The paper presents DORA, an online learning algorithm for robot navigation that uses Dijkstra’s algorithm as an exact planning engine under a weaker condition than usual causality—specifically, nonnegativity of a reduced cost on a determinized map. DORA calls a shortest‑path oracle a fixed number of times per episode, avoids estimating transition kernels, and incorporates a logarithmic survival weight to keep contact probabilities with dynamic obstacles within a budget. Experiments on grid‑world, directional drilling, and drone surveillance benchmarks show that DORA matches optimistic value iteration with the true transition kernel while performing 4.5 to 19.3 times less planner work, reduces contacts by a factor of seventeen compared to determinize‑and‑replan, and maintains contact rates within wide budget ranges.
By Mansur M. Arief, Ali Akarma, Ahmad Alfan Alfian Irfan
arXiv:2508. 19186v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reactive obstacle avoidance methods often cause agents to become trapped in local minima, because they can often only reason one step ahead (i.
By Christopher Chandler, Bernd Porr, Giulia Lafratta, Alice Miller
The paper introduces the Unified Path Planner (UPP), a graph‑search algorithm that balances safety and optimality by adaptively weighting heuristics and using a local inverse‑distance safety field. UPP auto‑tunes its parameters during search, guaranteeing suboptimality bounds while improving obstacle clearance. Evaluation on ten simulated environments shows UPP achieving a 0.94 OptiSafe score—significantly higher than existing methods—while adding only 0.5–1% to path length and maintaining a 100% success rate, with hardware validation on a TurtleBot confirming practical benefits.
By Jatin Kumar Arora, Soutrik Bandyopadhyay, Sunil Sulania, Shubhendu Bhasin
The paper introduces SafeHarness, an obstacle‑aware framework that improves the safety of coding agents for robot manipulation. By decomposing tasks into route planning and contact execution, the harness enables the agent to prioritize collision avoidance, achieving 71.9% task success and 87.5% collision avoidance—significantly better than prior methods. The study demonstrates that safety constraints can be effectively integrated into language‑model‑driven robot controllers.
By Bingxin Xu, Yuzhang Shang, Zhen Dong, Emilio Ferrara
arXiv:2607. 20289v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider a task planning scenario in which robots sharing a persistent environment are assigned tasks one at a time from a held-out sequence.
By Md Ridwan Hossain Talukder, Roshan Dhakal, Elizabeth Phillips, Gregory J. Stein
The paper presents a training-free diffusion-based motion planner that replaces learned global trajectory scores with analytical local scores derived from obstacle, smoothness, velocity, and inter-agent feasibility terms. By reconstructing trajectory scores through local interactions between neighboring waypoints and nearby constraints, the method decomposes the denoising process while preserving the optimization structure of classical trajectory methods. Experiments demonstrate that this approach generates smooth, feasible trajectories for large multi-agent tasks in complex environments quickly, outperforming learning-based and optimization baselines without requiring training data.
By Michael Y. Fatemi, Jinhao Liang, Ferdinando Fioretto
arXiv:2608. 15175v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed for autonomous navigation in complex outdoor environments, where dynamic conditions and mission requirements require intelligent adaptive decision-making.
By Yousef Emami, Mohammadhossein Homaei, Hao Zhou, Miguel Guti\'errez Gait\'an, Atefeh Hajijamali Arani, Rui Zhang
arXiv:2606. 06618v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How can we plan long-horizon routes that reach designated goals, visit required waypoints, and remain short when only short-horizon offline trajectories are available?
By Jungmin Seo, Jaesik Park
arXiv:2607. 00065v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Any-angle path planning extends traditional graph-based path planning by allowing movement between any pair of vertices, rather than being restricted by predefined edges.
By Yiyuan Zou, Clark Borst
arXiv:2512.00939v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Recent progress in contact-rich robotic manipulation has been striking, yet most deployed systems remain confined to simple, scripted routine...
By Nayesha Gandotra, Itamar Mishani, Lai Yuan, Oren Salzman, Maxim Likhachev
Probabilistic Focal Search (PFS) augments traditional Focal Search by probabilistically choosing between the standard heuristic-guided expansion and expanding the minimum‑f node in OPEN. This strategy advances the lower bound, enlarges the FOCAL frontier, and can dramatically reduce node expansions—up to 90% in some benchmarks such as N‑Puzzle and TSP—especially when long f_min plateaus delay useful FOCAL admissions. An anytime variant, APFS, outperforms other tested anytime algorithms on the Generalized Covering TSP, and the same probabilistic scheduler transfers to Dynamic Potential Search as Probabilistic Dynamic Potential Search (PDPS), though its effectiveness varies by domain and bound.
By Minh Vu Duc, Trung Le Huu, H\`a Minh Ho\`ang, Trung Thanh Nguyen, Phuong Khanh Nguyen, Huynh Thi Thanh Binh
arXiv:2503. 01236v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper addresses fixed-graph terrain-aware path refinement, in which a global planner is restricted to a predefined route space and may remain optimal within that space while missing lower-cost terrain corridors available in the native-resolution map.
By Ling Xiao, Toshihiko Yamasaki