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cs.RO: explore 673 source-linked works published from 2023 to 2026, with original documents and citations.

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Includes records with this source-supplied label or an explicit phrase match in their metadata. Matches indicate a mention, not proof that a paper uses a method or tests a material. Source versions are consolidated by DOI.

Sources: arxiv. Collection updated 2026-09-16. Counts describe this index, not the complete source archives.

Long-Horizon Consistent and Interaction-Aware World Models for Multi-Style End-to-End Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving has increasingly adopted world model-based reinforcement learning frameworks to improve learning efficiency through \textit{imagined rollouts}. However, existing world models suffer from three key limitations: temporal inconsistency in long-horizon imagined rollouts, inadequate modeling of ego-environment interactions, and limited adaptability to diverse driving styles. To address these challenges, we propose \textit{StyleDrive}, a world-model-based learning framework that jointly enforces long-horizon consistency, explicitly disentangles interactive traffic states, and supports multi-style policy optimization within a unified learning paradigm. First, we introduce a temporal consistency regularization that integrates historical latent states through gated cross-attention, stabilizing long-horizon imagined rollouts and mitigating error accumulation. Second, we design an explicit state disentanglement module that separates ego-relevant from ego-irrelevant interactive states, enabling more interpretable and efficient decision-making in complex traffic scenarios. Third, we enable multi-style driving behaviors through Group Relative Policy Optimization, which replaces per-step reward optimization with trajectory-wise relative advantages, reducing reward variance and supporting diverse driving styles without retraining. We evaluate StyleDrive on the Bench2Drive closed-loop driving benchmark, achieving a driving score of 88.44 (+17.08 over the previous best world model-based method) and a success rate of 66.82 (+16.58). Furthermore, we deploy StyleDrive on a real automated guided vehicle platform and demonstrate promising sim-to-real transfer capability in dynamic driving scenarios.

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Establishing a Dynamic Multimodal HRI Dataset for Engagement Analysis with a Humanoid Robot

This paper presents an experimental design for constructing a multimodal dataset to analyze user engagement in human-robot interaction (HRI). Prior studies have mainly relied on observable behavioral cues, with limited frameworks integrating physiological signals. We therefore propose a structured data-collection protocol to build a multimodal dataset that includes wearable physiological signals, behavioral data, and self-report measures under different levels of task complexity defined in this experiment.

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R2S-Eval: Robot Evaluation with Real-to-Sim Calibration via Vision-Language Models

Evaluating robot manipulation policies is becoming increasingly important as generalist models, particularly vision-language-action (VLA) models, are deployed on physical robots. However, conventional real-world evaluation remains labor-intensive, unstable, and insufficiently informative. It requires repeated hardware trials, manual scene resets, and continuous operator monitoring, may produce different policy rankings across repeated evaluations, and primarily relies on success-rate metrics that provide limited information about execution quality. In contrast, humans assess robot performance by observing and comparing complete behaviors rather than relying solely on binary success outcomes. To this end, we propose R2S-Eval, an evaluation pipeline that combines real-to-sim calibration with vision-language model (VLM) preference evaluation. The real-to-sim component efficiently generates rollout videos in a simulator calibrated to the real-world evaluation setting, thereby reducing the need for repeated hardware trials. The VLM evaluator assesses the execution quality of rollout videos and produces pairwise preferences, which are subsequently aggregated into policy rankings. We further introduce a protocol to assess whether the proposed evaluation pipeline yields validated policy conclusions while mitigating the key challenges of conventional real-world evaluation. Experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that R2S-Eval produces reliable and stable policy conclusions, achieves agreement with human preferences, substantially reduces repeated hardware-operation effort, and reveals behavior-quality differences that are not captured by binary success labels. In general, R2S-Eval advances robot evaluation from manual success counting toward automated, statistically stable, and quality-aware evaluation of robot behavior. Project page: https://r2s-eval.github.io.

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Programming and execution of skill-based human-robot-crane collaborative tasks

Highly varying production sets increasing challenges for robotic manufacturing and indoor logistics. New capabilities for agility, flexibility, and robustness are needed. Robot skills, integrating motions, tool operations, and sensor perceptions consistently provide an execution mechanism for a versatile set of tasks with varying parameters. In this paper, easy-to-use CAD-model based programming and execution system for parametrized skills and skill monitors is showcased. The execution control structure is dynamic and parametrized, based on a modified Behavior Tree, where only event based communication is used. A human-robot-crane collaborative skill is shown as a test example, where a human instructs an overhead crane and a manipulator in inserting a heavy object supported by the crane, and guided by the manipulator, into the goal.

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BRIDGE: An Open-Source Humanoid Platform via Morphology-Control Co-Design for Physical AI

Developing humanoid robots capable of leveraging human behavioral data is essential for general-purpose embodiment, yet conventional development remains bottlenecked by a decoupled paradigm that isolates hardware design from whole-body control. This approach leads to suboptimal systems that compromise human-like fluidity and agility. To bridge this gap, we introduce a data-driven morphology-control co-design framework that optimizes humanoid morphology for human-like movement. To quantify morphological fidelity, we also introduce a novel metric that jointly considers kinematic retargeting fidelity to human motion and dynamic tracking performance. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across all metrics compared to baseline humanoids (Bumi, K1, and Toddlerbot). Finally, we realize this design in Bridge, an open-source, 88cm-tall humanoid platform released alongside its control policy. We demonstrate that Bridge captures human motion data with superior fidelity, exhibiting exceptional performance across foundational locomotion, robust balance, and highly dynamic maneuvers. Videos and open-source materials: https://sites.google.com/view/bridgerobot.

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TRaIL-Odom: Tightly Coupled Continuous Time Radar-IMU-LiDAR Odometry with Adaptive Doppler Weighting

Existing radar-LiDAR fusion methods rely on fixed residual weights, even though the informativeness of radar Doppler and LiDAR geometry is scan- and direction-dependent, leading to uniform radar weighting that misallocates Doppler information across translational directions. To address this limitation, we propose two degeneracy-aware Doppler reweighting modules within a tightly coupled Radar-IMU-LiDAR odometry framework: per-point radar reweighting and scan-wise radar gain scheduling. Since geometric degeneracy is directional, we first identify weak translational directions from the LiDAR geometry and reweight individual radar Doppler constraints based on their alignment with the weak subspace. We further adjust the overall radar contribution using LiDAR geometric anisotropy such that radar is emphasized when LiDAR observability is poor and suppressed when LiDAR constraints are already reliable. Across 13 evaluated sequences, TRaIL-Odom achieves state-of-the-art overall performance, with clear advantages in geometrically degenerate scenes. In ablation experiments on three degenerate sequences, combining the two adaptive weighting modules reduces RMSE ATE and RTE by 86.0% and 78.5% relative to the fixed-weight baseline. We make our code and an accompanying dataset publicly available at https://github.com/ChiyunNoh/TRaIL-Odom.

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Toward Physically Grounded JEPA World Models for Goal-Conditioned Robotic Planning

Action-conditioned JEPA world models enable planning toward visually specified goals without reconstructing future pixels, yet latent prediction alone does not explicitly encourage the learned representations to retain information relevant to robotic control. We introduce an end-to-end JEPA world model that augments latent prediction with inverse dynamics (IDM) and state alignment (SA). While inverse dynamics discourages latent collapse and makes latent transitions informative of the actions that produced them, state alignment grounds consecutive representations in their associated physical configuration and motion. Across four benchmark tasks, our model attains the highest success rates on TwoRoom (100%), PushT (98%), and OGBench-Cube (87%), while performing comparably to LeWorldModel on Reacher. Our ablation further shows that adding state alignment consistently improves planning success over IDM alone across all four tasks. Although LeWorldModel, our primary baseline, attains higher average straightening on OGBench-Cube, transition-subspace analysis shows that its transition energy is concentrated in a substantially lower-dimensional subspace. Our state-aligned model exhibits a higher effective transition dimension than LeWorldModel and improves planning over IDM alone, supporting state alignment as an effective complement to inverse dynamics for robotic planning.

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Scaling Bimanual Household Manipulation from 1,500 hours of Demonstrations to On-Policy Corrections

Learning generalist policies for robust bimanual manipulation is bottlenecked by the scarcity of high quality large scale human demonstration data. In this work, we release 1,500 hours of diverse bimanual manipulation demonstrations covering everyday household tasks, and use this comprehensive corpus to train XR-2, a powerful vision-language-action (VLA) model. Enabled by a purpose built high throughput data pipeline and a carefully designed multi stage training paradigm, XR-2 attains strong manipulation performance in our systematic experiments while retaining favorable training efficiency and high data utilization. We further study two critical scaling axes: varying the amount of expert demonstration data, and post training on DAgger correction data from real time human interventions. In both settings, task success rate improves steadily over the data ranges we probe, exhibiting a clear consistent scaling trend at our current data scale. These results validate both the learning capacity of XR-2 and the promising scaling properties of the released dataset, which we open source to support reproducible research on bimanual robot manipulation learning.

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SV-WAM: An Efficient Surround-View World-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

World models (WMs) have demonstrated strong potential for end-to-end autonomous driving by learning predictive representations of future scene dynamics. However, generating future videos during inference introduces substantial computational overhead, leading many recent driving WMs to adopt a single front camera as input for efficient deployment. This design restricts spatial coverage in safety-critical maneuvers such as lane changes, merges, and turns. To address this limitation, we propose SV-WAM, a surround-view world-action model (WAM) that preserves full six-camera observations while maintaining efficient inference. SV-WAM leverages future-video prediction as dense training supervision for action learning within a shared generative model, rather than as an inference-time output. At the core of this design is an action-centered causal mask that prevents action tokens from attending to future-video tokens during joint action-video denoising. Consequently, the video branch can be discarded at deployment, enabling efficient action-only planning. Furthermore, we introduce a differentiable drivable-area compliance regularizer that penalizes vehicle-footprint corners approaching or crossing drivable boundaries, improving planning safety and boundary awareness. Extensive experiments on the closed-loop NAVSIMv2 benchmark and the open-loop nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that SV-WAM achieves state-of-the-art planning performance with low inference latency and competitive zero-shot transfer capability.

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FailBench: How Reliable are VLMs at Judging Robot Task Success?

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used to evaluate robot manipulation outcomes, but existing benchmarks offer limited evidence of cross-domain generalization. We introduce FailBench, a benchmark for robot failure detection comprising 2,197 manipulation attempts across 14 public sources (12 real-world, 2 simulated). In FailBench, 75% of failures occur naturally, and six real-world sources come from non-failure-detection datasets. Evaluating 13 VLM-based detectors, we find the best model achieves only 0.77 mean balanced accuracy. Notably, models fine-tuned for failure detection consistently underperform general-purpose VLMs and their own pretrained baselines. Performance depends heavily on required visual evidence: models approach saturation when outcomes depend on observable object motion, but degrade to near-chance (<0.60 balanced accuracy) on contact-intensive assembly tasks. Error analysis reveals a systematic bias toward predicting success under ambiguous evidence, which persists even with increased reasoning effort. Finally, we show that input-level intervention--spatially localizing and cropping outcome-relevant regions--improves the top detector by 2.4 percentage points without extra training.

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QLAUN: A Research-Oriented, Robust, Agile, Modular, and Affordable Torque-Controlled Quadruped Robot

QLAUN Bot (Quad-Legged Adaptive Unmanned Navigator Robot) is a torque-controlled quadruped robot that is research-oriented, cost-effective, and aimed at achieving simultaneous robustness and agility while being completely 3D-printed. It is a quadruped robot that is aimed at empowering robotics research at universities and research institutes in Lebanon and the MENA region. Using a novel electronics-free leg design strategy, we present a modular robot with interchangeable and easily replaceable legs. The 15 kg robot possesses 12 DoF (Degrees-of-Freedom) with three per leg, each paired with a completely 3D-printed Quasi-Direct Drive (QDD) actuator that consists of a brushless DC motor and a low-ratio gearbox transmission that is connected to a belt transmission system for significantly increasing the torque outputs at the joints. We present legs that have decoupled hip and knee actuators to improve the overall modularity of the robot. QLAUN is almost completely 3D-printed using polylactic acid (PLA) and assembled using off-the-shelf parts to create a robust, agile, and affordable robot for legged robot locomotion research. The legs possess joints with wide ranges of motion, including a continuous hip flexion-extension joint. A compliant foot, printed using TPU-95A is also implemented for alleviating hard impacts and handling terrain uncertainties. This extended abstract aims to introduce QLAUN, a novel platform for robotics research, emphasizing the design concepts and principles that underpin its development to the academic and research communities in the field of robotics.

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Local Path Planning and Obstacle Avoidance for an Omnicopter Platform

Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) increasingly operate in cluttered environments where global planners such as RRT* are not directly deployable at control rates. This paper presents a real-time local planning and obstacle avoidance module for an omnidirectional multirotor (omnicopter) by extending the Dynamic Window Approach to six degrees of freedom (6D-DWA). Our method achieves real-time feasibility through (i) local-map voxelisation, (ii) a compact sphere-based approximation of the vehicle geometry, and (iii) adaptive velocity sampling in the 6D search space. To improve reactivity to unknown obstacles, we introduce a context-aware "Agile Mode" that adjusts scoring weights online to trade-off between goal progress, clearance, and heading/facing constraints during evasive manoeuvres. We evaluate our approach in simulation across computational stress tests, dense-waypoint path tracking, and static/unknown obstacle scenarios. Our planner runs consistently within a 0.2s control loop, tracks waypoint-dense global paths with < 0.1m average cross-track error and 13deg average heading error, and avoids collisions in static environments. For unknown obstacle avoidance, Agile Mode achieves 79.3% success for an off-centre obstacle and 41.4% for a centred obstacle, highlighting both the effectiveness of adaptive weighting and remaining limitations in highly constrained geometries.

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Understanding Autonomous Driving Datasets by Describing Differences between Image Subsets in Natural Language

Understanding the composition of large-scale autonomous driving datasets is essential for safety, robustness, and reliable operation across domains. For example, domain shift between locations could lead to the operating environment being misaligned with the training data, resulting in potentially dangerous performance degradation. Yet, existing data analysis pipelines largely rely on metadata, predefined labels, or manual inspection, which provide limited semantic insight or do not scale. This paper studies set difference captioning: given two subsets of images, the goal is to produce a natural-language hypothesis describing differences between the target and reference set. Building on a two-stage formulation, we adapt the method to autonomous driving by focusing on object-centric patches derived from object detection, which simplifies aggregation and enables attribution of differences to specific object instances or categories. To evaluate this setting in-domain, we introduce a new benchmark, AD-Diff Bench. Low-concentration experiments assess the suitability of set-difference-captioning approaches to sparse, real-world differences. We restrict our experiments to open-weight models to support reproducibility and ease of deployment. The proposed benchmark and analysis provide a step towards practical, human-interpretable dataset introspection for autonomous driving datasets. Our implementation and benchmark dataset are available at https://github.com/KIT-MRT/AD-Diff

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DropClick: Semi-Automated One-Click Segmentation for Agricultural Robotic Data

Labelling vision datasets, especially for segmentation tasks, is a laborious and costly process that stymies novel developments in agricultural robotics. In this paper, we present DropClick, a click-guided segmentation tool that simplifies the annotation process. Our system utilises single-click inputs on objects to generate pseudo-labels, which can replace manual annotations. DropClick stands out as it is a semi-automated approach and does not require a click for every object in the scene. It can therefore further reduce the required amount of user input drastically. We evaluate our method on two challenging agricultural robotic datasets, SB20 and BUP20 for plant and fruit segmentation, respectively. DropClick is first trained on a small subset of just 5 images from the original training data. This DropClick model can then be deployed as a one-click segmentation system and achieves comparable or higher performance than other one-click methods achieving an mIoU of 70.0 and 72.6 points, for SB20 and BUP20 respectively. DropClick then excels at maintaining high performance when clicks are not given (e.g. dropped); when 50% of the clicks are missing it still maintains an mIoU of 68.9 and 71.3 points, for SB20 and BUP20 respectively. We validate DropClick as a pseudo-labelling approach by taking its outputs to train a Mask2Former instance-based segmentation model in a semi-supervised manner. In this process, partially removing user input from DropClick yields similar high performance when compared to providing all clicks, at 70.1 vs 70.7 points AP50 for SB20 and no difference for BUP20 at 77.0 for both models; at the same time saving 46.3% of total input for SB20 and 31.9% for BUP20.

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WISE: World-model-guided Imagination Scheduling for Efficient Post-training of Vision-Language-Action Models

Post-training VLA policies typically rely on supervised fine-tuning with costly expert demonstrations or reinforcement learning with expensive and potentially unstable real-world exploration. World models offer a promising alternative by evaluating candidate behaviors through imagined futures, yet effective post-training requires more than accurate prediction: imagination must be scheduled where it is useful, bounded within reliable horizons, and translated into trustworthy policy supervision. In robotic manipulation, the value of imagination varies substantially across execution stages, while extended rollouts can accumulate prediction errors and introduce unreliable learning signals. We introduce WISE (World-model-guided Imagination Scheduling for Efficient Post-training of Vision-Language-Action Models), a unified framework that coordinates when and how world-model imagination is used during policy refinement. WISE selectively invokes imagination at interaction-relevant states, performs bounded multi-view rollouts, evaluates candidate futures using progress and completion signals, and uses their relative outcomes to refine actions generated from real interaction contexts. Extensive experiments with both $π_0$ and $π_{0.5}$ demonstrate consistent improvements across diverse manipulation tasks while reducing GPU computation time by approximately 80% compared with full imagination. Real-world evaluations further show substantial gains in robustness and generalization under diverse real-world distribution shifts.

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Predictive Zonotope Reduction: Precise Runtime Monitoring under Uncertainty

Robots operating in physical environments make control decisions based on uncertain sensor measurements, which can lead to unsafe or suboptimal actions. Runtime monitors that check their behavior against safety specifications must represent this uncertainty soundly. Zonotopes are a widely used representation, but continuously incorporating new measurements grows their order unboundedly, so monitors must periodically apply an over-approximating reduction. The choice of the reduction method substantially affects the zonotope's precision, yet existing approaches typically utilize a fixed method throughout the run, even though the optimal choice depends on the current state. This paper presents a Predictive Zonotope Reduction (PZR) approach, which frames reducer selection as an optimal control problem and solves it using beam-search model predictive control. Policy distillation into a small neural policy further provides substantially higher execution speed than model predictive control while maintaining improved performance, enabling uncertainty-aware runtime monitoring on resource-constrained real-time systems. We implement our approach in the RLola runtime monitoring framework and evaluate it on a 5-degree-of-freedom robotic arm simulated in MuJoCo, with sensor uncertainty modeled according to ISO 5725. Experiments on a Raspberry Pi 5 show that dynamic reduction significantly lowers false-positive rates in monitoring compared with static reduction strategies.

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Toward an~Integrated Cognitive--Ergonomic Architecture for~Human--Machine Interaction: Combining Cognitive Models with~Human Factors Ergonomics

This paper presents an integrated approach to modeling human competencies by combining the theoretical foundations of cognitive architectures with principles from Human Factors Ergonomics (HFE). Through a comparative analysis of established cognitive models-SOAR, ACT-R, LIDA, and COCOM-we synthesize a tailored architecture designed to address the complexities of human-machine interaction (HMI) in dynamic environments. By contextualizing this model within ergonomic frameworks, we elucidate the mechanisms underlying decision-making, skill acquisition, and adaptive behavior, bridging the gap between cognitive theory and applied system design. Our framework is empirically grounded in industrial robotics applications, where operator expertise, normative knowledge, and real-time feedback loops are critical. The proposed architecture not only enhances the cognitive alignment of HMI systems but also provides a scalable methodology for designing intelligent, human-centered interfaces in high-stakes environments. This work advances both the theoretical understanding of human competencies and the practical implementation of adaptive, ergonomically optimized systems.

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MINERVA: How Small Can a Manipulation Policy Be and Still Solve LIBERO?

Vision-language-action (VLA) models with billions of parameters now dominate the LIBERO manipulation benchmark, but the model capacity actually required by the benchmark remains unclear. We introduce MINERVA (MINimal Efficient Robotic Vision-Action policy), a family of deliberately compact visuomotor policies designed to measure this task-specific capacity floor. A 0.54M-parameter policy achieves 95.1% average success over 2,000 rollouts on the four standard LIBERO suites, only 2.4 points below the reported LeRobot $π_{0.5}$ result despite using 7,700$\times$ fewer parameters. Performance saturates near 1M parameters and collapses below 0.25M. Across broad architectural, training, and inference sweeps, only action-chunk length and vision capacity consistently exceed a $\pm$1-point training-seed band. Flow matching provides no detectable advantage over direct L1 regression across three seeds, while regression is up to 3.8$\times$ faster on GPU. A task-ID permutation probe shows that standard LIBERO instruction conditioning primarily selects among memorized tasks: changing only the task-ID mapping reduces success to near chance. The same recipe achieves 94.6% success across 89 LIBERO-90 tasks, while LIBERO-Plus perturbations reduce performance to 46--56%, with near-zero robustness to photometric shifts. The 0.54M policy replans every control step in 5--9 ms per chunk on a laptop CPU, 113$\times$ faster than SmolVLA and 1,400$\times$ faster than $π_{0.5}$, without a GPU. These results establish a first empirical estimate of LIBERO's task-specific capacity floor and motivate capacity-aware design and distillation for deployment-efficient robot policies.

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Compare source metadata on this page
WorkPublishedSource identifierSource
Long-Horizon Consistent and Interaction-Aware World Models for Multi-Style End-to-End Driving2026-09-172609.03225arxiv
Establishing a Dynamic Multimodal HRI Dataset for Engagement Analysis with a Humanoid Robot2026-09-032609.03255arxiv
R2S-Eval: Robot Evaluation with Real-to-Sim Calibration via Vision-Language Models2026-09-032609.03276arxiv
Programming and execution of skill-based human-robot-crane collaborative tasks2026-09-032609.03392arxiv
BRIDGE: An Open-Source Humanoid Platform via Morphology-Control Co-Design for Physical AI2026-09-032609.03497arxiv
TRaIL-Odom: Tightly Coupled Continuous Time Radar-IMU-LiDAR Odometry with Adaptive Doppler Weighting2026-09-032609.03561arxiv
Toward Physically Grounded JEPA World Models for Goal-Conditioned Robotic Planning2026-09-192609.03565arxiv
Scaling Bimanual Household Manipulation from 1,500 hours of Demonstrations to On-Policy Corrections2026-09-032609.03591arxiv
SV-WAM: An Efficient Surround-View World-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving2026-09-032609.03602arxiv
FailBench: How Reliable are VLMs at Judging Robot Task Success?2026-09-032609.03611arxiv
QLAUN: A Research-Oriented, Robust, Agile, Modular, and Affordable Torque-Controlled Quadruped Robot2026-09-032609.03623arxiv
Local Path Planning and Obstacle Avoidance for an Omnicopter Platform2026-09-032609.03630arxiv
Understanding Autonomous Driving Datasets by Describing Differences between Image Subsets in Natural Language2026-09-032609.03677arxiv
DropClick: Semi-Automated One-Click Segmentation for Agricultural Robotic Data2026-09-032609.03680arxiv
WISE: World-model-guided Imagination Scheduling for Efficient Post-training of Vision-Language-Action Models2026-09-032609.03681arxiv
Predictive Zonotope Reduction: Precise Runtime Monitoring under Uncertainty2026-09-032609.03699arxiv
Toward an~Integrated Cognitive--Ergonomic Architecture for~Human--Machine Interaction: Combining Cognitive Models with~Human Factors Ergonomics2026-09-032609.03704arxiv
MINERVA: How Small Can a Manipulation Policy Be and Still Solve LIBERO?2026-09-032609.03715arxiv

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