Papers for

logistics teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Mobile robot senses surroundings to navigate safely in changing spaces

Object- and Task-Aware Active Perception for Safe Navigation of Mobile Manipulators in Semi-Static Environments

Abstract: Mobile manipulators must navigate safely in cluttered, partially unknown environments across logistics, manufacturing, and service applications. Semi-static changes between robot visits can lead to outdated scene knowledge and increased collision risk. We propose an active perception framework that enables a high degree-of-freedom (DoF) mobile manipulator to inspect uncertain or safety-critical regions with its hand camera during navigation. A probabilistic, object- and task-aware next-best-view (NBV) formulation prioritizes observations near the desired path and around uncertain or potentially changing objects. The perception objective is integrated into hierarchical-task model predictive control (HTMPC), exploiting kinematic redundancy for viewpoint adjustment while preserving the higher priority of base-trajectory tracking. The system unifies navigation, map maintenance, and active perception in a closed loop. Real-world tests show improved map consistency, reduced task-dependent map entropy, and lower navigation risk than passive or non-task-aware baselines. Additional simulation and real-world sequences demonstrate responses to controlled semi-static scene changes.

Wed 21 OctRobotics
The gist
Mobile robots with arms often need to move safely in cluttered places where things might have changed since their last visit. The authors propose a method where the robot uses its hand camera to actively look around uncertain or potentially changed areas while moving. Their approach plans where to look next by focusing on important objects near its path and adjusts its viewpoint without losing track of its main route. Tests show this method helps the robot maintain better maps and avoid collisions compared to more passive approaches.
Open → 2610.29964v1

Latent recursion improves neural routing for vehicle delivery problems

RELAGRAM: Recursive Latent Graph Model for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

Abstract: Latent recursion repeatedly processes internal representations through the same neural network. Recent work has shown this approach to be effective on structured reasoning tasks such as Sudoku and maze solving. However, whether latent recursion can support neural routing remains unclear. We introduce RELAGRAM (Recursive Latent Graph Model), a novel approach that brings latent recursion to graph combinatorial optimization. RELAGRAM encodes a capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) instance as edge tokens; a compact transformer recurrently updates the latent representations of these tokens. An output head maps the answer state to an edge heatmap, from which an autoregressive decoder constructs a feasible solution. On CVRP-100 instances, the 0.53M-parameter RELAGRAM achieves gaps to a PyVRP reference of 13.4%, 9.8%, and 8.3% under greedy decoding, eightfold symmetry augmentation, and 256-candidate search, respectively. Trained only on CVRP-100, RELAGRAM generalizes zero-shot to CVRP-500 and CVRP-1000, achieving gaps of 15.6% and 21.7% under 256-candidate search. Together, these results demonstrate that latent recursion is a promising approach to neural routing.

Sat 10 OctMachine LearningNeural and Evolutionary Computing
The gist
Finding efficient routes for delivery vehicles is a tough problem, especially when vehicles have limited capacity. This paper shows a new neural network approach called RELAGRAM that repeatedly processes graph information to help solve these routing challenges. Using a transformer model that updates relationship information between locations, RELAGRAM produces good routes with fewer parameters compared to some traditional methods. Additionally, it can handle larger delivery problems without being retrained, which suggests it might work well in real-world routing tasks.
Open → 2610.15106v1