Technology areas
Perception and localization
Vision, 3D and tactile perception; sensor fusion; SLAM; mapping and relocalization; body pose, contact state, and terrain estimation. This area asks what the environment and robot are like now. Sensor hardware design belongs under Robot hardware and key components.
35 selected · 14 in the last 30 days
3D视觉工坊 · 微信公众号 ·
Any3R goes open source: one model unifies 3D reconstruction and pose estimation for pinhole, fisheye, and panoramic cameras
South Dakota State University and other institutions propose Any3R, which uses a dense ray field to describe arbitrary central cameras, reconstructing a 3D point cloud and estimating pose from mixed-camera images in a single forward pass. The method replaces the row and column indices of rotary position encoding with angular coordinates and weights the pixel loss by solid angle, so one set of weights covers pinhole, fisheye beyond 180°, and 360° panoramic cameras. On benchmarks spanning 13 central camera types and 3 datasets, it leads in both reconstruction accuracy and pose accuracy; the inference code, 13 camera models, and weights are open-sourced.
甲子光年 · 微信公众号 ·
Peking University's Dong Hao team proposes One Scan is Enough: embodied navigation post-training with a single scan
Dong Hao's team at Peking University has published the paper "One Scan is Enough," which uses a LiDAR-equipped iPhone to scan a target environment once, automatically generates navigation tasks, and uses the reconstructed scene geometry for reinforcement post-training, without needing manual teleoperation demonstrations.
3D视觉工坊 · 微信公众号 ·
HKU open-sources GenSfM: jointly reconstructing 3D objects and camera poses from four uncalibrated images
A University of Hong Kong team has open-sourced GenSfM, which uses a native 3D diffusion model to jointly denoise object shape and per-view camera poses within a single multimodal sequence, requiring only 2 to 4 uncalibrated images and no camera intrinsics or extrinsics. Evaluated on Toys4k and GSO, it improves novel-view PSNR by 3.2–4.5 dB over the multi-view baseline TRELLIS-M, reduces median Chamfer distance by about 64%–74%, and achieves pose Acc@5° above 96%.
CMU Robotics Institute ·
CMU proposes Wiggle and Go: estimating physical properties of ropes by wiggling to plan manipulation
A team at CMU's Robotics Institute has proposed the Wiggle and Go system, in which a robot first briefly wiggles a rope or cable while an overhead camera records how the waves propagate; a computer vision algorithm then tracks the motion and estimates the object's physical properties, which are used to plan subsequent actions without repeated trial and error. The model is trained entirely in simulation, and properties are then estimated from the motion of real ropes being wiggled to improve prediction accuracy on real hardware. The research has been accepted to the 2026 Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) and will be presented next month in Austin; it is partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
arXiv cs.RO ·
Rendering-Free Event Frame Simulation Accelerates Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Robot Navigation
The authors propose an analytic event simulator that synthesizes event streams directly from scene geometry and ego-motion without image rendering, generating 64x64 event observations in just 17 microseconds on a single GPU, over 400 times faster than state-of-the-art rendering pipelines. Reinforcement learning training for an event-camera obstacle-avoidance policy based on this simulator converges in under 30 minutes, three orders of magnitude faster than training on rendered events, and transfers zero-shot to ray-traced event simulation in Isaac Sim.
机器之心 · 微信公众号 ·
Ropedia Releases Six Research Results, Exploring How First-Person Human Data Can Be Turned into Robot Capabilities
Ropedia released six studies at the first Ropedia Super Week, held October 19 to 23, centered on how first-person human video can be turned into training and execution information usable by robots.
arXiv cs.RO ·
RepresentNav: A Navigation Foundation Model Built on a Self-Constructed Representation Space
The authors propose RepresentNav, a navigation foundation model that uses Representation Residuals, a three-layer transformer, to aggregate full-depth features from multiple vision foundation models and construct a representation space driven by the policy's own objectives.
深蓝AI · 微信公众号 ·
TU Delft's MonoRace achieves 100 km/h autonomous drone racing using only a single front-facing camera
The MonoRace system from TU Delft's MAVLab in the Netherlands, relying only on a single front-facing camera and an IMU, defeated three world-champion-level pilots in a row at the 2025 Abu Dhabi Autonomous Drone Racing competition; the paper was published in Science Robotics on October 14, 2026.
中国机器人网 · 微信公众号 ·
Google-owned Intrinsic open-sources robot foundation software platform Intrinsic Core
At ROSCon 2026 in Toronto, Canada, Intrinsic announced that it is open-sourcing the core components of its industrial robotics platform under the Apache 2.0 license and launching Intrinsic Core, a ROS-compatible foundation software platform.
Dexmate ·
Dexmate and CMU Release MeMoREval Benchmark: Robot Storing Camera Frames Beats Text Descriptions
Dexmate and CMU introduced the MeMoREval benchmark, which uses a two-stage protocol of experiencing first and asking questions later to evaluate what embodied agents should store as memory. It includes 53 tasks and 4 simulated indoor environments, and runs on the Vega 1 Pro dual-arm mobile manipulator. Results show that storing raw camera frames scored 70% and had lower write cost, surpassing text descriptions at 56 to 60%; adding scene graphs achieved the highest overall success rate among all tested models. The protocol also completed two memory retrieval demonstrations on a real Vega 1 Pro using a SLAM map and head camera.
RealSense ·
RealSense D585 Pro On-Device Human Detection: Ranging Principles and Safety Architecture Usage
RealSense explains D585 Pro on-device human detection: the detection model runs on its Gen5 Vision SoC and outputs JSON metadata at 30 fps with class, confidence, pixel box, and millimeter-level distance, without needing a host GPU.
CMU Robotics Institute ·
CMU research team develops human-inspired multisensory fingertips for DeltaHands robotic hand
CMU researchers designed human-hand-inspired fingertips that can be mounted on the DeltaHands flexible robotic hand. They combine strain gauges to measure pinch pressure with a microphone that captures micro-vibrations through a plastic fingernail, enabling the hand to count paper cups, identify materials, and grasp fragile items such as tofu cubes and potato chips. Each fingertip costs less than 100 US dollars, compared with about 800 US dollars to build a similar setup from off-the-shelf products. The work was presented at the 2026 Intelligent Robots and Systems Conference in Pittsburgh.
RealSense ·
RealSense Perception Studio Min-Z extends stereo depth near-field range to about 2 cm
RealSense has introduced Min-Z, an improved close-range depth feature in Perception Studio that extends usable stereo depth to about 2 cm on D401/D405 and about 12 cm on D43x/D45x without changing cameras.
PKU EPIC Lab ·
PKU EPIC Lab proposes UniPart for zero-shot language-driven 3D part segmentation
PKU EPIC Lab proposes UniPart, a feed-forward cross-modal 3D Transformer conditioned on CLIP text embeddings that uses free-text phrases to select functional parts on point clouds, achieving zero-shot language-driven 3D part segmentation.
Boston Dynamics ·
Boston Dynamics releases Spot 5.2 and Orbit update, connecting factory AI data around assets
Boston Dynamics has released Spot 5.2, positioned as a middle layer connecting the various AI systems in a factory. The Orbit software has been restructured to organize data around assets, can import asset hierarchies and link them to inspections, supports connecting external data sources such as PLC sensors and security cameras, and adds an MCP layer for AI agents to autonomously schedule Spot deployments.
NEURA Robotics ·
NEURA Robotics fully acquires German cleaning robotics company ADLATUS Robotics
NEURA Robotics announced that its NEURA Mobile Robots GmbH has acquired 100% of the shares of ADLATUS Robotics GmbH, an autonomous cleaning robotics company based in Ulm, Germany.
加速进化 · 微信公众号 ·
Tsinghua's Zhao Mingguo team publishes Science Robotics paper proposing a unified perception-motion reinforcement learning framework for vision-driven humanoid soccer skills
On August 19, Professor Zhao Mingguo's team in Tsinghua University's Department of Automation published the paper "Learning Vision-Driven Reactive Soccer Skills for Humanoid Robots" in Science Robotics, selected for the August 2026 humanoid robotics special issue; the robot platform used was a humanoid robot independently developed by Booster.
LeadeRobot ·
Mila and Polytechnique Montréal team open-source ~$2,000 robot guide dog Milo, built on Unitree Go2 for autonomous indoor and outdoor navigation
Mila-Quebec AI Institute and a Polytechnique Montréal team have released Milo, an open-source robot guide dog that they say can cut the roughly $50,000 cost of a guide dog to about $2,000. The hardware base is a Unitree Go2 Air/Pro plus an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano; a magnetic-encoder telescoping handle is used to inversely solve the user's 3D position, a bird's-eye-view map is built first and then a navigation policy is run, and the policy is trained in about 10 minutes in GPU-accelerated simulation and deployed zero-shot on the real robot.
北京智在无界科技有限公司 ·
BeingBeyond releases Being-H0.8, the first implicit world action model to introduce touch in pretraining
BeingBeyond has released Being-H0.8, which it calls the world's first implicit tactile world action model, unifying vision, touch, action, and future state changes into a single latent space, with pretraining on more than 500,000 hours of first-person human video.
Lavender Hill Capital Partners ·
Tashan Technology Completes Series B Round Worth Hundreds of Millions of Yuan, Building an End-to-End Tactile Sensing Industry Layout
Tashan Technology recently announced the completion of a Series B financing round worth hundreds of millions of yuan, with investors including Lavender Hill Capital Partners (LHCP).