New robotics and physical-AI papers, with what each one means for the industry.
Extending single Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) exploration methods to multi-UAV teams can improve coverage speed and robustness, but introduces challenges such as consistent mapping, safe navigation, and deployment strategy. In this work, we present a centralized multi-UAV exploration framework that enables the use of existing single-UAV sampling-based planners in a multi-UAV setting.
Mobile robots and vehicles carry synchronized multi-camera rigs, yet many streaming 3D foundation models are designed for monocular input, leaving efficient use of rig geometry a challenge. We present StreamRig, a freeze-and-stream framework that builds causal streaming odometry for calibrated rigs on a frozen multi-view 3D foundation model.
Preprint. The authors introduce GroundAnything, a 4B-parameter visual grounding model that uses bidirectional diffusion with blockwise denoising for parallel spatial decoding instead of sequential autoregressive token generation. Its autoregressive variant, GroundAnything-VLM, reports 72.42% across 30 grounding benchmarks, ahead of GPT-6 Astra at 71.35%. This matters for latency-sensitive robotics and interactive vision systems that need fast, precise localization.
Autonomous powder weighing is one of many bottlenecks in laboratory automation due to the complex, non-linear dynamics of heterogeneous materials. Robot chemists performing this task utilise standard tools shaped for the dexterity of human hands, whose fixed geometry sets the dynamics that the control policy needs to regulate.
Physical LiDAR attacks are often evaluated using fixed primitives and manually selected parameters, despite their strong dependence on surrounding traffic. We present TACTIC, a scene-aware framework that uses a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to coordinate state-adaptive roadside LiDAR attacks.
Pretrained robot policies provide useful action priors, but long-horizon manipulation still requires coordination between semantic reasoning and physical execution. Semantic reasoning operates at a coarser timescale than physical interaction, while episode-level failures provide limited guidance on which system component should be revised.
A vision-language-action (VLA) policy can finish a manipulation task while knocking over objects unrelated to it, so task success alone does not show that the policy is safe to deploy in clutter. We study how to keep a pretrained VLA policy clear of such hazards at run time without retraining it, which requires guarding more of the arm than the end effector, following the hazard as it moves, and sharing onboard compute with the policy.
Echolocating bats can navigate dark and cluttered spaces using echolocation. Over a decade ago, BatSLAM showed that a robot with a biomimetic binaural sonar can build a topological map of the environment, by recognizing places from the received acoustic signals.
Robot navigation in dynamic, human-centered environments requires socially-compliant decisions grounded in robust scene understanding. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit promising capabilities such as object recognition, common-sense reasoning, and contextual understanding, capabilities that align with the nuanced requirements of social robot navigation.
Vision-language-action (VLA) models generalize broadly across robotic manipulation tasks, but complex environments require balancing task success with unintended contact. Runtime shields can correct individual actions, but they leave the underlying policy unchanged, so repeated disagreements may create a persistent policy-shield mismatch that blocks task progress.
We present Game-Guided Skill Discovery (GGSD), a framework that uses self-play in games to discover motor skills that are directly playable by humans. Playable skills provide a compact abstraction for controlling embodied agents through a small set of learned behaviors rather than low-level actions.
The task of 3D assembly requires translating an understanding of parts and their relationships into precise spatial arrangements. Can pretrained general-purpose agents assemble objects through visual interaction without additional assembly-specific fine-tuning?
Robot brain models integrate vision, language, and robot state to generate actions for complex manipulation tasks. Most predict fixed-length action chunks that may span multiple task phases.
This preprint introduces NEUPRO, a neuro-symbolic safety system that learns reusable visual safety predicates from human-written symbolic rules through a differentiable graph reasoner. On the REASON real-robot benchmark it reaches 92% mean safety-classification accuracy across seven tasks versus 55% for Qwen3.5 and 44% for DeepSeek-VL2, and it can explain violations in first-order logic. The result matters because it offers a path to interpretable, transferable safety constraints instead of opaque per-task cost functions.
Mastering robot manipulation skills via reinforcement learning (RL) remains largely sample-inefficient. The most common RL algorithms rely on random action sampling to discover new strategies, resulting in agents that allocate most of their training budget to motions in free space, away from the contacts from which manipulation skills emerge.
World action models (WAMs) are large embodied policies that jointly predict future video and the actions to execute, emitting a fixed-length action chunk per inference call. Such a policy allocates its computational budget uniformly in time, unable to execute for longer over free-space motion or to spend more inference on contact-rich manipulation, which limits the throughput a WAM can reach when served in the cloud.
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) aims to find collision-free paths for multiple agents in a shared environment. Classical MAPF assumes that all static obstacles are known in advance, but real-world environments can change unexpectedly due to fallen objects, spills, or other local disturbances.
Open concrete canals play a vital role in water transportation, serving as primary water infrastructure for millions of people across the Phoenix, Arizona, metro area. Over time, the concrete canals can experience a range of issues, including canal lining deformation, cracked concrete, and sediment buildup on the canal floor.
DiffWAM is a preprint that introduces a UAV navigation world-action model. It recovers camera trajectories directly from the predictive features of a frozen video model, avoiding future-video decoding and multi-frame geometric reconstruction at deployment. The paper reports a trajectory RMSE of 0.3492 m and adds FastDreamer, an execution system that overlaps computation with flight for continuous UAV control.
Vision-language-action (VLA) models can exceed 90% success on in-distribution tasks and withstand nuisance changes that preserve the required action, yet fail under counterfactual changes that demand a different action. Aggregate robustness scores can therefore conceal a more specific failure, in which a policy responds to both language and vision yet does not combine them to select the action the task requires.
Papers come from arXiv robotics feeds. Where our summary is not written yet, you see the opening lines of the abstract.