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cs.RO: explore 162 source-linked works published from 2024 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 2026-09-15. Counts describe this index, not the complete source archives.

arXiv2026

AURASeg: Attention-Guided Upsampling with Residual-Assisted Boundary Refinement for Drivable-Area Segmentation

Free-space segmentation is essential for autonomous robots to identify drivable regions and navigate safely across indoor, outdoor, and road-scene environments. However, conventional encoder-decoder models often recover coarse region masks while losing the fine spatial information needed to localize drivable-area boundaries accurately. We propose Attention-Guided Upsampling with Residual-Assisted Boundary Refinement (AURASeg), a segmentation framework designed to preserve region-level accuracy while improving boundary quality. Built on a ResNet-18 encoder, AURASeg introduces an Attention Progressive Upsampling Decoder (APUD) that progressively combines semantic context with high-resolution spatial detail, together with a Residual Boundary Refinement Module (RBRM) that explicitly refines contour-sensitive features before final prediction. We evaluate AURASeg across indoor simulation, ground-robot imagery, and road-driving benchmarks. The results show that our proposed model remains competitive with established segmentation models on region-level metrics while providing particularly strong boundary localization, including in comparison with boundary-focused methods. Detailed ablations further demonstrate the role of the proposed decoding and refinement modules.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

HybridWorldSim: A Scalable and Controllable High-fidelity Simulator for Autonomous Driving

Realistic and controllable simulation is critical for advancing end-to-end autonomous driving, yet existing approaches often struggle to support novel view synthesis under large viewpoint changes or to ensure geometric consistency. We introduce HybridWorldSim, a hybrid simulation framework that integrates multi-traversal neural reconstruction for static backgrounds with generative modeling for dynamic agents. This unified design addresses key limitations of previous methods, enabling the creation of diverse and high-fidelity driving scenarios with reliable visual and spatial consistency. To facilitate robust benchmarking, we further release a new multi-traversal dataset MIRROR that captures a wide range of routes and environmental conditions across different cities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HybridWorldSim surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods, providing a practical and scalable solution for high-fidelity simulation and a valuable resource for research and development in autonomous driving.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Super4DR: 4D Radar-centric Self-supervised Odometry and Gaussian-based Map Optimization

Conventional odometry and mapping methods using visual or LiDAR data often struggle under poor illumination and adverse weather conditions. Although 4D radar is suited for such environments, its sparse and noisy point clouds hinder accurate odometry estimation, while the radar maps suffer from obscure and incomplete structures. Thus, we propose Super4DR, a 4D radar-centric framework for learning-based odometry estimation and gaussian-based map optimization. First, we design a cluster-aware odometry network that incorporates object-level cues from the clustered radar points for inter-frame matching, alongside a hierarchical self-supervision mechanism to overcome outliers through spatio-temporal consistency, knowledge transfer, and feature contrast. Second, we propose using 3D gaussians as an intermediate representation, coupled with a radar-specific growth strategy, selective separation, and multi-view regularization, to recover blurry map areas and those undetected based on image texture. Experiments show that Super4DR achieves a 67% performance gain over prior self-supervised methods, nearly matches supervised odometry, and narrows the map quality disparity with LiDAR while enabling multi-modal image rendering.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

TriPilot-FF: Coordinated Whole-Body Teleoperation with Force Feedback

Mobile manipulators broaden the operational envelope for robot manipulation. However, the whole-body teleoperation of such robots remains a problem: operators must coordinate a wheeled base and two arms while reasoning about obstacles and contact. Existing interfaces are predominantly hand-centric (e.g., VR controllers and joysticks), leaving foot-operated channels underexplored for continuous base control. We present TriPilot-FF, an open-source whole-body teleoperation system for a custom bimanual mobile manipulator that introduces a foot-operated pedal with lidar-driven pedal haptics, coupled with upper-body bimanual leader-follower teleoperation. Using only a low-cost base-mounted lidar, TriPilot-FF renders a resistive pedal cue from proximity-to-obstacle signals in the commanded direction, shaping operator commands toward collision-averse behaviour without an explicit collision-avoidance controller. The system also supports arm-side force reflection for contact awareness and provides real-time force and visual guidance of bimanual manipulability to prompt mobile base repositioning, thereby improving reach. We demonstrate the capability of TriPilot-FF to effectively ``co-pilot'' the human operator over long time-horizons and tasks requiring precise mobile base movement and coordination. Finally, we incorporate teleoperation feedback signals into an Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT) policy and demonstrate improved performance when the additional information is available. We release the pedal device design, full software stack, and conduct extensive real-world evaluations on a bimanual wheeled platform. The project page of TriPilot-FF is http://bit.ly/46H3ZJT.

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arXiv2026

RoboTrustBench: Benchmarking the Trustworthiness of Video World Models for Robotic Manipulation

Video world models are increasingly used in robotic manipulation, yet existing benchmarks mostly evaluate them under valid, feasible, and safe instructions. We introduce RoboTrustBench, a benchmark for evaluating the trustworthiness of video world models under four scenarios: Normal, Constraint-Sensitive, Counterfactual, and Adversarial. Built from real-world DROID episodes, RoboTrustBench contains 1,207 expert-validated instruction-image pairs and a six-dimensional evaluation protocol with 13 fine-grained criteria. Evaluating seven representative video world models with human and MLLM assessment, we find that current models often generate visually coherent videos, but struggle with constraint reasoning, counterfactual grounding, physical interaction, and unsafe-instruction suppression. These results show that visual quality and surface-level instruction following are insufficient for trustworthy robotic video world modeling.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

TRACE: Trajectory-Routed Causal Memory for Delayed-Evidence Visuomotor Imitation

Robots under autonomous operation may require decisions based on evidence that is no longer visible. We study delayed-evidence tasks, where an early cue disappears before a later decision point, so visually similar observations can require different actions. In these settings, the current observation is not a sufficient state for control. We introduce TRAjectory-routed Causal Evidence (TRACE), a memory framework for visuomotor imitation policies. TRACE stores task-relevant visual and robot-state evidence, such as object identity, target choice, or route-dependent state, in a fixed-size latent memory that remains bounded over long episodes. Instead of indexing memory by raw time or manually provided task labels, TRACE uses path signatures: compact, order-sensitive features of the executed robot-state trajectory. These signatures do not store the visual cue itself; rather, they provide trajectory-conditioned keys for writing and retrieving the evidence stored when the cue was visible. When the robot later reaches an ambiguous observation, the policy conditions on TRACE memory to recover the missing context and choose the correct branch. TRACE attaches through lightweight adapters to policies, without changing the policy backbone, action head, or imitation objective. Across real-world long-horizon manipulation tasks with visually ambiguous branch points, TRACE improves branch selection and task success over alternative baselines, including short-history and recurrent memory. Project page: https://jeong-zju.github.io/trace

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

ImprovedVBGS: Real-time Continual Variational Bayes Gaussian Splatting

On-the-fly reconstruction is a key requirement for many applications in robotics and autonomous navigation. Variational Bayes Gaussian Splatting (VBGS) enables continual learning without replay buffers using Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference (CAVI), but its per-frame iterations over all observed points make it too slow for real-time use with strict memory and latency requirements. We present ImprovedVBGS, an accelerated framework for on-the-fly continual reconstruction. This is achieved primarily through (i) spatially truncated variational inference, and (ii) improved reassignment that uses forwarding, truncation and eliminates wasteful dynamic recompilation. On the NeRF synthetic dataset, we reduce mean per-frame latency from ~84.0 s to ~0.050 s on an RTX 3070 Ti, a 1680x speed-up while maintaining reconstruction quality. We also improve novel-view synthesis quality using an exact renderer with no added training costs.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

AffordTrajDP: Dynamic Affordance-Guided Visuomotor Policy Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Affordance-guided imitation learning has shown impressive performance in robotic manipulation tasks by compressing visual perception into task-specific geometric constraints (e.g., fixed contact points). However, the commonly used static affordances can become inconsistent in precision-critical tasks or under object location perturbations, leading to post-contact trajectory drift. To address this issue, we propose AffordTrajDP, a dynamic framework that constructs affordance trajectories via object-centric temporal propagation to guide the progressive manipulation process. Specifically, given an RGB-D observation, our core insight is that a retrieved anchor affordance, which captures the desired contact point between the end-effector and the target object, can be propagated forward via affordance propagation, using the object's SE(3) pose as a natural propagation medium, to yield an affordance trajectory that provides temporally consistent, state-aware guidance throughout execution. AffordTrajDP achieves 70.0% average success rate on ManiSkill3, outperforming strong baselines by up to 17.8%. Real-world experiments on Galaxea A1 and UR7e robotic arms, covering StackCube, PickCup, AdapterInsertion, Ring-on-Peg, Put-in-Bowl, and USB Insertion, further validate robustness under object placement variations and appearance changes, with seen and unseen object instances evaluated on Galaxea A1, and ablations confirm the contribution of each proposed component.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

DELE-w0.5: Inferring Action from Future Latent State for Robotic Manipulation

World-Action Models (WAMs) build robot control on video-generation backbones, which jointly predict dense future visual trajectories and robot actions. We argue that video generation is an unnecessary intermediate objective for world-action modeling. For robotic manipulation, the goal of a world model is not to reproduce how the world looks at every intermediate moment, but to predict the state that the world will reach after an action is executed. The intermediate frames only describe the visual transition between physical states, which consumes substantial model capacity and computation, but do not directly specify the physical outcome that the robot action is intended to produce. In this paper, we propose DELE-w0.5, which infers robot actions from predicted future states without relying on video generation. Concretely, DELE-w0.5 infers the action sequence from its corresponding compact future latent state. The future latent state captures the action-relevant physical outcome of robot interaction and serves as an explicit bridge between world modeling and action generation. The core design principle of DELE-w0.5 is to model how the physical world changes under robot actions, rather than how its visual appearance evolves frame by frame. This formulation removes the high-dimensional visual redundancy introduced by dense video representations, and it therefore enables cheaper training and low-latency inference. Across 640 real-robot trials on four long-horizon manipulation tasks, our DELE-w0.5 achieves the best performance among all compared policies, attaining 62.5% overall full-task success and 81.3% macro ordered-stage progress. It outperforms the strongest baseline by 32.5 percentage points in full-task success and 20.1 percentage points in macro progress.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

SOLO: Stable Omni-terrain Long-Horizon Perceptive Humanoid Locomotion

Humans traverse complex terrain over long distances without losing balance, whereas perceptive humanoid policies become fragile as perception and control errors accumulate. We present SOLO, a unified framework addressing two compounding causes of this long-horizon fragility: dense terrain reconstruction smooths action-critical details, and pointwise imitation lacks temporal credit assignment. Its Query Reconstructor (QR) uses Fourier-encoded cell queries to retrieve spatially specific evidence from depth-proprioception tokens, preserving sharp terrain boundaries. Trajectory-Aware MSE (TA-MSE) Distillation adds next-state teacher-student disagreement to the PPO reward, enabling Generalized Advantage Estimation to propagate future disagreement penalties to preceding actions. In simulation, QR reduces height-map L1 error by factors of 3.3-4.0, while TA-MSE surpasses PPO and MSE+PPO in curriculum progression. On stress-test terrains, SOLO achieves 97.5% mean traversal success and 96% stepping-stone success, versus 75.0-75.6% and 0-3% for dense-reconstructor variants. Deployed zero-shot with only a chest-mounted depth camera and proprioception, SOLO completes a continuous 1.5-km outdoor route and an indoor mixed-terrain course. Project page: https://sunpihai-up.github.io/solo/

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Rethinking Language's Role in Efficient VLA for Autonomous Vehicles: Toward Smarter, Trustworthy Driving

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are reshaping autonomous driving (AD) by unifying perception, reasoning, and control through language, enabling semantic grounding, interpretable decisions, and better long-tail generalization. But language is expensive onboard: latency and memory budgets are tight, and autoregressive decoding is inherently sequential. This work reframes the central question as when and where language should act at inference, since inference cost recurs at every deployed frame while training cost is paid once. We introduce the Language Residue taxonomy to organize methods by their inference-time use of language: train-time-only supervision (L1), latent non-textual reasoning (L2), conditional invocation (L3), and full per-frame generation (L4). We review representative methods and tag each across five deployment axes (latency, parameters, memory, FLOPs, tokens), analyzing them on major open- and closed-loop driving benchmarks (e.g., nuScenes, NAVSIM, Bench2Drive). We further trace how efficient methods from NLP/LLM are adapted in AD, identifying the constraints and motivations driving these adaptations. A continuously updated repository will be available at Github.

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arXiv2026

Open-Source Autonomous Driving System Analysis and Multi-Disciplinary Hardware-in-the-Loop Research Paradigm with Reinforcement-Learning Testing and Large Language Models

Open-source autonomous driving systems provide an inspectable software foundation for intelligent vehicle research. Under real-vehicle deployment conditions, the recording and review of experimental conditions are important for interpreting system behavior and reusing experimental results. However, in a shared real-vehicle environment involving multiple vehicles, task processes, code modifications, and hardware testing feedback are often distributed across different teams and experimental stages, making it challenging to maintain continuous and reviewable experimental records. To address this limitation, this paper examines an Apollo-on-Hongqi EV environment and proposes a real-vehicle experimental framework. The framework connects multi-vehicle experiments, repository-based code reuse and software-hardware testing feedback within a unified review process. Large language models and RL-based testing serve as auxiliary components for record organization, anomaly summarization, and simulation-based candidate scenario generation. Based on this setting, this paper analyzes preliminary evidence from multi-vehicle collaborative experimentation, code and experimental-skill sharing, and software-hardware collaborative testing. The analysis shows that experimental records can be examined together with their operating conditions, providing a reviewable basis for Apollo-on-Hongqi EV research.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

Robust Semi-passive Velocity Field Control with Boundedness Guarantees for Safe Interaction between Mechanical Systems and Physical Environment

Controllers that guarantee energetic passivity with respect to the pair of external force and velocity realize safe interaction between the mechanical system and its physical environment. However, solely adhering to energetic passivity constraints may impose fundamental limitations on control performance and, in some cases, prevent the successful execution of controlled tasks. In addition, external disturbances from the physical environment can drive the system energy level and states beyond operational regions, thereby undermining task performance and safety. In this paper, we study a robust time-varying semi-passive velocity field control to aim to relax the inherently conservative nature of fully passive control methods in a controlled manner. Specifically, the proposed control method guarantees passivity of the closed-loop system with respect to the force-velocity input-output pair when the energy level exceeds a predefined level, while permitting non-passive behaviors to preserve task performance otherwise. Furthermore, the energy level and the states of the closed-loop system are proved to converge to bounded domains even in the presence of unpredicted disturbances. Additionally, the proposed method also enables constraining power flow between the closed-loop system and its physical environment to enhance safety in the interaction process. Numerical simulation examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

eess.SY↗
arXiv2026

Contrast-Free Autonomous Navigation of Untethered Endovascular Microrobots Using Single-Plane Fluoroscopy

Reliable three-dimensional (3D) navigation of magnetically actuated untethered microrobots remains a major barrier to clinical translation. X-ray fluoroscopy is the standard real-time imaging modality for endovascular procedures, but single-plane fluoroscopy provides only a two-dimensional (2D) projection, eliminating depth information and complicating autonomous navigation. Recovering this information through biplane imaging or repeated contrast-enhanced angiography increases procedural complexity, radiation exposure, or contrast burden. Here, we introduce VISTA (Virtual Integration for Spatial Tracking and Autonomy), a digital twin framework enabling contrast-free autonomous navigation under single-plane fluoroscopy. VISTA reconstructs vascular anatomy as a 3D digital twin, discretizes the vessel centerline into navigation milestones, and assigns the detected 2D robot position to the nearest projected milestone. Consecutive milestones define the local vessel orientation used to generate magnetic actuation commands, converting single-plane fluoroscopic observations into topology-constrained navigation states without requiring contrast injection during navigation. VISTA is demonstrated across anatomically distinct vascular phantoms under continuous flow and within the inferior vena cava of a live rat in vivo. Compared with conventional fluoroscopic human-in-the-loop control, VISTA reduced navigation time by up to 62%, corrective actuation commands by up to 98%, and radiation exposure by up to 57%. These results establish VISTA as a digital twin-guided framework for contrast-free autonomous navigation of untethered endovascular microrobots using widely available single-plane fluoroscopy.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Optimized Modular Design and Development of a Tilt-Rotor Bicopter Drone

Hybrid systems like tilt-rotor bicopter drones combine the beneficial characteristics of both fixed-wing and rotary-wing technology, enabling long endurance and VTOL capability. However, such drones also require an optimum design to ensure both static and dynamic stability. The modular design of a traditional bicopter is developed in this paper based on extensive analysis and in-depth structural and aerodynamic simulations. The structural analysis has been performed to ensure that the aircraft's structure withstands the stresses encountered during different flight modes. Controlling the relative positions of the Center of Gravity (CG) and Neutral Point (NP) is an essential aspect of the design, ensuring stability during hover and positive stability during forward flight. The thrust and power analyses have been conducted to assess the flight performance and endurance. After analysis, the drone has been developed, and flight tests with a basic flight controller were conducted to validate the performance metrics obtained in the simulation.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

CanonNav: Disentangling Navigation Behavior from Camera Geometry in Cross-Platform Visual Navigation

While visual navigation has advanced through imitation learning from cross-platform demonstrations, fully leveraging such data remains challenging. First, directly learning from image-trajectory pairs entangles navigation behavior with platform-dependent camera geometry. This hinders consistent learning by forcing the policy to implicitly infer camera geometry from visual observations, an inherently ill-posed problem. Second, imitation learning from demonstrated trajectories captures the expert's chosen motion but leaves the intermediate decisions underlying that motion implicit. To address these issues, we propose CanonNav, a visual navigation framework that disentangles navigation behavior from camera geometry and incorporates complementary planning supervision into learning from cross-platform demonstrations. CanonNav introduces camera geometry canonicalization, which transforms visual observations and trajectories into a camera-consistent representation space. Building on this representation, we derive safety and local-progress supervision using pseudo-labels from an offline traversability estimator. Safety supervision penalizes unsafe trajectories, while local-progress supervision guides where the robot should advance. Experiments across diverse camera configurations and environments show that, despite using only RGB at inference, CanonNav consistently outperforms RGB-based baselines and even surpasses RGB-D-based methods in challenging scenarios.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

CometVLA: Co-Training on an Embodied Data Pyramid towards Physical Understanding

Vision-language-action (VLA) models remain brittle in manipulation tasks that require physical commonsense. Current physical VQA data is typically disembodied and misaligned with robot action domains. Egocentric videos are used only as auxiliary pre-training. It remains unclear whether improved VLM physical understanding actually benefits downstream action generation. Therefore, we present CometVLA to close this gap. We construct CometData and CometBench, an embodied physical VQA corpus and benchmark strictly aligned with the robot's action data and embodiment. We introduce Global Action Prior (GAP) tokens, a compact learnable bottleneck that isolates task-agnostic motion regularities and lets the action head consume physical commonsense without corrupting the pre-trained VLM backbone. We co-train CometVLA across the embodied data pyramid, spanning teleoperation, simulation, egocentric trajectories, and VQA layers. On real-world manipulation tasks and RoboTwin simulation, CometVLA consistently outperforms strong VLA baselines. Correlation analysis shows that stronger VLM performance on CometBench indicates higher VLA success rates. Results demonstrate that physical understanding pre-training genuinely benefits downstream manipulation.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Data-Centric Neuromotor Interfaces for Portable Human-Machine Interaction

Dexterous human-machine interaction requires intuitive and expressive interfaces that can be efficiently deployed on constrained edge devices. Flexible material-based neuromotor interfaces hold considerable promise, as they decode human movement intention into natural control. Although emerging flexible electronic skins enable wearable high-fidelity data acquisition, practical deployment inevitably involves trade-offs between computational resources and portability. We present a data-centric paradigm where physiological features yield fundamental separability, providing sufficient discriminative cues for recognition. A wireless, high-bandwidth system developed for collecting various electrophysiological signals, when integrated with muscle-specific electrodes, forms a surface electromyography-based interface. Exploiting highly separable data, a 2,210-parameter model achieves 94.36% accuracy across 34 gestures and can be rapidly deployed on edge devices, establishing a new thousand-parameter benchmark for dexterous decoding. The underlying data-algorithm interactions in the data-centric paradigm are further clarified, demonstrating its feasibility in real-world scenarios. This study provides a principled and validated pathway for practical deployment of reliable neuromotor interfaces.

cs.RO↗
Compare source metadata on this page
WorkPublishedSource identifierSource
AURASeg: Attention-Guided Upsampling with Residual-Assisted Boundary Refinement for Drivable-Area Segmentation2026-08-312510.21536arxiv
HybridWorldSim: A Scalable and Controllable High-fidelity Simulator for Autonomous Driving2026-08-312511.22187arxiv
Super4DR: 4D Radar-centric Self-supervised Odometry and Gaussian-based Map Optimization2026-08-312512.09608arxiv
TriPilot-FF: Coordinated Whole-Body Teleoperation with Force Feedback2026-08-312602.09888arxiv
RoboTrustBench: Benchmarking the Trustworthiness of Video World Models for Robotic Manipulation2026-08-312606.01600arxiv
TRACE: Trajectory-Routed Causal Memory for Delayed-Evidence Visuomotor Imitation2026-08-312606.14551arxiv
ImprovedVBGS: Real-time Continual Variational Bayes Gaussian Splatting2026-08-312607.15542arxiv
AffordTrajDP: Dynamic Affordance-Guided Visuomotor Policy Learning for Robotic Manipulation2026-08-312608.01603arxiv
DELE-w0.5: Inferring Action from Future Latent State for Robotic Manipulation2026-08-312608.22067arxiv
SOLO: Stable Omni-terrain Long-Horizon Perceptive Humanoid Locomotion2026-08-312608.26583arxiv
Rethinking Language's Role in Efficient VLA for Autonomous Vehicles: Toward Smarter, Trustworthy Driving2026-08-312608.30144arxiv
Open-Source Autonomous Driving System Analysis and Multi-Disciplinary Hardware-in-the-Loop Research Paradigm with Reinforcement-Learning Testing and Large Language Models2026-08-312608.30179arxiv
Robust Semi-passive Velocity Field Control with Boundedness Guarantees for Safe Interaction between Mechanical Systems and Physical Environment2026-08-312608.30193arxiv
Contrast-Free Autonomous Navigation of Untethered Endovascular Microrobots Using Single-Plane Fluoroscopy2026-08-312608.30220arxiv
Optimized Modular Design and Development of a Tilt-Rotor Bicopter Drone2026-08-312608.30222arxiv
CanonNav: Disentangling Navigation Behavior from Camera Geometry in Cross-Platform Visual Navigation2026-08-312608.30242arxiv
CometVLA: Co-Training on an Embodied Data Pyramid towards Physical Understanding2026-08-312608.30289arxiv
Data-Centric Neuromotor Interfaces for Portable Human-Machine Interaction2026-08-312608.30301arxiv

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