AI Companion Robots Are Closing the Human Connection in Modern Homes

This article is brought to you by Ollobot.From about 2017, individuals began to truly connect with the initial wave of companion robots. These devices had personality, moved around, joked, and answered when you spoke to them. Most early companion robots, however, were still limited by simple voice-command interactions and narrow functionality. Once the novelty wore…

LEGO: Learning and Executing Generalized Operational Skill Chains for Autonomous Condition-Adaptive Surgical Knot-Tying From Few-Shot Demonstrations

Autonomous robotic knot-tying is a pivotal yet challenging task in minimally invasive surgery. However, reliable deployment remains difficult due to the need for rapid adaptation to diverse surgical scenarios. Off-the-shelf approaches struggle to handle interactions between flexible sutures and rigid instruments, which often require extensive training data, failing to generalize across varying conditions. In this…

An Equivariant Filter-Based State Estimator for Tightly-Coupled LiDAR–Radar–Inertial Odometry

Over the past decade, the fusion of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and inertial navigation systems (INS) has become a reliable solution for environmental perception in intelligent mobile platforms. However, LiDAR performance degrades under adverse weather conditions. Millimeter-wave radar offers complementary benefits: it is robust to environmental disturbances and provides direct Doppler velocity measurements. Moreover,…

Multimodal Perception for Underwater Hitchhiking of Robotic Remora: Integrating Semantic Vision and ToF Sensing

Hitchhiking is a low-energy locomotion strategy employed by remoras. Its success critically depends on the ability to accurately perceive and identify suitable attachment targets throughout both the far-field approach and near-field contact stages. Motivated by this biological insight, this work focuses on enhancing perception for hitchhiking tasks and proposes a multimodal perception framework for a…

Conformal Tactile Sensor Array-Based Hemispherical Detector for Robotic Spatial Exploration

Tactile perception plays a critical role in spatial exploration for robotics when visual sensing is limited by extreme lighting, occlusion, and dust. Conventional tactile sensors, constrained by their planar substrates, cannot be conformally mounted onto curved surfaces commonly used in robotic probes, thus being unable to accurately capture spatially distributed tactile information. In this work,…

Unleashing the Potential of Mamba: Boosting a LiDAR 3D Sparse Detector by Using Cross-Model Knowledge Distillation

The LiDAR 3D object detector that strikes a balance between accuracy and speed is crucial for achieving real-time perception in autonomous driving. However, many existing LiDAR detection models depend on complex feature transformations, leading to poor real-time performance and high resource consumption, which limits their practical effectiveness. In this work, we propose a Faster LiDAR…

CAVERS: Multimodal SLAM Data From a Natural Karstic Cave With Ground Truth Motion Capture

Autonomous robots operating in natural karstic caves face perception and navigation challenges that are qualitatively distinct from those encountered in mines or tunnels: irregular geometry, reflective wet surfaces, near-zero ambient light, and complex branching passages. Yet publicly available datasets targeting this environment remain scarce and offer limited sensing modalities and environmental diversity. We present CAVERS,…

LSTP-Nav: Lightweight Spatiotemporal Policy for Map-Free Multi-Agent Navigation With LiDAR

Safe map-free multi-robot navigation requires robots to make real-time decisions from partial and noisy local observations in dynamic, unstructured environments. Existing approaches often depend on prior maps, computationally intensive perception pipelines, or carefully tuned interaction models, which limit their robustness on resource-constrained platforms. This paper proposes LSTP-Nav, a lightweight, decentralized navigation framework built on LSTP-Net…

Physics-Guided Robotic Radiation Source Localization Along Arbitrary Measurement Paths in Unstructured Environments

Using robots to estimate the location of the radiation source is an effective way to improve efficiency and safety. Existing methods focus on planning the robot’s path to achieve precise estimation, typically approaching the source. However, approaching the source increases the risk of radiation damage to a robot. In addition, a path-planning algorithm designed solely…

PointLIBERO: Unlocking Spatial Awareness in VLAs With a Novel 3-D Dataset and a Lightweight Framework

Vision-Language-Action models such as OpenVLA and DexVLA have demonstrated impressive generalization by leveraging large-scale 2D robotic datasets. However, their reliance on 2D RGB imagery significantly limits their 3D spatial reasoning, leading to spatial naivety in depth-sensitive tasks. Bridging this gap is hindered by two primary challenges: the data scarcity of high-quality 3D robotic demonstrations and…