warehouse robotics teams

Abstract: Robotic missions involving spatially distributed tasks often require jointly selecting rewarding locations and planning feasible motions under limited travel budgets. This paper proposes Reward-Guided RRT*, a new sampling-based framework that constructs a budget-feasible mission through a sequence of locally joint task-selection-and-motion-planning stages, evaluated directly in the continuous state space, without requiring a precomputed task-transition graph. The method incrementally builds a mission using reward-guided RRT* searches, while a return-feasibility procedure ensures that each selected task can be visited without violating the mission budget. Experiments with increasing obstacle complexity and number of tasks show solutions comparable to VNS-PRM* while requiring substantially fewer sampled states. We also extend the framework to Dubins steering and evaluate it in CoppeliaSim with a scaled car-like robotic platform, demonstrating its ability to incorporate vehicle kinematic constraints.

Abstract: Modern industrial automation demands autonomous collaborative systems capable of coordinated manipulation in workspaces with heterogeneous object arrangements. Existing systems rely on predetermined trajectories and rigid allocation strategies, causing suboptimal workspace utilization and collision risks. This paper presents a distance-based competitive task allocation framework for dual-arm systems, integrating real-time vision perception with collision-free motion planning. A temporal window mechanism enables each arm to evaluate object detections over five consecutive vision frames before committing to optimal distance-based selection, featuring dynamic reallocation and spatial conflict resolution at 0.01m threshold accuracy. An improved Artificial Potential Field (iAPF) framework provides coordinated dual-arm movements through exponential goal attraction, inter-arm repulsion, home-seeking, and velocity damping forces. Simulation results validate superiority over market-based, round-robin, and fixed allocation strategies in distance efficiency, collision risk, and workspace coverage. Hardware experiments using two 6-DOF Kinova Gen3 Lite manipulators demonstrate approximately 47% average velocity improvement over fixed allocation in homogeneous scenarios with zero collisions, while mixed object scenarios confirm universal handling with approximately 11% time overhead offset by superior safety margins. The framework integrates YOLOv8 OBB detection at 30 FPS with 10 Hz control loops, demonstrating practical deployment capability for industrial assembly and sorting operations.

Abstract: Autonomous navigation in cluttered and constrained environments typically assumes a fixed environment and searches only for paths within existing free space. However, a route can be blocked by an articulated structure, a movable object, or a pedestrian, and reaching the goal may therefore require appropriate embodied interaction with the environment. This paper formulates Path-Creative Navigation (PCN), a navigation paradigm in which the robot recovers free space by coordinating locomotion and embodied interaction, and addresses one class of PCN tasks with a mapless framework. The vision-LiDAR-odometry framework integrates local observations, obstacle geometry, and robot-state estimates through a unified navigation system, providing stable semantic and geometric information for navigation and interaction. The traversability-aware decision method utilizes visual and LiDAR distance information to determine whether a blockage is actionable and whether it can be safely bypassed, enabling the robot to interact only when necessary while supporting articulated structure pushing, movable object pushing, obstacle avoidance, and pedestrian requests. We design simulation scenarios and evaluate different methods in both simulation and two real-world tasks that cannot be completed by conventional navigation alone without embodied interaction. These results demonstrate that our framework achieves higher task completion than the baseline methods by coordinating navigation and interaction in cluttered and constrained environments. Code is available at:{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/path-creative-navigation/}.

Abstract: Reliable shelf monitoring is an important capability for retail automation, yet existing out-of-stock detection methods mainly operate in image space and lack metric 3D localization for downstream robotic systems. We formulate shelf monitoring as object-level 3D change detection: given two RGB-D observations captured at different times, the goal is to identify changed products and localize each change with a 3D bounding box. To support this task, we introduce ShelfChange3D, comprising 145K synthetic and 5K real-world paired RGB-D observations with object-level 3D change annotations. We further propose ChangeBox, an end-to-end framework that jointly reasons over paired observations and predicts object-level 3D change boxes. To improve localization accuracy, we introduce a geometry-based refinement stage that exploits depth and gravity prior to estimate relative pose and refine predicted boxes. Experiments show that ChangeBox outperforms existing change detection baselines, with further gains from refinement and effective transfer from synthetic to real-world observations.

Abstract: Fully autonomous tractor--trailer systems are increasingly deployed in logistics, agriculture, and industrial environments, where precise and robust path-tracking capabilities are essential. However, the articulation between the tractor and the trailer introduces additional nonlinearities and significantly complicates lateral and longitudinal control, particularly during reversing maneuvers. This paper introduces a novel path-tracking algorithm specifically designed for articulated vehicles with a single trailer. The proposed method combines a lateral control law applied at the trailer level with a short-horizon predictive adjustment of the tractor steering angle, ensuring stable convergence toward the desired path in both forward and backward motion. The approach is geometry-based and requires no per-vehicle calibration or training. Simulation studies in a high-fidelity physics simulator demonstrate the ability of the controller to match or outperform classical and state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, stability, and robustness to disturbances.

Abstract: Fine-grained object (FO) manipulation requires robots to distinguish a specified FO from visually similar objects and execute actions reliably despite scene distractors. However, scene-level visual conditioning lacks explicit object selection, while category-level guidance cannot reliably distinguish FOs within the same category. We present a SAM3-guided visuomotor framework that addresses these challenges through persistent object memory and focused visual conditioning. First, we introduce FO Memory-driven SAM3 (FOM-SAM3), which learns reusable FO memory tokens from limited multi-view registration images while keeping SAM3 fully frozen. Through one-vs-rest learning, these tokens encode persistent memories for localizing target FOs and rejecting similar alternatives, which can be stored in a memory bank. Second, we propose Focused Spatial-Appearance Encoding (FSAE), which combines in-FO local appearance features with explicit bounding-box coordinates to condition action policies including Diffusion Policy (DP) and Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT). The effectiveness of the proposed FOM-SAM3 was validated on the FO-30 dataset comprising 30 physical objects across four coarse categories. Across three real-robot FO manipulation tasks, our FOM-SAM3-guided policies demonstrated robustness against distractors, discrimination ability among similar FOs, and extendibility to new FOs.

Abstract: Generalizable bimanual robotic manipulation requires a reusable task prior that can persist across increasingly diverse tasks, objects, scenes, embodiments, and execution conditions, thus avoiding the prohibitive cost of large-scale teleoperated demonstrations and policy retraining. In this work, we present VLBiMan++, an extended framework that expands the generalization boundary of vision-language anchored one-shot bimanual manipulation. Starting from a single human demonstration, VLBiMan++ performs task-aware decomposition to identify reusable and adaptable skill components, and employs vision-language grounded geometric adaptation to transfer these skills to novel configurations without retraining. Building on this foundation, we systematically extend generalization along five dimensions: task generalization through diverse and long-horizon skill compositions; object generalization across unseen categories, varying geometries, and more complex articulated or deformable objects; scene generalization under clutter, occlusion, and dynamic interference; embodiment generalization across heterogeneous dual-arm robotic platforms; and deployment generalization through prolonged closed-loop execution under repeated external perturbations. To support this broader scope, we further introduce object-state-aware adaptation and lightweight trajectory optimization mechanisms that accommodate changes beyond simple rigid 6-DoF pose variations while preserving reliable bimanual coordination. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that VLBiMan++ maintains strong task success and adaptation capability across these increasingly challenging settings. Overall, VLBiMan++ advances one-shot bimanual manipulation from demonstrating isolated transferability toward a more systematic and scalable framework for generalization across tasks, objects, scenes, embodiments, and long-term deployment conditions.

Abstract: Precise manipulation in dynamic environments, whether induced by a mobile robot base or a target with unknown motion, remains a major challenge in robotics. Manipulation in dynamic environments introduces substantial uncertainty, which fundamentally conflicts with the tight precision requirement of precise tasks such as peg-in-the-hole. We propose a Vision-Force Admittance Learning (VFAL) framework that fuses asynchronous visual feedback with a high-frequency force-based model, using visual pose estimations as a regularization term. VFAL adapts insertion strategies online to dynamic motion while maintaining millimeter-level precision. To obtain robust, low-frequency pose information, we employ state-of-the-art vision foundation models for visual pose estimation. Additionally, we incorporate failure recovery mechanisms to enhance overall robustness. We validate our approach in real-world experiments, demonstrating high success rates and strong adaptability to various pegs and dynamic environments.

Abstract: Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs) substantially boost warehouse throughput, but routing large-scale AGV fleets remains challenging. Classical Multi-Agent Pathfinding solvers suffer from exploding combinatorial complexity and super-quadratic runtime, while relying on idealized grid or piecewise-linear motion models that mismatch real-world kinematics. Recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) solutions improve flexibility via decentralized agent policies but depend on discretized spatiotemporal representations, require millions of episodes to converge, and incur full-map observation at every step, which leads to large models, slow convergence, and high inference latency that violates real-time industrial control constraints. To address these bottlenecks, we propose HiRAD, a hierarchical RL framework for continuous-space AGV routing with real-time guarantees: (1) a step-level spatiotemporal representation that translates continuous motion into a differentiable RL problem, (2) a hierarchical strategy that splits heading choice from velocity control to reduce the action space, and (3) an asynchronous event-driven decision pipeline that lowers inference complexity from O(n^2) to O(n) and cuts per-step latency by as much as 71 percent. Across random graphs and two warehouse maps, HiRAD reduces makespan by 45 percent to 63 percent and shortens end-to-end runtime.