Synergizing Efficiency and Reliability for Continuous Mobile Manipulation

Humans seamlessly fuse anticipatory planning with immediate feedback to perform successive mobile manipulation tasks without stopping, achieving both high efficiency and reliability. Replicating this fluid and reliable behavior in robots remains fundamentally challenging, not only due to conflicts between long-horizon planning and real-time reactivity, but also because excessively pursuing efficiency undermines reliability in uncertain environments: it impairs stable perception and the potential for compensation, while also increasing the risk of unintended contact. In this work, we present a unified framework that synergizes efficiency and reliability for continuous mobile manipulation. It features a reliability-aware trajectory planner that embeds essential elements for reliable execution into spatiotemporal optimization, generating efficient and reliability-promising global trajectories. It is coupled with a phase-dependent switching controller that seamlessly transitions between global trajectory tracking for efficiency and task-error compensation for reliability. We also investigate a hierarchical initialization that facilitates online replanning despite the complexity of long-horizon planning problems. Real-world evaluations demonstrate that our approach enables efficient and reliable completion of successive tasks under uncertainty (e.g., dynamic disturbances, perception and control errors). Moreover, the framework generalizes to tasks with diverse end-effector constraints. Compared with state-of-the-art baselines, our method consistently achieves the highest efficiency while improving the task success rate by 26.67\%--81.67\%. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the contribution of each component. The source code will be released.

Project Imaging-X: A Survey of 1000+ Open-Access Medical Imaging Datasets for Foundation Model Development

Foundation models have demonstrated remarkable success across diverse domains and tasks, primarily due to the thrive of large-scale, diverse, and high-quality datasets. However, in the field of medical imaging, the curation and assembling of such medical datasets are highly challenging due to the reliance on clinical expertise and strict ethical and privacy constraints, resulting in a scarcity of large-scale unified medical datasets and hindering the development of powerful medical foundation models. In this work, we present the largest survey to date of medical image datasets, covering over 1,000 open-access datasets with a systematic catalog of their modalities, tasks, anatomies, annotations, limitations, and potential for integration. Our analysis exposes a landscape that is modest in scale, fragmented across narrowly scoped tasks, and unevenly distributed across organs and modalities, which in turn limits the utility of existing medical image datasets for developing versatile and robust medical foundation models. To turn fragmentation into scale, we propose a metadata-driven fusion paradigm (MDFP) that integrates public datasets with shared modalities or tasks, thereby transforming multiple small data silos into larger, more coherent resources. Building on MDFP, we release an interactive discovery portal that enables end-to-end, automated medical image dataset integration, and compile all surveyed datasets into a unified, structured table that clearly summarizes their key characteristics and provides reference links, offering the community an accessible and comprehensive repository. By charting the current terrain and offering a principled path to dataset consolidation, our survey provides a practical roadmap for scaling medical imaging corpora, supporting faster data discovery, more principled dataset creation, and more capable medical foundation models.

Structured Observation Language for Efficient and Generalizable Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an embodied agent to navigate complex environments by following natural language instructions, which typically demands tight fusion of visual and language modalities. Existing VLN methods often convert raw images into visual tokens or implicit features, requiring large-scale visual pre-training and suffering from poor generalization under environmental variations (e.g., lighting, texture). To address these issues, we propose SOL-Nav (Structured Observation Language for Navigation), a novel framework that translates egocentric visual observations into compact structured language descriptions for efficient and generalizable navigation. Specifically, we divide RGB-D images into a N*N grid, extract representative semantic, color, and depth information for each grid cell to form structured text, and concatenate this with the language instruction as pure language input to a pre-trained language model (PLM). Experimental results on standard VLN benchmarks (R2R, RxR) and real-world deployments demonstrate that SOL-Nav significantly reduces the model size and training data dependency, fully leverages the reasoning and representation capabilities of PLMs, and achieves strong generalization to unseen environments.

Annotation-Free Detection of Drivable Areas and Curbs Leveraging LiDAR Point Cloud Maps

Drivable areas and curbs are critical traffic elements for autonomous driving, forming essential components of the vehicle visual perception system and ensuring driving safety. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have significantly improved perception performance for drivable area and curb detection, but most DNN-based methods rely on large manually labeled datasets, which are costly, time-consuming, and expert-dependent, limiting their real-world application. Thus, we developed an automated training data generation module. Our previous work generated training labels using single-frame LiDAR and RGB data, suffering from occlusion and distant point cloud sparsity. In this paper, we propose a novel map-based automatic data labeler (MADL) module, combining LiDAR mapping/localization with curb detection to automatically generate training data for both tasks. MADL avoids occlusion and point cloud sparsity issues via LiDAR mapping, creating accurate large-scale datasets for DNN training. In addition, we construct a data review agent to filter the data generated by the MADL module, eliminating low-quality samples. Experiments on the KITTI, KITTI-CARLA and 3D-Curb datasets show that MADL achieves impressive performance compared to manual labeling, and outperforms traditional and state-of-the-art self-supervised methods in robustness and accuracy.

Design of an In-Pipe Robot with Contact-Angle-Guided Kinematic Decoupling for Crosstalk-Suppressed Locomotion

In-pipe inspection robots must traverse confined pipeline networks with elbows and three-dimensional fittings, requiring both reliable axial traction and rapid rolling reorientation for posture correction. In compact V-shaped platforms, these functions often rely on shared contacts or indirect actuation, which introduces strong kinematic coupling and makes performance sensitive to geometry and friction variations. This paper presents a V-shaped in-pipe robot with a joint-axis-and-wheel-separation layout that provides two physically independent actuation channels, with all-wheel-drive propulsion and motorized rolling reorientation while using only two motors. To make the decoupling mechanism explicit and designable, we formulate an actuation transmission matrix and identify the spherical-wheel contact angle as the key geometric variable governing the dominant roll-to-propulsion leakage and roll-channel efficiency. A geometric transmission analysis maps mounting parameters to the contact angle, leakage, and efficiency, yielding a structural guideline for suppressing crosstalk by driving the contact angle toward zero. A static stability model further provides a stability-domain map for selecting torsion-spring stiffness under friction uncertainty to ensure vertical-pipe stability with a margin. Experiments validate the decoupling effect, where during high-dynamic rolling in a vertical pipe, the propulsion torque remains nearly invariant. On a multi-material testbed including out-of-plane double elbows, the robot achieved a 100% success rate in more than 10 independent round-trip trials.

Language-Grounded Multi-Agent Planning for Personalized and Fair Participatory Urban Sensing

Participatory urban sensing leverages human mobility for large-scale urban data collection, yet existing methods typically rely on centralized optimization and assume homogeneous participants, resulting in rigid assignments that overlook personal preferences and heterogeneous urban contexts. We propose MAPUS, an LLM-based multi-agent framework for personalized and fair participatory urban sensing. In our framework, participants are modeled as autonomous agents with individual profiles and schedules, while a coordinator agent performs fairness-aware selection and refines sensing routes through language-based negotiation. Experiments on real-world datasets show that MAPUS achieves competitive sensing coverage while substantially improving participant satisfaction and fairness, promoting more human-centric and sustainable urban sensing systems.

Language-Assisted Image Clustering Guided by Discriminative Relational Signals and Adaptive Semantic Centers

Language-Assisted Image Clustering (LAIC) augments the input images with additional texts with the help of vision-language models (VLMs) to promote clustering performance. Despite recent progress, existing LAIC methods often overlook two issues: (i) textual features constructed for each image are highly similar, leading to weak inter-class discriminability; (ii) the clustering step is restricted to pre-built image-text alignments, limiting the potential for better utilization of the text modality. To address these issues, we propose a new LAIC framework with two complementary components. First, we exploit cross-modal relations to produce more discriminative self-supervision signals for clustering, as it compatible with most VLMs training mechanisms. Second, we learn category-wise continuous semantic centers via prompt learning to produce the final clustering assignments. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves an average improvement of 2.6% over state-of-the-art methods, and the learned semantic centers exhibit strong interpretability. Code is available in the supplementary material.

Traffic Sign Recognition in Autonomous Driving: Dataset, Benchmark, and Field Experiment

Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR) is a core perception capability for autonomous driving, where robustness to cross-region variation, long-tailed categories, and semantic ambiguity is essential for reliable real-world deployment. Despite steady progress in recognition accuracy, existing traffic sign datasets and benchmarks offer limited diagnostic insight into how different modeling paradigms behave under these practical challenges. We present TS-1M, a large-scale and globally diverse traffic sign dataset comprising over one million real-world images across 454 standardized categories, together with a diagnostic benchmark designed to analyze model capability boundaries. Beyond standard train-test evaluation, we provide a suite of challenge-oriented settings, including cross-region recognition, rare-class identification, low-clarity robustness, and semantic text understanding, enabling systematic and fine-grained assessment of modern TSR models. Using TS-1M, we conduct a unified benchmark across three representative learning paradigms: classical supervised models, self-supervised pretrained models, and multimodal vision-language models (VLMs). Our analysis reveals consistent paradigm-dependent behaviors, showing that semantic alignment is a key factor for cross-region generalization and rare-category recognition, while purely visual models remain sensitive to appearance shift and data imbalance. Finally, we validate the practical relevance of TS-1M through real-scene autonomous driving experiments, where traffic sign recognition is integrated with semantic reasoning and spatial localization to support map-level decision constraints. Overall, TS-1M establishes a reference-level diagnostic benchmark for TSR and provides principled insights into robust and semantic-aware traffic sign perception. Project page: https://guoyangzhao.github.io/projects/ts1m.

MoE-ACT: Scaling Multi-Task Bimanual Manipulation with Sparse Language-Conditioned Mixture-of-Experts Transformers

The ability of robots to handle multiple tasks under a unified policy is critical for deploying embodied intelligence in real-world household and industrial applications. However, out-of-distribution variation across tasks often causes severe task interference and negative transfer when training general robotic policies. To address this challenge, we propose a lightweight multi-task imitation learning framework for bimanual manipulation, termed Mixture-of-Experts-Enhanced Action Chunking Transformer (MoE-ACT), which integrates sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) modules into the Transformer encoder of ACT. The MoE layer decomposes a unified task policy into independently invoked expert components. Through adaptive activation, it naturally decouples multi-task action distributions in latent space. During decoding, Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) dynamically modulates action tokens to improve consistency between action generation and task instructions. In parallel, multi-scale cross-attention enables the policy to simultaneously focus on both low-level and high-level semantic features, providing rich visual information for robotic manipulation. We further incorporate textual information, transitioning the framework from a purely vision-based model to a vision-centric, language-conditioned action generation system. Experimental validation in both simulation and a real-world dual-arm setup shows that MoE-ACT substantially improves multi-task performance. Specifically, MoE-ACT outperforms vanilla ACT by an average of 33% in success rate. These results indicate that MoE-ACT provides stronger robustness and generalization in complex multi-task bimanual manipulation environments. Our open-source project page can be found at https://j3k7.github.io/MoE-ACT/.

C$^2$-Explorer: Contiguity-Driven Task Allocation with Connectivity-Aware Task Representation for Decentralized Multi-UAV Exploration

Efficient multi-UAV exploration under limited communication is severely bottlenecked by inadequate task representation and allocation. Previous task representations either impose heavy communication requirements for coordination or lack the flexibility to handle complex environments, often leading to inefficient traversal. Furthermore, short-horizon allocation strategies neglect spatiotemporal contiguity, causing non-contiguous assignments and frequent cross-region detours. To address this, we propose C$^2$-Explorer, a decentralized framework that constructs a connectivity graph to decompose disconnected unknown components into independent task units. We then introduce a contiguity-driven allocation formulation with a graph-based neighborhood penalty to discourage non-adjacent assignments, promoting more contiguous task sequences over time. Extensive simulation experiments show that C$^2$-Explorer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, reducing average exploration time by 43.1\% and path length by 33.3\%. Real-world flights further demonstrate the system's feasibility. The code will be released at https://github.com/Robotics-STAR-Lab/C2-Explorer