arXiv_RO
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Mind the Refinement Gap: When Safe High-Level Robot Plans Produce Unsafe Executions
2026-10-02 01:31:57Stabak Das, Priyesh Ranjan, Xiangfang Li, Lijun QianAbstract
Language-enabled robot systems increasingly combine semantic-graph planning with temporal-logic safety monitors. We investigate a trace-completeness assumption in these systems: whether the high-level action sequence checked by a monitor represents the navigation and implicit action effects induced during execution. We audit this assumption in RoboGuard by comparing its verdict on a surface plan with its verdict on a graph-refined trace under the same Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) specification. Our evaluation comprises 28 controlled cases spanning five action-abstraction families and 14 end-to-end cases in which SPINE [1] generates plans from natural-language instructions while RoboGuard generates scene-grounded safety specifications. In the controlled evaluation, all 12 targeted abstraction cases exhibit the predicted surface-versus-refined discrepancy while all 16 controls behave as expected, motivating graph-based trace refinement as a lightweight mitigation and a diagnostic tool for physical-AI safety monitors.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02662
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Real-time Event-camera Stereo Visual Odometry via Keytime Gaussian Process Regression
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Event cameras have microsecond-level temporal resolution and high dynamic range which make them more resilient to motion blur and poor illumination than standard frame-based cameras. Event-camera visual odometry (VO) pipelines maximize these benefits when they process the asynchronous event stream at the native temporal resolution. Continuous-time Gaussian process (GP) regression and a white-noise-on-acceleration (WNOA) prior can handle asynchronous measurements but result in a prohibitively large estimation state when applied naively. This paper presents a continuous-time event-camera stereo VO pipeline that maintains the native measurement times of asynchronous events while also running in real time. It reduces the estimation states to keytimes while maintaining full temporal resolution by interpolating measurements to their exact timestamps with a physically founded WNOA prior. This decouples the state size from the dense number of measurements without discarding their asynchronous nature. The real-time continuous-time VO pipeline is evaluated on the MVSEC and DSEC datasets. It provides estimates in real time that are more accurate than ES-PTAM, a state-of-the-art discrete estimator, in all but one of the tested sequences. The pipeline respectively provides estimates at 22 Hz and 6 Hz on MVSEC and DSEC and RMS relative errors of 0.46 cm and 0.038 degrees across all valid sequences, which were 11 and 15 times better than ES-PTAM, respectively.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02601
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Test-time Multi-agent Coordination by Decomposed Value Gradient Flow
2026-10-01 22:38:27Dongsu Lee, Haoran Xu, Amy ZhangAbstract
Offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) faces a persistent trade-off. Expressive generative policies can represent multi-modal coordination in the data, but cannot distinguish high-value regions, while value-optimized policies exploit the learned Q-function but collapse the multi-modal into a single dominant mode. A single agent's mode collapse can break joint coordination, and simultaneous drift across agents can push the joint policy into unseen regions of the action space. We propose scalable coordination via optimal unified transport (SCOUT), the first offline MARL framework to combine a generative foundation model with a learned value function through test-time action refinement. SCOUT trains two decoupled components: a flow-matching behavioral prior and a decomposed value function. At test-time, it transports behavioral samples toward high-value regions via Stein variational gradient descent. The number of transport steps controls adaptive test-time scaling, replacing a fixed regularization coefficient. Under the individual-global-max (IGM) principle, we prove a single-term KL bound on the joint soft-value gap that vanishes as transport converges, with an irreducible additive residual proportional to the IGM violation. Empirically, SCOUT achieves the best average performance across discrete and continuous offline MARL benchmarks and yields performance improvements in all offline-to-online configurations.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02554
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RUL-Aware RRT*: Degradation-Balanced Motion Planning for Robotic Manipulators
Abstract
Robotic manipulators operating over long durations often experience uneven joint degradation, which causes the weakest actuator to fail prematurely, leads to unplanned downtime, and results in significant operational losses. Traditional motion-planning algorithms do not account for joint health conditions and therefore tend to exacerbate this imbalance during extended operation. To address this challenge, this study introduces the RUL-aware RRT*, a motion-planning method that incorporates joint remaining useful life information into the planning process and adaptively adjusts joint usage in response to evolving health conditions. The method is evaluated across three representative scenarios, namely the Full Health Scenario (FHS), the Heterogeneous Degradation Scenario (HDS), and the Local Degradation Scenario (LDS). The results show that the RUL-aware RRT* effectively suppresses degradation imbalance, delays the emergence of bottleneck failures, and improves the long-term reliability of the robotic system during extended operation. These findings demonstrate that integrating health feedback into motion planning provides a practical and robust pathway for enhancing the durability and operational resilience of manipulators subject to continuous wear.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02469
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OpenRUA: Robot-Use Agents Are Zero-Shot Visuomotor Policies
2026-10-01 20:32:41Zhaoyang Chu, Earl T. Barr, Claire Le Goues, Peter O'Hearn, Mark Harman, Federica Sarro, He YeAbstract
Coding agents are extending their reach into the physical world by writing and executing robot control programs. One might expect the agents to use the existing mature software stack that engineers have developed over decades to access sensors and control motion. Yet prior work primarily engineers complex custom harnesses to orchestrate agents for robot use, particularly by prescribing specialized workflows and providing bespoke interfaces. This raises the question: "Is such additional harness engineering necessary?" We introduce OpenRUA, a zero-abstraction harness that bypasses bespoke abstraction layers by providing off-the-shelf coding agents with only terminal access to the robot's native software interface ROS 2. OpenRUA employs a minimalist workspace-as-harness design, only offering ROS 2 documentation and basic tools while leaving the coding agent to organize its own work without orchestrating any agentic workflow. Within this workspace, OpenRUA recasts perception as file I/O and manipulation as coding. With Claude Code powered by Claude Opus 5, OpenRUA achieves success rates of 99.0% on CaP-Bench and 87.0% on LIBERO-PRO, demonstrating that an off-the-shelf coding agent can serve as a zero-shot visuomotor policy through the robot's native interface, without bespoke primitives or task-specific training. Under this minimalist design, further analysis reveals striking emergent behaviors of coding agents: (1) For perception, the agent spontaneously writes programs that process raw sensory inputs and derive metric measurements in 96.80% of episodes. (2) For manipulation, the agent spontaneously builds motion-control clients (e.g., gripper control) in 95.87% of episodes and closed-loop control programs (e.g., adjusting motion based on sensor feedback) in 50.13% of episodes. Our code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02459
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Find Something You Can't Do: Agentic Real-World Reinforcement Learning for Self-Improving VLA Models
2026-10-01 19:55:47Yuan Fang, Zechu Li, Haolei Tong, Puze Liu, Georgia ChalvatzakiAbstract
Vision--language--action (VLA) models provide strong priors for robotic manipulation but are typically deployed as frozen policies, unable to improve from their own failures. Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) offers a path to continued improvement, yet manual environment resets and task-success supervision hinder autonomous learning. We introduce \textbf{FIND}, an agentic real-world RL framework that closes the loop between scene understanding, weakness-aware practice, self-evaluation, and policy improvement in a persistent workspace. FIND reframes autonomous practice as a scene-conditioned, performance-aware task-selection problem: instead of restoring a predefined scene after each rollout, it uses the resulting scene to determine what to practice next. A vision--language agent identifies feasible tasks from a predefined library, prioritizes those with lower recent success rates, and evaluates outcomes using paired pre- and post-execution observations. We instantiate FIND with a frozen $\pi_{0.5}$ VLA and residual off-policy RL. Across eight real-world manipulation tasks, the independent human-assessed success rate improves from $55\%$ to $71.9\%$. A representative run completes 456 autonomous episodes within 6 hours of interaction, requiring 30 scene-recovery interventions and no human-provided reward labels during online learning. Ablations and systematic evaluations further examine key design choices, agent evaluation accuracy, and human intervention requirements. Our website is made publicly available at: this http URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32069
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Autonomous mobile robot operations logistics: a dataset of jobs, dispatch events and robot states
2026-10-01 19:50:02Jan-Felix Klein, Yongkuk JeongAbstract
Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) increasingly perform material transport in production logistics, where their operation is governed by job generation, dispatching and robot control. We present MoRoOp, a dataset of AMR operations recorded in a laboratory kit preparation and supply scenario over nine eight-hour shifts. During each shift, an AMR executed stochastically generated kit supply, empty-box refill and charging jobs. The dataset links job specifications, the operations constituting each job, dispatch events documenting operation state transitions and outcomes, and robot-state observations comprising position, orientation, velocity, per-wheel state of charge and diagnostics. It contains 1,382 jobs, 4,815 operations, 19,352 dispatch events and 140,386 robot-state observations together with the kit specifications used during job generation. The dataset was recorded in an operating laboratory environment, and technically valid observations of delays, obstructed navigation and unsuccessful operations were retained. Both raw and cleaned robot-state tables are provided. Documented reuse directions include the evaluation of AI agents on operational decision records, disturbance detection, operation prediction, data-driven simulation and event-log analysis.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02428
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Keep the Effect, Drop the Actor: Programmable Effect-to-Execution World-Action Models
2026-10-01 19:25:04Junyi Hu, Zhewen He, Zhenhua Li, Yi FangAbstract
A robot demonstration records two things in the same frames: what happened to the objects, and how one particular arm made it happen. We condition on the first. A demonstration is compiled into an effect program: the 3D keypoint trajectories of the objects that moved, two points marking where each was held, and the configuration the scene ends in, with the demonstrator removed. PEWAM, a 71.5M-parameter world-action model, generates effect, robot execution, action and terminal state as four streams with independent flow-matching times, so clamping a program and sampling the execution turns inference into programming, re-solved closed loop from the live scene. On held-out LIBERO-Goal tasks, one demonstration's program completes 40 of 90 episodes, where the same backbone given a goal image or language, and published demonstration-conditioned methods, complete at most 19; on three of Meta-World's held-out classes it exceeds the best published results, though not on the five-class mean. Because a program is a set of coordinates, a person can edit it: the placement follows a shifted terminal state and the grasp turns with rotated contact points. The same program runs on four robot arms without retraining, and after a push, re-solving completes 23 of 60 episodes where replaying the demonstration completes 6. On a Franka arm, fine-tuned on real demonstrations of other tasks, programs compiled from single human videos complete 36 of 40 trials, against 22 for the same backbone conditioned on the video's last frame as a goal image.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02398
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Rethinking World-Action Model for Compositional and In-Context Robotic Manipulation
2026-10-01 18:45:04Shukai Gong, Xuanran Zhai, Yintianrun Zhang, Ruopeng Cui, Ye Huang, Yiyang Fu, Dexuan Lyu, Chaojie Li, Xinyi Song, Peiwen Lin, Chuang Wang, Mingyuan Jia, Yufan Deng, Jiaxin Fang, Bo Liang, Jiaxin Li, Yuxiang Gao, Hao Liu, Daquan ZhouAbstract
Long-horizon compositional manipulation has become increasingly important for real-world robot deployment, where a single task involves multiple coordinated subtasks. Existing world-action models (WAMs) jointly predict short-horizon visual futures and actions, but typically lack explicit subtask-level reasoning. We propose Visual Goal-conditioned Action Reasoning (ViGAR), a hierarchical framework that factorizes manipulation into a visual subgoal planner and a subgoal executor. Given the current observation and global instruction, the subgoal planner predicts a visual subgoal for the next subtask. The subgoal executor then jointly generates future visual trajectories and actions conditioned on the predicted subgoal. Both components share a pretrained world-model representation, enabling task-level planning and action generation to benefit from common physical knowledge. Moreover, our framework naturally supports in-context learning: using a global goal image as context can induce different subtask decompositions and behaviors without parameter updates. On the RoboTwin Clean2Random benchmark, ViGAR achieves 82.00% and 67.02% success rates under the Clean and Random settings, respectively, surpassing the strongest baseline by 12.86 percentage points in average success rate. Real-world robot experiments on five compositional and two in-context learning tasks further confirm the effectiveness of ViGAR.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02368
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Co-design Gym: A Unified Benchmark for Embodiment-Policy Co-optimization
2026-10-01 18:42:56Aviraj Newatia, Yordan Tsvetkov, Leonard Pleiss, Andrew Spielberg, Rika AntonovaAbstract
Finding an optimal behaviour policy within a given environment is a widely studied problem in domains as diverse as games, robotics, energy infrastructure, communication networks, and multi-agent systems. Numerous benchmarks have been developed to support such research, but the vast majority assume that the agent's embodiment (design) is fixed, focusing instead on policy learning alone. Lifting this assumption gives rise to a broader class of problems in which optimizing embodiment and policy separately is highly suboptimal. An agent's embodiment strongly shapes which control policies can be discovered, while the optimal embodiment is in turn defined by the policies it admits. To help the research community study this class of problems explicitly and systematically, we introduce Co-Design Gym - a suite of benchmark environments for jointly optimizing embodiment and policy. Our environments span domains such as robotic manipulation and locomotion, multi-robot cooperation, deformable and soft dynamics, video games, electricity grids, wireless networks, F1 racing, multi-agent warehouses, and optimal control, offering 20 environment families (domains), with over 85 distinct co-design presets in total. We further contribute a systematic evaluation of representative co-design algorithms, characterizing the current state of the art. Together, these contributions lay the groundwork for cumulative, comparable progress in co-design.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02366
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SocialVLA: A Social Perception Gateway for Human-Reaction-Based Failure Detection and Recovery in VLA Manipulation
2026-10-01 18:36:35Sofya Konstantinova, Miguel Altamirano Cabrera, Artem Lykov, Dzmitry TsetserukouAbstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies enable diverse robotic manipulation but can fail during execution without recognizing their own errors. Human observers provide complementary signals, as unexpected robot behavior can trigger rapid vocal, facial, or verbal reactions before failure is completed. We introduce SocialVLA, a local, policy-agnostic social perception gateway that converts spontaneous human reactions into runtime intervention signals for VLA manipulation. SocialVLA combines causal paralinguistic audio detection, visual reaction recognition, explicit stop phrases, and robot-relevance estimation. An asynchronous first-event fusion mechanism triggers a VLA hold from the earliest sufficiently confident signal, while a separate speech channel captures verbal corrections for participant-directed continuation, restart, or instruction revision. We evaluate SocialVLA on physical Unitree G1 manipulation using 15 participants, with 238 annotated intervention-worthy episodes and 1.038 h of non-intervention behavior. Frozen offline replay achieves 54.6% recall and 69.5% precision, while unfiltered audio-video fusion reaches 64.3% recall. Relevance estimation reduces false-stop episodes from 100 to 57 and increases precision from 60.5% to 69.8%. In prospective deployment on an unseen 16th participant, the frozen system achieves 59.5% recall and 91.7% precision. Median detector-to-fusion latency is 47.9 ms, VLA-gate-to-physical-hold latency is 336 ms, and reaction-onset-to-hold latency is 1.021 s. These results demonstrate a complete local pathway from spontaneous social reaction to physical VLA interruption and participant-directed recovery.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02360
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Filter-Aware Fine-Tuning for Safe Humanoid Whole-Body Tracking
2026-10-01 18:14:41Pranit Mohnot, Christian Helten, Daniele Gammelli, Marco PavoneAbstract
Safe whole-body motion is essential for deploying humanoid robots in unstructured environments. Modern humanoid control commonly separates reference specification from execution, with a planner, teleoperator, or motion generator providing a reference that a reinforcement-learning policy tracks through dynamically feasible whole-body control. Runtime safety filters, such as control barrier functions (CBFs), offer a promising approach for enforcing newly introduced constraints via interventions on the tracker's outputs. We show, however, that treating the tracking policy and safety filter independently induces fundamental mismatches, as filtering alters both the executed actions and the induced state distribution. We study this policy-filter interface through case studies that isolate dynamics, objective, and information mismatches, highlight their root causes, and use these insights to develop CoFiT (Constrained Filter-aware Tuning), a filter-aware fine-tuning method for pretrained trackers. Across diverse constraint scenes, CoFiT reduces violation time relative to filter-only training by 91% on TWIST2 and 21% on SONIC, while requiring smaller safety filter corrections. On Unitree G1 hardware, CoFiT reduces violation time by 83% for TWIST2 and completes every trial without operator intervention, whereas 50% of baseline trials require an operator stop. Together, these results provide actionable insights into policy-filter interactions and establish design principles for integrating learned trackers with runtime safety filters.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02341
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NEEDLEWORK: Offline Rewriting of Robot Data with Verified Local Stitches
Abstract
Robot demonstrations may contain useful behavior even when individual episodes are inefficient or unsuccessful. Trajectory stitching offers a way to compose these behaviors into improved training data, but identifying useful connections and verifying their feasibility is difficult in high-dimensional robot data, where many prior methods rely on low-dimensional state representations. We introduce NEEDLE, an offline dataset-augmentation algorithm that addresses these challenges by adding short, verified action bridges between recorded observations in high-dimensional robot demonstrations. First, NEEDLE identifies and creates connections that bypass suboptimal detours, broaden action coverage, and augment the original dataset with failed trajectories, using only RGB images, proprioception, and episode-level outcomes, without new environment interaction or privileged object state. Next, we present a sampling technique that incorporates accepted bridges into policy training without synthesizing intermediate images or discarding the original demonstrations, allowing policies to learn alternative actions while retaining the original dataset's coverage. On real-robot tasks, NEEDLE improves success rate over the strongest baseline on each task by an average of 21 percentage points. Videos and supplementary materials are on this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02339
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SoTa: Soft Tactile Skins for Dexterous Manipulation
2026-10-01 18:08:59Jingyun Yang, Baiyu Shi, Timothy Yu, Haitian Liu, Alberta Longhini, Weichen Wang, Rika Antonova, Zhenan Bao, Jeannette BohgAbstract
A growing body of work suggests that tactile sensing gives robot policies contact information that complements vision in dexterous manipulation. However, visuo-tactile robot data remains scarce: dexterous demonstrations require teleoperating robots, which limits dataset scale. Human demonstrations are far cheaper to collect and offer a path to scale this data, but only if human and robot hands carry tactile sensors with corresponding signals. This requires sensors that conform to different hand geometries, cover the full hand, and share a common layout across embodiments. We present SoTa, a low-cost capacitive tactile skin that provides full-hand coverage on humans and robots while preserving a shared layout of 202 taxels across corresponding finger and palm regions. Our multilayer design with fabric electrodes enables in-house fabrication of thin, soft skins with customizable geometry for under $10 in materials per skin. The sensor retains over 97% of its initial response span after 10,000 loading-unloading cycles with traces retaining continuity through 1,280 tight-fist folding cycles. The shared taxel layout supports human-robot co-training with a common tactile encoder and no learned cross-sensor mapping. Across three contact-rich manipulation tasks, tactile observations improve in-distribution success over vision-only policies. With a fixed robot demonstration budget, adding human demonstrations more than doubles mean success across eight evaluation conditions, from 22.8% to 45.9%, improving success in all five out-of-distribution conditions. We plan to open-source the resources needed to fabricate and operate these skins.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02338
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SkeleWAM: Skeleton World-Action Modeling for Efficient Robotic Manipulation
2026-10-01 17:35:10Juyi Sheng, Hua Wang, Mengyuan LiuAbstract
World action models (WAMs) combine robot action generation with future state prediction. Existing WAMs typically predict videos or learned visual latents, which represent interaction geometry only implicitly and may retain appearance information unrelated to control. We introduce SkeleWAM, a compact WAM that represents a manipulation scene as a sparse 3D skeleton composed of robot joints, object centers, and interaction points. Constructed online from current RGB-D observations and robot proprioception, the skeleton provides a unified geometric state for action generation and future skeleton prediction. Future skeleton prediction provides additional geometric supervision for action learning without requiring visual reconstruction. At inference, SkeleWAM generates actions directly from the current skeleton and language instruction, while Medoid Action Consensus (MAC) serves as an auxiliary consensus strategy for stochastic action samples. On LIBERO-Plus, SkeleWAM achieves an overall success rate of 85.9% with 57.1M parameters, outperforming Cosmos-Policy by 3.7 percentage points. These results demonstrate that sparse 3D robot--object structure provides an effective state space for robust and parameter-efficient world action learning. The project is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02120
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GlassGuard: Verified Glass Plane Mapping for Robot Navigation
2026-10-01 17:31:23Hanwen Guo, Zhengzhi Lin, Yusen Xie, Ji ZhangAbstract
Transparent and specular surfaces pose a serious challenge to LiDAR-based SLAM and navigation because laser returns may pass through glass, leaving collision boundaries absent from the map. Prior work attempts to reconstruct the missing surfaces, but inaccurate obstacle placement can create the opposite failure: contamination of traversable free space. Recognizing this dual requirement, we present GlassGuard, a navigation-oriented framework for reconstructing planar architectural glass from complementary visual and LiDAR evidence. We formulate success in terms of both glass coverage and free-space contamination and apply this principle throughout proposal verification and global map construction. A foundation vision model provides glass-instance masks, structural 3D cues generate metric plane hypotheses, and depth-free 2D projective geometry checks their orientations before they enter a consolidated global map. We evaluate GlassGuard in nine building-scale scenes spanning diverse glass structures, spatial scales, and lighting conditions, with more than one hour and 2.1 km of real-world robot traversal. GlassGuard achieves 85% of total glass coverage for its panoramic version. Under identical pinhole inputs, GlassGuard achieves 82% total coverage, compared with at most 61% for the evaluated baselines, while producing 5-17x fewer false voxels per frame. Qualitative examples with a navigation planner illustrate the reconstructed planes blocking paths through glass while leaving traversable routes open. The project page is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02110
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UniWAM: Unified World-Action Model
2026-10-01 17:01:27Jiayi Chen, Wenxuan Song, Jingbo Wang, Shuai Zhou, Xicheng Gong, Zehua Fan, Ziyang Zhou, Junwu E, Haodong Yan, Fuhao Li, Qize Yu, Xu Huang, Pengwei Wang, Wen Chen, Shunbo Zhou, Haoang LiAbstract
Vision-language-action models benefit from the understanding and reasoning capabilities of pretrained vision-language models, but action-only supervision provides limited grounding in world dynamics. Conversely, world-action models inherit spatiotemporal priors from video generation models, yet remain limited in semantic understanding and reasoning under distribution shifts. We introduce UniWAM, a unified architecture that integrates a physical reasoner, a world generator, and an action predictor to jointly learn semantic understanding of the physical world, visual generation, and action prediction. To ensure the quality of the training data, we developed a rigorous data cleaning and annotation pipeline for both human egocentric data and robot data. To adapt the vision-language component to embodied tasks while preserving its inherited language capabilities, we represent low-level actions in natural language and introduce a pre-training recipe that assigns complementary supervision from visual question answering (VQA) data, human egocentric data, and robot demonstrations to the appropriate model components. During post-training, future visual noise augmentation reduces reliance on precise future predictions, while history-conditioned flow matching uses encoded action history to initialize action generation. Together, these designs significantly reduce denoising steps while maintaining performance. UniWAM achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across multiple evaluations, including in-distribution performance, robustness, generalization, instruction following, and long-horizon task execution. Furthermore, we uncover a log-linear scaling law of unified human-robot co-training, demonstrating the effectiveness of large-scale pre-training on a mixture of human and robot data.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02054
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H-SPAR: Hydrodynamic-aware Simulation for Particle Transport and Autonomous Robots
2026-10-01 16:26:17Navid Zarrabi, Nariman Yousefi, Sajad SaeediAbstract
Environmental robotic sampling requires considering the dual influence of water currents on robotic motion and particle transport. Existing marine robotics simulators generally model flow, autonomy, and sampling targets separately, limiting joint evaluation of mission cost and sampling performance. H-SPAR integrates spatially and temporally varying velocity fields, Lagrangian particle transport, probabilistic sampling, and ROS 2/Gazebo-based uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) autonomy. In this work, shared precomputed flow fields drive particle advection and current-induced forces during closed-loop vehicle execution. Path-planning experiments show that the existing current-aware planner SVF-RRT* achieves 69.4% lower upstream cost than conventional RRT* at the planning level, but this reduction falls to 41.7% during execution under time-varying currents, reflecting temporal flow variation, vehicle motion constraints, and path deviation omitted during planning. Coverage experiments show that sweep orientation changes the particle-sampling rate by up to 22.2% under the complete H-SPAR configuration. These findings highlight the importance of evaluating planning, vehicle execution, particle transport, and sampling together under consistent hydrodynamic conditions. The project webpage is available at this https URL, and the open-source code is available on GitHub at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01985
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BLT*: Informed Belief Localization Trees for Uncertainty-Aware Planning on Digital Twins
Abstract
We present Informed Belief Localization Trees* (Informed BLT*), a sampling-based belief space planning (BSP) algorithm that scales to large outdoor digital twins with point-cloud observations. We adapt RRT* and Informed RRT* to belief space using the $2$-Wasserstein ($W_2$) metric. Assuming isotropic Gaussian beliefs, sampled belief states can be connected efficiently while accounting for available information and probabilistic collision constraints. This enables steering and rewiring without repeatedly propagating observations, and allows previously computed measurement information to be reused. We present a framework to generate semantically labelled digital twins for planning in real-world environments with point-cloud-based localization. Experiments in simulated environments and digital twins show faster initial solution discovery in most maps with competitive cost convergence.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01972
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Training-Free Diffusion Planning with Analytical Local Scores
2026-10-01 16:15:15Michael Y. Fatemi, Jinhao Liang, Ferdinando FiorettoAbstract
Path finding and multi-robot motion planning require trajectories that are smooth, goal-directed, and collision-free in environments with complex geometric constraints. Recent diffusion-based planners have shown that trajectory generation can be cast as iterative denoising which has opened the doors to learning-based approaches that can handle multi-modal trajectory distributions and refine entire trajectories. However, a key limitation is that diffusion planners require training on large collections of feasible trajectories, rendering them map-specific, and difficult to deploy when high-quality demonstrations are unavailable. This paper introduces 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. The proposed idea relies on a key observation: the score of a trajectory can be reconstructed by considering only local interactions between neighboring waypoints and nearby constraints. This structure exploitation yields a decomposed denoising procedure that retains the optimization structure of classical trajectory methods while inheriting the iterative refinement behavior of diffusion models. Experiments on a large collection of complex environments and large multi-agent planning tasks show that the proposed analytical score produces smooth and feasible trajectories within limited computational costs, for example in generating feasible paths for 300+ agents in environments containing 100+ obstacles in under 6 seconds on a GPU, outperforming strong learning-based and optimization baselines, while avoiding the data requirements of learned diffusion planners.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01959
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