https://hu-zlatan.github.io/embodied-ai-radar/robots/mobile.xml 2026-10-29T00:00:00ZEmbodied AI Radar https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37111 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Active simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) addresses the problem of planning robot motion to build complete and accurate maps of unknown environments through efficient exploration while maintaining high localization accuracy. This raises a dilemma between exploring unknown spaces to expand coverage and exploiting visited regions to perform active loop closures. Despite numerous prior works on ground robots, aerial robots with high agility and constrained sensor suites face more significant localization drift and thereby demand dedicated active SLAM planning. Moreover, a unified …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36725 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

Mobile robot manipulators extend contact-task capability beyond the workspace of fixed robot installations, but their bases must also sustain the forces generated by the task. On lightweight platforms, base motion and support compliance can change the force and motion realised at the workpiece. How these non-rigid base effects manifest during sustained contact remains insufficiently characterised. This paper investigates non-rigid base effects in mobile robot manipulators through a sanding case study combining exploratory simulation with experiments on two lightweight, unactuated wheeled …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35062 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Large vehicles in cluttered environments are often blocked by movable obstacles, motivating mobile robot teams to clear traversable corridors. Navigation Among Movable Obstacles (NAMO) approaches often abstract obstacle displacements while neglecting robot dimensions, obstacle mass, contact geometry and forces, yielding physically infeasible plans. PushAround is a physics-informed hybrid search that couples geometric connectivity reasoning with short-horizon simulation to construct executable clearing plans. Repeated W-clearance connectivity graph (WCCG) queries expose frontier gaps requiring …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34929 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Dynamic target tracking requires a mobile robot to maintain target visibility while navigating obstacles with smooth, feasible controls. Online trajectory optimization explicitly encodes these objectives but requires repeated numerical solving, whereas waypoint-based neural policies separate geometric prediction from control execution. We introduce LECO, a framework that transfers tracking optimization into offline learning of a direct-control policy. LECO predicts control sequences and maps them to trajectories through a differentiable kinematic model, allowing trajectory-level objectives to …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34519 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Vision-language-action (VLA) models are increasingly used for robot manipulation because they map camera images and a language instruction directly to actions. Robots that cannot be tethered to a workstation, such as mobile manipulators and humanoids, must run them on onboard embedded boards, where the prefill latency of the language backbone grows with the hundreds of visual tokens processed at every control step. To meet real-time limits, training-free accelerators recompute only a subset of the visual tokens and skip the rest, either by pruning them or by reusing their cached key-value …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33916 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Predicting the short-term future trajectory of a person from RGB-D cameras is a key capability for mobile robots navigating in dynamic and human populated environment. The key challenge to deploying learned predictors on real robots is the train-deploy pipeline gap. Training data are often prepared with an idealized, smoothed ground truth, whereas at inference, the model is fed noisy estimates from pose detectors and depth sensors. The model is therefore evaluated on an input distribution it never encountered during training. Most existing models rely on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) or …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33735 2026-10-27T00:00:00Z

Floor traction influences wheel-slip behavior, dead-reckoning accuracy, and the navigation performance of wheeled mobile robots that rely on wheel odometry. As these robots become increasingly common in GNSS-denied indoor environments, including automated manufacturing and retail facilities, their onboard measurements could also be used to characterize floor conditions and improve localization. In this study, a skid-steer robot was driven over five floor surfaces with distinct traction characteristics using commanded velocity profiles designed to induce wheel slip through repeated …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32633 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

Autonomous mobile robots support material transport in warehouses and industrial facilities, where navigation must adapt to changing operating conditions. Sensor observations reveal physical obstacles, but do not by themselves specify temporary access rules, route preferences, or exceptions known to operators. This paper presents a natural-language policy interface that brings this knowledge into ROS 2 Nav2. A local large language model converts instructions into JSON policies specifying destinations, spatial constraints, and temporal or event conditions. Deterministic checks govern mission …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32130 2026-10-26T00:00:00Z

Traversability analysis in off-road settings remains a fundamental challenge for mobile robots. Key difficulties include constructing an accurate and expressive local map from multimodal sensor data, and using the map to design traversability rules that yield desirable navigation behavior. Importantly, this system must be resilient to the limited sensing regime brought about by complex environments and high speeds. In this paper, we present TravSUITE, a traversability system suitable for high-speed navigation in off-road environments. TravSUITE consists of two major components: 1) an …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30994 2026-10-23T00:00:00Z

This paper presents TRACE, a traversability-aware reactive navigation framework designed for the autonomous operation of ground robots in unstructured forest environments. Unlike traditional approaches, TRACE leverages VLM-based confidence maps from positive and negative natural-language prompt sets and combines them through evidential fusion to produce a dense traversability map that prioritizes the terrain based on signs of previously traversed paths. Traversability-annotated points are then extracted and used to derive the left and right boundaries of the traversable path via percentile …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29964 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Mobile manipulators must navigate safely in cluttered, partially unknown environments across logistics, manufacturing, and service applications. Semi-static changes between robot visits can lead to outdated scene knowledge and increased collision risk. We propose an active perception framework that enables a high degree-of-freedom (DoF) mobile manipulator to inspect uncertain or safety-critical regions with its hand camera during navigation. A probabilistic, object- and task-aware next-best-view (NBV) formulation prioritizes observations near the desired path and around uncertain or …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29845 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Autonomous mobile robots operating in dense crowds and cluttered sites require $360^\circ$ perception to react to surrounding hazards. While panoramic LiDAR offers full-surround coverage, learning representations within reinforcement learning (RL) is sample-inefficient under sparse rewards, and existing 3D pretrained point-cloud encoders are too memory-heavy for massively parallel RL simulation. We present RangeNav, a compact (183k parameters) LiDAR range-image encoder pretrained entirely on synthetic data. RangeNav uses anisotropic convolutions and circular padding to handle the extreme …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28953 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Autonomous mobile robots require spatial representations that capture geometry and semantics while staying sparse enough for planning in large, unknown environments. Graphs provide a natural representation for this purpose and underpin both classical planning methods and a growing class of reinforcement-learning (RL) policies. However, RL training needs hundreds to thousands of parallel environments, each constructing and updating its own graph. Existing graph libraries are typically designed for either single-robot deployment or fixed graphs, and CPU-based graph construction limits scalable …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28948 2026-10-22T00:00:00Z

Mobile manipulators must adapt not only to objects, but also to the spatial context in which they appear: where to position the base, how to manipulate, and where to look while navigating surrounding scene geometry. To address this, we present COWBOY, a scalable sim-to-real framework for learning such contextual whole-body manipulation. On whole-body dexterous grasping, COWBOY transfers zero-shot to hundreds of objects and diverse in-the-wild scenes, spanning cluttered tabletops, shelves, drawers, and other unstructured settings. Rather than learning scene adaptation directly with RL in …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28432 2026-10-21T00:00:00Z

Classical robot navigation stacks are reliable but often require re-engineering for each new robot type and site. Learning-based navigation shifts this effort from hand-tuned parameters to data generation and training, where a policy adapts to each new embodiment or facility by fine-tuning in simulation. Whether policies adapted this way stay reliable on real industrial robots has seen little systematic testing. We study this for NVIDIA's X-Mobility and COMPASS workflow for training learned navigation policies on Idealworks robots. In simulation, we extend the COMPASS benchmark with two …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26852 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Reinforcement learning enables mobile robots to make fast and scalable navigation decisions in constrained human-shared environments. However, directly extending single-robot approaches to multi-robot settings often fails to ensure safety and efficiency, especially under occlusions and out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, where individual robots may overlook potential risks or make inaccurate predictions. Leveraging cooperation effectively for both prediction and navigation remains a major challenge. We propose CoopUQ, a multi-robot social navigation framework that bridges uncertainty-aware …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25397 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Visual-inertial odometry systems are often constrained by the assumption that sensors are rigidly mounted, which limits their adaptability in practical scenarios involving structural motion. To address this limitation, this paper investigates time-varying camera-IMU extrinsic calibration. First, a dynamic camera-IMU extrinsic calibration method based on the Denavit-Hartenberg convention is proposed by incorporating the robot kinematic model. Second, a two-step initialization strategy is developed to efficiently estimate the initial joint angles, providing a reliable starting point for …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25225 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

This study presents the development of two Robot Operating System (ROS) nodes with a primary focus on differentiating seven radioactive isotopes. The first node, referred to as the model training node, uses a Gradient Boosting classifier to identify and classify these isotopes. The classifier achieved a reported overall accuracy of 95\% on the held-out test dataset. The second node, known as the prediction node, provides classification results when users input data in CSV format. For the practical demonstration, the C12137 radiation detector module was mounted on the Jackal UGV, and an …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24449 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Tethered mobile robots can sustain long-duration operation through continuous power supply and stable communication via their cables. However, cable-environment interaction causes unintended obstacle displacement, cable snagging or entanglement, and even cable damage, leading to mission failure. To assess the risk of individual cable-obstacle contacts, this study investigates cable tension as a sensing modality for estimating whether a contacted obstacle is movable or non-movable. We conducted experiments with a tethered mobile robot and collected tension data while varying robot velocity, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23891 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

A robotic agent operating in an unknown environment must gather sufficient task-relevant information before acting. However, determining when the available information is sufficient remains a challenge. We propose a conceptual hybrid neuro-symbolic framework for task-sufficient active perception in unknown environments. After interpreting a requested task, the agent generates an initial plan and iteratively reevaluates it as new information becomes available. At each iteration, it can acquire a more informative viewpoint, inspect or manipulate candidate objects, ask the user for …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23883 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Long-range throwing on unstructured terrain is a key capability for mobile robots in delivery and retrieval tasks, but it requires high release velocity, coordinated whole-body motion, and robustness to terrain-induced disturbances. We present a whole-body kinetic-coordination framework for a wheeled-quadruped manipulator that combines kinetic-chain arm modeling with SQP-based trajectory optimization and a reference-guided reinforcement learning policy for coordinated base motion. The manipulator is first reduced to a kinetic-chain model and optimized under kinematic and dynamic constraints …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23878 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Aerial tracking of autonomous ground vehicles can provide useful situational awareness in environments where fixed external perception infrastructure is unavailable. However, visual-only tracking from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is limited by camera field of view, viewpoint changes, occlusions, and temporary loss of target visibility. This paper presents a heterogeneous UAV--UGV methodology for aerial tracking of small-scale autonomous ground vehicles in simulation. The system is implemented in ROS~2 and Gazebo Sim using a Tello-like UAV equipped with a front-facing RGB camera and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23622 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Geometric and Semantic Foundation models are becoming increasingly popular tools for generating spatial maps for robots. Recent work (e.g., FOUND-IT) has leveraged these tools to construct real-time, task-driven, and open-set 3D scene graphs from a single uncalibrated camera. However, while classical robot mapping techniques have undergone extensive system demonstrations, limited work has been done to develop both the fundamental and the systems wide advancements needed to integrate these new types of robot spatial memory into a full, useable autonomy pipeline. In this paper, we bridge this …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22997 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Achieving precise terminal position and heading alignment remains a significant challenge for learning-based mobile robot control. Recent vision-based learning methods have shown promise for precise target-relative control and generalization to unseen environments with pretrained visual encoders, but general-purpose visual representations are not specifically designed to capture the fine-grained spatial differences between current and goal views required for precise control, and real-world demonstrations combining millimeter-scale terminal accuracy with zero-shot transfer across environments …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22563 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

We demonstrate high-precision global localization using natural ground texture viewed through microscope optics, achieving localization in the tens-of-micrometers regime. For the planar ground texture localization problem considered here, we relate optical magnification and image-space localization uncertainty to physical localization precision. Leveraging this relationship, we then develop a microscope-based localization system that addresses the calibration, camera-modeling, and focus challenges introduced by high-magnification imaging. We evaluate this system across several surface …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22552 2026-10-19T00:00:00Z

Echolocating bats navigate dense forests using sonar alone, and in-air 3D imaging sonars now capture the entire frontal hemisphere with every pulse. Sonar SLAM, however, has so far been planar: current systems estimate a 2D trajectory and discard the elevation information in the sonar images, an assumption that does not hold on rough and sloped terrain such as a forest floor. In this paper, we introduce RTISSLAM-3D, a novel 6-DoF SLAM system for a wheeled robot that carries an in-air 3D imaging sonar, an IMU and wheel encoders. A CFAR detector on the sphere reduces every sonar image to a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21429 2026-10-15T00:00:00Z

Sound-Triggered Mobile Manipulation (STMM) requires robots to respond to sound events by navigating to the associated objects and performing appropriate physical interactions. Existing STMM evaluations primarily vary object layouts within limited architectural structures, leaving challenges to unseen scenes insufficiently explored. We introduce Multi-scene Sound-Triggered Mobile Manipulation (MuSTMM), a dataset that combines spatial audio rendering and physical interaction across 31 scenes with diverse architectures and object layouts. MuSTMM contains 14.36 million precomputed binaural Room …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20998 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

Passive human videos of everyday activity offer robots access to a massive amount of human experience without requiring a demonstration for each task. However, using this experience requires recovering knowledge from unstructured video recordings and adapting it to a different body (i.e., the robot). To overcome these challenges, we present mobile code-as-policy (MoCaP), an agentic framework that turns passive human video recordings into guidance for an end-to-end mobile manipulation policy. MoCaP extracts spatial memory and cues of how people prepare to interact with objects, which inform …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20958 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

Autonomous mobile robots in warehouses and production facilities operate in precisely the environments that defeat point-feature visual odometry: featureless aisles, uniform walls, repetitive racking and specular floors. Such environments are, however, rich in straight-edge structure: rack uprights, door frames, wall junctions and cabinet outlines present high-contrast linear edges stable across wide viewpoint changes. A line-feature extension to cuVSLAM, a CUDA-accelerated visual-SLAM system, is presented that recovers this signal. Lines are parameterised as Plücker coordinates for geometric …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20875 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

Sustainably powered mobile robots enable long-duration observational missions by harvesting energy from the environment. However, effective autonomy requires the robots to make decisions as to how to allocate this energy to maximize information quality over time. In this paper, we study a persistent (infinite-horizon) speed trajectory optimization problem that is posed as a periodic optimal control problem in which a robot repeatedly traverses a fixed closed path, coupling a super-linear propulsion cost with dynamic information gain and decay. Using the information-theoretic quantity of …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20607 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

Mobile Manipulation (MoMa) is a cornerstone of autonomous robotic systems, yet real-world fine-tuning remains a formidable challenge because of high-dimensional action spaces and intricate coupling between heterogeneous modules. In this paper, we propose HiRe-MoMa (Hierarchical Residual Mobile Manipulation), a systematic framework for stable and sample-efficient real-world fine-tuning of complex MoMa systems. At its core, HiRe-MoMa adopts a Hierarchical Residual Architecture that fine-tunes a frozen base policy. A Policy-Agnostic Residual learns additive corrections atop the base policy, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19600 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong performance on local robot manipulation, yet their success does not readily translate to long-horizon mobile manipulation. In our experiments, a pretrained subtask VLA achieves 80% success rate on atomic manipulation tasks but only 19% when these skills are composed into mobile manipulation. We argue that this gap stems from failures across the execution process rather than from local manipulation capability alone. To uncover these bottlenecks, we systematically diagnose failures in long-horizon mobile manipulation and identify …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19594 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

Whole-body mobile manipulation suffers from two fundamental challenges: inherent motion heterogeneity across locomotion, arm, and hand modules, and progressive error accumulation over long-horizon multi-stage tasks. Existing teleoperation platforms also lack integrated dexterous tactile sensing to support coordinated whole-body decision-making. This paper presents RoboSpan, a high-DoF whole-body teleoperation and demonstration platform, and the Hierarchical Modular Framework (HMF) for learning modular coordination policies. HMF functionally decouples the 29-DoF action space into fine hand …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18850 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Collaborative planning under operational constraints is essential for heterogeneous robot teams in large-scale missions. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provide rapid area coverage but are limited by onboard energy, while Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) can serve as mobile recharging stations yet are constrained by road-network traversability. Effective collaboration must enforce operational constraints during execution while enabling parallel, coordinated actions. Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have shown promise through token unmasking but have two key limitations: entropy-guided scheduling …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18479 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Sonar was one of the first sensors with which mobile robots built maps, and in-air sonar keeps working where cameras and lidar fail, in darkness, smoke, dust and next to glass. Classical sonar SLAM, however, relied on geometric features or occupancy grids built from sparse range readings, and both struggle with the specular reflections that dominate indoor sonar. In this letter, we introduce RTISSLAM, a novel sonar-only SLAM system for an embedded 3D imaging sonar, which combines the robust pose graph of BatSLAM 2.0 as back-end with an occupancy grid as map. Energyscapes from …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18425 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Cooperative aerial manipulation is difficult under wind, payload motion, and noisy goal broadcasts because multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are coupled through a shared payload. We present CALM (Cooperative Aerial Learned Manipulation), a decentralized controller for aerial manipulators carrying a basket while tracking a moving ground robot. CALM combines a parameter-shared Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) policy, trained using Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO), with goal estimation, per-UAV Extended State Observers (ESOs), basket-mass estimation, and …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18381 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Aerial mobile manipulation requires unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to traverse heterogeneous environments such as indoor and outdoor domains, and connect navigation with subsequent physical interaction within the same trajectories. Existing aerial benchmarks are typically confined to single-environment settings, limiting evaluation of agents across continuous environmental transitions. When interaction is evaluated, agents are often initialized near the target, leaving the transition from navigation to interaction largely unassessed. This work introduces CrossFly, a benchmark for …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18160 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Robotic harvesting of cherry tomatoes in greenhouses remains challenging due to dense fruit clusters, delicate skin, and the need for gentle yet effective detachment. This study presents a force-data-driven framework for autonomous cherry tomato harvesting that integrates six-axis force/torque sensing, a bio-inspired compliant gripper, and deployment on a mobile robotic platform. A wearable ATI six-axis force/torque sensor mounted on the index finger captured kinetic signatures of three elemental picking patterns (gripping, twisting, and lateral pulling) across 150 manual trials (50 per …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18123 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Broadcast spraying remains the dominant method of disease control in greenhouse tomato production, yet it treats healthy and diseased tissue alike, exposes workers to hazardous aerosols, and depends on operator skill. This paper presents MARTS (Modular Agricultural Robot for Targeted Spraying), a low-cost robotic platform that closes the loop from plant-level disease detection to leaf-localised spray delivery in commercial greenhouses. MARTS integrates a Clearpath Husky A200 mobile base, a UR5 manipulator, a novel modular spraying end-effector built around a single 12 V micro-diaphragm pump, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17748 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

Policies trained offline from teleoperated demonstrations can degrade outside their training distribution. This gap is particularly acute in long-horizon whole-body mobile manipulation, where long horizons amplify compounding errors and coordinated arm, torso, and base motion makes exhaustive demonstration coverage impractical. We introduce I3L, an integrated hardware and learning system that combines whole-body correction with iterative policy refinement to address this last-mile reliability gap. Its low-cost, open-source JoyLo+ interface uses policy-tracking leader arms and touch-triggered …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17677 2026-10-13T00:00:00Z

We completely characterize the solvability profiles of tasks for two autonomous mobile robots in the plane under variable disorientation, chirality, and rigid movements. The four standard capability models and the schedulers considered here have a known quotient order Q of thirteen computational classes. A task's solvability profile is the set of classes in which it is solvable, and is necessarily an upset of Q. We prove that every upset is realizable and construct a minimum exact disjunctive basis of thirteen concrete tasks. The basis contains one task for each principal upset. For every …