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robotics

1,114 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Beyond Waypoint Regression: Query-Based Cost Learning over Reachable Ego Futures for End-to-End Driving

End-to-end planners based on waypoint regression achieve strong open-loop accuracy, but they primarily learn to mimic expert geometry and remain difficult to adapt to deployment-time safety constraints. We propose a query-based cost-learning framework that estimates bounded costs for dynamically reachable ego trajector...

Ahmed Abouelazm, Rupert Polley, Qingyuan Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Energy-Aware Path Following: Comparative Analysis of Reinforcement Learning and NMPC for Electric Vehicles

Path-following control strategies typically follow the bi-objective optimization dilemma: minimizing deviations from a reference path while maintaining smooth speed profiles. The latter objective is especially relevant for Electric Vehicles (EVs), since their limited driving range can be extended by recovering energy t...

Mohamed Sabaa, Mostafa Emam · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Learning Grasp Targeting from Point Clouds for Log Pile Clearing on a Hydraulic Crane

In mill yards, log loaders clear dense piles by a sequence of bundle grasps: hundreds of logs rest in contact, and each removal changes the pile available to the next grasp. A learned policy chooses where to place and orient the grapple from unsegmented point clouds and runs on a trailer-mounted hydraulic forestry cran...

George Sideris, Lucas Bessai, Heshan Fernando et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Modeling Latent Disturbances for Robust Decision-Making in World Models

In this paper, we study robust decision-making in the latent space of world models (WMs). Robust optimization is a mathematical framework where, given explicitly specified dynamics and physically meaningful disturbances, a robot can select actions that remain effective even under worst-case disturbances. However, apply...

Junwon Seo, Andrea Bajcsy · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

The Robot Is Not Its Description: GaugeBench for Representation Robustness in Morphology-Aware Policies

A robot description does more than specify a physical mechanism: it also encodes arbitrary conventions, such as joint-axis direction, joint-angle zero, and the order and names of links and joints. Morphology-aware policies consume interfaces built from these descriptions, yet cross-embodiment evaluation typically chang...

Rahath Malladi, Arshia Sangwan, Rajesh K. Gupta et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

BiGym 2.0: Benchmarking Learned and Agent-Developed Policies for Humanoid Household Manipulation

Humanoid household manipulation requires the arms to act while the body balances, steps and changes posture. We present BiGym 2.0, an adaptation of BiGym for the Unitree G1 across 20 household tasks using a unified whole-body controller for demonstration and evaluation. The suite provides 60 native human virtual-realit...

Zexi Zhang, Zecheng Zhu, Zidong Chen et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Seeing the Invisible: Physics-Guided Visual Prompting for Temperature- and Radiation-Aware VLA Navigation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become a major paradigm for Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN). However, in safety-critical facilities, invisible risks such as radiation or temperature spikes cannot be detected by an RGB camera, and handling each risk is expensive, requiring a new encoder, new data, and mode...

Hojoon Son, Fan Zhang · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

MobileVISTA: Generative Data Augmentation for Pose Generalization in Mobile Manipulation

Mobile manipulators such as humanoid robots are increasingly deployed in dynamic, unstructured environments to perform dexterous manipulation tasks. However, end-to-end manipulation policies trained to imitate demonstration data collected from a single robot pose are brittle: even centimeter-scale deviations in robot p...

Suzannah Wistreich, Stephen Tian, Isabella Huang et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Behavioral Cloning Mystery

Behavioral cloning (BC), despite its simplicity, exhibits many counterintuitive phenomena in the real world. For example, the performance of BC often keeps increasing as the model overfits more to the dataset, and fully closed-loop policies often completely fail without action chunking. Unfortunately, properly studying...

Seohong Park, Sergey Levine · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Hierarchy-GBP: Accelerating Factor Graph Inference via Abstraction and Recovery

Gaussian Belief Propagation (GBP) is a distributed inference algorithm that passes messages in graphical models, making it attractive for scalable spatial intelligence. However, we find GBP most effective locally: it rapidly smooths message errors that vary sharply between neighbor variables, but corrects global errors...

Yuzhou Cheng, Tom Yates, Ignacio Alzugaray et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Statistical Turbulence and High-Fidelity Disturbance Fields for Quadrotor Flight Control

Reinforcement-learning quadrotor controllers are usually trained under simplified wind models, yet the impact of wind-field fidelity, as opposed to magnitude, on policy robustness remains unquantified. This paper compares five disturbance-fidelity levels, from wind-free flight and discrete 1-cosine gusts through statis...

Xun Huang · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Revisiting Temporal Regularization for Smooth Control in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Deep Reinforcement Learning policies can produce nonsmooth action oscillations that hinder deployment on physical robots. Existing architectural and penalty-based approaches seek spatial smoothness by directly reducing sensitivity to changes in state inputs, but their broad constraints can degrade task performance as s...

SungJae Ahn, Jeong Woon Lee, Kyoleen Kwak 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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