Occupancy World Models (OWMs) aim to predict future 3D occupancy scenes from historical observations and future ego motions, providing a useful world simulation tool for autonomous driving. Existing methods usually rely on large networks to implicitly align multi-frame historical states and predict future occupancy in a full-state manner, which is costly and redundant because most scene regions remain unchanged over short time intervals. In this paper, we propose Aligned Delta-Triplane Transformer (ADTT), a compact 4D OWM that explicitly aligns historical triplanes with ego-motion compensation and predicts only future scene changes. Based on the aligned triplane prior, a query-conditioned Transformer predicts residual changes, where ego-motion queries guide controllable future motion and learnable external queries capture scene changes beyond ego motion. The predicted changes are added to the aligned prior and decoded into future occupancy scenes. Experiments on Occ3D-nus show that ADTT achieves state-of-the-art forecasting performance with fewer parameters and higher FPS. Our code is publicly available online: https://github.com/kyoran/ADTT.
Obstacle avoidance is essential for ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles. Accurate perception and motion planning are crucial to enabling vehicles to navigate complex environments while avoiding collisions. In this paper, we propose an efficient obstacle avoidance pipeline that leverages a camera-only perception module and a Frenet-Pure Pursuit-based planning strategy. By integrating advancements in computer vision, the system utilizes YOLOv11 for object detection and state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation models, such as Depth Anything V2, to estimate object distances. A comparative analysis of these models provides valuable insights into their accuracy, efficiency, and robustness in real-world conditions. The system is evaluated in diverse scenarios on a university campus, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling various obstacles and enhancing autonomous navigation. The video presenting the results of the obstacle avoidance experiments is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoXiO5S_tA8
Robotics has made remarkable hardware strides-from DARPA's Urban and Robotics Challenges to the first humanoid-robot kickboxing tournament-yet commercial autonomy still lags behind progress in machine learning. A major bottleneck is software: current robot stacks demand steep learning curves, low-level C/C++ expertise, fragmented tooling, and intricate hardware integration, in stark contrast to the Python-centric, well-documented ecosystems that propelled modern AI. We introduce ARK, an open-source, Python-first robotics framework designed to close that gap. ARK presents a Gym-style environment interface that allows users to collect data, preprocess it, and train policies using state-of-the-art imitation-learning algorithms (e.g., ACT, Diffusion Policy) while seamlessly toggling between high-fidelity simulation and physical robots. A lightweight client-server architecture provides networked publisher-subscriber communication, and optional C/C++ bindings ensure real-time performance when needed. ARK ships with reusable modules for control, SLAM, motion planning, system identification, and visualization, along with native ROS interoperability. Comprehensive documentation and case studies-from manipulation to mobile navigation-demonstrate rapid prototyping, effortless hardware swapping, and end-to-end pipelines that rival the convenience of mainstream machine-learning workflows. By unifying robotics and AI practices under a common Python umbrella, ARK lowers entry barriers and accelerates research and commercial deployment of autonomous robots.
Diffusion models have demonstrated exceptional visual quality in video generation, making them promising for autonomous driving world modeling. However, existing video diffusion-based world models struggle with flexible-length, long-horizon predictions and integrating trajectory planning. This is because conventional video diffusion models rely on global joint distribution modeling of fixed-length frame sequences rather than sequentially constructing localized distributions at each timestep. In this work, we propose Epona, an autoregressive diffusion world model that enables localized spatiotemporal distribution modeling through two key innovations: 1) Decoupled spatiotemporal factorization that separates temporal dynamics modeling from fine-grained future world generation, and 2) Modular trajectory and video prediction that seamlessly integrate motion planning with visual modeling in an end-to-end framework. Our architecture enables high-resolution, long-duration generation while introducing a novel chain-of-forward training strategy to address error accumulation in autoregressive loops. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with 7.4\% FVD improvement and minutes longer prediction duration compared to prior works. The learned world model further serves as a real-time motion planner, outperforming strong end-to-end planners on NAVSIM benchmarks. Code will be publicly available at \href{https://github.com/Kevin-thu/Epona/}{https://github.com/Kevin-thu/Epona/}.
Large vision-language models (VLMs) for autonomous driving (AD) are evolving beyond perception and cognition tasks toward motion planning. However, we identify two critical challenges in this direction: (1) VLMs tend to learn shortcuts by relying heavily on history input information, achieving seemingly strong planning results without genuinely understanding the visual inputs; and (2) the chain-ofthought (COT) reasoning processes are always misaligned with the motion planning outcomes, and how to effectively leverage the complex reasoning capability to enhance planning remains largely underexplored. In this paper, we start from a small-scale domain-specific VLM and propose Drive-R1 designed to bridges the scenario reasoning and motion planning for AD. Drive-R1 first undergoes the supervised finetuning on a elaborate dataset containing both long and short COT data. Drive-R1 is encouraged to reason step-by-step from visual input to final planning decisions. Subsequently, Drive-R1 is trained within a reinforcement learning framework that incentivizes the discovery of reasoning paths that are more informative for planning, guided by rewards based on predicted trajectories and meta actions. Experimental evaluations on the nuScenes and DriveLM-nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate that Drive-R1 achieves superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art VLMs. We believe that Drive-R1 presents a promising direction for bridging reasoning and planning in AD, offering methodological insights for future research and applications.
In multi-agent systems, signal temporal logic (STL) is widely used for path planning to accomplish complex objectives with formal safety guarantees. However, as the number of agents increases, existing approaches encounter significant computational challenges. Recognizing that many complex tasks require cooperation among multiple agents, we propose swarm STL specifications to describe the collective tasks that need to be achieved by a team of agents. Next, we address the motion planning problem for all the agents in two stages. First, we abstract a group of cooperating agents as a swarm and construct a reduced-dimension state space whose dimension does not increase with the number of agents. The path planning is performed at the swarm level, ensuring the safety and swarm STL specifications are satisfied. Then, we design low-level control strategies for agents within each swarm based on the path synthesized in the first step. The trajectories of agents generated by the two-step policy ensure satisfaction of the STL specifications. We evaluate our two-stage approach in both single-swarm and multi-swarm scenarios. The results demonstrate that all tasks are completed with safety guarantees. Compared to the baseline multi-agent planning approach, our method maintains computational efficiency as the number of agents increases, since the computational time scales with the number of swarms rather than the number of agents.
The convergence of robotics and virtual reality (VR) has enabled safer and more efficient workflows in high-risk laboratory settings, particularly virology labs. As biohazard complexity increases, minimizing direct human exposure while maintaining precision becomes essential. We propose GAMORA (Gesture Articulated Meta Operative Robotic Arm), a novel VR-guided robotic system that enables remote execution of hazardous tasks using natural hand gestures. Unlike existing scripted automation or traditional teleoperation, GAMORA integrates the Oculus Quest 2, NVIDIA Jetson Nano, and Robot Operating System (ROS) to provide real-time immersive control, digital twin simulation, and inverse kinematics-based articulation. The system supports VR-based training and simulation while executing precision tasks in physical environments via a 3D-printed robotic arm. Inverse kinematics ensure accurate manipulation for delicate operations such as specimen handling and pipetting. The pipeline includes Unity-based 3D environment construction, real-time motion planning, and hardware-in-the-loop testing. GAMORA achieved a mean positional discrepancy of 2.2 mm (improved from 4 mm), pipetting accuracy within 0.2 mL, and repeatability of 1.2 mm across 50 trials. Integrated object detection via YOLOv8 enhances spatial awareness, while energy-efficient operation (50% reduced power output) ensures sustainable deployment. The system's digital-physical feedback loop enables safe, precise, and repeatable automation of high-risk lab tasks. GAMORA offers a scalable, immersive solution for robotic control and biosafety in biomedical research environments.
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.
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.
The problem of relocating a set of objects to designated areas amidst movable obstacles can be framed as a Geometric Task and Motion Planning (G-TAMP) problem, a subclass of task and motion planning (TAMP). Traditional approaches to G-TAMP have relied either on domain-independent heuristics or on learning from planning experience to guide the search, both of which typically demand significant computational resources or data. In contrast, humans often use common sense to intuitively decide which objects to manipulate in G-TAMP problems. Inspired by this, we propose leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), which have common sense knowledge acquired from internet-scale data, to guide task planning in G-TAMP problems. To enable LLMs to perform geometric reasoning, we design a predicate-based prompt that encodes geometric information derived from a motion planning algorithm. We then query the LLM to generate a task plan, which is then used to search for a feasible set of continuous parameters. Since LLMs are prone to mistakes, instead of committing to LLM's outputs, we extend Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to a hybrid action space and use the LLM to guide the search. Unlike the previous approach that calls an LLM at every node and incurs high computational costs, we use it to warm-start the MCTS with the nodes explored in completing the LLM's task plan. On six different G-TAMP problems, we show our method outperforms previous LLM planners and pure search algorithms. Code can be found at: https://github.com/iMSquared/prime-the-search
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely adopted in various real-world applications. However, the control and optimization of multi-UAV systems remain a significant challenge, particularly in dynamic and constrained environments. This work explores the joint motion and communication control of multiple UAVs operating within integrated terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks that include high-altitude platform stations (HAPS). Specifically, we consider an aerial highway scenario in which UAVs must accelerate, decelerate, and change lanes to avoid collisions and maintain overall traffic flow. Different from existing studies, we propose a novel hierarchical and collaborative method based on large language models (LLMs). In our approach, an LLM deployed on the HAPS performs UAV access control, while another LLM onboard each UAV handles motion planning and control. This LLM-based framework leverages the rich knowledge embedded in pre-trained models to enable both high-level strategic planning and low-level tactical decisions. This knowledge-driven paradigm holds great potential for the development of next-generation 3D aerial highway systems. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed collaborative LLM-based method achieves higher system rewards, lower operational costs, and significantly reduced UAV collision rates compared to baseline approaches.
In this paper, we introduce a multi-robot system that integrates mapping, localization, and task and motion planning (TAMP) enabled by 3D scene graphs to execute complex instructions expressed in natural language. Our system builds a shared 3D scene graph incorporating an open-set object-based map, which is leveraged for multi-robot 3D scene graph fusion. This representation supports real-time, view-invariant relocalization (via the object-based map) and planning (via the 3D scene graph), allowing a team of robots to reason about their surroundings and execute complex tasks. Additionally, we introduce a planning approach that translates operator intent into Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) goals using a Large Language Model (LLM) by leveraging context from the shared 3D scene graph and robot capabilities. We provide an experimental assessment of the performance of our system on real-world tasks in large-scale, outdoor environments.
This paper addresses the problem of underwater acoustic source tracking and pursuit with a team of autonomous underwater vehicles. Producing distributed control strategies in an underwater sensor network is not trivial since communication is primarily acoustic, which makes it intermittent and often plagued with major difficulties. For this reason, we propose an optimization scheme based on a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process for improving the performance of underwater mobile sensor networks, in which autonomous underwater vehicles (agents) play the role of moving nodes of a network. The key idea is to adjust the agents' guidance strategies to achieve coordinated motion planning, enabling optimal geometric configurations between the agents and the target to enhance tracking performance. Such a problem is cast as a multi-objective optimization problem that is solved through a receding horizon lookahead optimization scheme since we are interested in long-term tracking accuracy. The planning strategy is distributed using the sequential multi-agent decision-making paradigm to make the solving tractable since the optimization depends on the joint action domain. A distributed control framework has been implemented in a simulation environment to validate the proposed approach, which explicitly accounts for the major limitations imposed by acoustic communications.
Traditional motion planning methods for robots with many degrees-of-freedom, such as mobile manipulators, are often computationally prohibitive for real-world settings. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-model motion planning pipeline, termed Re4MPC, which computes trajectories using Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC). Re4MPC generates trajectories in a computationally efficient manner by reactively selecting the model, cost, and constraints of the NMPC problem depending on the complexity of the task and robot state. The policy for this reactive decision-making is learned via a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) framework. We introduce a mathematical formulation to integrate NMPC into this DRL framework. To validate our methodology and design choices, we evaluate DRL training and test outcomes in a physics-based simulation involving a mobile manipulator. Experimental results demonstrate that Re4MPC is more computationally efficient and achieves higher success rates in reaching end-effector goals than the NMPC baseline, which computes whole-body trajectories without our learning mechanism.
Humans are known to have an internal "world model" that enables us to carry out action planning based on world states. AI agents need to have such a world model for action planning as well. It is not clear how current AI models, especially generative models, are able to learn such world models and carry out procedural planning in diverse environments. We introduce WorldPrediction, a video-based benchmark for evaluating world modeling and procedural planning capabilities of different AI models. In contrast to prior benchmarks that focus primarily on low-level world modeling and robotic motion planning, WorldPrediction is the first benchmark that emphasizes actions with temporal and semantic abstraction. Given initial and final world states, the task is to distinguish the proper action (WorldPrediction-WM) or the properly ordered sequence of actions (WorldPrediction-PP) from a set of counterfactual distractors. This discriminative task setup enable us to evaluate different types of world models and planners and realize a thorough comparison across different hypothesis. The benchmark represents states and actions using visual observations. In order to prevent models from exploiting low-level continuity cues in background scenes, we provide "action equivalents" - identical actions observed in different contexts - as candidates for selection. This benchmark is grounded in a formal framework of partially observable semi-MDP, ensuring better reliability and robustness of the evaluation. We conduct extensive human filtering and validation on our benchmark and show that current frontier models barely achieve 57% accuracy on WorldPrediction-WM and 38% on WorldPrediction-PP whereas humans are able to solve both tasks perfectly.
Human motion generative modeling or synthesis aims to characterize complicated human motions of daily activities in diverse real-world environments. However, current research predominantly focuses on either low-level, short-period motions or high-level action planning, without taking into account the hierarchical goal-oriented nature of human activities. In this work, we take a step forward from human motion generation to human behavior modeling, which is inspired by cognitive science. We present a unified framework, dubbed Generative Behavior Control (GBC), to model diverse human motions driven by various high-level intentions by aligning motions with hierarchical behavior plans generated by large language models (LLMs). Our insight is that human motions can be jointly controlled by task and motion planning in robotics, but guided by LLMs to achieve improved motion diversity and physical fidelity. Meanwhile, to overcome the limitations of existing benchmarks, i.e., lack of behavioral plans, we propose GBC-100K dataset annotated with a hierarchical granularity of semantic and motion plans driven by target goals. Our experiments demonstrate that GBC can generate more diverse and purposeful high-quality human motions with 10* longer horizons compared with existing methods when trained on GBC-100K, laying a foundation for future research on behavioral modeling of human motions. Our dataset and source code will be made publicly available.
Heterogeneous multi-robot systems show great potential in complex tasks requiring hybrid cooperation. However, traditional approaches relying on static models often struggle with task diversity and dynamic environments. This highlights the need for generalizable intelligence that can bridge high-level reasoning with low-level execution across heterogeneous agents. To address this, we propose a hierarchical framework integrating a prompted Large Language Model (LLM) and a GridMask-enhanced fine-tuned Vision Language Model (VLM). The LLM decomposes tasks and constructs a global semantic map, while the VLM extracts task-specified semantic labels and 2D spatial information from aerial images to support local planning. Within this framework, the aerial robot follows an optimized global semantic path and continuously provides bird-view images, guiding the ground robot's local semantic navigation and manipulation, including target-absent scenarios where implicit alignment is maintained. Experiments on real-world cube or object arrangement tasks demonstrate the framework's adaptability and robustness in dynamic environments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an aerial-ground heterogeneous system integrating VLM-based perception with LLM-driven task reasoning and motion planning.
In this paper, we consider the problem of understanding the physical properties of unseen objects through interactions between the objects and a robot. Handling unseen objects with special properties such as deformability is challenging for traditional task and motion planning approaches as they are often with the closed world assumption. Recent results in Large Language Models (LLMs) based task planning have shown the ability to reason about unseen objects. However, most studies assume rigid objects, overlooking their physical properties. We propose an LLM-based method for probing the physical properties of unseen deformable objects for the purpose of task planning. For a given set of object properties (e.g., foldability, bendability), our method uses robot actions to determine the properties by interacting with the objects. Based on the properties examined by the LLM and robot actions, the LLM generates a task plan for a specific domain such as object packing. In the experiment, we show that the proposed method can identify properties of deformable objects, which are further used for a bin-packing task where the properties take crucial roles to succeed.
While recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have accelerated the development of language-guided robot planners, their black-box nature often lacks safety guarantees and interpretability crucial for real-world deployment. Conversely, classical symbolic planners offer rigorous safety verification but require significant expert knowledge for setup. To bridge the current gap, this paper proposes ViLaIn-TAMP, a hybrid planning framework for enabling verifiable, interpretable, and autonomous robot behaviors. ViLaIn-TAMP comprises three main components: (1) ViLaIn (Vision-Language Interpreter) - A prior framework that converts multimodal inputs into structured problem specifications using off-the-shelf VLMs without additional domain-specific training, (2) a modular Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) system that grounds these specifications in actionable trajectory sequences through symbolic and geometric constraint reasoning and can utilize learning-based skills for key manipulation phases, and (3) a corrective planning module which receives concrete feedback on failed solution attempts from the motion and task planning components and can feed adapted logic and geometric feasibility constraints back to ViLaIn to improve and further refine the specification. We evaluate our framework on several challenging manipulation tasks in a cooking domain. We demonstrate that the proposed closed-loop corrective architecture exhibits a more than 30% higher mean success rate for ViLaIn-TAMP compared to without corrective planning.
Generative models have become increasingly powerful tools for robot motion generation, enabling flexible and multimodal trajectory generation across various tasks. Yet, most existing approaches remain limited in handling multiple types of constraints, such as collision avoidance and dynamic consistency, which are often treated separately or only partially considered. This paper proposes UniConFlow, a unified flow matching (FM) based framework for trajectory generation that systematically incorporates both equality and inequality constraints. UniConFlow introduces a novel prescribed-time zeroing function to enhance flexibility during the inference process, allowing the model to adapt to varying task requirements. To ensure constraint satisfaction, particularly with respect to obstacle avoidance, admissible action range, and kinodynamic consistency, the guidance inputs to the FM model are derived through a quadratic programming formulation, which enables constraint-aware generation without requiring retraining or auxiliary controllers. We conduct mobile navigation and high-dimensional manipulation tasks, demonstrating improved safety and feasibility compared to state-of-the-art constrained generative planners. Project page is available at https://uniconflow.github.io.