Yuanjie Lu

Yuanjie Lu, Beichen Wang, Zhengqi Wu et al.

Autonomous navigation in highly constrained environments remains challenging for mobile robots. Classical navigation approaches offer safety assurances but require environment-specific parameter tuning; end-to-end learning bypasses parameter tuning but struggles with precise control in constrained spaces. To this end, recent robot learning approaches automate parameter tuning while retaining classical systems' safety, yet still face challenges in generalizing to unseen environments. Recently, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promise by leveraging foundation models' scene understanding capabilities, but still struggle with precise control and inference latency in navigation tasks. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Planner Parameter Learning from Vision-Language-Action Model (\textsc{applv}). Unlike traditional VLA models that directly output actions, \textsc{applv} leverages pre-trained vision-language models with a regression head to predict planner parameters that configure classical planners. We develop two training strategies: supervised learning fine-tuning from collected navigation trajectories and reinforcement learning fine-tuning to further optimize navigation performance. We evaluate \textsc{applv} across multiple motion planners on the simulated Benchmark Autonomous Robot Navigation (BARN) dataset and in physical robot experiments. Results demonstrate that \textsc{applv} outperforms existing methods in both navigation performance and generalization to unseen environments.

Beichen Wang, Yuanjie Lu, Linji Wang et al.

Recent advances in humanoid locomotion have enabled dynamic behaviors such as dancing, martial arts, and parkour, yet these capabilities are predominantly demonstrated in open, flat, and obstacle-free settings. In contrast, real-world environments such as homes, offices, and public spaces, are densely cluttered, three-dimensional, and geometrically constrained, requiring scene-aware whole-body coordination, precise balance control, and reasoning over spatial constraints imposed by furniture and household objects. However, humanoid locomotion in cluttered 3D environments remains underexplored, and no public dataset systematically couples full-body human locomotion with the scene geometry that shapes it. To address this gap, we present Moving Through Clutter (MTC), an opensource Virtual Reality (VR) based data collection and evaluation framework for scene-aware humanoid locomotion in cluttered environments. Our system procedurally generates scenes with controllable clutter levels and captures embodiment-consistent, whole-body human motion through immersive VR navigation, which is then automatically retargeted to a humanoid robot model. We further introduce benchmarks that quantify environment clutter level and locomotion performance, including stability and collision safety. Using this framework, we compile a dataset of 348 trajectories across 145 diverse 3D cluttered scenes. The dataset provides a foundation for studying geometry-induced adaptation in humanoid locomotion and developing scene-aware planning and control methods.

Zhenqi Wu, Yuanjie Lu, Xuesu Xiao et al.

Oyster reefs are critical ecosystem species that sustain biodiversity, filter water, and protect coastlines, yet they continue to decline globally. Restoring these ecosystems requires regular underwater monitoring to assess reef health, a task that remains costly, hazardous, and limited when performed by human divers. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) offer a promising alternative, but existing AUVs rely on geometry-based navigation that cannot interpret scene semantics. Recent vision-language models (VLMs) enable semantic reasoning for intelligent exploration, but existing VLM-driven systems adopt an end-to-end paradigm, introducing three key limitations. First, these systems require the VLM to generate every navigation decision, forcing frequent waits for inference. Second, VLMs cannot model robot dynamics, causing collisions in cluttered environments. Third, limited self-correction allows small deviations to accumulate into large path errors. To address these limitations, we propose CORAL, a framework that decouples high-level semantic reasoning from low-level reactive control. The VLM provides high-level exploration guidance by selecting waypoints, while a dynamics-based planner handles low-level collision-free execution. A geometric verification module validates waypoints and triggers replanning when needed. Compared with the previous state-of-the-art, CORAL improves coverage by 14.28% percentage points, or 17.85% relatively, reduces collisions by 100%, and requires 57% fewer VLM calls.

Linji Wang, Tong Xu, Yuanjie Lu et al.

Robotics Reinforcement Learning (RL) often relies on carefully engineered auxiliary rewards to supplement sparse primary learning objectives to compensate for the lack of large-scale, real-world, trial-and-error data. While these auxiliary rewards accelerate learning, they require significant engineering effort, may introduce human biases, and cannot adapt to the robot's evolving capabilities during training. In this paper, we introduce Reward Training Wheels (RTW), a teacher-student framework that automates auxiliary reward adaptation for robotics RL. To be specific, the RTW teacher dynamically adjusts auxiliary reward weights based on the student's evolving capabilities to determine which auxiliary reward aspects require more or less emphasis to improve the primary objective. We demonstrate RTW on two challenging robot tasks: navigation in highly constrained spaces and off-road vehicle mobility on vertically challenging terrain. In simulation, RTW outperforms expert-designed rewards by 2.35% in navigation success rate and improves off-road mobility performance by 122.62%, while achieving 35% and 3X faster training efficiency, respectively. Physical robot experiments further validate RTW's effectiveness, achieving a perfect success rate (5/5 trials vs. 2/5 for expert-designed rewards) and improving vehicle stability with up to 47.4% reduction in orientation angles.