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robotics

1,156 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Collision-Free Locomotion of an Underactuated Biped

A bipedal robot cannot deviate from its path to avoid an obstacle without disturbing its balance, and this coupling is most severe on underactuated platforms such as the biped considered here, which has four actuated joints per leg and no hip or ankle roll. This paper presents a Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL...

J. Sahoo, Saurabh Kumar, Surya Prakash S.K. et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Scenario-Based Compositional Statistical Model Checking for Safety Specifications

In safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving, systems must be evaluated across a large number of environment conditions, often represented as composite scenarios built from primitive scenarios. Existing statistical model checking (SMC) approaches analyze each composite scenario independently, requiring many ex...

Abhinav Pomalapally, Arya Raeesi, Kevin Kai-Chun Chang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

FLEX-WAM: Flexible Block-Causal World-Action Models for Long-Horizon Imagination and Planning

World--action models (WAMs) promise a unified model that predicts action-conditioned futures, generates feasible actions, and supports planning in imagination. However, existing joint video--action models often use computationally heavy, fixed-horizon backbones ill-suited to streaming inference and stable long-horizon...

R. Khorrambakht, Joseph Amigo, F\'elix Lebel et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Optimal Control with Learned Critics under Unmodeled State Dependencies

Model Predictive Control (MPC) provides a structured and constraint-aware mechanism for decision-making, but its reliance on optimization-friendly analytical dynamics models limits its use in tasks with contacts and other hard-to-model state dependencies. Model-free reinforcement learning avoids explicit modeling assum...

P. Schöch, Markus Ryll · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

VAMPS: Visual and Motor Policies from Sampling-Based Planning

Learning robot policies directly on physical systems remains difficult because data collection is costly and policy exploration can be unsafe. We introduce Visual and Motor Policies from Sampling-Based Planning (VAMPS), a framework that uses Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control to train reusable policies witho...

Mohamed Yassine Kabouri, Pietro Noah Crestaz, Q. Nguyen et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

CoDance: Learning Reactive and Compliant Human-Humanoid Interaction from Video

Partnered human-humanoid interaction couples locomotion with continuous physical contact. A humanoid needs to coordinate with a person's motion while responding to interaction forces and maintaining stable and natural movement. We present CoDance, a framework for learning reactive and compliant human-humanoid interacti...

Zhuoqun Chen, Shu-Cheng Jia, Bo-Yuan Chen · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Vela: Scaling Vision-Language-Action Models with Adaptive Action Curve Parametrization

Most vision-language-action models represent future motion as fixed-rate action chunks, tying temporal resolution and prediction horizon to a fixed output budget. This pointwise representation wastes capacity on highly correlated neighboring actions, leaves temporal continuity and smoothness to be learned implicitly, a...

Yifan Li, Jiaxu Wang, Dongming Wu et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

Direction-Conditioned Policies for Online Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Contrastive Reinforcement Learning (CRL) learns representations that estimate goal reachability, yet its policy remains conditioned on raw goals and therefore does not directly exploit the geometry encoded by its critic. We introduce Direction-Conditioned Policies (DCP), a method built around a small modification to CR...

S. Swaminathan, Damiya Gondha, Theyanesh Eswaramoorthy Rajahkrishnan et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

A Unified Dynamics Framework for Reinforcement Learning and Classical Control of a Six-DOF Pipeline-Tracking ROV in NVIDIA Isaac Sim

Reinforcement learning controllers for underwater vehicles are usually trained against one physics representation and deployed against another, so reported performance does not always describe behavior outside training. This paper presents a pipeline-tracking architecture for a six-degree-of-freedom remotely operated v...

Cheng Siong Chin, M. Venkateshkumar, Jianhua Zhang · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

DiVeR: Decision-Critical Verifier Learning for VLA Test-Time Scaling

Scaling robot data and model capacity has improved Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies, but further progress is constrained by the high cost of robotic data. Verifier-guided test-time scaling offers an efficient alternative by sampling multiple action candidates and selecting the one most likely to lead to task succe...

Seongheon Park, Heecheol Kim, Shu-Lin Tian et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Oct 2026

PreAct-Nav: Agentic Reasoning Before Action for Urban Navigation

Urban navigation requires embodied agents to pursue long-horizon goals through local decisions based on egocentric observations. However, existing agentic navigation methods often struggle to translate distant goals into coherent local decisions in large-scale physical environments. Their reliance on linguistic reasoni...

Jing Xie, Shou-Wei Ruan, Yu-Bin Wang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Robot Learning with Visual Predicted Force

Force-aware manipulation typically relies on specialized force or tactile sensors. We show that force-aware manipulation can instead be achieved through visual force prediction from the deformation of a compliant Fin Ray gripper. Our approach trains two models. First, we train a visual force estimator on calibration da...

Haonan Chen, Feiyang Wu, Yuxiang Ma et al. · 0 citations

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Microsoft Research Blog Sep 23, 2026

Offloaded inference for real-world physical AI robotics

Robots are getting smarter, but how can their hardware match that growth? New Microsoft Research findings show that moving AI inference beyond the robot can improve task success, boost efficiency, and support more advanced physical AI workloads. The post Offloaded inference for real-world physical AI robotics appeared first on Microsoft Research.

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