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Author

Maren Bennewitz

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Preprint Aug 2026

Semantic- and Density-Aware Planning for Accessibility-Preserving Multi-Object Placement

Long-term manipulation planning requires robots to reason not only about immediate task success but also about how current decisions affect future interactions with the environment. In this context, household service robots may need to organize groceries in partially occupied shelves while using limited storage space efficiently and preserving access for subsequent placements. In this paper, we consider an online multi-object shelf-placement setting in which future objects arrivals are unknown. Existing approaches do not jointly address semantic organization, dense space utilization, and manipulator accessibility during sequential shelf filling. To address this gap, we propose Semantic-Dense Placement Planning (SDPP), an accessibility-preserving approach that ranks candidate poses using a semantic-density score combining inter-object semantic similarity with spatial proximity. An Accessibility Map (AM) further filters candidates unlikely to be reachable before motion planning and penalizes placements that reduce the remaining accessible workspace. Simulation experiments show that SDPP significantly improves semantic placement quality over state-of-the-art baselines and achieves the highest average shelf density, while the AM substantially reduces the time required to identify feasible placement poses. A qualitative real-world experiment demonstrates the applicability of our pipeline in a domestic shelf-storage scenario.

Benno Wingender, Nils Dengler, Nicolas Busch et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

ACME: A Multi-Cultural, Multi-Embodiment Social-Navigation Dataset

Understanding how robots and humans move in shared spaces is essential for designing effective social robot navigation policies and predicting human behavior. However, existing datasets often lack the diversity needed to capture differences in culture, geography, and human-robot interaction-factors that strongly shape appropriate social behavior. To address this gap, we introduce ACME: A Cross-cultural, Multi-Embodiment dataset for social navigation. A large-scale data collection effort across 8 sites in 5 countries, using 7 robot embodiments, ACME is a large and diverse multi-modal dataset aimed at advancing social navigation research, providing 29.35 hours of onboard robot data and 43.5 hours of overhead pedestrian tracking data. Unlike prior datasets, it focuses on capturing goal-driven social navigation behavior in complex social scenarios with explicit robot-crowd interaction through robot speech. To facilitate learning navigation policies and predicting pedestrian trajectories, ACME provides 3D and 2D scene features, odometry, interaction information, and human-annotated pedestrian trajectory labels. We make ACME easy to use by providing both human-readable data for each sensor modality as well as raw binary data. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses show that our dataset captures more challenging scenarios and a broader distribution of pedestrian behavior than previous datasets.

Shashank Rao Marpally, Allan Wang, Atharva Ghotavadekar et al. · 0 citations