arXiv AI

Language-Guided Terrain-Adaptive Neural MPC for Autonomous Traversal of Articulated Tracked Robots

The paper introduces ASTRIL-MPC, a language‑guided neural model predictive control framework that enables articulated tracked robots to navigate complex, contact‑rich urban environments such as stairwells and cluttered interiors. By combining a learned kinematics model that predicts short‑horizon state changes, an optimization‑based planner with multi‑objective costs, and a large language model that safely updates control weights, the system achieves up to 71% better traversal quality than non‑adaptive NMPC and 67% better than a PPO baseline, while eliminating collision impacts during descent. Real‑robot trials over four indoor obstacles confirm the method’s transferability to physical contact‑rich traversal.

arXiv AI
Jul 23

PGTT: Phase-Guided Terrain Traversal for Perceptive Legged Locomotion

arXiv:2510. 18348v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: State-of-the-art perceptive Reinforcement Learning controllers for legged robots typically either (i) impose oscillator-or IK-based gait priors that constrain the action space, bias policy optimization, and limit adaptability across robot morphologies, or (ii) operate "blind," making them unable to anticipate hind-leg terrain and brittle to observation noise.

By Alexandros Ntagkas, Chairi Kiourt, Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis
arXiv AI
Jul 9

Behavior Foundations for Quadruped Robots: ABot-C0 Technical Report

arXiv:2607. 07370v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In embodied intelligence systems, the motion controller serves as the critical bridge between semantic reasoning and physical execution.

By Xufeng Zhao, Fuzhi Yang, Jianhui Chen, Li Gao, Zhang Meng, Jie Gao, Yao Zheng, Wenyu Liu, Menglin Yang, Minqi Gu, Yaru Zhao, Honglin Han, Shihui Su, Zixiao Tang, Liu Liu, Mu Xu, Yang Cai, Wenbin Tang
arXiv AI
Jun 17

OmniRetarget: Interaction-Preserving Data Generation for Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation and Scene Interaction

arXiv:2509. 26633v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A dominant paradigm for teaching humanoid robots complex skills is to retarget human motions as kinematic references to train reinforcement learning (RL) policies.

By Lujie Yang, Xiaoyu Huang, Zhen Wu, Angjoo Kanazawa, Pieter Abbeel, Carmelo Sferrazza, C. Karen Liu, Rocky Duan, Guanya Shi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

REFINE-DP: Diffusion Policy Fine-tuning for Humanoid Loco-manipulation via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2603. 13707v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humanoid loco-manipulation requires coordinated task-space motion planning with stable loco-manipulation command tracking under complex robot-environment dynamics and long-horizon tasks.

By Zhaoyuan Gu, Yipu Chen, Zimeng Chai, Alfred Cueva, Thong Nguyen, Yifan Wu, Huishu Xue, Minji Kim, Isaac Legene, Fukang Liu, KyoungMok Kim, Ayan Barula, Yongxin Chen, Ye Zhao
arXiv AI
Jul 16

Agile perceptive multi-skill locomotion for quadrupedal robots in the wild

arXiv:2607. 13579v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enabling quadrupedal robots to traverse complex terrains-from rugged outdoor environments to urban landscapes-requires seamless integration of multiple motor skills, smooth transitions between gaits, and high-speed perceptive locomotion using only onboard sensors.

By Jun-Gill Kang, Jaehyun Park, Tae-Gyu Song, Joon-Ha Kim, Seungwoo Hong, Hae-Won Park
arXiv AI
Sep 16

SafeFlow: Real-Time Text-Driven Humanoid Whole-Body Control via Physics-Guided Rectified Flow and Selective Safety Gating

SafeFlow is a real‑time, text‑driven humanoid control framework that blends physics‑guided motion generation with a three‑stage safety gate. It uses Physics‑Guided Rectified Flow Matching in a VAE latent space to produce physically executable trajectories, accelerates sampling with Reflow, and filters unsafe outputs via semantic OOD detection, directional sensitivity checks, and hard kinematic constraints before handing them to a motion‑tracking controller. Experiments on the Unitree G1 show that SafeFlow achieves higher success rates, better physical compliance, and faster inference than diffusion‑ and retargeting‑based baselines while maintaining motion diversity.

By Hanbyel Cho, Sang-Hun Kim, Jeonguk Kang, Donghan Koo
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 16

World-Action Models for Robot Learning and Control: A Survey

The survey "World-Action Models for Robot Learning and Control" reviews recent advances in coupling future world prediction with executable action generation for robots in open environments. It clarifies the scope of World-Action Models (WAMs) relative to conventional world models, model-based RL, and Vision‑Language‑Action policies, and organizes existing methods through a unified taxonomy covering representations, transition modeling, action interfaces, architectures, training pipelines, data modalities, and scaling strategies. The paper also surveys applications in manipulation, navigation, and autonomous driving, summarizes datasets, benchmarks, and metrics, and discusses key challenges such as action alignment, spatial consistency, long‑horizon memory, and efficient inference.

By Zuxing Lu, Hongjia Zhai, Guanzhi Wang, Huajian Zeng, Jiaqi Yang, Jingyu Liu, Lei Cheng, Yuantai Zhang, Yuheng Qiu, Zezhou Cheng, Ivan Laptev, Danfei Xu, Benjamin Riviere, Giuseppe Loianno, Eric Xing, Xingxing Zuo