arXiv AI

TANGO: Humanoid Navigation in Cluttered Environments with a Whole-Body Vision-Language-Action Model

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 AI
Aug 14

SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Control

arXiv:2511. 07820v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the rise of billion-parameter foundation models trained across thousands of graphical processing units (GPUs), similar scaling gains have not been shown for humanoid control.

By Zhengyi Luo, Ye Yuan, Tingwu Wang, Chenran Li, Fernando Casta\~neda, Sirui Chen, Zi-Ang Cao, Jiefeng Li, David Minor, Qingwei Ben, Jinhyung Park, David Sami, Zi Wang, Xingye Da, Runyu Ding, Cyrus Hogg, Lina Song, Edy Lim, Eugene Jeong, Tairan He, Haoru Xue, Wenli Xiao, Simon Yuen, Jan Kautz, Yan Chang, Umar Iqbal, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Yuke Zhu
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Visual Cue Guided Video Planning for Generalizable Robot Navigation

CueNav is a video model-based navigation framework that uses visual cues—a Bird's-Eye View map for global task context and a body-aware egocentric view for embodiment context—to guide a video planner. The framework couples this planner with an embodiment-specific Inverse-Dynamics Model that translates dense flow fields from the video plan into robot actions. Experiments show that CueNav nearly doubles maze navigation success compared to cue-less planning and achieves 70% success in narrow passages, while also supporting zero-shot semantic-conditioned navigation across different robot platforms.

By Hojin Lee, Sizhe Lester Li, Maximilian Hilger, Susie Lu, Achim J. Lilienthal, Vincent Sitzmann, Daniel A. Duecker
arXiv AI
Sep 17

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.

By Zhenfeng Gan, Yanbo Chen, Lirong Che, Yongyi Ma, Rongkai Zhu, Xueqian Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 10

WNM-3D: A World Navigation Model with 3D Scene Conditioning for Closed-Loop VLN

arXiv:2608. 07267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent vision-language navigation (VLN) systems increasingly adapt pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) into vision-language-action (VLA) policies that map egocentric observations and language instructions directly to navigation actions.

By Yuehao Huang, Yunzi Wu, Xiaotao Zhang, Xinhai Li, Jiankun Dong, Jiajun Lv, Chi Zhang, Chenjia Bai, Yong Liu, Xuelong Li