Soft growing robots, commonly referred to as vine robots, have demonstrated remarkable ability to interact safely and robustly with unstructured and dynamic environments. It is therefore natural to exploit contact with the environment for planning and design optimization tasks. Previous research has focused on planning under contact for passively deforming robots with pre-formed bends. However, adding active steering to these soft growing robots is necessary for successful navigation in more complex environments. To this end, we develop a unified modeling framework that integrates vine robot growth, bending, actuation, and obstacle contact. We extend the beam moment model to include the effects of actuation on kinematics under growth and then use these models to develop a fast parallel simulation framework. We validate our model and simulator with real robot experiments. To showcase the capabilities of our framework, we apply our model in a design optimization task to find designs for vine robots navigating through cluttered environments, identifying designs that minimize the number of required actuators by exploiting environmental contacts. We show the robustness of the designs to environmental and manufacturing uncertainties. Finally, we fabricate an optimized design and successfully deploy it in an obstacle-rich environment.
Sampling-based methods such as ReCom are widely used to audit redistricting plans for fairness, with the balanced spanning tree distribution playing a central role since it favors compact, contiguous, and population-balanced districts. However, whether such samples are truly representative or exhibit hidden biases remains an open question. In this work, we introduce the notion of separation fairness, which asks whether adjacent geographic units are separated with at most a constant probability (bounded away from one) in sampled redistricting plans. Focusing on grid graphs and two-district partitions, we prove that a smooth variant of the balanced spanning tree distribution satisfies separation fairness. Our results also provide theoretical support for popular MCMC methods like ReCom, suggesting that they maintain fairness at a granular level in the sampling process. Along the way, we develop tools for analyzing loop-erased random walks and partitions that may be of independent interest.
The so-called $X17$ particle has been proposed in order to explain a very significant resonant behaviour (in both the angular separation and invariant mass) of $e^+e^-$ pairs produced during a nuclear transition of excited $^8$Be, $^4$He and $^{12}$C nuclei. Fits to the corresponding data point, as most probable explanation, to a spin-1 object, which is protophobic and has a mass of approximately 16.7 MeV, which then makes the $X17$ potentially observable in Coherent Elastic neutrino ($\nu$) Nucleus Scattering (CE$\nu$NS) at the European Spallation Source (ESS). By adopting as theoretical framework a minimal extension of the Standard Model (SM) with a generic $U(1)'$ gauge group mixing with the hypercharge one of the latter, which can naturally accommodate the $X17$ state compliant with all available measurements from a variety of experiments, we predict that CE$\nu$NS at the ESS will constitute an effective means to probe this hypothesis, even after allowing for the inevitable systematics associated to the performance of the planned detectors therein.
This study evaluates publicly available deep-learning based lung segmentation models in transplant-eligible patients to determine their performance across disease severity levels, pathology categories, and lung sides, and to identify limitations impacting their use in preoperative planning in lung transplantation. This retrospective study included 32 patients who underwent chest CT scans at Duke University Health System between 2017 and 2019 (total of 3,645 2D axial slices). Patients with standard axial CT scans were selected based on the presence of two or more lung pathologies of varying severity. Lung segmentation was performed using three previously developed deep learning models: Unet-R231, TotalSegmentator, MedSAM. Performance was assessed using quantitative metrics (volumetric similarity, Dice similarity coefficient, Hausdorff distance) and a qualitative measure (four-point clinical acceptability scale). Unet-R231 consistently outperformed TotalSegmentator and MedSAM in general, for different severity levels, and pathology categories (p<0.05). All models showed significant performance declines from mild to moderate-to-severe cases, particularly in volumetric similarity (p<0.05), without significant differences among lung sides or pathology types. Unet-R231 provided the most accurate automated lung segmentation among evaluated models with TotalSegmentator being a close second, though their performance declined significantly in moderate-to-severe cases, emphasizing the need for specialized model fine-tuning in severe pathology contexts.
Future planetary exploration rovers must operate for extended durations on hybrid power inputs that combine steady radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) output with variable solar photovoltaic (PV) availability. While energy-aware planning has been studied for aerial and underwater robots under battery limits, few works for ground rovers explicitly model power flow or enforce instantaneous power constraints. Classical terrain-aware planners emphasize slope or traversability, and trajectory optimization methods typically focus on geometric smoothness and dynamic feasibility, neglecting energy feasibility. We present an energy-constrained trajectory planning framework that explicitly integrates physics-based models of translational, rotational, and resistive power with baseline subsystem loads, under hybrid RTG-solar input. By incorporating both cumulative energy budgets and instantaneous power constraints into SE(2)-based polynomial trajectory optimization, the method ensures trajectories that are simultaneously smooth, dynamically feasible, and power-compliant. Simulation results on lunar-like terrain show that our planner generates trajectories with peak power within 0.55 percent of the prescribed limit, while existing methods exceed limits by over 17 percent. This demonstrates a principled and practical approach to energy-aware autonomy for long-duration planetary missions.
We propose a new formulation for the multi-robot task allocation problem that incorporates (a) complex precedence relationships between tasks, (b) efficient intra-task coordination, and (c) cooperation through the formation of robot coalitions. A task graph specifies the tasks and their relationships, and a set of reward functions models the effects of coalition size and preceding task performance. Maximizing task rewards is NP-hard; hence, we propose network flow-based algorithms to approximate solutions efficiently. A novel online algorithm performs iterative re-allocation, providing robustness to task failures and model inaccuracies to achieve higher performance than offline approaches. We comprehensively evaluate the algorithms in a testbed with random missions and reward functions and compare them to a mixed-integer solver and a greedy heuristic. Additionally, we validate the overall approach in an advanced simulator, modeling reward functions based on realistic physical phenomena and executing the tasks with realistic robot dynamics. Results establish efficacy in modeling complex missions and efficiency in generating high-fidelity task plans while leveraging task relationships.
Efficient coordination of multiple robots for coverage of large, unknown environments is a significant challenge that involves minimizing the total coverage path length while reducing inter-robot conflicts. In this paper, we introduce a Multi-robot Connectivity-Aware Planner (Multi-CAP), a hierarchical coverage path planning algorithm that facilitates multi-robot coordination through a novel connectivity-aware approach. The algorithm constructs and dynamically maintains an adjacency graph that represents the environment as a set of connected subareas. Critically, we make the assumption that the environment, while unknown, is bounded. This allows for incremental refinement of the adjacency graph online to ensure its structure represents the physical layout of the space, both in observed and unobserved areas of the map as robots explore the environment. We frame the task of assigning subareas to robots as a Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), a well-studied problem for finding optimal routes for a fleet of vehicles. This is used to compute disjoint tours that minimize redundant travel, assigning each robot a unique, non-conflicting set of subareas. Each robot then executes its assigned tour, independently adapting its coverage strategy within each subarea to minimize path length based on real-time sensor observations of the subarea. We demonstrate through simulations and multi-robot hardware experiments that Multi-CAP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in key metrics, including coverage time, total path length, and path overlap ratio. Ablation studies further validate the critical role of our connectivity-aware graph and the global tour planner in achieving these performance gains.
This short paper presents a general approach for computing robust Wasserstein barycenters of persistence diagrams. The classical method consists in computing assignment arithmetic means after finding the optimal transport plans between the barycenter and the persistence diagrams. However, this procedure only works for the transportation cost related to the $q$-Wasserstein distance $W_q$ when $q=2$. We adapt an alternative fixed-point method to compute a barycenter diagram for generic transportation costs ($q > 1$), in particular those robust to outliers, $q \in (1,2)$. We show the utility of our work in two applications: \emph{(i)} the clustering of persistence diagrams on their metric space and \emph{(ii)} the dictionary encoding of persistence diagrams. In both scenarios, we demonstrate the added robustness to outliers provided by our generalized framework. Our Python implementation is available at this address: https://github.com/Keanu-Sisouk/RobustBarycenter .
The concept of Deadbeat Robust Model Predictive Control (DRMPC) is to completely extinguish the effect of external disturbances within the first few steps of the prediction horizon. The benefit is that the remaining dynamics of the system can be planned with certainty. This means it is not necessary to employ a Robust Positive Invariant (RPI) set as a terminal condition, which is often complex or even intractable to compute. Recent work has shown that it is possible to obtain full system theoretic guarantees in the case of linear systems, including recursive feasibility of all constraints and input-to-state stability. This paper extends this contribution to linear time-varying (LTV) or parameter-varying systems (LPV) systems with bounded parametric uncertainty and additive disturbances. Full system-theoretic guarantees can also be provided for these cases. Numerical simulation results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed LPV-DRMPC scheme, with the origin as the terminal set and a slightly increased prediction horizon, is almost comparable to that of other LPV-MPC schemes with an RPI terminal set constraint, despite a lower computational complexity. Besides avoiding the computation of RPI terminal sets, LPV-DRMPC allows to shift a significant portion of the computations offline.
While simulators exist for vehicular IoT nodes communicating with the Cloud through Edge nodes in a fully-simulated osmotic architecture, they often lack support for dynamic agent planning and optimisation to minimise vehicular battery consumption while ensuring fair communication times. Addressing these challenges requires extending current simulator architectures with AI algorithms for both traffic prediction and dynamic agent planning. This paper presents an extension of SimulatorOrchestrator (SO) to meet these requirements. Preliminary results over a realistic urban dataset show that utilising vehicular planning algorithms can lead to improved battery and QoS performance compared with traditional shortest path algorithms. The additional inclusion of desirability areas enabled more ambulances to be routed to their target destinations while utilising less energy to do so, compared to traditional and weighted algorithms without desirability considerations.
While trajectory prediction plays a critical role in enabling safe and effective path-planning in automated vehicles, standardized practices for evaluating such models remain underdeveloped. Recent efforts have aimed to unify dataset formats and model interfaces for easier comparisons, yet existing frameworks often fall short in supporting heterogeneous traffic scenarios, joint prediction models, or user documentation. In this work, we introduce STEP -- a new benchmarking framework that addresses these limitations by providing a unified interface for multiple datasets, enforcing consistent training and evaluation conditions, and supporting a wide range of prediction models. We demonstrate the capabilities of STEP in a number of experiments which reveal 1) the limitations of widely-used testing procedures, 2) the importance of joint modeling of agents for better predictions of interactions, and 3) the vulnerability of current state-of-the-art models against both distribution shifts and targeted attacks by adversarial agents. With STEP, we aim to shift the focus from the ``leaderboard'' approach to deeper insights about model behavior and generalization in complex multi-agent settings.
Manipulation in confined and cluttered environments remains a significant challenge due to partial observability and complex configuration spaces. Effective manipulation in such environments requires an intelligent exploration strategy to safely understand the scene and search the target. In this paper, we propose COMPASS, a multi-stage exploration and manipulation framework featuring a manipulation-aware sampling-based planner. First, we reduce collision risks with a near-field awareness scan to build a local collision map. Additionally, we employ a multi-objective utility function to find viewpoints that are both informative and conducive to subsequent manipulation. Moreover, we perform a constrained manipulation optimization strategy to generate manipulation poses that respect obstacle constraints. To systematically evaluate method's performance under these difficulties, we propose a benchmark of confined-space exploration and manipulation containing four level challenging scenarios. Compared to exploration methods designed for other robots and only considering information gain, our framework increases manipulation success rate by 24.25% in simulations. Real-world experiments demonstrate our method's capability for active sensing and manipulation in confined environments.
Graph condensation (GC) aims to distill the original graph into a small-scale graph, mitigating redundancy and accelerating GNN training. However, conventional GC approaches heavily rely on rigid GNNs and task-specific supervision. Such a dependency severely restricts their reusability and generalization across various tasks and architectures. In this work, we revisit the goal of ideal GC from the perspective of GNN optimization consistency, and then a generalized GC optimization objective is derived, by which those traditional GC methods can be viewed nicely as special cases of this optimization paradigm. Based on this, Pre-trained Graph Condensation (PreGC) via optimal transport is proposed to transcend the limitations of task- and architecture-dependent GC methods. Specifically, a hybrid-interval graph diffusion augmentation is presented to suppress the weak generalization ability of the condensed graph on particular architectures by enhancing the uncertainty of node states. Meanwhile, the matching between optimal graph transport plan and representation transport plan is tactfully established to maintain semantic consistencies across source graph and condensed graph spaces, thereby freeing graph condensation from task dependencies. To further facilitate the adaptation of condensed graphs to various downstream tasks, a traceable semantic harmonizer from source nodes to condensed nodes is proposed to bridge semantic associations through the optimized representation transport plan in pre-training. Extensive experiments verify the superiority and versatility of PreGC, demonstrating its task-independent nature and seamless compatibility with arbitrary GNNs.
The presence of obstacles has a major impact on distance computation, motion planning, and visibility. While these problems are well studied in the plane, our understanding in three and higher dimensions is still limited. We investigate how different obstacle properties affect the induced geodesic metric in three-dimensional space. A finite metric space is said to be approximately realizable by a collection of obstacles if, for any $\varepsilon>0$, it can be embedded into the free space around the obstacles with geodesic distance and worst-case distortion $1+\varepsilon$. We focus on three key properties-convexity, disjointness, and fatness-and analyze how omitting each of them influences realizability. Our main result shows that if fatness is dropped, then every finite metric space can be realized with distortion $1+\varepsilon$ using convex, pairwise disjoint obstacles in $\mathbb{R}^3$, even if all obstacles are congruent equilateral triangles. Moreover, if we enforce fatness but drop convexity or disjointness, the same realizability still holds. Our results have important implications on the approximability of TSP with Obstacles, a natural variant of TSP introduced recently by Alkema et al. (ESA 2022). Specifically, we use the recent results of Banerjee et al. on TSP in doubling spaces (FOCS 2024) and of Chew et al. on distances among obstacles (Information Processing Letters 2002) to show that TSP with Obstacles admits a PTAS if the obstacles are convex, fat, and pairwise disjoint. If any of these three properties is dropped, then our results, combined with the APX-hardness of Metric TSP, demonstrate that TSP with Obstacles is APX-hard.
While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) generate extensive chain-of-thought reasoning, we lack a principled framework for understanding how these thoughts are structured. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach by applying Schoenfeld's Episode Theory, a classic cognitive framework for human mathematical problem-solving, to analyze the reasoning traces of LRMs. We annotated thousands of sentences and paragraphs from model-generated solutions to math problems using seven cognitive labels (e.g., Plan, Implement, Verify). The result is the first publicly available benchmark for the fine-grained analysis of machine reasoning, including a large annotated corpus and detailed annotation guidebooks. Our preliminary analysis reveals distinct patterns in LRM reasoning, such as the transition dynamics between cognitive states. This framework provides a theoretically grounded methodology for interpreting LRM cognition and enables future work on more controllable and transparent reasoning systems.
The rapid proliferation of IoT nodes equipped with microphones and capable of performing on-device audio classification exposes highly sensitive data while operating under tight resource constraints. To protect against this, we present a defence-in-depth architecture comprising a security protocol that treats the edge device, cellular network and cloud backend as three separate trust domains, linked by TPM-based remote attestation and mutually authenticated TLS 1.3. A STRIDE-driven threat model and attack-tree analysis guide the design. At startup, each boot stage is measured into TPM PCRs. The node can only decrypt its LUKS-sealed partitions after the cloud has verified a TPM quote and released a one-time unlock key. This ensures that rogue or tampered devices remain inert. Data in transit is protected by TLS 1.3 and hybridised with Kyber and Dilithium to provide post-quantum resilience. Meanwhile, end-to-end encryption and integrity hashes safeguard extracted audio features. Signed, rollback-protected AI models and tamper-responsive sensors harden firmware and hardware. Data at rest follows a 3-2-1 strategy comprising a solid-state drive sealed with LUKS, an offline cold archive encrypted with a hybrid post-quantum cipher and an encrypted cloud replica. Finally, we set out a plan for evaluating the physical and logical security of the proposed protocol.
Understanding how people read city scenes can inform design and planning. We introduce a small benchmark for testing vision-language models (VLMs) on urban perception using 100 Montreal street images, evenly split between photographs and photorealistic synthetic scenes. Twelve participants from seven community groups supplied 230 annotation forms across 30 dimensions mixing physical attributes and subjective impressions. French responses were normalized to English. We evaluated seven VLMs in a zero-shot setup with a structured prompt and deterministic parser. We use accuracy for single-choice items and Jaccard overlap for multi-label items; human agreement uses Krippendorff's alpha and pairwise Jaccard. Results suggest stronger model alignment on visible, objective properties than subjective appraisals. The top system (claude-sonnet) reaches macro 0.31 and mean Jaccard 0.48 on multi-label items. Higher human agreement coincides with better model scores. Synthetic images slightly lower scores. We release the benchmark, prompts, and harness for reproducible, uncertainty-aware evaluation in participatory urban analysis.
This study presents a system integration approach for planning schedules, sequences, tasks, and motions for reconfigurable robots to automatically disassemble constrained structures in a non-destructive manner. Such systems must adapt their configuration and coordination to the target structure, but the large and complex search space makes them prone to local optima. To address this, we integrate multiple robot arms equipped with different types of tools, together with a rotary stage, into a reconfigurable setup. This flexible system is based on a hierarchical optimization method that generates plans meeting multiple preferred conditions under mandatory requirements within a realistic timeframe. The approach employs two many-objective genetic algorithms for sequence and task planning with motion evaluations, followed by constraint programming for scheduling. Because sequence planning has a much larger search space, we introduce a chromosome initialization method tailored to constrained structures to mitigate the risk of local optima. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively solves complex problems in reconfigurable robotic disassembly.
The chip design process involves numerous steps, beginning with defining product requirements and progressing through architectural planning, system-level design, and the physical layout of individual circuit blocks. As the enablers of large-scale chip development, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools play a vital role in helping designers achieve high-quality results. The Shift-Left methodology introduces a pathway toward creating digital twins and fusing multiple design steps, thereby transitioning traditionally sequential, physically-aware processes into virtual design environments. This shift allows designers to establish stronger correlations earlier and optimize designs more effectively. However, challenges remain, especially in accurately replicating downstream behaviors and determining the right scope and timing for adoption. These challenges, in turn, have revealed new opportunities for EDA vendors, physical designers, and logic designers alike. As the industry advances toward intelligent EDA tools and techniques, it is timely to reflect on Shift-Left progress made and the challenges that remain. The rise of AI techniques and the momentum of open-source design flows have significantly strengthened prediction and modeling capabilities, making data-driven methods increasingly relevant to the EDA community. This, in turn, enhances the ''Shift-Left'' features embedded in current tools. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of existing and emerging paradigms in Shift-Left research within EDA and the broader design ecosystem. Our goal is to provide a unique perspective on the state of the field and its future directions. Relevant papers mentioned are organized in https://github.com/iCAS-SJTU/Shift-Left-EDA-Papers.
Predictive process monitoring techniques support the operational decision making by predicting future states of ongoing cases of a business process. A subset of these techniques predict the remaining sequence of activities of an ongoing case (case suffix prediction). Existing approaches for case suffix prediction generate sequences of activities with a single timestamp (e.g. the end timestamp). This output is insufficient for resource capacity planning, where we need to reason about the periods of time when resources will be busy performing work. This paper introduces a technique for predicting case suffixes consisting of activities with start and end timestamps. In other words, the proposed technique predicts both the waiting time and the processing time of each activity. Since the waiting time of an activity in a case depends on how busy resources are in other cases, the technique adopts a sweep-line approach, wherein the suffixes of all ongoing cases in the process are predicted in lockstep, rather than predictions being made for each case in isolation. An evaluation on real-life and synthetic datasets compares the accuracy of different instantiations of this approach, demonstrating the advantages of a multi-model approach to case suffix prediction.
This paper addresses the challenges of automating vibratory sieve shaker operations in a materials laboratory, focusing on three critical tasks: 1) dual-arm lid manipulation in 3 cm clearance spaces, 2) bimanual handover in overlapping workspaces, and 3) obstructed powder sample container delivery with orientation constraints. These tasks present significant challenges, including inefficient sampling in narrow passages, the need for smooth trajectories to prevent spillage, and suboptimal paths generated by conventional methods. To overcome these challenges, we propose a hierarchical planning framework combining Prior-Guided Path Planning and Multi-Step Trajectory Optimization. The former uses a finite Gaussian mixture model to improve sampling efficiency in narrow passages, while the latter refines paths by shortening, simplifying, imposing joint constraints, and B-spline smoothing. Experimental results demonstrate the framework's effectiveness: planning time is reduced by up to 80.4%, and waypoints are decreased by 89.4%. Furthermore, the system completes the full vibratory sieve shaker operation workflow in a physical experiment, validating its practical applicability for complex laboratory automation.
Strawberries naturally grow in clusters, interwoven with leaves, stems, and other fruits, which frequently leads to occlusion. This inherent growth habit presents a significant challenge for robotic picking, as traditional percept-plan-control systems struggle to reach fruits amid the clutter. Effectively picking an occluded strawberry demands dexterous manipulation to carefully bypass or gently move the surrounding soft objects and precisely access the ideal picking point located at the stem just above the calyx. To address this challenge, we introduce a strawberry-picking robotic system that learns from human demonstrations. Our system features a 4-DoF SCARA arm paired with a human teleoperation interface for efficient data collection and leverages an End Pose Assisted Action Chunking Transformer (ACT) to develop a fine-grained visuomotor picking policy. Experiments under various occlusion scenarios demonstrate that our modified approach significantly outperforms the direct implementation of ACT, underscoring its potential for practical application in occluded strawberry picking.
SPHEREx, a recently launched astronomy mission, detected a bright 1.083 micron emission feature in the commissioning data. The PI group attributed this feature to the He I 1.0833 micron triplet line. Here, I review the physics and aeronomy of this well-known line of atmospheric origin. SPHEREx is in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous polar orbit, circling the earth nearly 15 times a day and observing close to the terminator plane. With a height of 650 km, SPHEREx is located in the upper thermosphere that is dominated by atomic oxygen and helium. The He I line is a result of resonance scattering of solar photons by metastable helium atoms. It appears that SPHEREx has the capacity to provide a rich dataset (global, daily, and 2-minute cadence) of column density of metastable helium in the upper thermosphere. As an example of this assertion, with data from just one orbit, the winter helium bulge was readily seen. Rapid variations in the column density of metastable helium is seen over the south pole which is probably due to spatial structure in the distribution of metastable helium as well as solar activity. Helium in the thermosphere is of considerable interest to operators of low-earth orbiting (LEO) satellites, since drag in the thermosphere is the primary cause of the decay of these satellites. SPHEREx, along with on-going ground-based studies (passive NIR spectroscopy, lidar, incoherent scatter radar), is poised to contribute to this topic.
Deep JWST imaging of the massive galaxy cluster MACS0417.5-1154, at redshift z=0.443, reveals a huge population of globular clusters (GCs) and Ultra-Compact Dwarfs (UCDs) primarily distributed around its single central giant galaxy (BCG). We present NIRCam/SWC photometry of the GC system in four bands (F090W, F115W, F150W, F200W). The spatial distribution of the system matches well in radial and ellipticity profile with the high elongation (b/a = 0.5) of the BCG halo light. The total GC population within MACS0417 is estimated to be near 1.5 x 10^5, similar to the systems in Abell 2744, Coma, and other galaxy clusters with comparable masses. With similar results for GC photometry in hand from other lensing clusters at a range of redshifts, it is now possible to trace on purely observational grounds the luminosity evolution of GC systems over many Gigayears of lookback time, as seen through their color-magnitude diagrams. We show this sequence for five systems reaching to lookback times of more than 7 Gyr. A systematic change in the GC/UCD sequence with lookback time is clearly visible, near what is expected for age-fading of a simple stellar population with time. Lastly, we evaluate the effectiveness of the various JWST NIRCam filters for broadband photometry of GC systems as a function of redshift, as an aid to planning further studies.
Learning abstractions directly from data is a core challenge in robotics. Humans naturally operate at an abstract level, reasoning over high-level subgoals while delegating execution to low-level motor skills -- an ability that enables efficient problem solving in complex environments. In robotics, abstractions and hierarchical reasoning have long been central to planning, yet they are typically hand-engineered, demanding significant human effort and limiting scalability. Automating the discovery of useful abstractions directly from visual data would make planning frameworks more scalable and more applicable to real-world robotic domains. In this work, we focus on rearrangement tasks where the state is represented with raw images, and propose a method to induce discrete, graph-structured abstractions by combining structural constraints with an attention-guided visual distance. Our approach leverages the inherent bipartite structure of rearrangement problems, integrating structural constraints and visual embeddings into a unified framework. This enables the autonomous discovery of abstractions from vision alone, which can subsequently support high-level planning. We evaluate our method on two rearrangement tasks in simulation and show that it consistently identifies meaningful abstractions that facilitate effective planning and outperform existing approaches.
We present a perception-driven safety filter that converts each 3D Gaussian Splat (3DGS) into a closed-form forward collision cone, which in turn yields a first-order control barrier function (CBF) embedded within a quadratic program (QP). By exploiting the analytic geometry of splats, our formulation provides a continuous, closed-form representation of collision constraints that is both simple and computationally efficient. Unlike distance-based CBFs, which tend to activate reactively only when an obstacle is already close, our collision-cone CBF activates proactively, allowing the robot to adjust earlier and thereby produce smoother and safer avoidance maneuvers at lower computational cost. We validate the method on a large synthetic scene with approximately 170k splats, where our filter reduces planning time by a factor of 3 and significantly decreased trajectory jerk compared to a state-of-the-art 3DGS planner, while maintaining the same level of safety. The approach is entirely analytic, requires no high-order CBF extensions (HOCBFs), and generalizes naturally to robots with physical extent through a principled Minkowski-sum inflation of the splats. These properties make the method broadly applicable to real-time navigation in cluttered, perception-derived extreme environments, including space robotics and satellite systems.
To meet the standards of the Open Science movement, the FAIR Principles emphasize the importance of making scientific data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Yet, creating a repository that adheres to these principles presents significant challenges. Managing large volumes of diverse research data and metadata, often generated rapidly, requires a precise approach. This necessity has led to the development of Software Reference Architectures (SRAs) to guide the implementation process for FAIR-compliant repositories. This article conducts a systematic review of research efforts focused on architectural solutions for such repositories. We detail our methodology, covering all activities undertaken in the planning and execution phases of the review. We analyze 323 references from reputable sources and expert recommendations, identifying 7 studies on general-purpose big data SRAs, 13 pipelines implementing FAIR Principles in specific contexts, and 3 FAIR-compliant big data SRAs. We provide a thorough description of their key features and assess whether the research questions posed in the planning phase were adequately addressed. Additionally, we discuss the limitations of the retrieved studies and identify tendencies and opportunities for further research.
We review how sensorimotor control is dictated by interacting neural populations, optimal feedback mechanisms, and the biomechanics of bodies. First, we outline the distributed anatomical loops that shuttle sensorimotor signals between cortex, subcortical regions, and spinal cord. We then summarize evidence that neural population activity occupies low-dimensional, dynamically evolving manifolds during planning and execution of movements. Next, we summarize literature explaining motor behavior through the lens of optimal control theory, which clarifies the role of internal models and feedback during motor control. Finally, recent studies on embodied sensorimotor control address gaps within each framework by aiming to elucidate neural population activity through the explicit control of musculoskeletal dynamics. We close by discussing open problems and opportunities: multi-tasking and cognitively rich behavior, multi-regional circuit models, and the level of anatomical detail needed in body and network models. Together, this review and recent advances point towards reaching an integrative account of the neural control of movement.
We present a cooperative aerial-ground search-and-rescue (SAR) framework that pairs two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to achieve rapid victim localization and obstacle-aware navigation in unknown environments. We dub this framework Guided Long-horizon Integrated Drone Escort (GLIDE), highlighting the UGV's reliance on UAV guidance for long-horizon planning. In our framework, a goal-searching UAV executes real-time onboard victim detection and georeferencing to nominate goals for the ground platform, while a terrain-scouting UAV flies ahead of the UGV's planned route to provide mid-level traversability updates. The UGV fuses aerial cues with local sensing to perform time-efficient A* planning and continuous replanning as information arrives. Additionally, we present a hardware demonstration (using a GEM e6 golf cart as the UGV and two X500 UAVs) to evaluate end-to-end SAR mission performance and include simulation ablations to assess the planning stack in isolation from detection. Empirical results demonstrate that explicit role separation across UAVs, coupled with terrain scouting and guided planning, improves reach time and navigation safety in time-critical SAR missions.
Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a core technology for 6G, and its application to closed-loop sensing, communication, and control (SCC) enables various services. Existing SCC solutions often treat sensing and control separately, leading to suboptimal performance and resource usage. In this work, we introduce the active inference framework (AIF) into SCC-enabled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems for joint state estimation, control, and sensing resource allocation. By formulating a unified generative model, the problem reduces to minimizing variational free energy for inference and expected free energy for action planning. Simulation results show that both control cost and sensing cost are reduced relative to baselines.