OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design for Robot Kinematic Calibration
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

This paper develops a Bayesian optimal experimental design for robot kinematic calibration on ${\mathbb{S}^3 \!\times\! \mathbb{R}^3}$. Our method builds upon a Gaussian process approach that incorporates a geometry-aware kernel based on Riemannian Matérn kernels over ${\mathbb{S}^3}$. To learn the forward kinematics errors via Bayesian optimization with a Gaussian process, we define a geodesic distance-based objective function. Pointwise values of this function are sampled via noisy measurements taken using fiducial markers on the end-effector using a camera and computed pose with the nominal kinematics. The corrected Denavit-Hartenberg parameters are obtained using an efficient quadratic program that operates on the collected data sets. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated via simulations and calibration experiments on NASA's ocean world lander autonomy testbed (OWLAT).
DroneDiffusion: Robust Quadrotor Dynamics Learning with Diffusion Models
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

An inherent fragility of quadrotor systems stems from model inaccuracies and external disturbances. These factors hinder performance and compromise the stability of the system, making precise control challenging. Existing model-based approaches either make deterministic assumptions, utilize Gaussian-based representations of uncertainty, or rely on nominal models, all of which often fall short in capturing the complex, multimodal nature of real-world dynamics. This work introduces DroneDiffusion, a novel framework that leverages conditional diffusion models to learn quadrotor dynamics, formulated as a sequence generation task. DroneDiffusion achieves superior generalization to unseen, complex scenarios by capturing the temporal nature of uncertainties and mitigating error propagation. We integrate the learned dynamics with an adaptive controller for trajectory tracking with stability guarantees. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world flights demonstrate the robustness of the framework across a range of scenarios, including unfamiliar flight paths and varying payloads, velocities, and wind disturbances.
A Hybrid Approach to Indoor Social Navigation: Integrating Reactive Local Planning and Proactive Global Planning
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

We consider the problem of indoor building-scale social navigation, where the robot must reach a point goal as quickly as possible without colliding with humans who are freely moving around. Factors such as varying crowd densities, unpredictable human behavior, and the constraints of indoor spaces add significant complexity to the navigation task, necessitating a more advanced approach. We propose a modular navigation framework that leverages the strengths of both classical methods and deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Our approach employs a global planner to generate waypoints, assigning soft costs around anticipated pedestrian locations, encouraging caution around potential future positions of humans. Simultaneously, the local planner, powered by DRL, follows these waypoints while avoiding collisions. The combination of these planners enables the agent to perform complex maneuvers and effectively navigate crowded and constrained environments while improving reliability. Many existing studies on social navigation are conducted in simplistic or open environments, limiting the ability of trained models to perform well in complex, real-world settings. To advance research in this area, we introduce a new 2D benchmark designed to facilitate development and testing of social navigation strategies in indoor environments. We benchmark our method against traditional and RL-based navigation strategies, demonstrating that our approach outperforms both.
A Novel Decomposed Feature-Oriented Framework for Open-Set Semantic Segmentation on LiDAR Data
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Semantic segmentation is a key technique that enables mobile robots to understand and navigate surrounding environments autonomously. However, most existing works focus on segmenting known objects, overlooking the identification of unknown classes, which is common in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a feature-oriented framework for open-set semantic segmentation on LiDAR data, capable of identifying unknown objects while retaining the ability to classify known ones. We design a decomposed dual-decoder network to simultaneously perform closed-set semantic segmentation and generate distinctive features for unknown objects. The network is trained with multi-objective loss functions to capture the characteristics of known and unknown objects. Using the extracted features, we introduce an anomaly detection mechanism to identify unknown objects. By integrating the results of close-set semantic segmentation and anomaly detection, we achieve effective feature-driven LiDAR open-set semantic segmentation. Evaluations on both SemanticKITTI and nuScenes datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/nubot-nudt/DOSS.
Coordinated Multi-Robot Navigation with Formation Adaptation
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Coordinated multi-robot navigation is an essential ability for a team of robots operating in diverse environments. Robot teams often need to maintain specific formations, such as wedge formations, to enhance visibility, positioning, and efficiency during fast movement. However, complex environments such as narrow corridors challenge rigid team formations, which makes effective formation control difficult in real-world environments. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel Adaptive Formation with Oscillation Reduction (AFOR) approach to improve coordinated multi-robot navigation. We develop AFOR under the theoretical framework of hierarchical learning and integrate a spring-damper model with hierarchical learning to enable both team coordination and individual robot control. At the upper level, a graph neural network facilitates formation adaptation and information sharing among the robots. At the lower level, reinforcement learning enables each robot to navigate and avoid obstacles while maintaining the formations. We conducted extensive experiments using Gazebo in the Robot Operating System (ROS), a high-fidelity Unity3D simulator with ROS, and real robot teams. Results demonstrate that AFOR enables smooth navigation with formation adaptation in complex scenarios and outperforms previous methods. More details of this work are provided on the project website: https://hcrlab.gitlab.io/project/afor.
General-Purpose Clothes Manipulation with Semantic Keypoints
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Clothes manipulation is a critical capability for household robots; yet, existing methods are often confined to specific tasks, such as folding or flattening, due to the complex high-dimensional geometry of deformable fabric. This paper presents CLothes mAnipulation with Semantic keyPoints (CLASP) for general-purpose clothes manipulation, which enables the robot to perform diverse manipulation tasks over different types of clothes. The key idea of CLASP is semantic keypoints -- e.g., "right shoulder", "left sleeve", etc. -- a sparse spatial-semantic representation that is salient for both perception and action. Semantic keypoints of clothes can be effectively extracted from depth images and are sufficient to represent a broad range of clothes manipulation policies. CLASP leverages semantic keypoints to bridge LLM-powered task planning and low-level action execution in a two-level hierarchy. Extensive simulation experiments show that CLASP outperforms baseline methods across diverse clothes types in both seen and unseen tasks. Further, experiments with a Kinova dual-arm system on four distinct tasks -- folding, flattening, hanging, and placing -- confirm CLASP's performance on a real robot.
Automatic Robotic-Assisted Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy Scanning System
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Diffuse Reflectance Spectroscopy (DRS) is a well-established optical technique for tissue composition assessment which has been clinically evaluated for tumour detection to ensure the complete removal of cancerous tissue. While point-wise assessment has many potential applications, incorporating automated large-area scanning would enable holistic tissue sampling with higher consistency. We propose a robotic system to facilitate autonomous DRS scanning with hybrid visual servoing control. A specially designed height compensation module enables precise contact condition control. The evaluation results show that the system can accurately execute the scanning command and acquire consistent DRS spectra with comparable results to the manual collection, which is the current gold standard protocol. Integrating the proposed system into surgery lays the groundwork for autonomous intra-operative DRS tissue assessment with high reliability and repeatability. This could reduce the need for manual scanning by the surgeon while ensuring complete tumor removal in clinical practice.
ReVLA: Reverting Visual Domain Limitation of Robotic Foundation Models
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Recent progress in large language models and access to large-scale robotic datasets has sparked a paradigm shift in robotics models transforming them into generalists able to adapt to various tasks, scenes, and robot modalities. A large step for the community are open Vision Language Action models which showcase strong performance in a wide variety of tasks. In this work, we study the visual generalization capabilities of three existing robotic foundation models, and propose a corresponding evaluation framework. Our study shows that the existing models do not exhibit robustness to visual out-of-domain scenarios. This is potentially caused by limited variations in the training data and/or catastrophic forgetting, leading to domain limitations in the vision foundation models. We further explore OpenVLA, which uses two pre-trained vision foundation models and is, therefore, expected to generalize to out-of-domain experiments. However, we showcase catastrophic forgetting by DINO-v2 in OpenVLA through its failure to fulfill the task of depth regression. To overcome the aforementioned issue of visual catastrophic forgetting, we propose a gradual backbone reversal approach founded on model merging. This enables OpenVLA -- which requires the adaptation of the visual backbones during initial training -- to regain its visual generalization ability. Regaining this capability enables our ReVLA model to improve over OpenVLA by a factor of 77\% and 66\% for grasping and lifting in visual OOD tasks. Comprehensive evaluations, episode rollouts and model weights are available on the ReVLA Page
LoRD: Adapting Differentiable Driving Policies to Distribution Shifts
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Distribution shifts between operational domains can severely affect the performance of learned models in self-driving vehicles (SDVs). While this is a well-established problem, prior work has mostly explored naive solutions such as fine-tuning, focusing on the motion prediction task. In this work, we explore novel adaptation strategies for differentiable autonomy stacks consisting of prediction, planning, and control, perform evaluation in closed-loop, and investigate the often-overlooked issue of catastrophic forgetting. Specifically, we introduce two simple yet effective techniques: a low-rank residual decoder (LoRD) and multi-task fine-tuning. Through experiments across three models conducted on two real-world autonomous driving datasets (nuPlan, exiD), we demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods and highlight a significant performance gap between open-loop and closed-loop evaluation in prior approaches. Our approach improves forgetting by up to 23.33% and the closed-loop OOD driving score by 9.93% in comparison to standard fine-tuning.
Watch Less, Feel More: Sim-to-Real RL for Generalizable Articulated Object Manipulation via Motion Adaptation and Impedance Control
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Articulated object manipulation poses a unique challenge compared to rigid object manipulation as the object itself represents a dynamic environment. In this work, we present a novel RL-based pipeline equipped with variable impedance control and motion adaptation leveraging observation history for generalizable articulated object manipulation, focusing on smooth and dexterous motion during zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. To mitigate the sim-to-real gap, our pipeline diminishes reliance on vision by not leveraging the vision data feature (RGBD/pointcloud) directly as policy input but rather extracting useful low-dimensional data first via off-the-shelf modules. Additionally, we experience less sim-to-real gap by inferring object motion and its intrinsic properties via observation history as well as utilizing impedance control both in the simulation and in the real world. Furthermore, we develop a well-designed training setting with great randomization and a specialized reward system (task-aware and motion-aware) that enables multi-staged, end-to-end manipulation without heuristic motion planning. To the best of our knowledge, our policy is the first to report 84\% success rate in the real world via extensive experiments with various unseen objects.
FedEFM: Federated Endovascular Foundation Model with Unseen Data
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

In endovascular surgery, the precise identification of catheters and guidewires in X-ray images is essential for reducing intervention risks. However, accurately segmenting catheter and guidewire structures is challenging due to the limited availability of labeled data. Foundation models offer a promising solution by enabling the collection of similar domain data to train models whose weights can be fine-tuned for downstream tasks. Nonetheless, large-scale data collection for training is constrained by the necessity of maintaining patient privacy. This paper proposes a new method to train a foundation model in a decentralized federated learning setting for endovascular intervention. To ensure the feasibility of the training, we tackle the unseen data issue using differentiable Earth Mover's Distance within a knowledge distillation framework. Once trained, our foundation model's weights provide valuable initialization for downstream tasks, thereby enhancing task-specific performance. Intensive experiments show that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results, contributing to advancements in endovascular intervention and robotic-assisted endovascular surgery, while addressing the critical issue of data sharing in the medical domain.
GRACE: Generating Socially Appropriate Robot Actions Leveraging LLMs and Human Explanations
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

When operating in human environments, robots need to handle complex tasks while both adhering to social norms and accommodating individual preferences. For instance, based on common sense knowledge, a household robot can predict that it should avoid vacuuming during a social gathering, but it may still be uncertain whether it should vacuum before or after having guests. In such cases, integrating common-sense knowledge with human preferences, often conveyed through human explanations, is fundamental yet a challenge for existing systems. In this paper, we introduce GRACE, a novel approach addressing this while generating socially appropriate robot actions. GRACE leverages common sense knowledge from LLMs, and it integrates this knowledge with human explanations through a generative network. The bidirectional structure of GRACE enables robots to refine and enhance LLM predictions by utilizing human explanations and makes robots capable of generating such explanations for human-specified actions. Our evaluations show that integrating human explanations boosts GRACE's performance, where it outperforms several baselines and provides sensible explanations.
Ergodic Exploration over Meshable Surfaces
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Robotic search and rescue, exploration, and inspection require trajectory planning across a variety of domains. A popular approach to trajectory planning for these types of missions is ergodic search, which biases a trajectory to spend time in parts of the exploration domain that are believed to contain more information. Most prior work on ergodic search has been limited to searching simple surfaces, like a 2D Euclidean plane or a sphere, as they rely on projecting functions defined on the exploration domain onto analytically obtained Fourier basis functions. In this paper, we extend ergodic search to any surface that can be approximated by a triangle mesh. The basis functions are approximated through finite element methods on a triangle mesh of the domain. We formally prove that this approximation converges to the continuous case as the mesh approximation converges to the true domain. We demonstrate that on domains where analytical basis functions are available (plane, sphere), the proposed method obtains equivalent results, and while on other domains (torus, bunny, wind turbine), the approach is versatile enough to still search effectively. Lastly, we also compare with an existing ergodic search technique that can handle complex domains and show that our method results in a higher quality exploration.
Under Pressure: Altimeter-Aided ICP for 3D Maps Consistency
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

We propose a novel method to enhance the accuracy of the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm by integrating altitude constraints from a barometric pressure sensor. While ICP is widely used in mobile robotics for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping ( SLAM ), it is susceptible to drift, especially in underconstrained environments such as vertical shafts. To address this issue, we propose to augment ICP with altimeter measurements, reliably constraining drifts along the gravity vector. To demonstrate the potential of altimetry in SLAM , we offer an analysis of calibration procedures and noise sensitivity of various pressure sensors, improving measurements to centimeter-level accuracy. Leveraging this accuracy, we propose a novel ICP formulation that integrates altitude measurements along the gravity vector, thus simplifying the optimization problem to 3-Degree Of Freedom (DOF). Experimental results from real-world deployments demonstrate that our method reduces vertical drift by 84% and improves overall localization accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods in non-planar environments.
Extended Friction Models for the Physics Simulation of Servo Actuators
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Accurate physical simulation is crucial for the development and validation of control algorithms in robotic systems. Recent works in Reinforcement Learning (RL) take notably advantage of extensive simulations to produce efficient robot control. State-of-the-art servo actuator models generally fail at capturing the complex friction dynamics of these systems. This limits the transferability of simulated behaviors to real-world applications. In this work, we present extended friction models that allow to more accurately simulate servo actuator dynamics. We propose a comprehensive analysis of various friction models, present a method for identifying model parameters using recorded trajectories from a pendulum test bench, and demonstrate how these models can be integrated into physics engines. The proposed friction models are validated on four distinct servo actuators and tested on 2R manipulators, showing significant improvements in accuracy over the standard Coulomb-Viscous model. Our results highlight the importance of considering advanced friction effects in the simulation of servo actuators to enhance the realism and reliability of robotic simulations.
Dur360BEV: A Real-World 360-Degree Single Camera Dataset and Benchmark for Bird-Eye View Mapping in Autonomous Driving
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

We present Dur360BEV, a novel spherical camera autonomous driving dataset equipped with a high-resolution 128-channel 3D LiDAR and a RTK-refined GNSS/INS system, along with a benchmark architecture designed to generate Bird-Eye-View (BEV) maps using only a single spherical camera. This dataset and benchmark address the challenges of BEV generation in autonomous driving, particularly by reducing hardware complexity through the use of a single 360-degree camera instead of multiple perspective cameras. Within our benchmark architecture, we propose a novel spherical-image-to-BEV module that leverages spherical imagery and a refined sampling strategy to project features from 2D to 3D. Our approach also includes an innovative application of focal loss, specifically adapted to address the extreme class imbalance often encountered in BEV segmentation tasks, that demonstrates improved segmentation performance on the Dur360BEV dataset. The results show that our benchmark not only simplifies the sensor setup but also achieves competitive performance.
Near Time-Optimal Hybrid Motion Planning for Timber Cranes
Venue: Conference ICRA 2025
Year: 2025

Efficient, collision-free motion planning is essential for automating large-scale manipulators like timber cranes. They come with unique challenges such as hydraulic actuation constraints and passive joints-factors that are seldom addressed by current motion planning methods. This paper introduces a novel approach for time-optimal, collision-free hybrid motion planning for a hydraulically actuated timber crane with passive joints. We enhance the via-point-based stochastic trajectory optimization (VP-STO) algorithm to include pump flow rate constraints and develop a novel collision cost formulation to improve robustness. The effectiveness of the enhanced VP-STO as an optimal single-query global planner is validated by comparison with an informed RRT* algorithm using a time-optimal path parameterization (TOPP). The overall hybrid motion planning is formed by combination with a gradient-based local planner that is designed to follow the global planner's reference and to systematically consider the passive joint dynamics for both collision avoidance and sway damping.