Zero-Shot Adaptation to Robot Structural Damage via Natural Language-Informed Kinodynamics Modeling

High-performance autonomous mobile robots endure significant mechanical stress during in-the-wild operations, e.g., driving at high speeds or over rugged terrain. Although these platforms are engineered to withstand such conditions, mechanical degradation is inevitable. Structural damage manifests as consistent and notable changes in kinodynamic behavior compared to a healthy vehicle. Given the heterogeneous nature of structural failures, quantifying various damages to inform kinodynamics is challenging. We posit that natural language can describe and thus capture this variety of damages. Therefore, we propose Zero-shot Language Informed Kinodynamics (ZLIK), which employs self-supervised learning to ground semantic information of damage descriptions in kinodynamic behaviors to learn a forward kinodynamics model in a data-driven manner. Using the high-fidelity soft-body physics simulator BeamNG.tech, we collect data from a variety of structurally compromised vehicles. Our learned model achieves zero-shot adaptation to different damages with up to 81% reduction in kinodynamics error and generalizes across the sim-to-real and full-to-1/10$^{\text{th}}$ scale gaps.

Verti-Arena: A Controllable and Standardized Indoor Testbed for Multi-Terrain Off-Road Autonomy

Off-road navigation is an important capability for mobile robots deployed in environments that are inaccessible or dangerous to humans, such as disaster response or planetary exploration. Progress is limited due to the lack of a controllable and standardized real-world testbed for systematic data collection and validation. To fill this gap, we introduce Verti-Arena, a reconfigurable indoor facility designed specifically for off-road autonomy. By providing a repeatable benchmark environment, Verti-Arena supports reproducible experiments across a variety of vertically challenging terrains and provides precise ground truth measurements through onboard sensors and a motion capture system. Verti-Arena also supports consistent data collection and comparative evaluation of algorithms in off-road autonomy research. We also develop a web-based interface that enables research groups worldwide to remotely conduct standardized off-road autonomy experiments on Verti-Arena.