New robotics and physical-AI papers, with what each one means for the industry.
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.
We focus on legible robot motion generation in social navigation settings. Legibility in human-robot interaction (HRI) is often described as the property of robot motion that enables an observer to confidently infer the robot's intent.
Voluntary movements have long been hypothesised to be comprised of discrete primitives called submovements, as a descriptive model of human motor behaviour. However, existing methods scale poorly, and no principled method exists to determine whether a decomposition is informative.
Egocentric human data provides a scalable source of experience for robot learning, but varies substantially in human-robot alignment, behavioral coverage, and available supervision. Existing work shows favorable scaling with increasing human data, but it remains unclear which data properties drive downstream robot gains and how to use such data throughout the training pipeline.
Continuum robots are well suited for gentle manipulation because of their inherent compliance and ability to adapt to complex environments. However, their continuously deformable structure makes accurate configuration estimation challenging, particularly when external vision systems are unavailable or obstructed.
Video generation models (VGMs) offer strong spatiotemporal priors for embodied observation--action modeling. However, joint-space action vectors lack explicit image-space structure and vary in dimensionality and semantics across embodiments, making it challenging to directly leverage the rich spatiotemporal priors of VGMs.
This preprint introduces a topology optimization method for designing multi-directional soft pneumatic actuators using Darcy-law pressure modeling and a robust three-field formulation. Optimized chambers are assembled into a simulated three-arm gripper; Abaqus tests at 0.15 MPa show single-arm tip displacements up to about 15.8 mm, with bending directions tracking the vector sum of activated chamber pressures. If experimentally validated, it could replace heuristic soft actuator design with systematic multi-axis bending for soft grippers.
Marine litter is a growing threat to the underwater ecosystem, driving demand for autonomous survey methods that can locate debris efficiently over large areas. Existing survey methods typically follow predefined paths or operate with a single sensing modality, typically a camera (with image quality suffering in poor-visibility conditions) or sonar (usually noisy and low-resolution).
World-action models (WAMs) augment robot policies with action-conditioned environment dynamics, yet existing approaches largely rely on future observation reconstruction or generic latent prediction and lack structured, control-oriented world representations tightly coupled with action generation. We introduce Magic-W0, a world-action foundation model that jointly models structured physical state evolution and continuous actions.
This preprint introduces GroundingPI, a 4B grounding foundation model that predicts object points and boxes as quantized token coordinates rather than using a general-purpose vision-language backbone. Across 34 grounding benchmarks it averages 73.68%, ahead of a larger GPT-6 Astra baseline at 71.54%, and as a visual backbone it improves downstream manipulation (RoboTwin 2.0, RoboCasa-GR1) and autonomous driving (nuScenes L2 0.296 m). The result matters because it argues grounding is a distinct perceptual layer that can make embodied foundation models more precise.
This preprint introduces a framework for scene-scale aerial manipulation on an articulated uncrewed aerial manipulator, combining synthetic whole-body VLA training, measured-progress-aligned trajectory realization, and scene-graph-guided mission composition. In simulation, local skills achieve 39/60 successes under oracle handoff, and full multi-site missions achieve 21/50 (42.0%), while a monolithic whole-task VLA baseline achieves 0/50. Physical trials validate representative tasks without platform demonstrations, reducing risk and data cost for aerial manipulation.
We present PrefPI (Preference-Guided Policy Iteration), an iterative framework for steering pretrained generative robot policies using only relative preferences over self-generated trajectories. Unlike prior preference-learning methods that primarily sharpen modes already represented by the policy, we study steering beyond the initial effective support, where desired behaviors are rarely or never observed under the initial policy.
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) requires embodied agents to generate actions based on instructions and observations. General-purpose multimodal agents offer a promising basis for this task, but selecting plausible local actions does not ensure that execution remains consistent with the intended route, particularly in long-horizon tasks.
This preprint introduces MVP-SLAM, an online visual-inertial SLAM system for construction sites that uses an as-planned floor plan to correct drift using only two back-to-back fisheye cameras and an IMU. It ranked 2nd of 22 teams in the Localization task of the Hilti–Trimble SLAM Challenge 2026 with 0.29 m mean RMSE, and 5th of 62 teams in SLAM with 0.24 m, the best among systems that integrate floor plans online. The work matters because it enables drift-bounded, plan-aligned localization during active site traversal without depth sensors.
This preprint presents an 8×8 array of 64 three-degree-of-freedom delta robots coupled by a stretchable membrane, creating a continuous surface that can manipulate objects both larger and smaller than the 43.3 mm actuator spacing. On real hardware, a learned policy transferred from simulation and succeeded on 76% of 50 trials across objects from 30 to 90 mm, while local hand-designed primitives routed 15 mm cubes at 7.6 mm/s. The work matters because it removes the centre-to-centre spacing lower bound on object size for distributed manipulation.
Cable-suspended aerial manipulation offers a lightweight architecture for cooperative transportation and physical interaction, yet the passive mechanical response perceived at the load remains insufficiently understood and systematically exploited. This work interprets aerial vehicles as movable compliant anchors and develops a gravity-aware quasi-static theory for predicting and shaping the passive Cartesian stiffness of a suspended load.
This preprint introduces vision-based pose-aware state estimators for neighboring multirotor UAVs, integrating visual tilt measurements to infer thrust direction, including a new linear thrust-constrained Kalman filter. Across two real-world and one simulated dataset, pose-aware methods cut mean velocity and acceleration errors by 40% and 57% versus position-only filters, remove a ~300 ms acceleration delay, and enable simulated follower tracking of >2 g lateral maneuvers where position-only estimation fails. This matters for collision avoidance and coordination in agile multi-UAV operations.
Robot AI models plan a short burst of movements at a time, and how many of those moves the robot carries out before it looks again is usually fixed by hand. This preprint from Tsinghua University, BAAI and partners adds a plug-in that picks that number while the robot works, raising success rates of existing Physical Intelligence and NVIDIA models in simulation and on a real two-arm robot without retraining them.
Papers come from arXiv robotics feeds. Where our summary is not written yet, you see the opening lines of the abstract.