Shubhodeep Shiv Aditya | Search arXiv

arXiv2026

Memory-Aware Multi-Sensor Perception for Efficient and Safe Navigation in Dynamic Environments

Autonomous navigation in previously unseen environments requires effective perception, persistent environmental representation, and collision avoidance while maintaining progress toward a goal. Existing perception-based methods often rely on prior maps or short-horizon observations, limiting their ability to exploit previously observed structure. We propose a memory-aware multi-sensor navigation framework that integrates LiDAR and RGB perception, online distance-field representation learning, and a stage-adaptive Modulated Control Barrier Function Quadratic Program (MCBF-QP). The framework persistently represents static infrastructure while tracking dynamic obstacles, enabling the MCBF-QP controller to exploit previously observed geometry for obstacle circumvention and adapt its safety constraints and guidance to local conditions. Experiments in complex indoor and outdoor environments demonstrate improved navigation efficiency and goal-reaching performance while maintaining collision avoidance in narrow passages and around dynamic obstacles.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Elastic Motion Policy: An Adaptive Dynamical System for Robust and Efficient One-Shot Imitation Learning

Behavior cloning (BC) has become a staple imitation learning paradigm in robotics due to its ease of teaching robots complex skills directly from expert demonstrations. However, BC suffers from an inherent generalization issue. To solve this, the status quo solution is to gather more data. Yet, regardless of how much training data is available, out-of-distribution performance is still sub-par, lacks any formal guarantee of convergence and success, and is incapable of allowing and recovering from physical interactions with humans. These are critical flaws when robots are deployed in ever-changing human-centric environments. Thus, we propose Elastic Motion Policy (EMP), a one-shot imitation learning framework that allows robots to adjust their behavior based on the scene change while respecting the task specification. Trained from a single demonstration, EMP follows the dynamical systems paradigm where motion planning and control are governed by first-order differential equations with convergence guarantees. We leverage Laplacian editing in full end-effector space, $\mathbb{R}^3\times SO(3)$, and online convex learning of Lyapunov functions, to adapt EMP online to new contexts, avoiding the need to collect new demonstrations. We extensively validate our framework in real robot experiments, demonstrating its robust and efficient performance in dynamic environments, with obstacle avoidance and multi-step task capabilities. Project Website: https://elastic-motion-policy.github.io/EMP/

cs.RO↗