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    "story_id": "mp-2026-09-11-014",
    "source_story_id": "tmp-story-cap-adaptive-humanoid-perception",
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    "position": 14,
    "story_type": "dispatch",
    "section": "robotics",
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    "headline": "The Humanoid Kept Walking as Its Depth Sensor Faded",
    "slug": "the-humanoid-kept-walking-as-its-depth-sensor-faded",
    "dek": "One locomotion policy denoised partial depth and blended body-state information instead of switching between perceptive and blind controllers.",
    "summary": "One locomotion policy denoised partial depth and blended body-state information instead of switching between perceptive and blind controllers.",
    "body_text": "CAP trains a perceptive encoder to reconstruct clean depth from corrupted input while a second encoder supplies proprioceptive body state. Depth-noise curriculum and feature dropout expose the same policy to a continuum from clean vision to perception loss. In simulation it matched or exceeded perceptive baselines with useful depth and degraded more smoothly than a binary-switching baseline as input worsened. Controlled Unitree G1 tests and indoor-outdoor deployments showed locomotion under occlusion, sensor corruption and outdoor depth artifacts. The abstract does not establish universal terrain safety or quantify all physical trial outcomes.",
    "why_it_matters": "One locomotion policy denoised partial depth and blended body-state information instead of switching between perceptive and blind controllers.",
    "limitations": [
      "The abstract does not establish universal terrain safety or quantify all physical trial outcomes."
    ],
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    "first_published_at": "2026-09-11T09:00:00.000-04:00",
    "modified_at": "2026-09-11T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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        "text": "One locomotion policy denoised partial depth and blended body-state information instead of switching between perceptive and blind controllers.",
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        "qualification": "The abstract does not establish universal terrain safety or quantify all physical trial outcomes."
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    "tags": [
      "humanoid robots",
      "locomotion",
      "sensor failure"
    ],
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    "corrections": []
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  "sources": [
    {
      "source_id": "source-2026-09-11-014",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2609.11553",
      "publisher": "arXiv",
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      "published_at": "2026-09-10T09:45:10.000-04:00",
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    "name": "The Machine Press",
    "url": "https://themachinepress.com",
    "description": "A daily newspaper for the age of artificial intelligence."
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  "cite_this_report": {
    "title": "The Humanoid Kept Walking as Its Depth Sensor Faded",
    "publisher": "The Machine Press",
    "published_at": "2026-09-11T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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