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Robotics — AI news & research

Embodied AI — robots, drones, self-driving systems and real-world manipulation. Updated continuously from 20+ curated sources.

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arxiv · Robotics

PAC-MAN: Perception-Aware CBF-RL for Whole-Body Safety in Humanoid Dodgeball

We present PAC-MAN, a perception-aware CBF-RL framework that couples control-barrier safety with deployment-realistic onboard sensing for whole-body humanoid dodgeball. The deployed policy sees the ball only as segmenta…

hn · Robotics

Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

hn · Robotics

Mbodi AI (YC P25) Is Hiring Robotics/Research Engineers

arxiv · Robotics

DLAM: Distributional Latent Actions with Temporal Constraints

Vision-language-action (VLA) models remain constrained by scarce action-labeled robot data, whereas action-free videos offer abundant observations of physical change. Latent action models can extract such priors, but re…

hn · Robotics

Transformer Transformer: A Unified Model for Motion-Conditioned Robot Co-Design

arxiv · Robotics

$π\mathbf{R}^2$: Reactive Real-time Flow Policies

Generalist manipulation policies increasingly take the form of action-chunking flow policies built on large pretrained backbones. Such chunks run open-loop, so the policy cannot react to sensory input arriving mid-execu…

arxiv · Robotics

Physics-Aware End-to-End Deep Reinforcement Learning for Quadcopter Control with Actuator Dynamics

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), particularly quadcopters, present unique challenges for autonomous control due to their underactuated dynamics: only four available control inputs must govern six degrees of freedom. Thi…

arxiv · Robotics

Data Pyramid for Embodied Manipulation

Multimodal foundation models learned to see and to speak by consuming the whole internet. Embodied agents admit no such shortcut, since they require data that couple observations with physical states and actions. These…

arxiv · Robotics

Hierarchical Soft Actor-Critic for Sparse-Reward Long-Horizon Reinforcement Learning

Exploration in sparse-reward long-horizon tasks poses significant challenges for reinforcement learning. To address these challenges, we propose a two-level Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) framework. The first…

arxiv · Robotics

LabRobFail: A Benchmark for Robotic Failure Analysis in Chemical Self-driving Laboratories

The deployment of embodied agents in self-driving laboratories could accelerate scientific discovery, yet their reliability is constrained by the irreversible and safety-critical nature of chemical experiments. Progress…

hf · Robotics

NVIDIA Cosmos-H-Dreams: Bringing Real-Time Generative Simulation to Surgical Robotics

arxiv · Robotics

Robot-Factored World Models via Robot Rendering

Action-conditioned video world models predict future observations from an initial observation and an action signal. In robotics, actions influence future observations through two distinct processes: they are first reali…

arxiv · Robotics

Robot Learning to Communicate through Projected Visual Abstractions

Humans routinely communicate through abstractions of their bodies, including shadows, silhouettes, and reflections. Yet robots remain largely confined to expressing themselves through their physical morphology. Enabling…

arxiv · Robotics

Scale Up Strategically: Learning Compositional Generalization via Bias-Aware Evaluation and Data Collection for Robotic Manipulation

Compositional generalization is essential for robot to follow diverse instructions. However, pretrained policies are known to take shortcuts, deferring to salient cues rather than grounding language. We introduce a diag…

arxiv · Robotics

Towards Miniature Humanoid Tele-Loco-Manipulation Using Virtual Reality and Reinforcement Learning

Full-sized humanoid robot capabilities have grown exponentially in recent years, aiming towards general-purpose deployment in human environments. A popular control method used by manufacturers utilizes Virtual Reality f…

arxiv · Robotics

Closing the Lab-to-Store Gap: A Data-Efficient Post-Training and Experience-Driven Learning VLA Framework for Retail Humanoids

Closing the gap between benchmark performance and reliable real-world operation remains a central challenge for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) humanoid robots, which must handle execution errors, distribution shifts, and…

tc · Robotics

Travis Kalanick’s robotics company raises $1.7B, led by a16z

Uber is also investing in Travis Kalanick's company Atoms, which has made gauzy claims about using industrial AI to modernize the world.

arxiv · Robotics

From Distances to Trajectories: Real-Time Signed Distance Function Mapping and Distance-Accelerated Motion Planning for UAVs

Autonomous flight in cluttered environments requires a robot to build a geometric map of its surroundings and plan safe, dynamically feasible trajectories, all onboard and in real time. Conventional approaches treat map…

arxiv · Robotics

Computing on the Fly: Navigating a Vision for the Future of Drone Computing

The report envisions a decade in which drones move goods, medical supplies, and information at a scale comparable to national infrastructure investments like highways and the electric grid. Potential applications includ…

arxiv · Robotics

Cognitive Dual-Process Planning for Autonomous Driving with Structured Scene Knowledge and Verifiable Reasoning-Action Consistency

High-level planning for autonomous driving is a knowledge-intensive engineering decision task that requires accurate scene understanding, timely inference, and internally consistent action selection. Vision-language mod…

arxiv · Robotics

Agentic Real2Sim: Physics-based World Modeling with Vision-Language Agents

Real-to-sim conversion for robotic interaction with objects remains labor-intensive because it requires more than visual reconstruction: a streamlined real2sim process must recover scene geometries and object states, in…

hf · Robotics

Grabette: an open system to record robot-manipulation data

arxiv · Robotics

Patch Policy: Efficient Embodied Control via Dense Visual Representations

Pretrained dense visual features from Vision Transformers (ViTs) are powerful yet have been underutilized in robot learning. Modern robot policies either compress each observation into a single global token, or rely on…

arxiv · Robotics

Learning Adaptive Safety Margins for Visual Navigation

Robots in cluttered indoor spaces often fail not because they cannot generate collision-free paths, but because a fixed safety margin is mis-calibrated: conservative margins cause detours and timeouts, while permissive…

arxiv · Robotics

Asynchronous Multimodal Diffusion Policy Composition via Latency-Aware Guidance Fusion

Diffusion policies have shown strong potential for robotic imitation learning, and recent extensions incorporate additional modalities to improve manipulation performance. However, these modalities often differ not only…

hn · Robotics

Xiaomi-Robotics-1

arxiv · Robotics

VTLoc: Learning-based Tactile Contact Localization in Visual Point Clouds

Vision and touch are complementary modalities essential for robotic perception and manipulation. While vision provides global object context, touch offers precise local information at contact points. Integrating these m…

tc · Robotics

Agility Robotics plants its flag in Tesla’s backyard

Agility is opening a new training center for its Digit robots in Fremont, California.

arxiv · Robotics

RoboTTT: Context Scaling for Robot Policies

Recent robot foundation models operate with single-step or short-history visuomotor context. We introduce Test-Time-Training Robot Policies (RoboTTT), a robot model and training recipe that scale visuomotor context to 8…

arxiv · Robotics

Scaling Behavior Foundation Model for Humanoid Robots

Humanoid control requires natural whole-body coordination, precise real-time responses to control signals, and robust generalization across diverse environmental contexts, making it a cornerstone for generalist embodied…

arxiv · Robotics

FlowWAM: Optical Flow as a Unified Action Representation for World Action Models

World Action Models (WAMs) are able to leverage pretrained video generators for both world modeling and action prediction. However, directly leveraging such video generators for control raises a new challenge: how to re…

arxiv · Robotics

UR-VC: Unsupervised Robotic Value Correction for Time-Derived Progress Proxies

Modern robot learning systems increasingly rely on dense progress or value signals to evaluate intermediate states, guide policy learning, and detect task completion, making the quality of these signals critical. Since…

arxiv · Robotics

Unveiling Complex Collective Behaviors from Simple Rewards

Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) holds great potential for robot swarms, but the black-box nature of neural policies complicates strategic analysis, limiting multi-robot applications. Furthermore, complex swarm…

arxiv · Robotics

A Minimalist Retargeting-Guided Reinforcement Learning Recipe for Dexterous Manipulation

Recent work in humanoid whole-body control has found success with a simple recipe: retarget human motion to robot kinematic references, then train policies via reinforcement learning (RL) to track them. But how does thi…

arxiv · Robotics

3D Scene Graph Prediction: Generating Hierarchical Models from Partially Observed Environments

Generating realistic 3D indoor scenes is an area of growing interest in computer vision and robotics. Existing methods, often motivated by applications such as interior design, generally focus on object layout generatio…

arxiv · Robotics

PAC-ACT: Post-training Actor-Critic for Action Chunking Transformers

Precision industrial contact manipulation requires reliable robot policies under pose perturbations and contact-force constraints. Vision-language-action models offer broad generalization but often introduce high infere…

arxiv · Robotics

Dual Latent Memory in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation

Mainstream Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predict actions primarily from the current observation under a Markovian assumption, thus struggling with long-horizon, temporally dependent tasks. Existing memory-augmente…

analytics · Robotics

Top Tech News Today | OpenAI Faces Legal Heat, Pixel 11 Confirmed, Honor Robot Phone, Claude Fable 5, AI Adoption Slows

hn · Robotics

Mistral's Robostral Navigate: a state of the art robotics navigation model

arxiv · Robotics

Lift3D-VLA: Lifting VLA Models to 3D Geometry and Dynamics-Aware Manipulation

Recently, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization across diverse tasks. However, effective robotic manipulation in physical environments fundamentally requires geometric understanding…

arxiv · Robotics

WristMimic: Full-Body Humanoid Control with Wrist-Guided Manipulation

Retargeting human object interaction demonstrations to physics based simulation requires reproducing not only body motion but also the object motion and contacts that make manipulation succeed. However, position only ha…

arxiv · Robotics

Learning to Throw Objects Safely in Multi-Obstacle Environments

Robotic throwing enables fast and efficient object placement beyond the robot's immediate workspace, but reliable throwing in cluttered environments remains underexplored. Existing approaches, such as TossingBot, learn…

arxiv · Robotics

Training-Free Acceleration for Vision-Language-Action Models with Action Caching and Refinement

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising approach for generalizable robotic manipulations. In particular, flow matching-based VLA models have shown remarkable success due to their capability to ge…

arxiv · Robotics

Responsible Personalisation: The Double-Edged Sword of Personalisation in Human-Robot Interaction

While personalisation is becoming a defining capability in human-robot interaction (HRI), the existing literature on responsible personalisation remains fragmented, offering isolated accounts of ethical risks without a…

arxiv · Robotics

OrchardBench: A Physically-Grounded, GPU-Parallel Apple-Orchard Simulation Benchmark for Agricultural Robotics

Robotic tree-fruit harvesting is a flagship problem for agricultural automation, but progress is bottlenecked by the cost and irreproducibility of field experiments: an orchard is available only weeks a year, every tree…

arxiv · Robotics

Deform360: A Massive Multi-view Visuotactile Dataset for Deformable World Models

Predicting object dynamics (i.e., world modeling) is a fundamental challenge for robotic manipulation, and modeling deformable objects presents a particularly difficult case due to their high-dimensional state spaces an…

arxiv · Robotics

Cortex: A Bidirectionally Aligned Embodied Agent Framework for Long-horizon Manipulation

While recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show promise toward generalist manipulation policies, they struggle with long-horizon tasks due to their Markovian nature-relying solely on current observations. Hierarch…

arxiv · Robotics

GaP: A Graph-as-Policy Multi-Agent Self-Learning Harness For Variational Automation Tasks

For robots to work reliably in commercial and industrial applications, can recent advances in agentic coding systems combine interpretable robot programming with the open-world adaptability of model-free policies? We fo…

analytics · Robotics

Top Tech News Today | Claude AI Revives Classic Game, Godrej on AI Future, Humanoid Robot IPO, Android Halo, AI Chip Stocks

analytics · Robotics

Hyundai Turns Global Football Spotlight into a Robotics Showcase

hn · Robotics

Heuristics for lab robotics, and where its future may go

arxiv · Robotics

Embodied.cpp: A Portable Inference Runtime of Embodied AI Models on Heterogeneous Robots

Embodied AI models now span vision-language-action (VLA) models and world-action models (WAMs), but practical deployment remains fragmented across model-specific Python stacks, backend assumptions, and robot-side glue c…

arxiv · Robotics

Controllable Sim Agents with Behavior Latents

Realistic traffic simulation requires agents that imitate logged behavior and can also be steered along interpretable axes. Such controllability enables engineers to isolate variables, reproduce specific edge cases, and…

arxiv · Robotics

Learning to Move Before Learning to Do: Task-Agnostic pretraining for VLAs

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are fundamentally bottlenecked by the scarcity of expert demonstrations -- triplets of observations, instructions, and actions that are costly to collect at scale. We argue that this…

arxiv · Robotics

FurnitureVLA: Learning Long-Horizon Bimanual Furniture Assembly with Vision-Language-Action Model

Current work on robot furniture assembly mostly focuses on toy-scale settings or single-arm manipulation. We introduce FurnitureVLA, the first systematic study of real-scale bimanual furniture assembly using Vision-Lang…

arxiv · Robotics

Structured 4D Latent Predictive Model for Robot Planning

Video predictive models are emerging as a powerful paradigm in robotics, offering a promising path toward task generalization, long-horizon planning, and flexible decision-making. However, prevailing approaches often op…

hn · Robotics

Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries

https://runtimewire.com/article/weave-robotics-isaac-1-home-...

hn · Robotics

Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with fall 2026 deliveries

arxiv · Robotics

Freeform Preference Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Reward design remains a central bottleneck for autonomous robot policy improvement, especially in long-horizon manipulation tasks where sparse success labels provide too little signal and binary preferences collapse man…

arxiv · Robotics

VLK: Learning Humanoid Loco-Manipulation from Synthetic Interactions in Reconstructed Scenes

Perception-based humanoid loco-manipulation requires connecting egocentric observations and task instructions to whole-body motion. Learning this mapping requires synchronized egocentric images, language commands, and r…

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