Saturday, November 7, 2026
12 papers added this day. New papers stay for 14 days.
Tactile sensing 1
Imitation learning and data collection 2
Robot foundation models 1
RL and sim-to-real 2
Legged locomotion 2
Humanoids and mobile manipulation 3
3D perception and scene representation 1
MessyNav: Zero-Shot Navigation via Manipulation in Messy Environments
November 2026
MessyNav lets a mobile manipulator clear blocked paths zero-shot. A VLM first decides from context which obstacles are safe to move, then a VLM planner sequences swipe, pick-up and navigation primitives. On a real TidyBot++ it succeeds in 67% of messy-room trials versus 40% for end-to-end VLM planning.
SCRUB: Contact-Based Surface-Frame Estimation for Force-Motion Control with an Armless Quadruped
November 2026
An armless Unitree Go1 presses and slides a body-mounted tool along unmapped walls by estimating the surface normal from contact force and gait-averaged tool velocity. It completed 89 of 90 hardware trials across speeds and loads, while no estimator ablation completed a column orbit.
PyRUA-DataFarm: LLM Agent as a Cost-Efficient Teleoperator for Real-Ready Robot Data
November 2026
A coding agent rebuilds a real task in simulation from one calibration recording, and a video model conditioned on real frames renders the simulated rollouts as photographic multi-view video with exact action labels. On five real dual-arm tasks, policies trained only on this data succeed in 93 of 100 trials against 84 for teleoperated data, and 87 against 46 under an unseen tablecloth and coloured light.
Future Representation Distillation for Imagination-free World Action Models
November 2026
DreamFree turns a pretrained video diffusion model into a visual encoder that predicts future-frame features from the current image, giving a robot policy video-model foresight without generating any video. On 10 real DROID tasks it succeeds 64% of the time (DreamZero 56%, π0.5 16%) while running at 11 Hz, 17.8x faster than DreamZero.
Hybrid Particle-Voxel Dynamics for Multimodal 3D World Simulation
November 2026
An action-conditioned world model that predicts the scene as 3D voxel latents, decoded into Gaussian particles and tactile points, so it can render any camera view and fingertip touch at 50 Hz. Across six bimanual ALOHA tasks it beats 2D video and 3D particle baselines on every image, depth, geometry and tactile metric, and its generated data trains imitation policies.
D&A: Decoupling Description and Assessment Enables VLMs as Zero-Shot Robotic Reward Models
November 2026
A prompt-only recipe that turns an off-the-shelf VLM into a robot reward model by first describing the video without seeing the task, then scoring it against an explicit success criterion. Its rewards lift real-robot online RL on a DROID Franka from 10% to 100% success.
When Robots Outweigh Objects: How Inertia Mismatch Shapes Robot Policy Learning
November 2026
A controlled simulation study of how a robot's inertia relative to the object affects learning. RL copes with every mass ratio tested, but behavior cloning gets worse as the robot gets heavier, and a heavy robot pushing a light object needs 16x the demonstrations to match a light one.
BeyondContact: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Airflow-Based Non-Contact Manipulation
November 2026
An Isaac Lab extension that applies forces from a measured blower airflow model, used to train RL policies for an arm with a fan mounted under its gripper. Zero-shot on the real arm, a push-then-blow policy moves a cube to a target beyond reach in 16 of 20 trials, and an airflow-only policy turns a cuboid to target headings with 2.6° mean error.
ReGATE: Recurrent Gated Visual Fusion for Reactive Humanoid-Object Interaction
November 2026
ReGATE lets a Unitree G1 humanoid pick up, carry and release a box on user command using only onboard depth and proprioception, with learned gates that decide how much to trust vision. In simulation it acquires static boxes 85.2% of the time vs 48.5% for VisualMimic, and on hardware it still grabs a box after the camera is blacked out.
SomaAlign: Reliability-Aware Multimodal Representation Learning for Soft Robotic Grasping
November 2026
A soft-gripper grasping dataset with six synchronized modalities (two RGB views, depth, tactile pressure, IMU and text) over 100 objects, plus a contrastive method that sets each modality pair's alignment strength by how reliably that pair can be reconstructed. It reaches 90.66% average Recall@10 across 30 cross-modal retrieval directions, and its frozen encoders classify grasp outcome on a separately collected 998-trial set with 94.59% accuracy.
Energy-Based Policy Orchestration
November 2026
EPO learns, for each frozen humanoid whole-body policy, an energy that predicts whether a commanded goal stays feasible and gets reached, then refines goals and runs the lowest-energy policy at runtime. On a simulated Unitree G1 it cuts standing-manipulation tracking error from 0.461 to 0.420 against a learned mixture-of-experts scheduler while switching policies about 7x less often, and it runs on the real robot without fine-tuning.
Learning Purposeful Co-designs of Bio-inspired Quadrupedal Robots
November 2026
Dogger is a 3D-printed quadruped whose leg segment lengths and knee springs can be swapped. One RL policy trained across all designs, combined with Bayesian optimization, picks a leg design for each task. Deployed zero-shot, the chosen designs cut cost of transport by 18.6% for inspection walking and 35.7% when carrying a 2 kg payload.
Summaries are written automatically from each paper's text. Figures and videos come from the paper and its project page; all credit goes to the authors.