IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO)
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IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO)
@ieeetro.bsky.social
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The IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) publishes major advances in the state-of-the-art in all areas of robotics including theory, design, experimental studies, analysis, algorithms, and integration and application case studies.
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Authors introduce a method that automatically selects sensor models and relevant state variables from runtime data—no prior knowledge needed. It integrates into localization frameworks with built-in false-positive checks
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/110...

#RobotSensingSystems
Generalized setup of transformations to express various sensor modalities such as vectors for the magnetic field or the velocity and transformations for 3-DoF and 6-DoF sensor measurements and calibrations. This work aims to process a gray-box sensor signal together with a reliable system state to identify a corresponding sensor model and its properties.
November 7, 2025 at 11:01 PM
ieeetro.bsky.social
Authors introduce a #TaskPlanning system that adapts to both a human partner’s preferences (whether they like to lead or follow) and performance; jointly handling task allocation + scheduling
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/110...

#HumanRobotInteraction
Overview of the robot planning framework. The robot adapts its task planning based on task goals (e.g., completion time), and its estimates of the human’s leading/following preferences and performance. The framework continuously observes human actions and updates its estimates accordingly, allowing the robot to dynamically adjust its role and task allocation decisions.
November 7, 2025 at 11:00 PM
ieeetro.bsky.social
Thank you to the T-RO editorial board for gathering either virtually or in-person in Hangzhou, China last week for our bi-annual board meeting. Our time together included great discussions, new initiatives, and for those in-person a memorably fun dinner at the Hangzhou Cuisine Museum.

#IEEETRO
A group of about 35 people smiling. A table top of beautiful food. A group of eight people smiling at a dinner table.
October 30, 2025 at 9:53 AM
ieeetro.bsky.social
RAG, a resource-aware greedy algorithm for #robot #MeshNetworks that only uses neighbor info for decision making. RAG scales linearly with network size, cuts communication/computation loads & yields near-optimal coordination in info gathering

ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/109...
October 13, 2025 at 4:16 AM
ieeetro.bsky.social
Authors present a unified #ModelPredictiveControl framework for #humanoid balance, integrating ankle, hip, and stepping strategies, with variable angular momentum weighting, optimized step timing, and an HQP whole-body controller.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/109...

#LeggedLocomotion
Experimental results are presented for the robot's response to external forces applied along both the negative x- and y-directions.
October 8, 2025 at 7:17 PM
ieeetro.bsky.social
Authors propose a task‑driven co‑design framework that optimizes sensors, planners & compute under safety, cost, energy & weight constraints—demonstrated to show how task complexity affects autonomy stack choices
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/109...

#RobotSensingSystem #AutonomousVehicle
Graphical illustration of the informal problem definition for designing an AV for urban driving tasks, based on a catalog of hardware and software components with an emphasis on minimizing resources.
October 8, 2025 at 7:07 PM
ieeetro.bsky.social
Authors propose STOCS, a novel algorithm that embeds contact point & timing selection into contact‑implicit trajectory optimization—dramatically improving planning speed and enabling complex contact-rich motions on high-fidelity 3D geometry.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/109...

#Robotics
October 1, 2025 at 7:26 PM
ieeetro.bsky.social
Researchers propose a compact 6D suction cup model that reduces parameter count from 21 to just 5 via symmetry reduction, achieving ~5 mm and 3° accuracy and robust force estimation even at 60° gripper tilt.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/109...

#RobotSensingSystems #RobotManipulator
Example of a robotic bin-to-bin application where the deformation of an active bellow suction cup is clearly visible. Our proposed model allows to accurately predict this deformation enabling new robotic manipulation tasks. The particular shows the parts of a suction cup: 1) Fitting 2) Bellows 3) Lip.
October 1, 2025 at 7:20 PM
ieeetro.bsky.social
Introducing Hierarchical Diffusion Policy that guides robot manipulation with a two‑stage policy—first predicting optimal contact points in 3D, then generating trajectories to reach them via conditional diffusion.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/109...

#RobotManipulation #RobotTrajectory
Inference Process of Hierarchical Diffusion Policy. Compared to the Diffusion Policy that generates operation trajectories end-to-end, HDP introduces contact points, predicted by the Guider network or provided by humans, to guide the trajectory generation.
September 24, 2025 at 2:16 PM
ieeetro.bsky.social
Introducing an autonomous design algorithm that synthesizes self-aligning #KneeJoint mechanisms—no human input—adapts to diverse physiques, completes design in under an hour, and promises fast, scalable exoskeleton deployment.

#HumanCenteredRobotics
Prototyped mechanism synthesized for Case 3. Fabrication procedure of the prototype.
September 18, 2025 at 5:26 PM
ieeetro.bsky.social
A call-for-papers for Foundation Models for Robotics special collection. T-RO is now accepting submissions through November 30.
www.ieee-ras.org/publications...

#FoundationModelsforRobotics #TactileSensing #RobotEmbodiments
September 5, 2025 at 9:29 PM
ieeetro.bsky.social
A fly‑inspired two-stage control policy enabling palm‑sized drones to perform dynamic inverted landings on ceilings. Trained via reinforcement learning in simulation (augmented optical‐flow+SVM+neural net)
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/108...

#AerialSystems #BiologicallyInspiredRobots
Bioinspired inverted landing. An illustration comparing an example of inverted landing in a small quadcopter and a blue-bottle fly [10]. Both an at-scale and a scaled-up version of the landing sequence of the blue-bottle fly are shown.
August 30, 2025 at 12:48 PM
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Presenting a dynamic model‑based cooperative tracking control for both position and orientation of a tensegrity continuum robot’s end‑effector—achieving precise, cooperative movement via a dynamic model.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/doc...

#ContinuumRobots #RobotSensingSystems
Fabrication of the TCR. (a) Compliant tensegrity joint. (b) Assembly by the tensegrity joints. (c) Body structure of the TCR. (d) 3-D printing experimental prototype.
August 28, 2025 at 8:41 PM
ieeetro.bsky.social
T-RO researchers present a novel rhythmic motion control strategy for robotic facial laser treatments by learning rhythmic, geometric-constrained trajectories from expert demonstrations.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/108...

#CosmeticDermatologyRobots #ServiceRobots #SkinCare
Snapshots of adaptation of the demonstrated treatment skill to other new faces that are not involved in the demonstration.
August 20, 2025 at 8:44 PM
ieeetro.bsky.social
A transformer-based, coarse-to-fine #VisualLocalization pipeline that extracts stable, illumination-invariant descriptors for place recognition, achieves sub-meter global relocalization in under 0.5 s across 2 km and provides real-time tracking.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/108...
Tracking results of iLoc. This plot shows the localization results in our urban dataset. The yellow line represents the trajectory of the reference map, and the red line represents the tracking trajectory. iLoc will first localize itself in the reference map by proposed fast-seq matching to find the best match of the reference frame. In the tracking procedure, iLoc continuously matches the observed panorama with the local sliding window to find the best match.
August 15, 2025 at 3:58 PM
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AQUA‑SLAM, a tightly coupled acoustic‑visual‑inertial #SLAM system fusing DVL, stereo vision, and IMU within a graph‑based framework. With novel online calibration it achieves state‑of‑the‑art underwater localization, validated in North Sea trials.

ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/109...
Estimated trajectory () and dense 3-D reconstruction of an offshore structure using the proposed AQUA-SLAM algorithm. Images (a)–(d) show the challenging underwater conditions for a SLAM system using a camera.
August 15, 2025 at 3:10 PM
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Authors introduce AVOCADO. The two-stage planner estimates other agents’ cooperation levels using nonlinear opinion dynamics, then adapts a Velocity-Obstacle policy for robust, communication-free crowd navigation

ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/109...

#CollisionAvoidance #RobotSensingSystem #Robotics
Cooperative circle (top) and crossing (bottom) scenarios with robots and planners. Each robot is depicted with a different color. Collisions are marked with crosses surrounded by circles.
July 29, 2025 at 5:30 PM
ieeetro.bsky.social
Check out the latest on the T-RO Visual SLAM special collection. Keep checking back as many more papers will be added to this collection in the coming months.

ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/topics-i...

#VisualSLAM #RobotLearning #GaussianSplatting
Our feature detection and matching on a challenging sequence in UMA-VI dataset. The red lines represent detected line features and the colored lines across images indicate feature association. The image may suddenly go dark due to turning off the lights, which is very difficult for vSLAM systems. Paper "AirSLAM: An Efficient and Illumination-Robust Point-Line Visual SLAM System" at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10874215
July 24, 2025 at 8:00 PM
ieeetro.bsky.social
A huge welcome to our new T-RO editorial board members. We are grateful for your commitment to the journal and look forward to working with you. Thank you!

www.ieee-ras.org/publications...

#IEEEras #Robotics
July 22, 2025 at 7:57 PM
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Researchers introduce a hybrid real‑to‑sim‑to‑real learning approach that helps robots adapt quickly to new tasks with minimal trials. The result? Faster learning and stronger performance with fewer attempts.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/doc...

#RobotLearning #BayesMethod #SimToReal
Experiment setup: A robot manipulator is balancing a planar pendulum and learning to follow the reference trajectory with the pendulum. Left: Simulator. Right: Real hardware.
July 18, 2025 at 7:43 PM
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The first experimental validation of model-based robust position control for an underactuated dielectric elastomer #SoftRobot! This shows the controller stabilizing arbitrary configurations despite underactuation & input saturation.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/108...

#Robotics #ControlSystems
July 18, 2025 at 7:36 PM
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T-RO Honorable Mention paper entitled “Task and Motion Planning for Execution in the Real” introduces a framework integrating task and motion planning for real-world robotic execution under uncertainty, improving adaptability
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/105...

#RobotSensingSystems #Robotics
Task is to move three objects to the goal tray. The full states of the dotted objects are not known precisely. A task and motion plan will have gaps, which can only be filled in during execution, e.g., the blue object's pose can only be known after opening the drawer. The problem imposes constraints visualized in a block-world-like diagram at the lower part of the figure.
July 11, 2025 at 11:45 AM
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T-RO is proud to announce the upcoming special collection, Foundation Models for Robotics. Submission window opens September 1.

#RobotEmbodiments #FoundationModels #RoboticsFoundationModels #RoboticVLM #RoboticsLLM #IEEERAS
T-RO logo Foundation Models for Robotics Special Collection. Submission window opens September 1.
July 10, 2025 at 8:55 PM
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Honorable Mention paper, “Modeling & Design of Lattice-Reinforced Pneumatic Soft Robots” proposes a design methodology for #SoftRobots using lattice structures to enhance strength and control complex deformations.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/103...

#PneumaticSoftRobots #RobotDesign
Lateral-climbing soft robot is designed consisting of a two-inputs soft actuator and two silicone suction feet. (a) Theoretically predicted antisymmetric deformation of soft actuators consists of two bending segments with \$n\$ = 3:2 and 2:3. (b)–(h) Soft robot moves laterally on the vertical surface due to the periodical input pressures.
July 9, 2025 at 6:15 PM
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A T-RO King-Sun Fu Award Honorable Mention paper develops reactive modulation techniques on manifolds for safe navigation around complex, non-convex obstacles in real-time.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/104...

Authors: Christopher K. Fourie, Nadia Figueroa, and Julie Shah

#RobotSensingSystems
Proposed modulation approach applied to the end-effector of a robot manipulator as a real-time, reactive, motion planner. Our method is able to navigate around nonconvex obstacles with a control frequency of 1 kHz, while updating the obstacle states at 100 Hz.
July 7, 2025 at 4:30 PM