Research Papers

Plain-English summaries of the latest robotics research — humanoid robots, quadrupeds, industrial automation, and AI.
499 papers
Physiologically Constrained Neural Network Estimates Wrist Motion from Partial Muscle Signals
RoboticsJun 8

Physiologically Constrained Neural Network Estimates Wrist Motion from Partial Muscle Signals

A physiologically constrained neural network estimates multi-DoF wrist kinematics from partially observed sEMG using an integrated musculoskeletal model.

Wending Heng, Mingming Zhang, Glen Cooper, Zhenhong Li

Quadruped Robots That Push and Pull Objects With Their Feet: A Smarter Training Approach
RoboticsJun 8

Quadruped Robots That Push and Pull Objects With Their Feet: A Smarter Training Approach

We present a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that enables quadruped robots to manipulate objects using their feet — a capability known as pedip…

Tuba Girgin, Jose Castelblanco, Gabriel Rodriguez +2

Flow-Based Policy Adjustment That Works Without Retraining the Robot
RoboticsJun 7

Flow-Based Policy Adjustment That Works Without Retraining the Robot

Flow-based action adaptation improves imperfect robot policies without retraining, using expert demonstrations for selective OOD-gated correction.

Luzhe Sun, Jingtian Ji, Haoran Chen +2

Speed-Controllable Robot Policies: TempoVLA Lets You Dial Up or Down Execution Speed
AIJun 7

Speed-Controllable Robot Policies: TempoVLA Lets You Dial Up or Down Execution Speed

Dong Jing, Jingchen Nie, Tianqi Zhang +4

HANDOFF Lets Humanoid Robots Use One Controller for Walking, Manipulating, and Recovery
HumanoidJun 7

HANDOFF Lets Humanoid Robots Use One Controller for Walking, Manipulating, and Recovery

Lizhi Yang, Junheng Li, Nehar Poddar +5

D³-MoE: Style-Controllable Autonomous Driving That Lets You Choose Aggressive or Cautious
RoboticsJun 6

D³-MoE: Style-Controllable Autonomous Driving That Lets You Choose Aggressive or Cautious

A new end-to-end autonomous driving system gives operators the ability to dial in a specific driving style—from conservative lane-cuddling to aggressive lane…

Renju Feng, Rukang Wang, Ning Xi +4

WAM-Nav: Unified Visual Navigation With Asymmetric World-Action Modeling
RoboticsJun 6

WAM-Nav: Unified Visual Navigation With Asymmetric World-Action Modeling

Researchers have built a single navigation model called WAM-Nav that works across multiple goal types—point, image, language—on a humanoid robot. By jointly …

Ning Yang, Yan Huang, Kaiwen Peng +9

Self-Guided Flow Policy Boosts Robot Task Success Without Separate Critics
RoboticsJun 6

Self-Guided Flow Policy Boosts Robot Task Success Without Separate Critics

Yunpeng Mei, Jiakai He, Hongjie Cao +12

What Cyclist Eye Gaze Reveals About Safer Road Infrastructure
RoboticsJun 5

What Cyclist Eye Gaze Reveals About Safer Road Infrastructure

Benjamin Hardin, Efimia Panagiotaki, Daniele De Martini +1

CIPER Unifies Cross-View Retrieval and Pose Estimation for Robots
RoboticsJun 5

CIPER Unifies Cross-View Retrieval and Pose Estimation for Robots

Researchers built CIPER, a single transformer network that simultaneously retrieves the correct aerial image from a city-scale database and estimates the pre…

Yurim Jeon, Dongseong Seo, Seung-Woo Seo

World Models That Generalize Across Environments for Quadrotor Navigation
RoboticsJun 5

World Models That Generalize Across Environments for Quadrotor Navigation

World models for quadrotor navigation that generalize across unseen environments, enabling closed-loop and short open-loop flight.

Luca Zanatta, Grzegorz Malczyk, Kostas Alexis

HORIZON: A Recoverability-Driven Curriculum for Scaling Physical Domains in Robot Locomotion
RoboticsJun 4

HORIZON: A Recoverability-Driven Curriculum for Scaling Physical Domains in Robot Locomotion

Chenhao Bai, Liqin Lu, Kaijun Wang +5

X4Val Uses Neural Surrogates to Slash Robot Validation Costs
RoboticsJun 4

X4Val Uses Neural Surrogates to Slash Robot Validation Costs

Rachel Luo, Michael Watson, Apoorva Sharma +6

GRAIL Generates Humanoid Loco-Manipulation from 3D Assets and Video Priors
HumanoidJun 4

GRAIL Generates Humanoid Loco-Manipulation from 3D Assets and Video Priors

GRAIL generates over 20,000 humanoid loco-manipulation sequences from 3D assets and video priors, achieving 84% pick-up and 90% stair-climbing success on a Unitree G1.

Tianyi Xie, Haotian Zhang, Jinhyung Park +17

Latent-Space Predictive World Model for Dynamic VLA Manipulation
RoboticsJun 3

Latent-Space Predictive World Model for Dynamic VLA Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action models struggle with dynamic objects that move during inference. AHEAD introduces a latent-space predictive world model that couples f…

Shahram Najam Syed, Arthur Jakobsson, Haoran Hao +1

Uncertainty-Aware 4D LiDAR Scene Synthesis for Smarter Autonomous Driving
RoboticsJun 3

Uncertainty-Aware 4D LiDAR Scene Synthesis for Smarter Autonomous Driving

Xiang Xu, Alan Liang, Youquan Liu +5

New Agricultural Robot Navigation System Detects and Corrects Instruction Mistakes
RoboticsJun 3

New Agricultural Robot Navigation System Detects and Corrects Instruction Mistakes

Xiaobei Zhao, Xingqi Lyu, Xin Chen +1

A Foundation Model for Understanding Object Affordances from Visual Data
RoboticsJun 2

A Foundation Model for Understanding Object Affordances from Visual Data

A unified affordance foundation model that learns object functionality understanding from visual data using MetaQuery tokens and three-stage training.

Zhaoning Wang, Yi Zhong, Jiawei Fu +2

New Safety Filter for Interactive Robots Uses Trusted Inference to Avoid Overly Cautious Behavior
AIJun 2

New Safety Filter for Interactive Robots Uses Trusted Inference to Avoid Overly Cautious Behavior

Researchers have developed a verification method for belief-space safety filters that reduces unnecessary conservativeness in interactive robots. By focusing…

Haimin Hu

RoboDream: Compositional World Models Boost Robot Data Synthesis Efficiently
RoboticsJun 2

RoboDream: Compositional World Models Boost Robot Data Synthesis Efficiently

Junjie Ye, Rong Xue, Basile Van Hoorick +6