, whose aim is to produce robot trajectories that provide complete coverage of target workspaces while minimizing task-specific objectives such as path length, overlap, number of turns, and energy consumption. CPP has widespread applications in cleaning, inspection, mapping, agriculture, manufacturing, surveillance, demining, and environmental monitoring. Although classical CPP has been extensively studied, recent advances have extended CPP beyond single-robot settings to multi-robot systems, complex 3D environments, constrained platforms, learning-based coverage planning, and visual coverage tasks. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of 125 representative works published primarily between 2015 and 2026, while presenting the evolution of recent developments in light of the classical CPP methods published before 2015. The CPP methods are organized into six

arXiv:2607.10630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust motion planning in dense traffic requires autonomous vehicles to interact in rare and safety-critical scenarios that are underrepresented in naturalistic driving data. Although adversarial training offers a feasible solution, existing methods often rely on external scenario generators, heuristic perturbations, or simulator-heavy rollouts, which makes them difficult to integrate with modern autoregressive planners. Here, we cast adversarially robust planner learning as a constrained min-max game and propose Adversarial World Modeling (AWM), a theoretically grounded multi-agent self-play fine-tuning framework. Since solving the exact game is intractable, AWM introduces a principled decoupled solver. In the inner minimization, the planner's predictive world model is converted into a role-conditioned adversary that learns sparse, scene-adaptive attack coalitions via counterfactual credit assignment. In the outer maximization, the ego p

arXiv:2607.10625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-conditioned Imitation Learning (IL) is essential for enabling robots to perform complex tasks following natural language instructions. However, generalizing to multi-step compositional tasks remains a significant challenge. While hierarchical approaches attempt to address this by decomposing tasks into atomic skills, existing methods often suffer from training instability and codebook collapse due to the tight coupling between high-level skill reasoning and low-level action generation in joint training paradigms. Inspired by the Dual-Process Theory of cognition, we propose Dual-Process Atomic Skill Learning (DASL), a novel asynchronous hierarchical imitation learning framework that decouples slow semantic reasoning from fast, real-time motion control. DASL comprises a Slow-Frequency Policy that predicts interpretable, discrete skills via Vector Quantization, and a High-Frequency Policy that leverages a latent diffusion model and

arXiv:2607.10565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: End-to-end motion planning has emerged as a promising paradigm in autonomous driving, directly mapping raw sensor data to control commands via deep neural networks. Despite its advantages, its large model size hinders deployment in resource-constrained platforms. In this paper, we present BucketKD, a bucket-based knowledge distillation framework that yields compact and safety-aware end-to-end planners. Compared to the state-of-the-art approach, which relies on simplified planning state representations, BucketKD discretizes critical environmental variables into adaptive buckets that capture richer scene semantics while preserving efficiency. In addition, we design a safety-aware waypoint attention mechanism that evaluates each waypoint's risk level by accounting for both obstacle proximity and relative motion through a time-to-collision (TTC) formulation widely used in transportation research. This enables the student model to better retai

arXiv:2607.10553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient exploration and target search in large-scale unknown environments remain challenging for aerial robots due to the demands of broad spatial coverage, fine-grained perception, and real-time decision-making. This paper presents SLIDER, a lightweight and memory-efficient framework that avoids reliance on globally dense maps by combining a local sliding map with sparse global history information. A novel observation quality evaluation method is proposed, leveraging historical poses and sensor models to assess point cloud data in real-time, enabling efficient frontier detection. To support scalable and responsive planning, an incremental viewpoint clustering strategy dynamically adapts to local updates, significantly reducing the number of candidate targets and decreasing computational load. A sparse global topological map is incrementally maintained to assist global planning and cost evaluation. Extensive simulations and real-world e

arXiv:2607.10504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative vision-language-action policies have advanced robot manipulation, but they often exhibit instability under noise, partial observability, and stochastic initial conditions. During extended rollouts, small velocity errors accumulate, degrading execution reliability. Existing diffusion and flow-based policies typically assume homoscedastic residuals and lack explicit uncertainty modeling within action generation, limiting robustness during iterative rollout. We propose SUREFlow, a state-space uncertainty-aware residual flow matching framework built on a Mamba backbone. The method jointly predicts action velocities and input-dependent residual uncertainty, enabling selective refinement of unreliable action dimensions without environment feedback while preserving computational efficiency. On LIBERO, SUREFlow achieves 92.5% average success rate (SR), outperforming the Mamba-based MaIL by 34.2%. On LIBERO-PRO, it attains around 49% SR

arXiv:2607.10374v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe and socially compliant navigation remains a fundamental challenge for autonomous robots operating in human-populated environments. Beyond collision avoidance, robots must anticipate human motion and respect personal space to ensure human comfort. Model Predictive Control (MPC) offers a robust alternative to classical and data-driven methods, although its effectiveness strongly depends on accurate human motion prediction and efficient computation. This paper introduces SFM-NMPC, a Social Force Model-based Non-linear Model Predictive Control framework that embeds human motion prediction directly within the optimization loop. By incorporating the Social Force Model into the dynamic model of surrounding agents, the controller jointly predicts the trajectories of humans and robots over the prediction horizon, thereby enabling socially-aware planning. A tailored set of social cost functions guides the optimization toward human-compliant be

arXiv:2607.10372v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The transition of autonomous mobile robots from controlled industrial settings to dynamic, human-centric environments, such as manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare, has made their safe and autonomous operation a critical area of research. These sophisticated machines must be capable of perceiving, understanding, and interacting with their surroundings to navigate freely and perform complex tasks. A significant obstacle to achieving this is the lack of comprehensive contextual awareness, which requires a robot to recognize its spatial environment and identify the objects and actors within it. Without this perceptual knowledge, robots struggle to plan adaptive behaviors or engage in meaningful interaction with humans. This thesis presents novel solutions to this challenge by exploring two distinct but complementary research directions. The first direction involves human re-identification and tracking to improve Human-Robot Collaboration

arXiv:2607.10369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow-matching policies have emerged as an effective policy parameterization for robot learning. They iteratively generate actions from noise, enabling highly expressive modeling of complex and multimodal action distributions. However, prior works observed that scaling these policies with value-gradient reinforcement learning (RL) often leads to training instability. Existing methods attribute this instability to iterative generation and therefore avoid end-to-end value-gradient optimization by sacrificing iterative generation, high expressiveness, or value-gradient optimization. Contrary to prior belief, we show the instability does not stem from iterative generation itself, but from the vanilla sampling strategy originally designed for behavior cloning, which becomes brittle under value-gradient RL. Motivated by this insight, we propose VINE, an RL-oriented sampling method that enables stable end-to-end value-gradient optimization for fl

arXiv:2607.10294v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conventional colonoscopy remains limited by patient discomfort and procedural risks, motivating research into compliant robotic alternatives. Eversion robots, which advance via pressure-driven tip growth, eliminate sliding friction against the colon wall and offer a less intrusive approach to traversal. However, no existing design simultaneously satisfies all clinical requirements. This paper benchmarks four recent eversion robot architectures against the key anatomical and clinical constraints of colonoscopy, including colon length, minimum luminal diameter, bending angle, and working-channel needs. We identify the central trade-offs each design reveals, particularly the difficulty of integrating steering and payload delivery without sacrificing the soft, low-friction behaviour that makes eversion robots attractive. We then provide design guidance across material selection, steering strategy, and payload delivery, and highlight open prob

arXiv:2607.10288v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous navigation in dense and highly dynamic environments requires both physically feasible control and low-latency replanning. Optimization-based methods such as Model Predictive Control (MPC) explicitly handle robot kinematics and safety constraints, but repeated nonlinear optimization can limit real-time responsiveness. Deterministic behavior-cloning policies enable efficient inference but may fail to represent multimodal avoidance behaviors, whereas diffusion policies capture multimodality at the cost of time-consuming iterative denoising. We propose PIER-Flow (Physics-Informed Efficient Rectified Flow), a lightweight navigation policy for mobile robots. By distilling an MPC expert into a continuous-time Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE), PIER-Flow achieves single-step action generation through parallel latent sampling and lightweight feasibility selection. We introduce a physics-informed training objective to enforce kinemati

arXiv:2607.10180v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce ActiveFly-Bench, the first benchmark to bridge cyberspace reasoning and physical-world interaction for UAV embodied perception. The benchmark decomposes active perception into three hierarchical tasks: Aerial Embodied Question Answering (Air-EQA), Observation Behavior Planning (OBP), and Fine-grained Language-guided UAV Control (FLUC), explicitly connecting high-level task understanding, behavior planning, and low-level control. The datasets are collected from both real-world and simulated outdoor environments for training and evaluation. We further develop ActiveFly, a closed-loop UAV agent that integrates visual-language reasoning with fine-grained control, and deploy it on a physical UAV platform. Experiments with representative VLMs and VLA models show that current UAV agents still struggle with behavior planning, viewpoint adjustment, and robust task completion in active perception. These results establish ActiveFly-

arXiv:2607.10172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deploying billion-parameter Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models on industrial hardware requires fine-tuning to bridge the embodiment gap. Full Fine-Tuning (FFT) provides maximal plasticity but requires data centre-grade GPUs. We present a systematic study of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for $\pi_0$, a flow-matching VLA, evaluated on four precision assembly tasks with a UR5e robotic manipulator. Across a sweep of LoRA ranks (r=8 to 256), allocation strategies, and component-freezing ablations, we find no statistically significant advantage of FFT over certain LoRA configurations. Performance saturates at r=32, and uniform allocation across the Vision-Language-Model (VLM) backbone and action expert proves sufficient. Freezing the VLM or restricting the vision encoder to LoRA significantly degrades performance, indicating that embodiment adaptation requires both semantic and visual plasticity. These results suggest that LoRA at r=32 with full

arXiv:2607.10170v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Communication graph rigidity is a fundamental requirement in many multi robot formation control approaches. However, ensuring and maintaining a rigid communication topology becomes challenging in practice due to limited sensing ranges and dynamic operating conditions. This paper provides a method for achieving an inter robot collision free, rigid time varying communication graph, where communication links are established or broken according to limited sensing ranges, without assuming an initial rigid graph. In addition, the proposed approach guarantees the realization of a rigid graph for heterogeneous nonlinear multi robot systems. A computationally lean, distributed quadratic optimization-based controller is developed for a leader follower architecture, acquiring rigidity based on hierarchical second-order consensus among robots. Follower agents do not require global absolute positions of any agent, including their own. The proposed