pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
On-board Sonar Data Classification for Path Following in Underwater Vehicles using Fast Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Extreme Learning Machine
Authors: Adrian Rubio-Solis, Luciano Nava-Balanzar, Tomas Salgado-Jimenez
Date: 2025-06-15 00:00:00

In autonomous underwater missions, the successful completion of predefined paths mainly depends on the ability of underwater vehicles to recognise their surroundings. In this study, we apply the concept of Fast Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Extreme Learning Machine (FIT2-FELM) to train a Takagi-Sugeno-Kang IT2 Fuzzy Inference System (TSK IT2-FIS) for on-board sonar data classification using an underwater vehicle called BlueROV2. The TSK IT2-FIS is integrated into a Hierarchical Navigation Strategy (HNS) as the main navigation engine to infer local motions and provide the BlueROV2 with full autonomy to follow an obstacle-free trajectory in a water container of 2.5m x 2.5m x 3.5m. Compared to traditional navigation architectures, using the proposed method, we observe a robust path following behaviour in the presence of uncertainty and noise. We found that the proposed approach provides the BlueROV with a more complete sensory picture about its surroundings while real-time navigation planning is performed by the concurrent execution of two or more tasks.
Adapting by Analogy: OOD Generalization of Visuomotor Policies via Functional Correspondence
Authors: Pranay Gupta, Henny Admoni, Andrea Bajcsy
Date: 2025-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

End-to-end visuomotor policies trained using behavior cloning have shown a remarkable ability to generate complex, multi-modal low-level robot behaviors. However, at deployment time, these policies still struggle to act reliably when faced with out-of-distribution (OOD) visuals induced by objects, backgrounds, or environment changes. Prior works in interactive imitation learning solicit corrective expert demonstrations under the OOD conditions -- but this can be costly and inefficient. We observe that task success under OOD conditions does not always warrant novel robot behaviors. In-distribution (ID) behaviors can directly be transferred to OOD conditions that share functional similarities with ID conditions. For example, behaviors trained to interact with in-distribution (ID) pens can apply to interacting with a visually-OOD pencil. The key challenge lies in disambiguating which ID observations functionally correspond to the OOD observation for the task at hand. We propose that an expert can provide this OOD-to-ID functional correspondence. Thus, instead of collecting new demonstrations and re-training at every OOD encounter, our method: (1) detects the need for feedback by first checking if current observations are OOD and then identifying whether the most similar training observations show divergent behaviors, (2) solicits functional correspondence feedback to disambiguate between those behaviors, and (3) intervenes on the OOD observations with the functionally corresponding ID observations to perform deployment-time generalization. We validate our method across diverse real-world robotic manipulation tasks with a Franka Panda robotic manipulator. Our results show that test-time functional correspondences can improve the generalization of a vision-based diffusion policy to OOD objects and environment conditions with low feedback.
Constrained Diffusers for Safe Planning and Control
Authors: Jichen Zhang, Liqun Zhao, Antonis Papachristodoulou, Jack Umenberger
Date: 2025-06-14 00:00:00

Diffusion models have shown remarkable potential in planning and control tasks due to their ability to represent multimodal distributions over actions and trajectories. However, ensuring safety under constraints remains a critical challenge for diffusion models. This paper proposes Constrained Diffusers, a novel framework that incorporates constraints into pre-trained diffusion models without retraining or architectural modifications. Inspired by constrained optimization, we apply a constrained Langevin sampling mechanism for the reverse diffusion process that jointly optimizes the trajectory and realizes constraint satisfaction through three iterative algorithms: projected method, primal-dual method and augmented Lagrangian approaches. In addition, we incorporate discrete control barrier functions as constraints for constrained diffusers to guarantee safety in online implementation. Experiments in Maze2D, locomotion, and pybullet ball running tasks demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve constraint satisfaction with less computation time, and are competitive to existing methods in environments with static and time-varying constraints.
Deep Fusion of Ultra-Low-Resolution Thermal Camera and Gyroscope Data for Lighting-Robust and Compute-Efficient Rotational Odometry
Authors: Farida Mohsen, Ali Safa
Date: 2025-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Sensor Fusion

Accurate rotational odometry is crucial for autonomous robotic systems, particularly for small, power-constrained platforms such as drones and mobile robots. This study introduces thermal-gyro fusion, a novel sensor fusion approach that integrates ultra-low-resolution thermal imaging with gyroscope readings for rotational odometry. Unlike RGB cameras, thermal imaging is invariant to lighting conditions and, when fused with gyroscopic data, mitigates drift which is a common limitation of inertial sensors. We first develop a multimodal data acquisition system to collect synchronized thermal and gyroscope data, along with rotational speed labels, across diverse environments. Subsequently, we design and train a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that fuses both modalities for rotational speed estimation. Our analysis demonstrates that thermal-gyro fusion enables a significant reduction in thermal camera resolution without significantly compromising accuracy, thereby improving computational efficiency and memory utilization. These advantages make our approach well-suited for real-time deployment in resource-constrained robotic systems. Finally, to facilitate further research, we publicly release our dataset as supplementary material.
AntiGrounding: Lifting Robotic Actions into VLM Representation Space for Decision Making
Authors: Wenbo Li, Shiyi Wang, Yiteng Chen, Huiping Zhuang, Qingyao Wu
Date: 2025-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) encode knowledge and reasoning capabilities for robotic manipulation within high-dimensional representation spaces. However, current approaches often project them into compressed intermediate representations, discarding important task-specific information such as fine-grained spatial or semantic details. To address this, we propose AntiGrounding, a new framework that reverses the instruction grounding process. It lifts candidate actions directly into the VLM representation space, renders trajectories from multiple views, and uses structured visual question answering for instruction-based decision making. This enables zero-shot synthesis of optimal closed-loop robot trajectories for new tasks. We also propose an offline policy refinement module that leverages past experience to enhance long-term performance. Experiments in both simulation and real-world environments show that our method outperforms baselines across diverse robotic manipulation tasks.
Perspective on Utilizing Foundation Models for Laboratory Automation in Materials Research
Authors: Kan Hatakeyama-Sato, Toshihiko Nishida, Kenta Kitamura, Yoshitaka Ushiku, Koichi Takahashi, Yuta Nabae, Teruaki Hayakawa
Date: 2025-06-14 00:00:00

This review explores the potential of foundation models to advance laboratory automation in the materials and chemical sciences. It emphasizes the dual roles of these models: cognitive functions for experimental planning and data analysis, and physical functions for hardware operations. While traditional laboratory automation has relied heavily on specialized, rigid systems, foundation models offer adaptability through their general-purpose intelligence and multimodal capabilities. Recent advancements have demonstrated the feasibility of using large language models (LLMs) and multimodal robotic systems to handle complex and dynamic laboratory tasks. However, significant challenges remain, including precision manipulation of hardware, integration of multimodal data, and ensuring operational safety. This paper outlines a roadmap highlighting future directions, advocating for close interdisciplinary collaboration, benchmark establishment, and strategic human-AI integration to realize fully autonomous experimental laboratories.
Efficient Multi-Camera Tokenization with Triplanes for End-to-End Driving
Authors: Boris Ivanovic, Cristiano Saltori, Yurong You, Yan Wang, Wenjie Luo, Marco Pavone
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Planning

Autoregressive Transformers are increasingly being deployed as end-to-end robot and autonomous vehicle (AV) policy architectures, owing to their scalability and potential to leverage internet-scale pretraining for generalization. Accordingly, tokenizing sensor data efficiently is paramount to ensuring the real-time feasibility of such architectures on embedded hardware. To this end, we present an efficient triplane-based multi-camera tokenization strategy that leverages recent advances in 3D neural reconstruction and rendering to produce sensor tokens that are agnostic to the number of input cameras and their resolution, while explicitly accounting for their geometry around an AV. Experiments on a large-scale AV dataset and state-of-the-art neural simulator demonstrate that our approach yields significant savings over current image patch-based tokenization strategies, producing up to 72% fewer tokens, resulting in up to 50% faster policy inference while achieving the same open-loop motion planning accuracy and improved offroad rates in closed-loop driving simulations.
ViTaSCOPE: Visuo-tactile Implicit Representation for In-hand Pose and Extrinsic Contact Estimation
Authors: Jayjun Lee, Nima Fazeli
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry, Object, Pose Estimation

Mastering dexterous, contact-rich object manipulation demands precise estimation of both in-hand object poses and external contact locations$\unicode{x2013}$tasks particularly challenging due to partial and noisy observations. We present ViTaSCOPE: Visuo-Tactile Simultaneous Contact and Object Pose Estimation, an object-centric neural implicit representation that fuses vision and high-resolution tactile feedback. By representing objects as signed distance fields and distributed tactile feedback as neural shear fields, ViTaSCOPE accurately localizes objects and registers extrinsic contacts onto their 3D geometry as contact fields. Our method enables seamless reasoning over complementary visuo-tactile cues by leveraging simulation for scalable training and zero-shot transfers to the real-world by bridging the sim-to-real gap. We evaluate our method through comprehensive simulated and real-world experiments, demonstrating its capabilities in dexterous manipulation scenarios.
SPLATART: Articulated Gaussian Splatting with Estimated Object Structure
Authors: Stanley Lewis, Vishal Chandra, Tom Gao, Odest Chadwicke Jenkins
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Representing articulated objects remains a difficult problem within the field of robotics. Objects such as pliers, clamps, or cabinets require representations that capture not only geometry and color information, but also part seperation, connectivity, and joint parametrization. Furthermore, learning these representations becomes even more difficult with each additional degree of freedom. Complex articulated objects such as robot arms may have seven or more degrees of freedom, and the depth of their kinematic tree may be notably greater than the tools, drawers, and cabinets that are the typical subjects of articulated object research. To address these concerns, we introduce SPLATART - a pipeline for learning Gaussian splat representations of articulated objects from posed images, of which a subset contains image space part segmentations. SPLATART disentangles the part separation task from the articulation estimation task, allowing for post-facto determination of joint estimation and representation of articulated objects with deeper kinematic trees than previously exhibited. In this work, we present data on the SPLATART pipeline as applied to the syntheic Paris dataset objects, and qualitative results on a real-world object under spare segmentation supervision. We additionally present on articulated serial chain manipulators to demonstrate usage on deeper kinematic tree structures.
SAIL: Faster-than-Demonstration Execution of Imitation Learning Policies
Authors: Nadun Ranawaka Arachchige, Zhenyang Chen, Wonsuhk Jung, Woo Chul Shin, Rohan Bansal, Pierre Barroso, Yu Hang He, Yingyang Celine Lin, Benjamin Joffe, Shreyas Kousik, Danfei Xu
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Scheduling

Offline Imitation Learning (IL) methods such as Behavior Cloning are effective at acquiring complex robotic manipulation skills. However, existing IL-trained policies are confined to executing the task at the same speed as shown in demonstration data. This limits the task throughput of a robotic system, a critical requirement for applications such as industrial automation. In this paper, we introduce and formalize the novel problem of enabling faster-than-demonstration execution of visuomotor policies and identify fundamental challenges in robot dynamics and state-action distribution shifts. We instantiate the key insights as SAIL (Speed Adaptation for Imitation Learning), a full-stack system integrating four tightly-connected components: (1) a consistency-preserving action inference algorithm for smooth motion at high speed, (2) high-fidelity tracking of controller-invariant motion targets, (3) adaptive speed modulation that dynamically adjusts execution speed based on motion complexity, and (4) action scheduling to handle real-world system latencies. Experiments on 12 tasks across simulation and two real, distinct robot platforms show that SAIL achieves up to a 4x speedup over demonstration speed in simulation and up to 3.2x speedup in the real world. Additional detail is available at https://nadunranawaka1.github.io/sail-policy
Robot Context Protocol (RCP): A Runtime-Agnostic Interface for Agent-Aware Robot Control
Authors: Lambert Lee, Joshua Lau
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00

The Robot Context Protocol (RCP) is a lightweight, middleware-agnostic communication protocol designed to simplify the complexity of robotic systems and enable seamless interaction between robots, users, and autonomous agents. RCP provides a unified and semantically meaningful interface that decouples client-facing operations from backend implementations, supporting a wide range of deployment environments including physical robots, cloud-based orchestrators, and simulated platforms. Built on HTTP and WebSocket transport layers, the protocol defines a schema-driven message format with structured operations such as read, write, execute, and subscribe. It integrates features such as runtime introspection, asynchronous feedback, multi-tenant namespace isolation, and strict type validation to ensure robustness, scalability, and security. The architecture, message structure, interface model, and adapter-based backend integration strategy of RCP are described, along with deployment practices and applicability across industries including manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare. RCP enables intelligent, resilient, and safe robotic operations in complex, multi-agent ecosystems.
Linearly Solving Robust Rotation Estimation
Authors: Yinlong Liu, Tianyu Huang, Zhi-Xin Yang
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00

Rotation estimation plays a fundamental role in computer vision and robot tasks, and extremely robust rotation estimation is significantly useful for safety-critical applications. Typically, estimating a rotation is considered a non-linear and non-convex optimization problem that requires careful design. However, in this paper, we provide some new perspectives that solving a rotation estimation problem can be reformulated as solving a linear model fitting problem without dropping any constraints and without introducing any singularities. In addition, we explore the dual structure of a rotation motion, revealing that it can be represented as a great circle on a quaternion sphere surface. Accordingly, we propose an easily understandable voting-based method to solve rotation estimation. The proposed method exhibits exceptional robustness to noise and outliers and can be computed in parallel with graphics processing units (GPUs) effortlessly. Particularly, leveraging the power of GPUs, the proposed method can obtain a satisfactory rotation solution for large-scale($10^6$) and severely corrupted (99$\%$ outlier ratio) rotation estimation problems under 0.5 seconds. Furthermore, to validate our theoretical framework and demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, we conduct controlled experiments and real-world dataset experiments. These experiments provide compelling evidence supporting the effectiveness and robustness of our approach in solving rotation estimation problems.
Foundation Models in Autonomous Driving: A Survey on Scenario Generation and Scenario Analysis
Authors: Yuan Gao, Mattia Piccinini, Yuchen Zhang, Dingrui Wang, Korbinian Moller, Roberto Brusnicki, Baha Zarrouki, Alessio Gambi, Jan Frederik Totz, Kai Storms, Steven Peters, Andrea Stocco, Bassam Alrifaee, Marco Pavone, Johannes Betz
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Survey

For autonomous vehicles, safe navigation in complex environments depends on handling a broad range of diverse and rare driving scenarios. Simulation- and scenario-based testing have emerged as key approaches to development and validation of autonomous driving systems. Traditional scenario generation relies on rule-based systems, knowledge-driven models, and data-driven synthesis, often producing limited diversity and unrealistic safety-critical cases. With the emergence of foundation models, which represent a new generation of pre-trained, general-purpose AI models, developers can process heterogeneous inputs (e.g., natural language, sensor data, HD maps, and control actions), enabling the synthesis and interpretation of complex driving scenarios. In this paper, we conduct a survey about the application of foundation models for scenario generation and scenario analysis in autonomous driving (as of May 2025). Our survey presents a unified taxonomy that includes large language models, vision-language models, multimodal large language models, diffusion models, and world models for the generation and analysis of autonomous driving scenarios. In addition, we review the methodologies, open-source datasets, simulation platforms, and benchmark challenges, and we examine the evaluation metrics tailored explicitly to scenario generation and analysis. Finally, the survey concludes by highlighting the open challenges and research questions, and outlining promising future research directions. All reviewed papers are listed in a continuously maintained repository, which contains supplementary materials and is available at https://github.com/TUM-AVS/FM-for-Scenario-Generation-Analysis.
FocalAD: Local Motion Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Authors: Bin Sun, Boao Zhang, Jiayi Lu, Xinjie Feng, Jiachen Shang, Rui Cao, Mengchao Zheng, Chuanye Wang, Shichun Yang, Yaoguang Cao, Ziying Song
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Bench2Drive, Motion Planning, motion prediction

In end-to-end autonomous driving,the motion prediction plays a pivotal role in ego-vehicle planning. However, existing methods often rely on globally aggregated motion features, ignoring the fact that planning decisions are primarily influenced by a small number of locally interacting agents. Failing to attend to these critical local interactions can obscure potential risks and undermine planning reliability. In this work, we propose FocalAD, a novel end-to-end autonomous driving framework that focuses on critical local neighbors and refines planning by enhancing local motion representations. Specifically, FocalAD comprises two core modules: the Ego-Local-Agents Interactor (ELAI) and the Focal-Local-Agents Loss (FLA Loss). ELAI conducts a graph-based ego-centric interaction representation that captures motion dynamics with local neighbors to enhance both ego planning and agent motion queries. FLA Loss increases the weights of decision-critical neighboring agents, guiding the model to prioritize those more relevant to planning. Extensive experiments show that FocalAD outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the open-loop nuScenes datasets and closed-loop Bench2Drive benchmark. Notably, on the robustness-focused Adv-nuScenes dataset, FocalAD achieves even greater improvements, reducing the average colilision rate by 41.9% compared to DiffusionDrive and by 15.6% compared to SparseDrive.
Control Architecture and Design for a Multi-robotic Visual Servoing System in Automated Manufacturing Environment
Authors: Rongfei Li
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00

The use of robotic technology has drastically increased in manufacturing in the 21st century. But by utilizing their sensory cues, humans still outperform machines, especially in micro scale manufacturing, which requires high-precision robot manipulators. These sensory cues naturally compensate for high levels of uncertainties that exist in the manufacturing environment. Uncertainties in performing manufacturing tasks may come from measurement noise, model inaccuracy, joint compliance (e.g., elasticity), etc. Although advanced metrology sensors and high precision microprocessors, which are utilized in modern robots, have compensated for many structural and dynamic errors in robot positioning, a well-designed control algorithm still works as a comparable and cheaper alternative to reduce uncertainties in automated manufacturing. Our work illustrates that a multi-robot control system that simulates the positioning process for fastening and unfastening applications can reduce various uncertainties, which may occur in this process, to a great extent. In addition, most research papers in visual servoing mainly focus on developing control and observation architectures in various scenarios, but few have discussed the importance of the camera's location in the configuration. In a manufacturing environment, the quality of camera estimations may vary significantly from one observation location to another, as the combined effects of environmental conditions result in different noise levels of a single image shot at different locations. Therefore, in this paper, we also propose a novel algorithm for the camera's moving policy so that it explores the camera workspace and searches for the optimal location where the image noise level is minimized.