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.
arXiv:2608. 05588v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding (LMAPF) requires repeatedly planning collision-free paths for agents that continuously receive new goals upon reaching their current ones.
arXiv:2603. 24084v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Empirical evaluation in multi-objective search (MOS) has historically suffered from fragmentation, relying on heterogeneous problem instances with incompatible objective definitions that make cross-study comparisons difficult.
arXiv:2607. 00444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatiotemporal motion planning, especially in multi-robot settings, requires robots to reason about collision-free regions that change over time, which is challenging in continuous spaces when feasible regions are transient and geometrically constrained.
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.
Mobile robots that operate in side by side with humans and critical facilities must reach their goals at low cost, despite often unknown true traversal costs of the map apriori and imperfect actuation...
arXiv:2607. 18200v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots in cluttered indoor spaces often fail not because they cannot generate collision-free paths, but because a fixed safety margin is mis-calibrated: conservative margins cause detours and timeouts, while permissive margins lead to near-boundary shortcuts under perception bias.
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.
arXiv:2602. 20055v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robot navigation typically assumes an obstacle-free path exists between start and goal.
arXiv:2606. 18634v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To locate a target object while exploring the unknown environment is a fundamental capability for autonomous agents, with applications ranging from search-and-rescue to field robots.
arXiv:2606. 29898v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world evaluation is the gold standard for robot policies because it tests them against the physical conditions and deployment challenges they are ultimately designed to handle.
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:2609.13083v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In urban search and rescue, articulated tracked robots (ATRs) must traverse structured but contact-rich environments such as stairwells and c...