arXiv papersarXiv 论文 · 2026-11-05

Vision-language-action models are typically built on a simple premise: perception is first compressed by visual encoders, and action reasoning begins only afterwards. Yet manipulation often hinges on precisely the visual signals most vulnerable to this abstraction, e.g., local geometry, boundaries, depth, and subtle state changes. This raises a fundamental question: should action policies inherit a fixed visual endpoint, or directly access evolving visual computation? We introduce NEO-VLA, a structurally encoder-free vision-language-action framework. Images are tokenized by lightweight patch …

Humanoid robots have the potential to automate a wide range of physical tasks. Progress toward generalist humanoid autonomy, however, remains constrained by a data bottleneck: mapping pixels and free-form language to low-level joint commands requires paired supervision, and no corpus of such data exists at sufficiently large scale. Some approaches rely on human teleoperation and wearable capture devices, which require at least an hour of human time to produce an hour of data. We present HALO, a humanoid autonomy system powered by a pipeline that synthesizes vision-language-motion data across …

Egocentric human video offers a scalable source of manipulation priors for robot learning, yet translating raw data scale into generalizable robot policies demands rigorous data curation and training recipes. We introduce Open-HumanScale, the first fully open recipe for scaling egocentric pretraining to 50,000 hours, anchored by Open-HumanScale-50K---a curated egocentric video corpus densely annotated with hand motion and natural language. Leveraging this corpus, we systematically investigate pure human pretraining via closed-loop simulation evaluations and uncover an empirical log-linear …

Coding agents powered by models such as GPT-6-Astra connect spatial reasoning with executable robot behavior, raising the question of how such agents can produce lasting improvements in robot capabilities from physical interaction. In this work, we study embodied recursive self-improvement (RSI) through real-world exploration, code refinement, and deployment using PyRUA-REAL, a framework in which coding agents retain interaction experience as persistent memory and reusable executable skills that inform subsequent exploration and improvement. Our empirical study places physical manipulation at …

We present a shared framework that adapts Cosmos world foundation models for real-time interactive world simulation in Physical AI. By streaming visual observations in response to actions and scene controls, the framework enables users and embodied agents to interact with evolving virtual environments. It supports both predicting the visual consequences of actions and generating observations from physical state maintained by an external simulator. We demonstrate this approach across camera navigation and robot manipulation, controllable video transfer, and multi-view autonomous vehicle (AV) …

Closed-loop driving benchmarks in CARLA rank agents by a driving score that multiplies route completion by an infraction penalty. This score does not distinguish an agent that stops in front of an obstacle from one that pushes past it. In a corridor closed by two parked cars, for example, one agent that drives through with contact averages 52.2 on the blocked widths, while the agents that stop average between 37.8 and 40.6. We propose failure-boundary profiles, an evaluation in which each scenario family varies one measured factor, such as corridor width or the time gap in oncoming traffic, …

Robotic manipulation often requires remembering information that is no longer visible, such as an object's location before occlusion or the order of a demonstrated action sequence. A large vision-language planner can read this history, but calling it before every action chunk is slow and costly. We present a three-tier system for the RoboMME benchmark. GPT-6 Astra (System 2) selects a grounded subtask from stored visual history, a $\pi_{0.5}$ vision-language-action policy (System 1) executes it, and a fine-tuned Qwen3-VL-4B monitor (System 1.5) checks after each action chunk whether the …

We study physics-based retargeting of human demonstrations for robot learning: finding robot controls that reproduce reference motions under contact dynamics. We propose GRASP (Gradient Recovery from Archived Samples for Proposals), which combines sampling-based exploration with gradient-guided refinement without requiring a differentiable simulator. GRASP-TO extends tempered sequential Monte Carlo by fitting local quadratic cost models to archived rollouts and using their gradients to guide Markov chain Monte Carlo rejuvenation. Metropolis-Hastings correction preserves the target …

Despite growing interest in foundation models for robotic manipulation, systematic evaluation of their capabilities remains elusive. Existing benchmarks are either narrow and saturated, offering little signal on SOTA methods, broadly scoped, providing diversity at the cost of controlled experimentation, or require training on large, messy open-source datasets. We introduce MESA, an evaluation framework designed for precise, reproducible measurement of language-conditioned policy generalization. MESA provides five evaluation suites that isolate in-distribution performance and four distinct …

We present cuRoboV2-Fast, a GPU-accelerated planner that reduces both planning latency and execution time for collision-free, payload-aware, torque-limited motions. B-spline trajectory optimization reduces the required iterations, while accelerated robot computations and differentiable inverse dynamics reduce refinement cost and accommodate changing payloads. TimeOpt optimizes traversal speed along the fixed path under sampled velocity, acceleration, jerk, and torque constraints, exploiting local spline support to solve banded Newton systems efficiently on the GPU. With a 3,kg payload, …

Self-Driving Chemical Laboratories (SDCLs) are moving chemical experimentation toward embodied automation, where machines must perceive laboratory scenes, reason about experimental states, and act under physical, procedural, and safety constraints. Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly considered as embodied brains for such systems, existing laboratory benchmarks mainly focus on safety, anomaly detection, or general scientific understanding, leaving their execution-oriented embodied capabilities underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce BEAKER, a Benchmark for …

The introduction of generalist robot policies has enabled a single, large model to learn to perform a variety of tasks from a vast pre-training corpus. While these models often exhibit powerful zero-shot generalization capabilities, they typically require an adaptation phase to achieve sufficient performance in deployment. Iterated self-improvement via reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated promise in enabling this adaptation, yet such approaches have been largely explored in single-task settings - where the goal is to simply improve on a narrow deployment task - which lies in stark …

For robots to operate reliably in commercial and industrial applications, they must persistently perform specific tasks with known variations in object shape and pose. We call this Variational Automation (VA) to differentiate these settings from fixed automation. Inspired by recent papers on Agentic Robotics, where pretrained LLM and VLM coding agents combine interpretable robot programming with the open-world adaptability of model free policies, we propose a general set of agentic robotics benchmark design criteria that includes accessibility, repeatability, diversity, relevance to agentic …

Code-as-policy agents often use execution feedback to retry failed programs. Additional sampling and task guidance can also improve success, leaving the contribution of failure-specific feedback unclear. We study this question in simulated robot manipulation. A fixed lookup selects feedback templates using failure labels and the API variant. A frozen code model generates a fresh program after each scene reset. On the same 252 initial failures, Qwen2.5-Coder-7B recovers 85.3% within five retries, compared with 68.3% for resampling with the same retry cap. The advantage persists under fixed …

Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) Reachability identifies the unsafe states of a dynamical system from which it can be forced into failure under worst-case disturbance. However, classical grid-based solvers scale exponentially with state dimension. DeepReach improves scalability by replacing the grid with a neural value function trained on the HJ-Isaacs (HJI) variational inequality (VI), but penalizes both sides of the residual equally. This allows the learned value to lie above the true one and unsafe states to be misclassified as safe. We propose Conservative DeepReach (ConDR) which aims to learn a …

Dexterous robotic hands are increasingly coupled to large-scale human data and foundation models, yet progress in hardware, representation learning and evaluation is often assessed separately. This survey reviews work from January 2024 to early November 2026, with earlier studies included to establish technical lineages. We organize the literature into five interdependent layers: hardware; data collection and curation; cross-embodiment transfer; learning and foundation models; and evaluation and applications. Human hand-object understanding and tactile sensing provide two cross-cutting …

Vision-language-action (VLA) models map camera observations and language instructions to robot actions. However, their large backbones and repeated action generation can make inference take longer than the robot's real-time requirements for its next action. To reduce the load of VLA computations, researchers have proposed multiple optimization approaches, including quantization and pruning. These optimizations can be combined with other general optimizations such as better kernel compilation or using CUDA graphs instead of the eager mode. However, most of these optimization results are …

Heterogeneous air-ground teams can use aerial sensing to address the limited range and viewpoint of ground-vehicle sensors, but deciding when the UGV needs assistance and what information the UAV should collect remains a challenge. This paper presents a planner-conditioned air-ground assistance method that evaluates how uncertain map information affects the UGV's current MPPI rollouts. When navigation remains degraded, we score the same rollouts under resolved map hypotheses, select the map layer with the largest useful improvement, request the corresponding aerial measurement, fuse the …

Teleoperating a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) in complex underwater environments presents unique challenges. Dynamic, three dimensional obstacles and unseen water currents pose real risks to expensive robotic hardware in environments in which recovery can be next to impossible. This paper explores the cognitive effects of haptic feedback to improve vehicle safety in such environments. An in-water study is analysed with a ROV exposed to controlled cross-currents, with environmental information presented via a soft and vibrating haptic touchpad. Results demonstrate that while encountering an …

Vision-based tactile sensors capture multiple aspects of physical interaction within a single image stream, including contact appearance, geometry, indentation depth, and tangential deformation. However, existing visuo-tactile policies often directly process tactile observations as images, making it difficult to determine which physical cues contribute to policy learning. This paper presents a controlled real-robot study that compares physically interpretable tactile signals using the LeRobot platform, enhanced with our visuo-tactile perception system. From the same tactile stream, we derive …

Generalist robot policies are trained on static offline datasets, yet physical manipulation unfolds sequentially across stages. Because a weakness in a downstream stage remains unobservable until the policy passes earlier ones, each resolved bottleneck exposes the next hidden failure mode. This staged structure calls for Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI), in which a policy iteratively executes, diagnoses failures, and updates itself. Moreover, because task completion behaves like a product of stage-level pass rates, recursive gains can multiply across generations. In physical environments, …

A robot action can satisfy shape and range constraints yet carry the wrong semantics: axes may be permuted, signs inverted, rotations rescaled, or gripper polarity reversed. We study learned state-action-effect relations as offline contracts for detecting these mismatches and ranking their likely fields. Clean held-out transitions calibrate alarms; a fixed inverse vocabulary supports closed-set localization. On ten LIBERO Spatial tasks comprising 432 source episodes, a capacity-controlled comparison at 2.5% empirical clean false-positive rate gives 46.1% recall for a ridge forward residual, …

Wiping, sanding, and inspection robots press a sliding tool on a surface with controlled force. Controlling that force needs the surface normal, which is unknown on real-world, unmapped surfaces. Surface-normal estimators can help estimate the surface normal, but they either need a friction model or assume that the instantaneous tool velocity lies along the surface; however, walking violates this assumption. We propose SCRUB, a contact-based surface-frame estimator, which lets an armless quadruped slide a body-mounted tool along near-vertical surfaces in the absence of known, axis-aligned, or …

Controlling the shape profile of soft trunk robots extends their reach into complex regions of the workspace and enhances their use in practical applications. Recent advances in soft robot design have enabled soft trunk robots to achieve greater flexibility in conforming to complex shapes. Specifically, trunk robots whose geometries are designed as helicoids have been shown to enable extreme shape-changing capabilities. Their compliance makes them highly nonlinear, which in turn makes shape control difficult. On similar tendon-driven trunk robots, model-based controllers based on the theory …

Ground robots operating in temperate forests suffer from systematic LiDAR occlusions caused by tree trunks, creating persistent blind regions that degrade traversability estimation. In this paper, we propose FOSCo-Net, a self-supervised voxel completion framework that learns to reconstruct occluded geometry from a single scan using temporally accumulated observations as automatic supervision, and we evaluate cylindrical and Cartesian ego-centric grids with multiple decoder designs. FOSCo-Net consistently improves reconstruction quality and traversal safety, with a gated skip decoder achieving …

Humanoid soccer requires a robot to seamlessly combine agile locomotion, ball manipulation, and impact-rich contact dynamics across a continuous, dynamic behavioral spectrum. Yet existing approaches either cover only a limited set of skills, or forego motion priors entirely and produce unnatural behaviors, leaving the combination of a unified skill set and human-like motion quality unaddressed. We present soccerbot, a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that resolves both limitations through a structured latent motion prior distilled from large-scale human soccer motion capture …

Coordinated whole-body control of humanoid robots remains challenging due to high-dimensional coupled dynamics and substantial physical heterogeneity across joint degrees of freedom (JDoFs). Existing multi-agent reinforcement learning methods either employ coarse agent partitions or directly apply generic heterogeneous-agent algorithms, while hierarchical controllers commonly optimize high-level planning and low-level execution independently, leading to uncoordinated motion. In this paper, we propose H^2MARL, a hierarchical heterogeneous multi-agent reinforcement learning framework with two …

In the real world, mobile manipulation robots must perform complex object interactions and make multi-step decisions, often relying on task-relevant information that is no longer observable. However, existing benchmarks provide limited evaluation of such memory-dependent decision-making in mobile manipulation. To address this gap, we introduce RoboCasa-Mem, a new benchmark comprising nine mobile manipulation tasks that require agents to use interaction history at key decision points. Specifically, the tasks are grouped into two categories of memory: One is environment memory, which captures …

Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) enable robots to perform manipulation tasks by leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to process visual observations and language instructions. However, the action prediction objective itself lacks fine-grained task-specific perceptual supervision, making it prone to relying on task-irrelevant visual shortcuts, leading attention away from target objects and key interaction areas, thereby limiting its operational performance and generalization ability. To address this, we propose Automatic Perception-Guided Attention Alignment for Robot Manipulation …

Online reinforcement learning offers an effective approach to precise laboratory manipulation, yet costly real-world demonstrations and limited access to dense process rewards hinder its practical application. We present TwinBridge, a digital twin-driven framework that supplies policy initialization and dense visual rewards for real-world online learning. We construct digital twins by combining 3D Gaussian splatting with physics simulation. Here, simulator states provide task events and geometric progress under physical prerequisites and ordering constraints, yielding rewards for policy …

Active embodied question answering requires agents to acquire evidence through viewpoint changes and physical interaction. The central challenge is to avoid undirected interaction: taking plausible actions without specifying what evidence they should reveal for answering the question. Action plans and accumulated histories alone can leave the informational purpose of an interaction implicit. We introduce EviSeek, a training-free framework that makes question-derived evidence demands explicit acquisition objectives, linking observation-conditioned actions and selectively retained evidence to …

Loop closure detection conventionally cascades separate models for global retrieval, geometric verification, and relative pose estimation, leading to redundant computation and disconnected visual representations. We propose UniLoop, a unified framework that reuses the hierarchical representations of the pretrained geometric foundation model throughout this pipeline. A shared image encoder produces features for compact global descriptors; the same features are passed to the cross-view decoder for pairwise verification; and the original geometric predictions provide relative camera constraints …

Vortex grippers are commonly integrated into automated systems for handling objects with complex geometries in packaging, sorting, and assembling. However, their interaction with compliant objects remains difficult to predict, particularly with respect to the vortex-induced torque transmitted during grasping. This study investigates vortex-induced torque during the grasping of compliant objects and quantifies the coupled effects of supply pressure, tangential nozzle diameter, surface geometry, and curvature. The results show that increasing the tangential nozzle diameter primarily enhances …

Feed-forward geometric foundation models enable dense monocular reconstruction without requiring camera calibration, but independently reconstructed submaps can accumulate scale drift, and even a valid revisit can yield an inconsistent cross-submap measurement. We extend VGGT-SLAM 2.0 with fixed-root scale anchoring and short-sequence-assisted direct loop connections. SALAD selects an image pair between the initial submap and each eligible new submap; joint VGGT inference then uses learned implicit semantic-geometric cues to supply a scale-only anchor while preserving the original overlap …

This paper addresses emergency-braking decisions for a redundant safety channel in automated vehicles. The channel is responsible for identifying hazards from sensor data and determining whether braking is necessary, given the constrained computational resources of embedded hardware. We present an emergency-braking approach that uses a predicted motion corridor to filter \ac{lidar} measurements and then decide whether the ego vehicle must brake. \ac{pmcm} constructs a curvature-aware boundary from the planned path and vehicle geometry so that the monitored region contains the full swept body …

Inspired by the coordination of global motion and local shape adaptation in snakes, elephant trunks, and octopus arms, we propose a unified planning and control framework for mobile continuum robots in cluttered and confined environments. Existing approaches often address high-level path planning and local motion control separately, limiting coordinated base-arm motion, kinematic consistency, and collision avoidance. Our framework integrates long-horizon trajectory planning with real-time geometric refinement under kinematic and environmental constraints. The global layer combines A* search …

With the rapid development of autonomous driving systems (ADSes), real-world roads are evolving into mixed-traffic environments where autonomous vehicles (AVs) and other traffic participants (e.g., human-driven vehicles (HDVs), cyclists, and pedestrians) coexist and interact with each other. However, current ADSes still incur various safety violations in mixed traffic scenarios, raising a strong demand for runtime safety assurance frameworks that can continuously monitor hazards and prevent potential violations. Existing ego-centric assurance approaches are insufficient for mixed traffic, …

Ensuring safety in advanced robot control methods such as Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Reinforcement Learning remains an open challenge. A common approach relies on control-invariant sets, yet their exact computation for nonlinear systems is generally intractable, and numerical approximations compromise theoretical guarantees. In this work, we show that safety does not need to rely exclusively on control invariance. We introduce novel classes of safe sets, each broader than classical control-invariant sets, and analyze corresponding MPC schemes that guarantee recursive feasibility by …

This extended abstract discusses a specific and, in our experience, practically relevant role for large language models (LLMs) in underwater robotics. Our main premise is that, in underwater fielding missions, the immediate difficulty is often not the synthesis of new low-level control laws, but the operation of complex robotic systems under limited communications, partial observability, and expensive field time. In particular, a significant fraction of the effort during sea trials is devoted to fault diagnosis, telemetry interpretation, mission adjustment, and coordination across …

Projector-based augmented reality enables natural interaction between users and devices by overlaying digital information onto the physical world through projected imagery. A key technical requirement of such systems is accurate positional alignment between the projector and the devices. Pixel-level Visible Light Communication (PVLC) achieves this alignment without external sensing infrastructure by embedding invisible spatial codes into each projected pixel through high-speed brightness modulation that preserves image quality. However, the information that PVLC transmits is inherently …

Embodied video world models predict scene changes caused by robot actions, yet generated object responses may remain inconsistent with task intent and contact dynamics. Critical responses in embodied scenes often concentrate in local regions and specific time intervals. Inspired by chain-of-thought reasoning, we introduce ReactWorld, an embodied video generation model guided by structured interaction anticipation. In the generation backbone's feature space, an interaction response field predictor anticipates how the interaction will unfold, explicitly describing participant roles, future …

Manipulating visually identical objects with different physical properties requires adapting actions based on information acquired through interaction. We address the problem of learning from demonstrations how to adapt manipulation actions, such as regrasping and changing contact locations, based on physical-property information acquired during interaction. To this end, we propose a learning-from-demonstration method that learns latent representations of physical properties needed to predict object responses and conditions a policy on online estimates of these representations. A dynamics …

Swarm robots have attracted growing interest as a physical interface for human--computer interaction, since a swarm can reshape its formation to fit the objects and surroundings it works with. For a human operator, however, adapting the swarm's behavior remains difficult. Most existing methods require the user to specify where the swarm should go, and they offer no intuitive way to change the collective's behavior as each task demands. We present Fluidic Body, a system that lets a person operate a swarm of fluid-imitating robots as an extension of the hand. The system places a virtual fluid …

Boundary-layer Sliding Mode Control (SMC) has been applied to vision-based stabilization, but identifying its activation condition against simpler causal baselines (LPF, PID) has been elusive. The operational condition is plant binding: the disturbance velocity approaches or exceeds the actuator slew limit, so the bounded per-step actuation budget binds. We validate this in two independent vision domains: handheld translation stabilization (12 1080p clips; LPF, PID, SMC, L1) and angular re-framing against a virtual slew-rate-limited pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) plant. Outside binding, leave-one-out …

Manipulating diverse objects with multi-fingered dexterous hands is challenging due to the high dimensionality and complex dynamics. Human-Object Interaction (HOI) datasets provide rich knowledge about task information and embodied interactions. Instead of solely imitating the human demonstrations, our method learns to holistically predict future hand-object states by leveraging these datasets. The predicted future states of the object can serve as a general-purpose reward term for reinforcement learning, reducing reliance on task-specific reward engineering and enhancing generalization …

Pedestrians increasingly encounter robots in urban public spaces without interacting with them, but how robots change the perceived safety of a street remains unclear. We examine how robot presence and type affect perceived safety across urban contexts. We generate 18 images of Seoul streets that vary in time of day, road class, and robot condition (no robot, a delivery robot, or a humanoid). Two multimodal large language models (MLLMs), Qwen3.8-27B and Gemma4-26B, each conditioned on 500 synthetic personas, choose the safer image in each pair, and 25 human respondents complete the same task. …

Visual-inertial odometry relies on visual features that correspond to 3D points with consistent projections across sequential frames. In reflective indoor-floor environments, however, specular floor patterns can be detected and triangulated as virtual features below the physical ground plane, producing unreliable feature associations and inconsistent visual residuals. This paper proposes a lightweight reflection-aware front-end for feature-based stereo VIO. Rather than suppressing all floor-region features, the proposed method estimates the ground height in real time and rejects only feature …

Integrating six-axis tactile feedback into robotic interfaces requires compact sensors with accurate load measurement and rapid online reconstruction. This paper presents LumiTac, a low-profile, camera-free optoelectronic tactile sensor combining spatially distributed illumination with spectral encoding. Five photoemitters and five RGBW photoreceivers are mounted on opposing circuit boards coupled through translucent silicone. Load-induced interlayer motion modulates the internal light field under compression, shear, bending, and torsion. The sensing head measures 12 mm in diameter and 4.75 …

Off-policy deep reinforcement learning trains on random samples from a replay buffer of past experience. In physical robot settings, that buffer is dominated by routine: thousands of near-identical transitions from normal operation, while the rare events that define the edges of the task are rarely sampled. We propose scoring every stored transition by its statistical leverage, which measures how unusual it is relative to the buffer's own data, computed from the stored numbers alone, with no labels, rewards, or value network. We draw each mini-batch from a mixture of this score and uniform …

An ordered sequence of end-effector poses can give a redundant robot arm multiple valid joint configurations at each waypoint. Inverse kinematics (IK) computes these configurations. Choosing a configuration only for the next waypoint can leave the arm poorly placed for later waypoints. This may increase planned motion time or cause a later planning failure. This paper presents Future-Window Inverse Kinematics (FWIK), an online method that selects IK solutions by considering a small window of future waypoints. FWIK generates several IK candidates, connects them in a layered joint-space graph, …

The optimal rapidly exploring random tree (RRT*) is proven asymptotically optimal on open subsets of Euclidean space with straight-line local planning. We ask whether it works on a triangle-mesh terrain, a two-dimensional surface in R^3. First, the original RRT* cannot run on a mesh: the surface has zero volume, so uniform sampling never hits it, no clearance ball fits in it, and chords across a fold leave it. Second, the surface reformulation we call Mesh RRT*, with its naive edge, the chord costed by its length, solved every run on heightfields with slopes up to 75 degrees but minimises the …

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) support planning by comparing predicted latent states with an encoded goal. For this comparison to guide temporal progress, states closer in time to the goal should receive lower costs. However, training representations for prediction and distribution regularization does not directly enforce this ordering. We examine this mismatch in flat LeWorldModel (LeWM) by analyzing how its Euclidean goal cost changes with temporal separation. Our analysis identifies conditions under which states at different long offsets receive similar average costs, …

Assessing the deployment performance of learned robot policies during training is challenging, as directly measuring task success requires costly real-world trials for each candidate checkpoint. Averaged validation loss offers a rollout-free alternative, but its checkpoint rankings can be inconsistent with deployment performance. We analyze two limitations of this criterion: it penalizes action deviations without considering whether the policy can recover from them, and gives later reference predictions equal weight even when earlier deviations may lead execution away from the reference. We …

Holistic perception for autonomous agents requires reliably segmenting and associating scene elements across time and camera views, including objects outside a fixed semantic taxonomy. Existing open-set panoptic benchmarks focus on individual images or views, while panoramic tracking benchmarks assume closed-set taxonomies. Consequently, these benchmarks do not evaluate whether unknown objects can be consistently segmented and tracked across synchronized multi-camera sequences. We introduce WayPOP, a panoramic open-set panoptic tracking benchmark built on real Waymo PVPS sequences augmented …

Short-horizon model predictive control (MPC) is fast but myopic. ZipMPC compensates by learning a context-dependent correction of the short-horizon cost that imitates a long-horizon expert. We observe that the optimal correction is often multimodal: when a slower opponent can be passed on either side, good corrections of opposite sign coexist, and the expert's choice between them hinges on tiny cost differences. Deterministic regression then averages modes or inherits inconsistent expert tie-breaking. We propose ZipDrift, which trains a one-step drifting generator over MPC cost corrections, …

Adaptive sampling can substantially improve the value of sparse ocean observations by directing mobile robots toward measurements that are most informative for an evolving environment. Recent learned generative ocean models can produce high-resolution forecasts and ensembles at substantially lower computational cost than traditional numerical models, creating an opportunity to use rich predictive forecasts directly in closed-loop robotic sampling. However, these models do not natively provide the explicit uncertainty representations assumed by classical informative-planning methods, and their …

Motor responses evoked by noxious stimulation are used to assess neurological function in hospitalized patients with disorders of consciousness. In standard bedside assessments, these stimuli are applied manually, resulting in substantial variation in force, duration, frequency, and location. Here, we present OUCH (Objective, Uniform, Controlled Haptic stimulation), a wrist-worn device that uses pneumatic actuation to deliver noxious mechanical stimuli. OUCH combines stacked pneumatic pouch actuators, a rigid indenter, and a compliant spacer designed to buckle at a set load, so that the …

Olfaction provides critical information about airborne chemical cues, yet it remains largely underexplored in embodied AI, with limited prior machine olfaction work focusing primarily on semantic odor perception. We introduce OdorSpaces, a physics-based simulation platform and benchmark for visual-olfactory embodied navigation. OdorSpaces augments Habitat-Sim with 3D odor transport and dispersion simulated by Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), enabling agents to navigate photorealistic indoor environments using both visual and olfactory observations. The benchmark includes two representative …

This paper presents Proactive Human-in-the-Loop (PHIL), a framework for proactive policy correction and preference-based post-training. PHIL enables operators to preview policy-predicted future motion and intervene before anticipated undesirable actions. During takeover, PHIL continues querying the policy and displaying its predicted trajectories in the physical workspace through an extended reality (XR) interface. PHIL pairs rejected policy predictions with corrective action chunks subsequently executed from the same physical state over the same horizon, and preference-based post-training …

A central challenge in assistive brain-to-robot control is decoding a user's latent intent from complex and noisy brain signals. Prior approaches evaluate decoders as single-trial classifiers with accuracy-based metrics, but this neglects the inherently sequential nature of assistive control. Since a planner must integrate intermittent, noisy decoder outputs over time, single-step accuracy can only be a proxy when predicting downstream task performance. We formalize brain-to-robot control as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), and prove that there is a sharp phase …

High motion performance and avoiding structural vibrations rely on smooth trajectory planning. The smoothness requirement depends on the robot's complexity in terms of the number of degrees of freedom and system order due to the flexibility of the joints and links. For industrial robots, the smoothness requirements have been determined and subsequently taken into account. Although unknown for soft continuum robots, the exact smoothness requirement can potentially be much larger than previously considered ones such as $\mathbf{\mathcal{C}^4}$ for collaborative robots and …

This letter presents a trajectory planner for humanoid robots to perform dynamic motions on complex, parameterizable terrains using a contact-implicit whole-body optimization framework. The planner generates feasible movements without predefined contact sequences, considering the robot's full dynamics and kinematics. To plan bipedal locomotion on steps, ramps, and other terrains, we propose a mathematical model to approximate ground geometry with a smooth surface. The rigid interaction between the robot and the ground is modeled via novel contact constraints, extending the domain of …

Robot imitation learning is limited by the scarcity of action-labeled data, while action-free demonstrations such as videos are abundant. Recent latent-action methods learn action-relevant representations from observation transitions, but they do not optimize latent actions for downstream control, leading to latent representations that are difficult for policies to model and difficult to accurately decode into continuous robot actions. This paper introduces ELA, an end-to-end framework for learning from video demonstrations via latent actions jointly optimized for policy learning and action …

Humanoid motion tracking has scaled to general policies that reproduce diverse human motion, but the resulting behavior is in free-space: the tracker knows where the body should be, not how it should interact with the environment. Other work makes the object part of the objective, yet abstracts that interaction to contact or geometry, which leaves the demanding cases under-explored. We argue that force is a natural command channel between motion imitation and object interaction, one that specifies not just where to make contact but how hard. We present Ctrl-F, a hierarchical motion-force …

Large language models understand passengers' driving commands, but as driving agents they reason in generated text for seconds and must infer each action's consequences implicitly from the scene. We present Jev-AD, which pairs Jev, a typed decision model that answers predefined questions with probabilities, not generated text, with a language world model that predicts for every candidate action how nearby vehicles move over the next two seconds. Code turns these predictions into foreseen consequences, which Jev compares instead of inferring them from coordinates. In simulated highway merging …

Rotation representations are foundational in fields such as computer graphics, robotics, and machine learning, where precise and efficient modeling of 3D orientations is critical. This paper comprehensively investigates diverse representations of the special orthogonal group $SO(3)$, such as Euler angles, axis-angle vectors, quaternions, rotation matrices, exponential maps, and emerging continuous and probabilistic methods, evaluating their mathematical formulations, continuity, susceptibility to gimbal lock, computational efficiency, storage requirements, interpolation properties, and …