# Robot Motion as a Keyed Communication Channel: Transmitting Messages via Motion Steganography

- Source: arXiv cs.RO
- Published: 2026-10-27T04:00:00.000Z
- RoboHot: https://robohot.news/en/items/g5lnd34arrn5fqxgov4otic09
- Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08920

## Summary

Researchers propose a "motion communication" method that encodes arbitrary short messages (such as an agent's current intent) as noise into the actions of any pre-trained policy, making robot motion detectable via remote vision or motion capture without degrading policy performance. This physical channel does not rely on wireless communication and requires no additional hardware or direct link to the robot. On real robots running at 50 Hz, four robots jointly recovered an 8-bit message at a total rate of 0.8 bits/s, with validation completed in both simulated environments and real-robot deployment.