We introduce AIRHILT (Aviation Integrated Reasoning, Human-in-the-Loop Testbed), a modular and lightweight simulation environment designed to evaluate multimodal pilot and air traffic control (ATC) assistance systems for aviation conflict detection. Built on the open-source Godot engine, AIRHILT synchronizes pilot and ATC radio communications, visual scene understanding from camera streams, and ADS-B surveillance data within a unified, scalable platform. The environment supports pilot- and controller-in-the-loop interactions, providing a comprehensive scenario suite covering both terminal area and en route operational conflicts, including communication errors and procedural mistakes. AIRHILT offers standardized JSON-based interfaces that enable researchers to easily integrate, swap, and evaluate automatic speech recognition (ASR), visual detection, decision-making, and text-to-speech (TTS) models. We demonstrate AIRHILT through a reference pipeline incorporating fine-tuned Whisper ASR, YOLO-based visual detection, ADS-B-based conflict logic, and GPT-OSS-20B structured reasoning, and present preliminary results from representative runway-overlap scenarios, where the assistant achieves an average time-to-first-warning of approximately 7.7 s, with average ASR and vision latencies of approximately 5.9 s and 0.4 s, respectively. The AIRHILT environment and scenario suite are openly available, supporting reproducible research on multimodal situational awareness and conflict detection in aviation; code and scenarios are available at https://github.com/ogarib3/airhilt.

This paper presents a BIM-discrepancy-driven active sensing framework for cooperative navigation between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in dynamic construction environments. Traditional navigation approaches rely on static Building Information Modeling (BIM) priors or limited onboard perception. In contrast, our framework continuously fuses real-time LiDAR data from aerial and ground robots with BIM priors to maintain an evolving 2D occupancy map. We quantify navigation safety through a unified corridor-risk metric integrating occupancy uncertainty, BIM-map discrepancy, and clearance. When risk exceeds safety thresholds, the UAV autonomously re-scans affected regions to reduce uncertainty and enable safe replanning. Compared to frontier-based exploration, our approach achieves similar uncertainty reduction in half the mission time. These results demonstrate that integrating BIM priors with risk-adaptive aerial sensing enables scalable, uncertainty-aware autonomy for construction robotics. Introduction Construction sites are among the most dynamic, unstructured, and safety-critical environments for autonomous robots. Unlike factory floors or structured indoor spaces, these environments are marked by continual change. New buildings are erected, materials are relocated, and the movement of heavy machinery and workers can be unpredictable. Such conditions make autonomous navigation particularly challenging. Construction 4.0 [1], emphasizing automation and digitalization, is moving robotics from trial phases to regular use on construction sites.

In recent years, consumer-grade UAVs have been widely adopted by first responders. In general, they are operated manually, which requires trained pilots, especially in unknown GNSS-denied environments and in the vicinity of structures. Autonomous flight can facilitate the application of UAVs and reduce operator strain. However, autonomous systems usually require special programming interfaces, custom sensor setups, and strong onboard computers, which limits a broader deployment. We present a system for autonomous flight using lightweight consumer-grade DJI drones. They are controlled by an Android app for state estimation and obstacle avoidance directly running on the UAV's remote control. Our ground control station enables a single operator to configure and supervise multiple heterogeneous UAVs at once. Furthermore, it combines the observations of all UAVs into a joint 3D environment model for improved situational awareness.

To reliably pick and place unknown objects under real-world sensing noise remains a challenging task, as existing methods rely on strong object priors (e.g., CAD models), or planar-support assumptions, limiting generalization and unified reasoning between grasping and placing. In this work, we introduce a generalized placeability metric that evaluates placement poses directly from noisy point clouds, without any shape priors. The metric jointly scores stability, graspability, and clearance. From raw geometry, we extract the support surfaces of the object to generate diverse candidates for multi-orientation placement and sample contacts that satisfy collision and stability constraints. By conditioning grasp scores on each candidate placement, our proposed method enables model-free unified pick-and-place reasoning and selects grasp-place pairs that lead to stable, collision-free placements. On unseen real objects and non-planar object supports, our metric delivers CAD-comparable accuracy in predicting stability loss and generally produces more physically plausible placements than learning-based predictors.

Robotic performance emerges from the coupling of body and controller, yet it remains unclear when morphology-control co-design is necessary. We present a unified framework that embeds morphology and control parameters within a single neural network, enabling end-to-end joint optimization. Through case studies in static-obstacle-constrained reaching, we evaluate trajectory error, success rate, and collision probability. The results show that co-design provides clear benefits when morphology is poorly matched to the task, such as near obstacles or workspace boundaries, where structural adaptation simplifies control. Conversely, when the baseline morphology already affords sufficient capability, control-only optimization often matches or exceeds co-design. By clarifying when control is enough and when it is not, this work advances the understanding of embodied intelligence and offers practical guidance for embodiment-aware robot design.

Human-robot collaboration requires precise prediction of human motion over extended horizons to enable proactive collision avoidance. Unlike existing planners that rely solely on kinodynamic models, we present a prediction-driven safe planning framework that leverages granular, joint-by-joint human motion forecasting validated in a physics-based digital twin. A capsule-based artificial potential field (APF) converts these granular predictions into collision risk metrics, triggering an Adaptive RRT* (A-RRT*) planner when thresholds are exceeded. The depth camera is used to extract 3D skeletal poses and a convolutional neural network-bidirectional long short-term memory (CNN-BiLSTM) model to predict individual joint trajectories ahead of time. A digital twin model integrates real-time human posture prediction placed in front of a simulated robot to evaluate motions and physical contacts. The proposed method enables validation of planned trajectories ahead of time and bridging potential latency gaps in updating planned trajectories in real-time. In 50 trials, our method achieved 100% proactive avoidance with > 250 mm clearance and sub-2 s replanning, demonstrating superior precision and reliability compared to existing kinematic-only planners through the integration of predictive human modeling with digital twin validation.

Conventional passivity-based torque controllers for manipulators are typically unconstrained, which can lead to safety violations under external perturbations. In this paper, we employ viability theory to pre-compute safe sets in the state-space of joint positions and velocities. These viable sets, constructed via data-driven and analytical methods for self-collision avoidance, external object collision avoidance and joint-position and joint-velocity limits, provide constraints on joint accelerations and thus joint torques via the robot dynamics. A quadratic programming-based control framework enforces these constraints on a passive controller tracking a dynamical system, ensuring the robot states remain within the safe set in an infinite time horizon. We validate the proposed approach through simulations and hardware experiments on a 7-DoF Franka Emika manipulator. In comparison to a baseline constrained passive controller, our method operates at higher control-loop rates and yields smoother trajectories.

We present the AgriCruiser, an open-source over-the-row agricultural robot developed for low-cost deployment and rapid adaptation across diverse crops and row layouts. The chassis provides an adjustable track width of 1.42 m to 1.57 m, along with a ground clearance of 0.94 m. The AgriCruiser achieves compact pivot turns with radii of 0.71 m to 0.79 m, enabling efficient headland maneuvers. The platform is designed for the integration of the other subsystems, and in this study, a precision spraying system was implemented to assess its effectiveness in weed management. In twelve flax plots, a single robotic spray pass reduced total weed populations (pigweed and Venice mallow) by 24- to 42-fold compared to manual weeding in four flax plots, while also causing less crop damage. Mobility experiments conducted on concrete, asphalt, gravel, grass, and both wet and dry soil confirmed reliable traversal consistent with torque sizing. The complete chassis can be constructed from commodity T-slot extrusion with minimal machining, resulting in a bill of materials costing approximately $5,000 - $6,000, which enables replication and customization. The mentioned results demonstrate that low-cost, reconfigurable over-the-row robots can achieve effective weed management with reduced crop damage and labor requirements, while providing a versatile foundation for phenotyping, sensing, and other agriculture applications. Design files and implementation details are released to accelerate research and adoption of modular agricultural robotics.

Obstacle avoidance is central to safe navigation, especially for robots with arbitrary and nonconvex geometries operating in cluttered environments. Existing Control Barrier Function (CBF) approaches often rely on analytic clearance computations, which are infeasible for complex geometries, or on polytopic approximations, which become intractable when robot configurations are unknown. To address these limitations, this paper trains a residual neural network on a large dataset of robot-obstacle configurations to enable fast and tractable clearance prediction, even at unseen configurations. The predicted clearance defines the radius of a Local Safety Ball (LSB), which ensures continuous-time collision-free navigation. The LSB boundary is encoded as a Discrete-Time High-Order CBF (DHOCBF), whose constraints are incorporated into a nonlinear optimization framework. To improve feasibility, a novel relaxation technique is applied. The resulting framework ensure that the robot's rigid-body motion between consecutive time steps remains collision-free, effectively bridging discrete-time control and continuous-time safety. We show that the proposed method handles arbitrary, including nonconvex, robot geometries and generates collision-free, dynamically feasible trajectories in cluttered environments. Experiments demonstrate millisecond-level solve times and high prediction accuracy, highlighting both safety and efficiency beyond existing CBF-based methods.

Birds can use a snack during the fall migration season and Amazon has a ton of great feeders on clearance. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. If you're in the US right now, you're probably starting to get into the fall mood. So are the birds, which means they would really appreciate a snack from a well-stocked bird feeder . While there are some great smart bird feeders out there with built-in cameras, you could also get a ton of enjoyment out of a basic model.