https://embodied-ai-radar.com/topics/control.xml 2026-11-10T00:00:00ZEmbodied AI Radar https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12767 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Autonomous vehicles track planned trajectories close to obstacles. Unknown disturbances make them deviate from these trajectories. With a bound on the tracking error that disturbances can cause, a planned trajectory can be certified as safe before execution. Existing set-based methods bound the tracking error by one invariant ellipsoid for the whole trajectory or by intervals, which are both conservative. For aerial and space vehicles, the tracking error evolves on a matrix Lie group with nonlinear dynamics. However, for group-affine systems, the error dynamics are linear in Lie algebra …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12378 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Control barrier function (CBF) filters depend on dynamic models that can be inaccurate when their parameters and external forces are uncertain. This paper investigates a radial basis function (RBF) neural network compensator whose output is shared by a Cartesian tracking controller and a joint-space CBF filter. An auxiliary state driven by the difference between requested and applied torques corrects the learning signal, reducing the direct influence of filter intervention on adaptation. A two-link manipulator is evaluated through constrained regulation, ablations, matched uncertainty and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12226 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

We present and evaluate a game-theoretic model predictive control planner for cooperative goal reaching and adversarial pursuit-evasion with drones. The planner combines 3D prediction, individual objectives, optional shared separation constraints and trajectory-tracking interfaces. A comparison of cooperative game solvers assesses their ability to find feasible trajectories that resolve conflicts. A computational study quantifies how number of drones, prediction horizon and move blocking affect computation time and numerical acceptance. Move blocking holds control inputs constant over groups …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11830 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Mixed reality (MR) allows users to inspect planned robot motion within their physical surroundings, but displaying trajectories from robotics software requires converting their joint configurations and timing into a format the MR application can play back. This paper presents ROS2MR, an extension of the MR-Robotics LAB platform that converts YAML-serialized ROS 2 joint trajectories, including MoveIt motion plans, into the platform's existing JSON playback format. The converter validates the input, maps arm joints by name, and resamples the trajectory at a nominal rate of 30 Hz, using cubic …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11815 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Classical optimal control is used to design a separate controller for each plant. This paper asks a different question. Can one learned policy serve a whole family of partially observed, noisy linear systems? We show that one transformer can. The policy is trained to imitate optimal LQG control on a heterogeneous family of Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) systems with Multiple Inputs and Multiple Outputs (MIMO), whose dimensions, cost matrices, and noise levels all vary. A shared representation with system-wise standardization, zero-padding, masking, and an encoding of the cost and noise …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11755 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

This paper presents a distributed model predictive control (MPC) architecture for collision-avoiding motion planning of planar robots with double-integrator dynamics. To reduce coordination demands, a time-varying predicted conflict graph selects relevant pairwise interactions. The associated collision-avoidance constraints are convexified once per MPC update using warm-start trajectories, yielding a fixed convex quadratic program (QP). The resulting QP is then decomposed using an edge-consensus formulation of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), enabling parallel …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11601 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Motion generation tools produce candidate trajectories, but interactive robot authoring also requires recoverable execution, traceable edits, explicit geometry, and model-specific validation. We present Kinora, a system that connects text-to-motion generation, a motion library, local agent tools, robot retargeting, and trajectory refinement through versioned artifacts. The current release uses an independently specified 52-joint authoring rig and procedural skeleton previews, separating the distributed human geometry from externally installed generation models and robot assets. Human-motion …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10938 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Disturbances encountered during autonomous navigation generally vary across space, often discontinuously, as obstacles redirect wind and changing terrain alters traction. Tracking controllers typically assume sufficient control authority to mitigate disturbances and maintain safety; the regime where this assumption fails remains underexplored. We present Belief-guided Residual Adaptive Control (BRACE), a hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) framework for reach-avoid navigation under unknown, bounded, spatially varying disturbances. BRACE infers a disturbance belief from model prediction …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10877 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Sampling-based model predictive control (MPC) is treated as a family of distinct algorithms: predictive sampling, MPPI, the cross-entropy method, and their biased, colored-noise, and annealed variants all sample control sequences and reweight them by cost. We show a single Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) inference algorithm implements them all, specified by three independent axes: the proposal, the update rule that reduces cost-weighted particles to a nominal plan, and the effective-sample-size threshold for resampling. We evaluate SMC-based planning on MuJoCo non-linear control, open-loop …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10748 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Agent harnesses -- runtime scaffolds that wrap an LLM's reasoning loop with tool dispatch, verification, and persistent memory -- have become the standard substrate for deploying LLMs as autonomous agents, as demonstrated by Claude Code and Codex in software engineering. In trajectory planning, however, this paradigm has not taken hold: existing LLM-based trajectory planning methods either keep the LLM in the decision loop, exceeding the millisecond-level control budget, or offload it to offline rules or training-time supervision -- leaving the runtime planner non-evolving. Intermediate …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10720 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly adopted as end-to-end driving planners, yet they suffer from cross-city domain shift. Existing methods treat this shift as a single quantity addressed by uniform alignment or single-site editing. We challenge this view on two counts: (i) domain shift in VLM trajectory planners is inherently structured across modality and layer, and (ii) a locate-then-repair recipe matched to this structure outperforms every uniform-objective baseline. We analyse domain shift via activation patching and uncover two regularities. (F1) Modality axis. Image and text …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10363 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) seeks collision-free paths for multiple agents from their respective starting locations to their respective goal locations while minimizing path costs. Although many MAPF algorithms were developed, most of them rely on a common assumption on synchronized actions, where the actions of all agents start at the same time and always take a time unit. This assumption may limit the use of MAPF planners in practice. To get rid of this assumption, recently, an algorithm called Loosely Synchronized Rule-based Planning (LSRP) was proposed, which can find sub-optimal …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10169 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

A fundamental aspect of humanoid footstep planning is to jointly guarantee obstacle avoidance and locomotion stability. This paper presents a capturability-aware sequential Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework for Linear Inverted Pendulum (LIP)-based humanoid footstep planning in the presence of obstacles. The proposed method combines obstacle avoidance with capturability constraints through safe corridors constructed as sequences of intersecting rectangles, yielding a sequential MPC framework with recursive feasibility guarantees for the LIP-based planning layer. The planner autonomously …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09937 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Differentiable model predictive control (MPC) enables structured, constraint-aware policies to be optimized end-to-end. However, learning MPC policies faces two bottlenecks: (1) nonsmooth sensitivities at active-set transitions and (2) expensive policy evaluation, since each requires an optimization solve. We first introduce SmoothedTurboMPC, a GPU-parallel differentiable MPC solver combining sequential quadratic programming (SQP) with a log-barrier-smoothed alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) inner solver. Its design enables smooth gradients, exact sensitivities at …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09640 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Autonomous racing provides a demanding testbed for collision avoidance under tight geometric and computational constraints. Building on a recent conference contribution and a master's dissertation, LACART combines lookahead-based control barrier functions (CBFs), a relaxed control Lyapunov function (CLF), and quadratic programming (QP) to modify nominal vehicle commands for obstacle avoidance and reference tracking. The method handles circular obstacles and track boundaries in a common optimisation layer. Comparative simulation results against Huang \emph{et al.} \cite{r9} show similar …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09210 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Global planners for ground vehicles usually approximate the vehicle by a disk, trading safety against conservativeness, while exact-footprint checking pays for every candidate motion, pose, and footprint edge. We present TPS-A*, a lattice planner whose edges are kinematically feasible trajectories from parameterized trajectory generators, built on certified collision checking in trajectory parameter space. A grid precomputed per footprint returns, in one pass over the local obstacles, a certified free distance along every candidate trajectory, so the per-node collision cost is independent of …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08872 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

In recent years, massively parallelized rigid-body simulation has played a central role in robotics research, enabling rapid progress in areas such as reinforcement learning, stochastic optimal control, and randomized smoothing-based trajectory optimization. Particularly in contact-rich settings, the scalability of such simulations in large part depends on well-optimized representations of collision geometry, often requiring a coarse approximation of the underlying surfaces using primitives such as spheres, capsules, cylinders, and boxes. Whenever the complexity of the surfaces or the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08119 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Repeated directed reachability queries arise in online path planning, task-agent allocation, and swarm control on static grid maps, where reachability is asymmetric and full transitive closure is storage-prohibitive. We introduce H-BRICK, a Hierarchical Boundary Reachability Index with Compressed Kleene closure for exact cell-to-cell queries on directed grid graphs. H-BRICK partitions the graph into tiles, computes a local Boolean Kleene closure within each tile, and projects it onto the tile's boundary ports. The resulting directed port-to-port summaries are then composed recursively across …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08009 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Physical human--robot interaction requires controllers capable of maintaining intrinsically bounded interactions with the environment. The Fractal Impedance Controller (FIC) has been proven to guarantee these safety characteristics by design. This paper introduces the robotic implementation and experimental validation of its most advanced architecture: the Harmonic-Passive Motion Paradigm (H-PMP), an evolution of the Passive Motion Paradigm designed to mimic human-like interaction. Furthermore, we present a unified framework for FIC deployment, supported by an open-source software suite …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07537 2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Safety is a central concern in modern autonomous systems. Safety certificates---functions whose existence guarantees that a system meets its safety specification---have long been used as a principled tool for rigorously reasoning about safety. Methods for synthesizing such certificates are scattered across research areas, with little guidance on when to use a particular approach. This tutorial provides a holistic treatment of safety certificate synthesis centered on two widely used families: Hamilton--Jacobi (HJ) reachability analysis and control barrier functions (CBFs). For each family of …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06913 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

We present cuRoboV2-Fast, a GPU-accelerated planner that reduces both planning latency and execution time for collision-free, payload-aware, torque-limited motions. B-spline trajectory optimization reduces the required iterations, while accelerated robot computations and differentiable inverse dynamics reduce refinement cost and accommodate changing payloads. TimeOpt optimizes traversal speed along the fixed path under sampled velocity, acceleration, jerk, and torque constraints, exploiting local spline support to solve banded Newton systems efficiently on the GPU. With a 3,kg payload, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06802 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) Reachability identifies the unsafe states of a dynamical system from which it can be forced into failure under worst-case disturbance. However, classical grid-based solvers scale exponentially with state dimension. DeepReach improves scalability by replacing the grid with a neural value function trained on the HJ-Isaacs (HJI) variational inequality (VI), but penalizes both sides of the residual equally. This allows the learned value to lie above the true one and unsafe states to be misclassified as safe. We propose Conservative DeepReach (ConDR) which aims to learn a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06214 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Inspired by the coordination of global motion and local shape adaptation in snakes, elephant trunks, and octopus arms, we propose a unified planning and control framework for mobile continuum robots in cluttered and confined environments. Existing approaches often address high-level path planning and local motion control separately, limiting coordinated base-arm motion, kinematic consistency, and collision avoidance. Our framework integrates long-horizon trajectory planning with real-time geometric refinement under kinematic and environmental constraints. The global layer combines A* search …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06196 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Ensuring safety in advanced robot control methods such as Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Reinforcement Learning remains an open challenge. A common approach relies on control-invariant sets, yet their exact computation for nonlinear systems is generally intractable, and numerical approximations compromise theoretical guarantees. In this work, we show that safety does not need to rely exclusively on control invariance. We introduce novel classes of safe sets, each broader than classical control-invariant sets, and analyze corresponding MPC schemes that guarantee recursive feasibility by …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05793 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Short-horizon model predictive control (MPC) is fast but myopic. ZipMPC compensates by learning a context-dependent correction of the short-horizon cost that imitates a long-horizon expert. We observe that the optimal correction is often multimodal: when a slower opponent can be passed on either side, good corrections of opposite sign coexist, and the expert's choice between them hinges on tiny cost differences. Deterministic regression then averages modes or inherits inconsistent expert tie-breaking. We propose ZipDrift, which trains a one-step drifting generator over MPC cost corrections, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05615 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

High motion performance and avoiding structural vibrations rely on smooth trajectory planning. The smoothness requirement depends on the robot's complexity in terms of the number of degrees of freedom and system order due to the flexibility of the joints and links. For industrial robots, the smoothness requirements have been determined and subsequently taken into account. Although unknown for soft continuum robots, the exact smoothness requirement can potentially be much larger than previously considered ones such as $\mathbf{\mathcal{C}^4}$ for collaborative robots and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05585 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

This letter presents a trajectory planner for humanoid robots to perform dynamic motions on complex, parameterizable terrains using a contact-implicit whole-body optimization framework. The planner generates feasible movements without predefined contact sequences, considering the robot's full dynamics and kinematics. To plan bipedal locomotion on steps, ramps, and other terrains, we propose a mathematical model to approximate ground geometry with a smooth surface. The rigid interaction between the robot and the ground is modeled via novel contact constraints, extending the domain of …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04957 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) shows promise in coordinating connected and automated vehicles but offers no safety guarantee. Although Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) can add this guarantee, their optimization problem can become infeasible in practice due to control bounds. Moreover, they often overapproximate vehicle and road geometry, which makes them conservative. This paper proposes the Backup-Horizon CBF (BH-CBF), which evaluates safety along a horizon until all vehicles stop. BH-CBF is recursively feasible under control bounds, and it considers the exact vehicle and road …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04096 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability provides certified backward reachable tubes (BRTs) for safety-critical robotic systems, but the level-set computation scales exponentially in the state dimension and has historically been performed offline. As autonomy stacks (ADAS/AV, humanoid robotics, and vision-language-action models) increasingly rely on black-box, probabilistic policies, a deterministic safety layer with formal guarantees is an essential complement. We present a CUDA implementation of the canonical WENO5 + TVD-RK3 + Lax-Friedrichs level-set Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs solver for 2D, 3D, and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03307 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Ball-balancing robots (ballbots) must lean to accelerate, and the lean is limited by the wheel torques and by safety. Planners that use the full robot model are expensive, while planners that ignore the balance dynamics produce references that cannot be followed. This paper presents a two-layer navigation scheme for a three-omni-wheel ballbot. The upper layer is a model predictive controller on a \emph{jerk model} of the ball position, with discrete-time control barrier functions for static, moving, rotating and concave obstacles. The lower layer is a hierarchical sliding mode controller with …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02626 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Control barrier functions (CBFs) are a standard way to keep a planner inside a safe set, but they assume control affine dynamics, a barrier function given in closed form, and a known nominal controller. Integral control barrier functions (ICBFs) remove the first assumption and absorb input constraints, yet they still assume a given nominal controller and a barrier function. In this work, we present an approach to learn all three from data, using neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) for the dynamics, imitation for the nominal controller, and supervised regression for the barrier …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02240 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Safe navigation in interactive traffic requires autonomous vehicles to reason about unobservable human characteristics and the reciprocal nature of multi-agent interactions. Traditional architectures often decouple prediction from planning, leading to the "Frozen Robot Problem" or unsafe maneuvers under high ambiguity because they treat risk assessment and information acquisition as independent objectives. We argue that the notion of safety should not remain static but must instead dynamically co-evolve with the system's internal confidence: the robot should actively clarify ambiguity when …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02181 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

In human-robot co-manipulation, the robot's trajectory should accommodate the human's, where human sensorimotor behavior is affected by the task's spatial and temporal constraints, as well as personal factors. Several robot trajectory planning methods have been proposed to embed human sensorimotor models in the robot trajectory planning, but these methods do not consider temporal constraints that adapt to how the human behaves when interacting with the robot. To better align human and robot collaborative motion, this work adapts a stochastic optimal control problem with a final state …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01814 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Latent-space path planning (LSPP) compresses the configuration space of a robotic manipulator into a compact, differentiable manifold learned by a variational autoencoder, enabling fast gradient-based planning without explicit inverse kinematics. Existing LSPP frameworks enforce obstacle avoidance with a binary collision classifier, whose saturated gradients near obstacle boundaries and lack of temporal structure cause the optimizer to stall and provide no forward-invariance guarantee. We replace the classifier with a neural control barrier function (CBF) learned directly in the latent space. …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01283 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

End-to-end planners decode the ego trajectory either by coordinate regression, which is fast but blends plausible maneuvers into one trajectory that may follow none of them, or by diffusion and flow matching, which model the trajectory distribution but need several inference steps. Drifting models move this iteration into training: a one-step generator learns to follow an attraction--repulsion field between generated and ground-truth samples. Drifting was developed for class-conditional image generation, where every class supplies many positive samples. In planning, every scene is its own …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01220 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

High-accuracy repetitive tracking is challenging for position-commanded manipulators whose low-level controllers are inaccessible, while constrained model-based iterative learning control (ILC) can require substantial manual parameter tuning. We present Differentiable Iterative Learning Control (Diff-ILC), an online bilevel framework that adapts the parameters of a constrained ILC update between physical robot executions. A closed-loop differential model is identified once from paired smooth perturbations and subsequently kept fixed. At each trial, a constrained quadratic program computes a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.42049 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Autonomous wheelchairs can improve the quality of life for individuals with mobility impairments by providing greater independence. However, reliable navigation especially in human environments is a major challenge due to factors such as dynamic obstacles, unpredictable pedestrian behavior, and the users' need to complete multiple stops along the way before reaching their final destination. This paper presents a hybrid path planning framework for multi-goal navigation in dynamic environments. The framework integrates the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) for global task ordering with the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41676 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Autonomous surface vessels operating in urban waterways must coordinate with other vessels in confined spaces while complying with traffic regulations, often without knowing their intentions. We present a decentralized motion planner based on model predictive path integral control, a sampling-based model predictive control scheme. The planner jointly computes a trajectory for the ego vessel and a prediction of the trajectories of the other vessels, and therefore accounts for their interaction. Traffic regulations are encoded as discontinuous costs, which the sampling-based formulation admits …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41667 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

In this letter, we present a volumetric mapping system that effectively calculates Occupancy Grid Maps (OGMs) and Euclidean Distance Transforms (EDTs) with parallel computing. Unlike these mappers for high-precision structural reconstruction, our system incrementally constructs global EDT and outputs high-frequency local distance information for online robot motion planning. The proposed system constructs OGM with massive amount of data from multiple types of sensor inputs. Using GPU programming techniques, the system quickly computes EDT in parallel within local volume. The new observation …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41558 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Collision-free motion planning for multi-agent robotic systems remains an active research area because of the complexity of coordinating robot trajectories, with applications ranging from coordinated drone shows to autonomous operations on land, in the air, and on water. Importantly, the analytical difficulty of nonconvex collision-avoidance constraints has so far driven the development of exclusively numerical methods. We derive a complete analytical characterization of the optimal trajectories for two robots that start and end at rest, under double-integrator dynamics and a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41548 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Multi-agent robotic systems have attracted growing interest in recent years, with applications ranging from coordinated drone shows to autonomous operations on land, in the air, and on water. At the planning level, robot motion is often modeled using double-integrator dynamics (with low-level controllers handling the physical dynamics during execution) with a minimum-energy objective subject to collision-avoidance constraints and limits on position, velocity, and acceleration. The complexity of the problem resides in the constraints, which couple the trajectories and make the optimization …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41477 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Achieving safe navigation in confined dynamic environments remains a challenging problem, as robots must balance navigation efficiency with safety. Existing actor--critic MPC architectures typically employ differentiable MPC layers, but this way cannot readily accommodate explicit state constraints, making it intractable to involve collision avoidance within learning-based planning. To address this issue, we propose an actor--critic model predictive control framework with state constraints. We first use vertices to represent the robot and obstacles, and half-spaces to represent the workspace. …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41330 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Motion planning in clutter is embodiment-specific: the feasible free space and reachable commands depend on each robot's geometry and dynamics. Existing cross-embodiment policies output normalized commands that disregard these differences, or compensate through per-robot training and distillation. World models can in principle pool cross-embodiment data, yet command-conditioned models bind their latent dynamics to a single action space, while pose-conditioned models omit the mapping from commands to body-specific motion. On flat ground, however, embodiment affects the planner's observations …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41235 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Centralized multi-agent path planning with cooperative localization in GPS-denied environments is generally computationally intractable when formulated in full belief space due to tightly coupled uncertainty dynamics. Prior work typically approximates belief dynamics or restricts inter-agent coupling. This work examines a multi-agent planning problem in which a primary agent must reach a goal in minimum time subject to a chance-constrained collision-avoidance requirement and a terminal bound on localization uncertainty. We obtain a tractable surrogate of the underlying belief-space problem by …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41214 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Multi-robot systems are increasingly deployed as heterogeneous fleets with diverse kinematic and actuation capabilities. While graph control barrier function (GCBF) methods provide a scalable framework for decentralized safe control, existing approaches typically assume homogeneous robot dynamics. Methods that directly encode robot classes can distinguish known types, but do not represent state-dependent motion capabilities or naturally transfer to unseen robot models. To address this challenge, we propose the Capability-Conditioned Heterogeneous Graph Control Barrier Function (CC-HGCBF), …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40922 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

End-to-end policies, from task-specific controllers to robot foundation models, learn complex behavior from raw observations but are not guaranteed to remain safe, so they are often wrapped in a safety filter. The resulting system operates under two domains: the filter's operational design domain (ODD), where its assumptions hold and safety is certified, and the policy's competence domain, where it is reliable. Filters typically fix their conservativeness regardless of the policy's competence, trading performance inside the ODD against margin beyond it. We ask whether the policy's confidence …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40473 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Sampling-based reachability estimates reachable sets from finitely many simulated trajectory endpoints. Existing guarantees often control missed probability mass or approximation error relative to the convex hull of the reachable set, leaving the geometric error relative to the reachable set incompletely characterized. We study this error as a problem of support estimation under flow distortion. Our assumptions combine a uniform lower bound on the local volume density of the initial set, a lower bound on the sampling density, and a one-sided Lipschitz constant $\mu$ for the vector field. …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40429 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

This paper studies UAV path planning in areas where GPS signals are not present. Because these drones can easily get lost when they don't have GPS, they must rely on dead reckoning and occasionally pass near cellular towers, which act as landmarks to reset and fix their position. The goal is to find the shortest path from a start to a goal location while keeping the estimation uncertainty within a given bound. To solve this problem, we propose a localization-constrained A* planner that treats uncertainty as a hard constraint during search. The robot state and covariance are propagated using …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40427 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

In this article, we present socx, a GPU-accelerated solver for lifted convex reformulations of linear stochastic optimal control under chance constraints, implemented in JAX. We demonstrate that by exploiting the sparse and independent structure of the problem, distributed optimization can reduce it to simpler problems: independent linear-quadratic tracking (LQT) problems and Euclidean projections onto sets. These simpler problems can be solved in parallel and then coupled using the constraints. To validate our solver, we run it on a hover-linearized 3D quadrotor and show a speed-up of up to …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40257 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Autonomous highway driving for heavy-duty trucks is a challenging control problem. The greater mass, dimensions and intricate dynamics increase the requirements for cooperation from surrounding traffic in critical maneuvers, requiring a careful balance between safety constraints and efficient long-horizon decision making. Model Predictive Control (MPC) provides rigorous constraint satisfaction but relies on terminal cost which can limit its effectiveness at short, computationally affordable horizons. Reinforcement Learning (RL) captures long-term driving behavior but offers no constraint …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39879 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

In the context of multi-stage trajectory planning for robotic percutaneous liver interventions, identifying a kinematically feasible entry point remains a critical computational bottleneck. Existing methods rely on exhaustive inverse kinematics or randomized searches, incurring delays of 13 to 27 seconds per target and limiting real-time intraoperative adaptation. This paper introduces an Orientation-Based Reachability Map (ORM) that precomputes the kinematic feasibility of a 6 Degrees of Freedom (DoF) serial manipulator across 188,873 workspace positions and encodes orientation feasibility …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39775 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Autonomous mobile robots commonly pair a global planner with a local model predictive controller (MPC), but nonconvex obstacle avoidance and a limited horizon can make the robot freeze in complex layouts. Deciding whether to replan, wait, or call for help is a supervisory decision. Recent work queries a large language model (LLM) supervisor on every anomaly, which is slow and costly. We instead distill the LLM online into a decision tree. After each training episode, counterfactual replay labels recoveries as needed, unnecessary, or harmful. These labels retire unhelpful rules. In simulation, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38291 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Compositional diffusion planners have demonstrated remarkable success on long-horizon diffusion planning by sampling short trajectories, namely chunks, and composing them into a long trajectory. However, averaging overlapping chunks can induce the mode-averaging problem, resulting in discontinuous trajectories. Several works aim to address this problem, whereas a non-negligible portion of plans remains infeasible. In this work, we propose Selective Compositional Diffuser (SCD), handling this problem by measuring reachability. To this end, we present a self-supervised learning method for the …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38233 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Mobile manipulator robots rarely reposition their base during manipulation, because doing so requires real-time knowledge of how well the arm can reach its surroundings among obstacles. Reachability maps (RMs) encode this knowledge, but existing methods are slow, coarse (typically 5 cm), or ignore real obstacles. This article asks whether a neural network can predict an obstacle-aware RM at 2 cm resolution from a live depth camera, on embedded hardware, fast enough for online use. We present HERON, a 3D U-Net trained on RMs computed with the GPU-accelerated inverse kinematics of cuRobo, first …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37310 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

This work investigates the use of event-based spiking controllers, implemented as spiking neural networks, for trajectory tracking in underactuated robots. Specifically, we address the problem of stabilizing a prescribed periodic orbit. It is well known that, by applying the method of transverse linearization to the robot dynamics in a neighborhood of a periodic trajectory, the dynamics can be approximately described by a linear time-varying system with periodic coefficients (a periodic LTV system). The problem of orbital stabilization can therefore be reduced to stabilizing the trivial …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35852 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

This paper proposes a smooth analytic gradient for frictional contact and applies it to policy learning and contact-implicit trajectory optimization for legged locomotion. The exact contact sensitivity is available in closed form but describes changes within the current contact mode, providing no first-order information toward neighboring contact modes. The proposed gradient replaces this sensitivity only in the backward pass, leaving the hard-contact forward solve unchanged and the realized rollout feasible. A central-path relaxation of the de Saxc\'e-corrected second-order-cone …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35670 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Agile quadruped navigation in dynamic environments demands trajectories that are both dynamically feasible and provably collision-free. Most real-time planners achieve tractability through a convex reduction that requires simplified kinematic models, discarding motion that the robot can readily execute, and certify safety only at discretization points, leaving open possible inter-sample collisions with moving obstacles. We present a real-time motion planning framework that retains the fully-actuated $SE(2)$ model of a quadruped, with its anisotropic, heading-coupled velocity bounds, and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35582 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Coordinating many miniature robots in a confined arena, with no leader, central planner, or global map, is a core challenge for swarm robotics. As the swarm grows denser, collision avoidance becomes the limiting factor, and the number of safely coexisting robots depends on the formulation of the inter-robot safety constraint. We present a distributed predictive flocking controller in which each robot solves its own nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) problem, optimizing swarm cohesion and alignment costs, inter-robot and obstacle safety, and a task objective, while exchanging only …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35494 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Training robotic manipulation policies in simulation is widely adopted due to safety and cost efficiency; however, tasks involving obstacles remain under-performing and often converge slowly under Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). To address this challenge, we propose a task decomposition framework for DRL that integrates Transfer Learning (TL) with Reward Redesign (RR) to improve learning efficiency and robustness in obstacle environments. The TL strategy selectively transfers only the first-layer critic parameters across structurally related tasks, since that layer captures general …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35448 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

End-to-end driving models perform well on standard benchmarks but collide frequently in safety-critical scenarios. We present a failure-mode analysis on NeuroNCAP which shows that 95.9% of DiffusionDrive's collisions are planning failures despite reliable detection, pinpointing the bottleneck in planning rather than perception. We attribute this to a fundamental data imbalance, as safety-critical interactions are rare in real driving logs, so planners are hardly ever trained on them. We close this gap with a novel model-aware framework that generates safety-critical training scenes against a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35342 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed for pipeline inspection, prevailing research predominantly assumes static pipes. In real-world industrial environments, pipes often exhibit dynamic movements, such as vibrations. This imposes more stringent requirements on UAVs' adaptive control and computational efficiency than in static scenarios. Therefore, this paper proposes a servo control framework named VisGeo-PipeTrack, which utilizes geometric constraints to enable UAV tracking of dynamic pipes. To achieve efficient UAV positioning, YOLOv5 is employed to detect labels …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35289 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Robotic missions involving spatially distributed tasks often require jointly selecting rewarding locations and planning feasible motions under limited travel budgets. This paper proposes Reward-Guided RRT*, a new sampling-based framework that constructs a budget-feasible mission through a sequence of locally joint task-selection-and-motion-planning stages, evaluated directly in the continuous state space, without requiring a precomputed task-transition graph. The method incrementally builds a mission using reward-guided RRT* searches, while a return-feasibility procedure ensures that each …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35040 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Deploying safety-critical cyber-physical systems requires control strategies that reconcile high performance and adaptability with rigorous safety guarantees. Classical control strategies offer stability proofs but are conservative, while advanced optimization- and learning-based controllers achieve high performance but lack formal verification. Runtime Assurance (RTA) architectures bridge this gap by introducing their own (dis-)advantages. Safety filters use online optimization and introduce chattering, while Simplex permissiveness is bounded by the tightness of the certified Region of …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34913 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

This paper studies the constrained line-of-sight pointing control problem of a two-axis current-command gimbal subjected to mismatched mechanical disturbances. Friction, torque ripple, current-response lag, model mismatch, and limited drive commands make accurate pointing more challenging yet interesting. A quantile disturbance predictor is proposed to compensate predictable acceleration residuals and describe their remaining uncertainty, with the aid of learning median and outer quantiles from state, command, and reference histories. A tube-inspired model predictive controller is proposed to …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34873 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

This paper studies UAV swarm search in GNSS-denied maritime environments, where inter-UAV ranging drives cooperative localization and uncertainty propagates along the multi-hop reference chain, affecting connectivity, collision avoidance, and search effectiveness. We propose an uncertainty-aware control barrier function (CBF) framework approximating cascading localization covariance through Fisher information matrices. First, the cascading covariance model captures how ranging noise and neighbor uncertainty accumulate along the localization chain. Second, uncertainty-tightened CBFs …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34849 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

This paper studies the constrained pointing control problem of airborne electro-optical gimbals subjected to composite periodic and aperiodic disturbances. Under carrier vibration, input delay, and actuator constraints, achieving line-of-sight stabilization and tracking is challenging. A disturbance-separated model predictive control (MPC) scheme is proposed to compensate these heterogeneous disturbances according to their physical characteristics. An adaptive periodic observer predicts multi-harmonic vibrations over the MPC horizon using linear-regression frequency estimation. A linear …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34789 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Quadrotor interceptors equipped with strapdown cameras offer a low-cost solution for physically countering unauthorized UAVs. However, this configuration inherently couples vehicle maneuvering and camera pointing, creating a conflict between rapid closing and maintaining target visibility. We present interception-oriented spherical-bearing nonlinear model predictive control (ISB-NMPC), which couples spherical-bearing prediction with nonlinear quadrotor dynamics to jointly optimize target-directed closing motion and visibility. An attitude-compensated extended Kalman filter on S^2 estimates …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33494 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Dexterous manipulation requires robots to leverage existing datasets for rapid skill acquisition while maintaining safety during real-world deployment to prevent damage to the robot or its surroundings. Offline-to-online safe reinforcement learning (O2O safe RL) provides a promising solution for this problem by leveraging prior experience for online improvement under safety constraints, thereby mitigating the sample inefficiency and exploration risk of learning safe policies from scratch. However, existing O2O safe RL approaches do not explicitly account for the safety budget already consumed …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33471 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Control barrier functions (CBFs) support collision avoidance, yet dense dynamic encounters can leave a vehicle with no feasible command. Geometric refinements and soft constraints help preserve motion choices. Using these choices also requires accounting for the vehicle's changing turning response. For a steering-limited bicycle, braking can lower closing speed while slowing the lateral motion needed before an obstacle arrives. We propose SCET-CBF, a speed-calibrated soft guidance law for one-step dynamic navigation. A short lateral escape maneuver gives an allowable approach speed. Its speed …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33317 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Deploying humanoid task policies requires reliable runtime monitors that anticipate unrecoverable falls in time to trigger a fallback. We formulate this task as learning the stochastic, finite-horizon recoverability envelope of a given fallback policy. Synthesizing this monitor is challenging: existing methods assume training data naturally covers the recoverability envelope, yet acquiring such data remains a major bottleneck for contact-rich systems. Consequently, they recover only a fraction of the true envelope, leaving them prone to optimistic hallucinations for out-of-distribution (OOD) …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33186 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) operating in dynamic, challenging conditions such as intersections and roundabouts must guarantee collision avoidance under uncertainty while maintaining real-time feasibility. Most existing planners struggle to simultaneously guarantee both requirements. Chance-constrained formulations embed safety constraints directly in the optimization but become infeasible as uncertainty compounds; deterministic planners provide feasible solutions but fail to address the uncertainty that causes collisions; end-to-end learned policies provide neither guarantee in an interpretable …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32538 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

These lecture notes provide an introduction to optimization, optimal control, and reinforcement learning for robotics, emphasizing their mathematical connections and practical relevance. They present established material compiled and edited by Yonghyeon Lee, rather than new research results. The notes were developed through a human and AI collaborative writing process, with AI assistance in drafting, organizing, and refining the exposition. This first version is a preliminary collection of notes, not yet a fully developed textbook, and currently contains no figures or graphs. The notes may be …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32365 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

We present the Graphs of Trajectory Bundles (GTB) method for motion planning of systems with nonlinear and black-box dynamics, combining sampling-based motion planning with trajectory optimization and graph search. Based on a graph-of-convex-sets decomposition of the workspace, GTB iteratively constructs a graph of trajectory bundles that captures the local dynamics of the system at any vertex. By solving a shortest-path problem on this graph, we find maximally dynamically feasible iterates that satisfy the system's dynamics in the limit and any constraints such as collision avoidance or …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32034 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

The growing population of orbital debris has intensified interest in active debris removal and on-orbit servicing, for which dual-arm space manipulators offer improved grasping stability and load distribution relative to single-arm systems. However, coordinating two manipulators under inter-arm collision avoidance, orientation alignment, and sensing uncertainty remains challenging. This paper develops a coordinated reinforcement learning framework for cooperative motion planning of a dual-arm space manipulator in a target-reaching task with inter-arm collision-avoidance constraints. A …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31923 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

As humanoid robots move from research laboratories toward deployment in human-centered environments such as homes, hospitals, and warehouses, safe operation around nearby people and objects becomes a fundamental requirement. Safety filters have emerged as a promising technique to address this challenge by providing mathematical guarantees that generated control actions do not result in collisions. This paper shows that these guarantees hold only when the safety parameters are configured correctly. However, correct parameter configurations are task- and environment-specific, and no general …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31891 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

Data-driven robots must learn to avoid collisions with as few demonstrations as possible to avoid collecting large datasets of destructive collision examples. We explore whole-body proximity sensors as inductive biases for learning reflexive collision-dodging behavior and find that lossy sensors with low resolution were stronger biases than high-resolution coverage. We also found that, perhaps unintuitively, anticipating when and where contact happens on the body of a robot reduced its learning sample efficiency. We investigated eight candidate representations in a reinforcement learning …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31852 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

Dynamic manipulation of deformable linear objects (DLOs) remains challenging due to underactuated, high-dimensional dynamics, delayed deformation responses, and the presence of multiple feasible motions under obstacle constraints. This paper presents BM2PC, a Bayesian Multimodal MPC framework for agile manipulation of DLOs. Building on the control-as-inference posterior, BM2PC formulates multimodal planning as a set optimization problem that balances control quality and behavioral diversity. An efficient incremental update maintains multiple promising control modes with low additional …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31540 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Multi-robot coordination of nonlinear systems is naturally formulated as joint-space optimal control subject to constraints over groups of robots. Existing methods that approach joint optimality remain largely centralized, offline, and confined to collision-free motion planning, while decentralized, real-time counterparts target safe navigation without pursuing the joint optimum. This paper develops a decentralized, real-time planner that approaches the joint optimum as an anytime process. We extend a recent single-robot framework that searches dispersive trees of forward-propagated commands …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30607 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

Motion planning is central to robotics, and it is increasingly used to correct the motions proposed by learned planners and policies. In both uses, constraints must hold at every instant of the motion, not only at sampled times. To our knowledge, no algorithm provably converges to a globally optimal motion once a smoothness cost is combined with such constraints. We cast planning and steering as a single continuous-time program: robots avoid one another and static or moving obstacles, and a learned proposal is steered by keeping the motion close to it. The program is elementary to state, yet …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30044 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Humanoid loco-manipulation requires an effective interface between high-level task policies and whole-body control. Existing interfaces typically rely on a single action representation for both task intent and whole-body coordination. This may burden the high-level policy or leave one aspect underspecified. We present SP-HLM, a framework built on a sparse-pose-driven interface. The interface combines five task-critical body poses with a learned latent motion prior to represent spatial intent and whole-body coordination in complementary forms. SP-VLA, a vision-language-action model, first …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29461 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Sidewinding is an efficient gait for snake robots to locomote on various terrains, by undulating the backbone curve and shifting the contact segments along it. However, relying solely on undulatory motion limits the locomotive capability of snake robots, and combining it with twisting motion can improve their speed and robustness. This hypothesis has recently been verified by the rolling vector approach, which locomotes the robot like a differential-drive car. Yet its twisting is concentrated in a short buffer segment, imposing most of the workload on the two twist joints in the middle, which …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29452 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Robust and reactive collision avoidance remains a central challenge for deploying Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies on real robotic manipulators, particularly when transferring behaviours learned in simulation to the physical world. This paper presents an RL framework that integrates the Euclidean Distance Field (EDF) directly into the observation space, providing the agent with continuous geometric cues that support stable and responsive avoidance behaviours. By leveraging the rich spatial information encoded in the EDF, the method enables a streamlined reward formulation that achieves …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29377 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Learning-based path planners based on diffusion and flow matching can generate diverse trajectories from demonstrations but typically lack mechanisms for constraint satisfaction and collision avoidance during deployment. This work proposes a framework that combines flow-matching-based path planning with model predictive path-following control to integrate data-driven path generation with real-time, constraint-aware execution. The flow-matching model captures multimodal path distributions, while the predictive controller adapts motion online to satisfy state and input constraints and avoid …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29356 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Industries employ robots for repetitive tasks due to their high precision and performance, typically achieved through feedforward control actions based on an accurate robot description. However, an exact dynamic model can be difficult to obtain, especially for robots with elastic elements or when the payload changes. Learning-based feedforward approaches are promising for trajectory tracking under model uncertainties, but typically face generalization issues when task parameters vary. This paper proposes a novel method to generalize the feedforward control action with respect to payload …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28769 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

This paper presents a novel framework integrating a robust wrench observer with a hybrid pose and force controller for physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI). In pHRI tasks, robots are expected to perform task-space motions robustly while remaining compliance with human disturbance, which proposes distinct control objectives. Most existing approaches focus mainly on either robustness or compliance and rely on force sensors for real-time tracking. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework with the following key contributions. Firstly, a neural network (NN) is trained to …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28761 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

In human-robot interaction (HRI) tasks, humans may interact with the robot in either an active guiding or passive following state, resulting in distinct control objectives for each interaction mode. Most existing approaches rely on predefined switching thresholds to distinguish interaction modes, but their performance can be sensitive to measurement noise. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework with the following key contributions. First, a neural network (NN) trained via meta-learning is developed to recognize human intention without manually defined thresholds. By …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28329 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Trajectory tracking for compliant robots is challenging due to nonlinear dynamics and modeling uncertainties, often requiring learning-based methods to avoid explicit parameter identification. Iterative Learning Control (ILC) ensures theoretically high precision and preserves the passive compliance of the robot. However, traditional ILC requires a separate learning phase for each new trajectory. Conversely, Reinforcement Learning (RL) generalizes to new trajectories, but practically suffers from high sample complexity and limited tracking precision. This work proposes Reinforced Iterative …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28106 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Reach-avoid sets, defining the states from which a task can be completed while avoiding unsafe regions, are fundamental tools for deploying robots in environments subject to disturbances and uncertainty, as well as for runtime task-feasibility monitoring, allowing prediction of whether a state is safe and will lead to successful task completion. Classical Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability (HJR) and its recent neural extensions (e.g., Lipschitz Continuous Reachability Learning, DeepReach) treat disturbances adversarially, computing the reach-avoid set under worst-case disturbances from a bounded …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27870 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability analysis offers formal safety guarantees for control systems, but training accurate neural certificates remains difficult, particularly when unsafe regions are hard to characterize. We propose a verification-guided training framework that addresses this by using probabilistic enumeration of safety constraints to detect forward-invariance violations, i.e., states where the learned certificate incorrectly classifies unsafe behavior. This produces a compact, targeted set of counterexamples that more precisely captures the failure boundary than inputs generated …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27732 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) face significant challenges in roundabout navigation due to dense traffic interactions and unpredictable agent behaviors, necessitating high levels of adaptability and safety. While the combination of Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Model Predictive Control (MPC) offers a promising approach, existing frameworks suffer from a structural mismatch where pointwise RL decisions fail to align with MPC's trajectory level optimization, and often lack rigorous safety guarantees. This work proposes RLTrajGen-PPMPC-CBF, a hierarchical framework for safe, smooth …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27414 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Reliable quadrotor flight in disturbed environments requires predictive models that remain accurate as unmodeled aerodynamic effects change during deployment. We introduce a disturbance-aware Koopman Control Family (DA-KCF) framework that preserves an offline-identified nominal model while learning only a disturbance-induced correction online. A reference-dependent KCF is first learned from simulation data and calibrated using limited hardware data. During deployment, the nominal KCF remains fixed while a lightweight residual ensemble learns a low-dimensional disturbance correction from …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25946 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Developing coordination policies for complex multi-agent systems relies on either labor-intensive algorithm design or opaque task-specific reinforcement learning. With recent advances in autonomous coding agents, we show that policy search directly in code space offers a compelling third path that combines automated optimization with explicit interpretability. We investigate a human-directed workflow in which coding agents iteratively propose, implement, evaluate, diagnose, and eventually refine algorithms guided by simulation feedback and explicit correctness verification. We conducted two …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25711 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Humanoid robots operating in human-centric environments must coordinate the entire body to traverse tight, cluttered spaces while maintaining balance. Existing methods often struggle to jointly consider dynamic stability and collision avoidance from high-dimensional perceptual inputs. Moreover, for humanoids, safe behavior is inherently multimodal: the same obstacle may admit multiple valid traversals, which is difficult to represent with a single deterministic policy. To address these challenges, we propose SWAP (Steerable Whole-body Avoidance Policy), a hierarchical framework that separates …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25600 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Visual world models have shown strong potential for robot planning, yet long-horizon manipulation remains challenging due to compounding prediction errors, large search complexity, and latent plans that the low-level controller cannot reliably reach. In this work, we introduce Vector-Quantized World Model (VQ-WM), a latent feedback motion planning framework that integrates discrete long-horizon search with continuous visual feedback control: a discrete latent predictor models transitions between vector-quantized latent states, allowing the planner to look far ahead and find a shortest path to …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25455 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Classical robot control, Finite State Machines and Behavior Trees (BTs), is deterministic and inspectable but fixed at design time: it fails on situations its designers did not anticipate. Foundation models can synthesize new control logic at runtime, at a cost in latency and non-determinism hard to accept in safety-critical aerial systems. Existing LLM-driven approaches keep the model in the loop permanently and discard what it produces. We propose Self-Crystallizing Behavior Trees (SCBT), in which the foundation model is a compiler rather than a runtime. When a BT node fails, an LLM …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25436 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Shared autonomy is a control paradigm that combines human cognitive abilities with robot precision to enable effective remote manipulation in complex environments. A key challenge is how to adapt the level of autonomy using information extracted from the human, task, and/or environment. In this paper, we propose a novel arbitration strategy that dynamically adjusts the level of autonomy in the system using the entropy of a belief distribution derived from a multimodal intent inference. Human intent is modeled with a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN), which updates beliefs over goals given …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25024 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Multi-quadrotor passage planning requires coordinated spatial routes and passage times under vehicle dynamics and actuation constraints. Optimizing these decisions jointly couples temporal allocation, nonlinear motion, and inter-vehicle interactions, creating a computational challenge for local trajectory generation. We propose a learning-optimization framework that predicts spatial waypoints and ordered passage events for independently solved quadrotor planners. A common physical time grid aligns the vehicles, with intermediate events fixed by the networks and terminal progress optimized …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24256 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Safe, real-time motion planning is especially difficult when a dynamic obstacle actively pursues the ego agent, requiring rapid adaptation as the environment changes. We present TrajEdit, a hierarchical trajectory planner for pursuit-evasion that combines flow matching, trajectory editing, and safety filtering. Rather than regenerating trajectories from scratch at every step, TrajEdit follows the current plan under nominal conditions and adapts its remaining portion through FlowEdit as the pursuer approaches, and falls back to a control barrier function safety filter if the adversarial agent …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24235 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

With advancements in learning-based policies, robots are increasingly being deployed in human-centric environments, such as manufacturing floors and homes, where safe and precise operation requires compensating for unknown loads while remaining compliant during human interactions. Reliably distinguishing between these interaction types is challenging with a single sensing modality, as force signals cannot separate payloads from human pushes, and vision is susceptible to occlusions. We propose a task-agnostic interaction estimation and adaptive control framework that addresses this challenge …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24149 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Fast motion planning requires both sample-efficient exploration and computationally efficient local steering. Conventional straight-line steering is inexpensive but wastes samples by rejecting colliding extensions. Quadratic program controllers with control barrier function (CBF) constraints can be used to achieve effective local steering but can increase the planning time due to the expensive sequential evaluations. We develop a method to accelerate CBF steering by computing a time horizon within which CBF-filtered velocity may be applied constantly using closed-form kinematic bounds on …