arXiv papersarXiv 论文 · 2026-11-10

Trained action policies write manipulation skill into network weights, tying what is learned to the distribution it is learned from. In-context learning (ICL) avoids this coupling but has not matched trained policies, because a demonstration recorded in another scene carries no feedback from the world the robot currently faces. We observe that what an agent learns in context is semantic, recording task steps and object roles rather than visual appearance, so experience gathered in one world transfers to another. Based on this insight, we propose World In-Context Learning (WICL), a paradigm in …

World action models jointly predict video and actions conditioned on language. Existing studies focus primarily on architectures and training mechanisms, typically treating language-video alignment acquired through video pretraining as an established foundation. However, introducing action learning may impair this alignment. Principled guidance on data and supervision design for maintaining language-video alignment during action learning remains limited. To investigate this, we curate a pool of approximately 47,000 hours of general videos, egocentric videos, UMI demonstrations, and robot …

Tactile sensing is an indispensable modality for contact-rich dexterous manipulation, a capability that hints at the ultimate frontiers of embodied intelligence. However, commercially available tactile sensors are still at a relatively early stage of development, with each type of sensor offering irreplaceable strengths alongside its own drawbacks. A key challenge is thus to free tactile understanding from sensor-specific physics, so that embodied models can effectively leverage heterogeneous tactile data. To this end, we develop LingBot-Touch, a tactile foundation model characterized by the …

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms often rely on data collected from a target environment, which can be expensive and noisy. Although simulators can generate large amounts of additional data, standard simulation mixing approaches, which directly combine simulated and real experience, can degrade performance due to simulator inaccuracies, especially when they bias the solution away from the optimal policy. We propose a conservative simulation-aided learning method based on control variates, where simulated data is used solely to reduce variance in the learning process rather than directly …

Many tasks compose transformations by a known rule: chained rotations in robotics and navigation. Learned models relearn it, compounding error; classical estimators hardcode it and miss hardware deviations. We impose the known structure and learn only the remainder: an exact non-commutative group law sits in the node of a self-contained layer, its edges learn local increments, and a zero-initialized correction psi learns unknown deviations of the law. A pre-training criterion predicts exact representability. On fixed-angle SU(2) composition, a 54-parameter dense edge is the most accurate …

Autoregressive VLA planning usually predicts continuous trajectories as the final output, but driving instructions often describe actions rather than ego states, which weakens direct conditioning on the final continuous trajectory. We address this gap with TrajCond, which introduces a discrete trajectory-geometric condition for VLA planning. Specifically, we represent TrajCond as a 1D-Brohan differential action trajectory and learn it with a two-stage training framework before final continuous trajectory prediction. With the simultaneous autoregressive generation of discrete and numeric …

Wearable robots depend on a software chain that links body-worn sensing to gait interpretation, assistance generation, and actuation. Personalization further requires each measured response to remain associated with the assistance parameters that generated it. This paper presents ExoStack, a modular ROS 2 framework for implementing that chain across embedded hubs and a host computer. Its Embedded Sensing and Actuation (ESA) library configures ESP32 boards as microROS sensing and actuation hubs. ExoCore supplies multi-hub synchronization, gait-event detection, profile generation, motion …

Zero-shot object-goal navigation requires autonomous agents to explore unseen environments and locate target objects without task-specific training, posing challenges in perceptual reliability under observation uncertainty and physically grounded goal termination. Although foundation-model-based approaches improve generalization, they remain vulnerable to unreliable long-range perception, hallucination-induced directional bias, and semantically plausible but geometrically incorrect stopping decisions. To address these limitations, we propose CSG-Nav, a zero-shot navigation framework centered …

Generalist robot policies often fail at one step of a task they can otherwise perform. We ask whether such a failure can be repaired by editing the policy's weights directly, without gradients, training data, or a change to the instruction. Told to put the cube then the banana in the bowl, a zero-shot $π_{0.5}$ vision-language-action policy in RoboLab releases the cube before it reaches the bowl. Replaying 21 of these decisions under rewordings shows that it binds "in the bowl" to the wrong object. Closed-form instruction distillation copies the per-layer effect of an explicit rewording into …

One-step stochastic world models avoid the mode averaging of deterministic feature predictors without the tens of network evaluations per step that diffusion and flow matching require. The simplest such objective is nearest-of-m matching (conditional implicit maximum likelihood estimation, IMLE): draw m candidate futures and pull only the one closest to the observed outcome. Recent work conjectures that a small m suffices for feature-space world models and that a strictly proper energy score should replace the hard minimum. We test both claims with one-step world models on frozen DINOv2/v3 …

Quadrotors inspecting buildings and tunnels must navigate unknown clutter with a forward-facing depth camera whose limited field of view constrains scene understanding and collision-avoiding navigation. Recent world-model agents learn navigation through imagined experience (e.g., AirDreamer), but remain data-intensive and often lack explicit geometric memory and awareness of what the camera can observe. We propose ScanDreamer, a map-grounded world model that constructs an online 2D scan-memory map from depth images and vehicle pose. Our world model, actor, and critic are conditioned on this …

Motion generation tools produce candidate trajectories, but interactive robot authoring also requires recoverable execution, traceable edits, explicit geometry, and model-specific validation. We present Kinora, a system that connects text-to-motion generation, a motion library, local agent tools, robot retargeting, and trajectory refinement through versioned artifacts. The current release uses an independently specified 52-joint authoring rig and procedural skeleton previews, separating the distributed human geometry from externally installed generation models and robot assets. Human-motion …

Humanoid loco-manipulation requires continuous coordination of high-dimensional whole-body motion to realize task objectives. While vision-language-action models and world action models transfer semantic and visual-dynamics priors to robot control, these priors do not necessarily capture the structure of robot motion. We introduce Kinematic Action Models (KAMs), a paradigm that treats whole-body motion as a direct pretraining target and uses a pretrained motion generator as the primary action-generation backbone. KAMs ground learned temporal and cross-body coordination priors through task …

The CoRL 2026 RoboEval challenge has eight bimanual tasks, and it ranks a policy not only on whether it succeeds but on how: every stage of the task, done safely, efficiently and with both arms in coordination, scored against human demonstrations. My solution has two parts. The generic part, carried over from my LeHome challenge solution, is off-policy RL on a $π_{0.5}$-based policy that is also its own value function. It is trained with AWR and RECAP on advantages of the exact official score, in a loop where every rollout is at the same time a Thompson-sampling trial of about 20 inference …

Recent robot manipulation benchmarks have enabled systematic evaluation of general-purpose robot policies across diverse objects, scenes, instructions, and embodiments. However, most existing benchmarks still assume that the robot is the only active agent and that task semantics are determined primarily by the instruction and object state. This assumption overlooks a common source of real-world variation: humans actively sharing the workspace. In such settings, humans may reveal an implicit goal, complete part of the task, temporarily change object availability, or constrain safe robot motion …

Sampling-based model predictive control (MPC) is treated as a family of distinct algorithms: predictive sampling, MPPI, the cross-entropy method, and their biased, colored-noise, and annealed variants all sample control sequences and reweight them by cost. We show a single Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) inference algorithm implements them all, specified by three independent axes: the proposal, the update rule that reduces cost-weighted particles to a nominal plan, and the effective-sample-size threshold for resampling. We evaluate SMC-based planning on MuJoCo non-linear control, open-loop …

Agent harnesses -- runtime scaffolds that wrap an LLM's reasoning loop with tool dispatch, verification, and persistent memory -- have become the standard substrate for deploying LLMs as autonomous agents, as demonstrated by Claude Code and Codex in software engineering. In trajectory planning, however, this paradigm has not taken hold: existing LLM-based trajectory planning methods either keep the LLM in the decision loop, exceeding the millisecond-level control budget, or offload it to offline rules or training-time supervision -- leaving the runtime planner non-evolving. Intermediate …

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly adopted as end-to-end driving planners, yet they suffer from cross-city domain shift. Existing methods treat this shift as a single quantity addressed by uniform alignment or single-site editing. We challenge this view on two counts: (i) domain shift in VLM trajectory planners is inherently structured across modality and layer, and (ii) a locate-then-repair recipe matched to this structure outperforms every uniform-objective baseline. We analyse domain shift via activation patching and uncover two regularities. (F1) Modality axis. Image and text …

While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is typically optimized from images only, many robotics and mapping applications provide both camera and high-definition LiDAR data, combining rich visual appearance with accurate geometric structure. We introduce PLS-GS, a probabilistic LiDAR scaffold for Gaussian Splatting that exploits this complementary sensing setting to construct a compact 3DGS representation aligned to the measured surface. PLS-GS fits a Hierarchical Gaussian Mixture Model jointly over position and color, yielding a continuous and adaptive scaffold that eliminates the need for discrete …

Understanding three-dimensional physical structure has become essential for vision-language-action models (VLAs). However, existing approaches either rely on explicit geometric inputs at inference time or adopt a single visual pathway, potentially compromising the visual-semantic knowledge inherited from pre-trained models. We present SPARK-VLA, Spatial Representation distillation and Knowledge routing for VLAs, a preserve-specialize-route framework for spatially adapting VLAs without requiring external 3D inputs or experts at inference. SPARK-VLA consists of two key components: (1) spatial …

Directing a robot to locate a target object in unseen environments remains a central challenge in embodied AI. Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based methods provide rich semantic reasoning but often produce uncalibrated and overconfident action decisions. We introduce CPNav, a navigation framework that combines collision-aware planning with statistically calibrated VLM action scoring for map-free object-goal navigation. From RGB-D input, CPNav constructs a navigability map, generates collision-free motion primitives, and queries two VLMs for goal detection and action scoring. The resulting scores …

This note describes a multi-view video dataset of a deformable object driven by a measured input, with the measured pose of every camera, and a first 3D result obtained on it with LaGSplat. LaGSplat learns from video a low-dimensional latent state that is both the generalized coordinate of a learned dissipative Lagrangian and the conditioning variable of a Gaussian Splatting decoder; fitting the decoder in 3D calls for synchronized multi-view footage, which the original paper only had from synthetic renderings. Here a robot arm moves a flexible strip by oscillating along a one-dimensional …

Understanding engagement in human interaction is essential for modelling assistive and context-aware AI systems. Previously, the MultiMediate challenge has focused on estimating momentary continuous engagement values in adult conversation across cultures, achieving high levels of generalisability across domains. However, engagement can be measured in different metrics and manifest differently between children and adults. MultiMediate'26 therefore expands the evaluated domain set to include the PInSoRo dataset of Child-Child and Child-Robot play sessions in English. These sessions were …

Proactively initiating a conversation is a fundamental social competence and a critical capability for social robots. However, determining how and when to start a conversation in a given situation remains an open challenge, primarily due to the lack of a principled definition of conversational context. While recent large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive conversational fluency, they are predominantly turn-reactive and often produce generic or monotonous openers when tasked with initiating interaction, even when contextual information is available. Such limitations are particularly …

Soft powered descent landings are becoming evermore important in the field of space exploration and scientific advancement, because of their ability to deliver mission critical payloads, both highly accurately and safely. The high efficiency restriction on planetary landings due to the severely limited fuel supply results in the need for optimal guidance trajectories and control. Model based reinforcement learning is proving to be an important tool in simplifying the highly complex process of generating optimal guidance trajectories and control. In this work, we present DreamLander, a state …

In ultrasound-guided femoral access, probe pressure deforms the tissue and changes the vascular anatomy a robot observes. A simulator must reproduce these mechanics fast enough for robotic interaction, yet the computational effort needed for a clinically meaningful signal like vein collapse before artery is unclear. We test the feasibility of a physics-based simulation in NVIDIA's Isaac Sim for Healthcare, with Stable Neo-Hookean tissue solved by Vertex Block Descent on one GPU. A simulation of a low-fidelity cylindrical benchtop phantom with known geometry and mechanical properties, pressed …

A challenging bottleneck in manipulation research is reproducibility and comparability of methods in real-world environments. Since manipulation is an interactive task, it cannot be evaluated on a static dataset of observations. Benchmarking in simulation is a common remedy, but cannot cover the whole complexity of real-world tests. This paper proposes a new paradigm of stochastic challenges. Like the well-known YCB objects, it is based on reproducible real-world scenes and therefore allows system-level innovation and comparability between different platforms. Due to their stochastic nature, …

Autonomous vehicles track planned trajectories close to obstacles. Unknown disturbances make them deviate from these trajectories. With a bound on the tracking error that disturbances can cause, a planned trajectory can be certified as safe before execution. Existing set-based methods bound the tracking error by one invariant ellipsoid for the whole trajectory or by intervals, which are both conservative. For aerial and space vehicles, the tracking error evolves on a matrix Lie group with nonlinear dynamics. However, for group-affine systems, the error dynamics are linear in Lie algebra …

This paper analyzes the cooperative transportation of a payload suspended from two drones in which, instead of being attached to two independent ropes, the payload is allowed to slide along a single rope connecting both UAVs. First, a planar nondimensional dynamical model of the sliding motion with viscous friction is presented. Then, considering stationary drones, this configuration is compared with a fixed payload with the same total rope length, both at equilibrium and under disturbances. The analytical results show that the sliding payload equalizes the tension in both rope segments for …

World models have increasingly been applied as a model-based control method for robotics tasks such as manipulation and locomotion. While early world model architectures relied on decoders to prevent mode collapse and learn a predictable latent space, recent works on world models, such as Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture or LeWorldModel, increasingly aim to learn embeddings without a grounding decoder, utilising only a latent forward dynamics predictor and a stabilising entropy term. In this paper, we set out to demonstrate that the further introduction of two additional latent losses …

Woody breast (WB) myopathy is a spatially heterogeneous fibro-degenerative condition of the broiler Pectoralis major muscle. Existing mechanical reference methods rely on single-point or sequential compression measurements, limiting characterization of spatial hardness variability. This study presents TACTUS (Tactile Adaptive Conformal 3D Uniform Sensing), an automated tactile array that generates thickness-normalized, three-dimensional hardness maps at 20 anatomically distributed locations within approximately 30 s. TACTUS integrates 20 independently motorized tactuators with force-sensing …

A world model predicts how a scene changes after an action, and a planner uses it to search for actions that reach a goal. If the camera moves or the controller changes, the same command moves the robot differently: when its commands are turned by 90 degrees, a frozen planner with the LeWM world model that succeeds in 77.5% of episodes succeeds in only 7.8%. Current fixes retrain the model, need training data, or forget a set-up when it returns. We propose Library of Hands (LoH), a training-free method that keeps the world model frozen and corrects only the map from commands to applied …

Vision-language-action (VLA) models are trained as general-purpose foundation models for robot learning, and require fine-tuning for each downstream task and robot. This raises practical questions such as how much data and training updates are needed, how checkpoints should be selected, and whether simulation can be leveraged to alleviate the cost of real data collection. We study these questions on a task that requires both precise manipulation and spatial understanding of the scene. In this task, an SO-101 arm moves a chess king between two squares that are given only by their names, such …

We examine what plan validation and execution reports establish in natural-language robot fleet control. Commands are traced through typed plans, deterministic corrections, fleet coordination and outcome checks in a three-level Robot Operating System 2 implementation with twenty simulated robots. An offline benchmark of 44 cases checks plan structure and selected command requirements. Across five local configurations without a response schema, 70.0-87.3% of responses pass. All runs in a selected 18-run simulation series meet their pose-based task conditions. This series includes two …

This paper addresses the modeling and state estimation of a towed marine system consisting of two autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs), a pair of umbilical cables, towfish, and a trailing loop cable. Inspired by the existing literature, we employ a lumped-mass modeling approach for the cables and towfish, capturing the essential dynamics while maintaining computational tractability. A Lyapunov-based analysis is conducted to verify the stability and convergence properties of the proposed model. Building on this model, we propose two state estimation methods, namely a reduced-order observer and a …

Multi-sensor state estimation requires accurate spatial and temporal calibration between heterogeneous sensors. Existing spatiotemporal calibration methods typically represent sensor extrinsic parameters as a rigid-body transformation together with a scalar temporal offset, causing the spatial and temporal parameters to enter the estimation problem through separate mechanisms. While the spatial transformation composes directly with the robot pose, accounting for the temporal offset requires evaluating the trajectory at a shifted time, typically through motion compensation, interpolation, or a …

To address unreliable cross-view association in long-sequence feed-forward dense SLAM, this letter presents V3DSAM, an open-vocabulary semantic dense SLAM system that establishes physical correspondences at both the scene and object levels. The system combines feed-forward geometric estimates from VGGT-SLAM 2.0 with open-vocabulary semantic observations from SAM3. We introduce semantic-geometric dual-scale loop verification, which identifies false loop closures using pixel-level bidirectional reprojection and object-level 3D spatial correspondences, without accessing backbone-internal …

Robots are increasingly expected to execute natural-language manipulation tasks in real-world environments. This is particularly relevant in household assistance and logistics, where clutter requires reasoning about both task objectives and execution feasibility. This challenge becomes even more pronounced for bimanual humanoid platforms, where coordinating two manipulators introduces additional interaction and kinematic constraints. We present a zero-shot vision-language framework for execution-aware bimanual manipulation that jointly reasons about task objectives and physical feasibility. …

Modern visuotactile sensors primarily sense contact by imaging the deformation of a compliant interface. Using techniques such as photometric stereo, they can recover detailed contact geometry, often represented as surface normals or depth. However, force-related information typically still needs to be inferred indirectly through calibration, geometric reconstruction, or learned mappings. Mechanochromic photonic-crystal (PC) materials offer an alternative physical encoding mechanism: contact loading changes their periodic microstructure and spectral response, directly transforming local …

Control barrier function (CBF) filters depend on dynamic models that can be inaccurate when their parameters and external forces are uncertain. This paper investigates a radial basis function (RBF) neural network compensator whose output is shared by a Cartesian tracking controller and a joint-space CBF filter. An auxiliary state driven by the difference between requested and applied torques corrects the learning signal, reducing the direct influence of filter intervention on adaptation. A two-link manipulator is evaluated through constrained regulation, ablations, matched uncertainty and …

Achieving generalizable and well-aligned multimodal representations remains a core challenge in robot learning. While recent approaches have attempted to align modalities by modeling conditional or higher-order statistical dependencies, they do not explicitly consider the structural coherence across modalities. In this work, we propose a novel multimodal alignment method that augments existing contrastive losses with a geometry-aware Gromov--Wasserstein (GW) distance-based regularization. To this end, we encode intra-modal geometry for each modality and reduce cross-modal structural …

Raw radar spectra are widely viewed as too cluttered and noisy for direct representation learning, motivating handcrafted reductions, sparse point clouds, or compact Doppler descriptors in radar perception. We challenge this assumption and argue that the main limitation lies not in the raw representation itself, but in the absence of a learning objective that separates structured signal from noise. Handcrafted reductions partially address this problem but impose rigid assumptions about what constitutes signal, discarding weak yet informative structure while retaining artifacts that fit the …

This paper focuses on the stochastic and real-time constraints of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) path planning in Search and Rescue (SAR) missions. We introduce a configurable data-driven and intelligent routing architecture that combines a closed-loop probability update with the Random-Key Optimizers (RKO). Our problem is mathematically modeled as a dynamic probabilistic variant of the Open Vehicle Routing Problem (OVRP), enabling the solver to switch adaptively between two objectives, thereby balancing probability maximization and resource minimization. The framework degrades elegantly under …

Robots operating in the real world are inherently subject to partial observability, particularly in multi-robot collaboration, where individual observations may be insufficient for effective task execution. A key challenge is leveraging complementary observations from partner robots to support collaborative decision-making. We argue that information sharing should go beyond passively transmitting raw observations or generic visual features. Instead, robots should selectively encode task-relevant information according to task objectives and execution progress. To this end, we propose a …

Physical intelligence requires embodied agents to ground language in observations and execute actions while retaining useful skills. Vision-language-action (VLA) policies offer a shared interface, but task-specific post-training often produces separate specialists. Consolidation is difficult: mixed-task reinforcement learning provides sparse trajectory-level credit, while offline distillation may miss student-visited observations and endpoint distillation does not supervise intermediate action-generation states. We introduce VLA Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (VLA-MOPD), a protocol for …

Reliable tip-over prevention is critical for planetary rovers operating in unstructured environments where communication delays prevent real-time human intervention. Existing learning-based approaches typically optimize a single prediction objective, limiting their ability to capture both gradual instability evolution and abrupt terrain disturbances. This work presents a hierarchical multi-channel tip-over prediction framework based on isolated temporal learning. A multi-horizon Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) learns progressive instability patterns from inertial measurements, while a …

Reinforcement learning (RL) from raw sensory inputs such as images or onboard sensors can be challenging due to high-dimensional observations and sparse rewards. A common strategy is to train a teacher policy with access to privileged state information and then distill it into a student policy that acts from raw inputs alone. However, when the teacher relies on information unavailable to the student, exact imitation may be impossible, creating an irreducible imitation gap. Existing approaches typically mitigate this mismatch through careful reward shaping or additional reinforcement learning …

We present and evaluate a game-theoretic model predictive control planner for cooperative goal reaching and adversarial pursuit-evasion with drones. The planner combines 3D prediction, individual objectives, optional shared separation constraints and trajectory-tracking interfaces. A comparison of cooperative game solvers assesses their ability to find feasible trajectories that resolve conflicts. A computational study quantifies how number of drones, prediction horizon and move blocking affect computation time and numerical acceptance. Move blocking holds control inputs constant over groups …

In patrol missions involving multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), a designated command USV can support fleet management by sequentially rendezvousing with each patrolling USV. These operations require motion-feasible route planning and priority-aware rendezvous sequencing, with the objective of minimizing mission completion time and total tardiness relative to priority-dependent due dates. We propose a framework combining grid-based path planning, surrogate travel-time prediction, and graph-based reinforcement learning. The path planner accounts for ocean currents and approximates …

Involving patients' lived experience (LE) early in neurorehabilitation technology design can improve the relevance and effectiveness of solutions, yet LE experts are often involved only when finished prototypes are tested. We present and evaluate a participatory design (PD) workshop for early LE involvement, examine how LE contributions influence design processes and outcomes, and provide recommendations for similar approaches. We conducted a PD workshop at the 6th International Conference on NeuroRehabilitation. Five people who have had a stroke (LE experts) and 18 workshop attendees …

Early successes on agentic robotics point to a potential paradigm shift toward using coding agents to control robots. Existing robotics benchmarks are built around visuomotor policy learning, leaving it open whether coding agents can reliably control diverse robots under physical-world constraints. We therefore introduce the Embodied First Exam, a unified, comprehensive, and agent-native evaluation framework where coding agents can choose their own control approach: direct control, code to control, or train a policy to control. We hope it serves as a first exam for coding agents before they …

Robotic manipulation has advanced rapidly in mapping visual observations and language instructions to actions. However, reliable manipulation in open-world environments requires robust spatial understanding: the ability to identify targets in complex layouts (spatial reasoning) and adapt to scenes that continuously evolve through interaction (spatial memory). Yet existing embodied benchmarks fall short in evaluating spatial understanding: they often introduce strong visual cues that bypass spatial reasoning, and focus on static scenes that offer little insight into an agent's capacity for …

Differentiable simulation propagates derivatives through a physics simulator, turning animation, system identification, control, and computational design into gradient-based optimization. Engines differ in the physics they model and, less visibly, in which mathematical object they differentiate. We separate two questions the literature conflates. The referent is which object the returned derivative belongs to: the finite computation that executed, the converged equation it approximates, or the continuous dynamics. The realization describes the organization of the backward pass: automatically …

Egocentric auto-labeling requires depth, camera pose, object, and human-pose estimates to agree across independently developed models. Differences in units, coordinate conventions, and scale can make individually plausible predictions geometrically inconsistent. We present \textbf{EgoLabel}, a zero-shot pipeline that combines off-the-shelf models without target-domain labeled training and provides explicit cross-modal registration and consistency diagnostics. The pipeline integrates MonST3R for geometry, LocateAnything with GMC-BoT-SORT and SAM~2 for objects, and V-HPOT for hands; FisheyeViT …

Biological experimentation is not reducible to a single optimization problem, but requires decisions at multiple levels of abstraction: translating scientific knowledge into experimental procedures, adapting culture conditions to measured phenotypes and selecting interventions that test biological hypotheses. Automating experimental execution does not, by itself, determine which experiments should be performed next or how they should change in response to biological feedback. Here we introduce BioMARS, a human-in-the-loop multi-agent robotic system that connects knowledge-guided experimental …

We study humanoid navigation across multiple destinations under long-horizon language instructions. This task is challenging because robots must maintain progress across successive goals while continuously producing natural, stable whole-body motion through confined spaces. However, task decomposition in existing methods does not by itself ensure progress throughout execution, while waypoint-based navigation does not guarantee natural, route-faithful whole-body motion. Our key idea is to organize navigation into three complementary roles operating at different time scales: a Brain for task …

Hand kinesthetic feedback is crucial for restoring and enhancing human perception of force and displacement in robotic hand teleoperation. Wide perception range of force feedback is vital in rendering objects of different stiffness, especially for high-stiffness rendering. However, existing approaches struggle to achieve wide range of force feedback while maintaining compact and wearable design. This paper presents a hand exoskeleton system employing magnetorheological (MR) brakes to provide a wide range kinesthetic feedback during teleoperation. The MR brake provides a braking torque ranging …

Autonomous agents must continually acquire reusable knowledge from experience without relying on costly large language model (LLM) reasoning for every decision. However, existing experience-based approaches often struggle to transform accumulated observations and reasoning into compact knowledge that lightweight models can independently apply. This paper proposes SCALE, a small-model-first framework that integrates selective LLM reasoning, experience-driven concept abstraction, and knowledge internalization. A lightweight model handles routine predictions, while prediction errors and …

A robot that works among people must judge what it cannot see: whether an object is still where it was last seen, and whether a pull on a door or drawer is worth its risk. Maps that track object change hold nothing about force, maps of physical properties answer a risk question at a fixed risk level, and vision-language-action models keep no explicit estimate of hidden physics. We propose Motion Belief Action (MBA), a decision layer on the scene map. From how often people move an object and how much force it needs, how much load it holds and whether it is blocked, MBA chooses under a force …

Dexterous hands enable versatile manipulation, but policies trained in simulation often degrade on hardware owing to non-idealities, and the high-dimensional action space makes real-world adaptation costly. Piano playing, which requires precise and coordinated multifinger motion, offers a representative testbed. We propose GAP (Generalized Adaptation Prior for Dexterous Piano Playing), a sample-efficient adaptation framework that learns how to adapt, rather than how to act, during simulation pretraining and transfers this adaptation prior to hardware. Between repeated executions, GAP uses …

Large-scale representation learning has produced public foundation models that provide strong general-purpose visual features. However, their pretraining objectives are not designed for robot representation learning, so the resulting embeddings tend to emphasize global semantics rather than the temporally sensitive representations required for robot control. Training robot models from scratch is also undesirable due to the limited scale and high collection cost of robotics data, as well as the substantial computational burden of pre-training. In this paper, we propose SPARK (Simple …

Traversability prediction is a core component of autonomous navigation, yet most vision-based methods operate frame-wise and produce temporally inconsistent predictions. We present SAM-VTP (Video Traversability Prediction), which fine-tunes SAM2's video memory pathway for dense, prompt-free traversability segmentation, conditioning each frame on a persistent memory of prior observations. Rather than inferring terrain geometry from appearance, we measure it: slope, roughness and height are computed from depth and fused into the image features. We also introduce an offline continuous …

Embodied navigation requires agents to achieve persistent spatial awareness and long-horizon execution stability in open-world environments. However, existing navigation architectures struggle to sustain both capabilities, remaining effective only over a handful of recent frames. We present Compass 1, the first embodied navigation foundation model to unify language understanding and video generation while enabling memory backtracking through nearly 2mins of visual history. Without altering the underlying architecture, we introduce History Representation, which integrates sparse visual …

The motion of an articulated part in cluttered surroundings is constrained not only by an object's intrinsic joint limits but also by extrinsic obstacles. However, existing approaches primarily consider object articulation properties alone. Here we present Motion Constraint Prediction Network (MoCo-Net), a two-stream neural network that jointly predicts the continuous motion ranges of articulated parts and obstacle heatmaps highlighting potential collision regions from partial-view point cloud observation. By capturing both internal and external motion constraints, MoCo-Net produces more …

This paper presents DPGS-SLAM (Diffusion-Prior and Provenance-Aware Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM) for dense mapping in environments containing dynamic objects. Dynamic observations can contaminate camera tracking and scene reconstruction in visual SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). Although 3DGS (3D Gaussian splatting) enables efficient dense mapping, existing 3DGS-SLAM systems may exhibit instability when dynamic objects violate their underlying static-scene assumption. Excluding dynamic observations can reduce their influence on tracking and mapping, but may leave occluded …

Dexterous grasping in robotics relies on distinct hand configurations depending on object geometry. We introduce BetaGrasp, a 3D diffusion policy that conditions a DP3-style point-cloud policy on a four-class grasp label (crimp, sloper, pinch, and jug), running on a Franka arm with a 16-DoF LEAP hand. We also introduce a climbing-hold benchmark: a spring testbed whose ratchet gives a slip-force reading in newtons. In our analysis the policy's point-cloud encoder did not separate the four holds, so the scan alone gave it little to choose a grasp from. Without the label (a DP3-style baseline), …

Navigation in dynamic environments requires mobile robots to make progress toward their goals while respecting motion limits and avoiding surrounding obstacles. Learned subgoal policies can guide model predictive control beyond its local prediction horizon, but a geometrically suitable subgoal does not necessarily lead to a successfully solved control problem. This paper proposes OASIS, a hierarchical navigation framework that incorporates recent optimization outcomes into reinforcement learning-based subgoal generation. A high-level policy trained using Soft Actor--Critic generates local …

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have begun incorporating thermal sensing, but existing approaches typically treat thermal images as ordinary visual inputs, providing limited support for temperature-aware relational reasoning in manipulation. To address this limitation, we propose Thermo-VLA with a ThermoRes Encoder, which decomposes thermal images into cold and hot attribute representations and injects them into the RGB token through language-conditioned residual modulation, enabling temperature-driven target selection and continuous manipulation. We further construct six …

Robot demonstration datasets combine demonstrations from teleoperators of uneven experience, so collection teams need to know how many demonstrations from one group match those from another. We measure this with a data multiple: the ratio of the numbers of demonstrations two groups need for their policies to reach the same success rate. On robomimic's simulated Square and Can tasks, we train behavior-cloning policies on demonstrations from the two teleoperators robomimic labels Better and the two it labels Worse, varying dataset size and the share of Worse demonstrations. On Square, within …

Flipping is a fundamental robotic manipulation skill that requires reorienting a target object in a stable pose on a planar support surface by rotating it 180$^\circ$ about an axis parallel to the support surface -- think of flipping a coin from heads to tails. Although flipping is a common objective in industrial tasks such as parts inspection, mechanical assembly, and tool use, coding a bimanual robot with grippers to flip diverse objects is a significant challenge. In this paper, we show that a coding agent can autonomously develop and refine object-flipping strategies through iterative …

Underwater leader-follower formation control requires continuous relative-pose estimation despite degraded sensing conditions and limited onboard computation. This paper presents a reliability-adaptive multimodal perception framework for six-degree-of-freedom relative-pose tracking between two moving underwater robots. The framework integrates complementary visual, acoustic-ranging, and hydrodynamic measurements while accounting for their distinct physical characteristics and time-varying reliability. It adaptively weights modality contributions and models temporal dependencies with linear …

The wide field of view of fisheye cameras and the simplicity of a monocular setup make monocular fisheye visual odometry (VO) attractive for robotic localization and mapping. Nevertheless, scale drift remains a major challenge over long trajectories. Unsupervised depth learning can help to mitigate this issue, but the pronounced distortion of fisheye images poses challenges for accurate depth estimation. This article presents S$^2$D-FVO, a monocular fisheye VO framework integrating spherical bundle adjustment (SBA)-guided unsupervised depth learning to improve scale consistency and depth …

Dexterous robotic fingers require coordinated joint motion and adaptability to object contact, while independently actuating multiple joints increases the complexity of the transmission mechanism. This paper presents a hybrid tendon--linkage robotic finger with four mechanical degrees of freedom driven by three actuators. The MCP abduction/adduction joint is driven through a bevel gear, while MCP and PIP flexion/extension are driven by separate bidirectional tendon transmissions. The DIP joint is not independently actuated but is coupled to the PIP joint through a four-bar linkage with a …

Spatial generalization in robot world models depends on whether action representations capture the physical relationships that remain valid across changing spatial configurations. Yet different coordinates can describe the same interaction, whereas similar motions can produce different outcomes when local physical conditions change. How these distinctions affect learned prediction remains insufficiently understood. This study evaluates matched action representations defined in world, object, and surface coordinate frames using a controlled robotic peeling benchmark. Global pose and contact …

Exploration in deep reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous control is commonly driven by temporally uncorrelated Gaussian (white) action noise, which leads to jerky motions with locally constrained exploration. In contrast, temporally correlated coloured noise, particularly pink noise, has been shown to support more efficient exploration in RL. Motivated by these findings, we inquire whether scheduling changes to the noise colour over the course of training can outperform white noise for continuous control robotics. We perform a systematic study of 49 linear schedules between white and …

Fleets of driving vision-language-action (VLA) models are developed one domain at a time: each operator finetunes a shared base model on private data, producing specialized experts that are costly to consolidate into a single model. Weight merging loses accuracy as heterogeneous domains accumulate, and dense mixture-of-experts routing is prohibitively expensive to combine them. We present DeltaForge, to our knowledge the first post-hoc mixture-of-experts VLA for driving, which consolidates N independently finetuned per-domain models into a single multi-domain model from their weights and a …

Vision-language-action (VLA) models pair a vision-language backbone with an action head, but in closed-loop control the backbone sits on the control-critical path: while it computes, the robot keeps moving, so each executed action is conditioned on an increasingly stale observation. A larger backbone therefore directly blocks reactivity, especially in humanoid dexterous manipulation. We present DASH, a Decoupled Asynchronous System for Humanoids that removes this coupling. DASH splits the policy into a slow vision-language model (System 2) and a fast flow-matching action head (System 1) that …

Connected physical systems fuse observations from robots, IoT sensors, and edge-AI modules into a shared account of the world, yet most evaluations score only the final answer or action and cannot tell whether a method attributed the evidence, updated its belief, handled contradictions, and justified its decision. We argue that shared reasoning in Connected Robotics should be evaluated as an evidence-to-belief trajectory, and introduce the Connected Robotics Evidence Graph (CREG) Benchmark to make that trajectory measurable. CREG comprises 350 deterministically generated scenarios across …

Mixed reality (MR) allows users to inspect planned robot motion within their physical surroundings, but displaying trajectories from robotics software requires converting their joint configurations and timing into a format the MR application can play back. This paper presents ROS2MR, an extension of the MR-Robotics LAB platform that converts YAML-serialized ROS 2 joint trajectories, including MoveIt motion plans, into the platform's existing JSON playback format. The converter validates the input, maps arm joints by name, and resamples the trajectory at a nominal rate of 30 Hz, using cubic …

Classical optimal control is used to design a separate controller for each plant. This paper asks a different question. Can one learned policy serve a whole family of partially observed, noisy linear systems? We show that one transformer can. The policy is trained to imitate optimal LQG control on a heterogeneous family of Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) systems with Multiple Inputs and Multiple Outputs (MIMO), whose dimensions, cost matrices, and noise levels all vary. A shared representation with system-wise standardization, zero-padding, masking, and an encoding of the cost and noise …

3D visual perception and scene reconstruction are critical for autonomous robots and intelligent transportation, yet real-world deployments often generate long, redundant image sequences that hinder downstream processing. This report investigates BCVS (budget-aware correspondence-driven view sampling), a pose-free view selection algorithm that offers 22+ FPS on a CPU, enabling online filtering for efficient 3D perception by mobile robots. Unlike existing approaches that rely on full structure-from-motion (SfM) pipelines or camera pose estimation, BCVS employs a purely correspondence-based …

While imitation learning has made substantial progress toward generalizable robot manipulation through scaling, viewpoint robustness remains a major bottleneck. Visuomotor policies rely heavily on visual inputs, yet images provide an inherently ambiguous signal under viewpoint change: similar scenes may appear markedly different across viewpoints, while distinct states may share certain visual overlaps. A policy must therefore infer not only the task-relevant state, but also how it is visually projected under a particular camera configuration. This entanglement of viewpoint-dependent …

Robots are typically evaluated in episodes that begin from a reset, while industrial work consists of repeated jobs whose outcomes affect subsequent operations. Evaluating such work at scale requires simulation of task-critical physical interactions, construction of industrial environments, and measurements of performance as scene state persists. We present HOLIDAYFACTORY 1.0, a framework for simulating, generating, and evaluating industrial robot work. Given a human-specified workplace and task, the framework defines a world pairing a scenario of scene variants and process logic with an …

Sampling-based planners such as MPPI and CEM query a learned world model thousands of times per control step, so low-bit world models are an obvious way to make model-based control cheaper on a robot. With round-to-nearest activation quantization and no calibration, we find that planning can collapse, by up to 100 points of success, while the world model's latent one-step prediction error stays no larger than that of a stochastic rounding scheme that plans well. At the same bit width, what decides the outcome is not the size of the rounding error but whether it persists across planner …

This paper presents a distributed model predictive control (MPC) architecture for collision-avoiding motion planning of planar robots with double-integrator dynamics. To reduce coordination demands, a time-varying predicted conflict graph selects relevant pairwise interactions. The associated collision-avoidance constraints are convexified once per MPC update using warm-start trajectories, yielding a fixed convex quadratic program (QP). The resulting QP is then decomposed using an edge-consensus formulation of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), enabling parallel …

Generative models can support both state estimation and control in robotics. For control, a common approach is to use the model as a policy that directly samples actions conditioned on observation histories. However, models that jointly represent states, actions, and observations can also predict how the robot state and its environment evolve. We investigate whether these predictions can improve state estimation and control through a change in inference procedure, without modifying the pretrained model. To this end, we use particle filtering to maintain competing hypotheses about state …

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires large amounts of interaction data or a reliable simulator, both hard to obtain for nonlinear soft robotic hardware. Recent work shows that a time-scale separation inherent to soft robot dynamics justifies their reduction to low-dimensional invariant manifolds, known as adiabatic spectral submanifolds (aSSMs). We demonstrate that an aSSM-reduced model, a simple polynomial ordinary differential equation learned purely from pre-collected data, can serve as an RL training environment. On a pneumatically actuated soft arm, we train a trajectory-tracking policy …

A purely data-driven method grounded in the theory of adiabatic spectral submanifolds (aSSMs) was recently used to model and control nonlinear soft robotic simulators. Here, we extend the methodology to learn aSSM-reduced models from data collected from hardware soft robotic platforms. Specifically, we learn a five dimensional (5D) aSSM-reduced nonlinear ordinary differential equation (ODE) that accurately models the dynamics of a soft-helicoid trunk robot. We then use this ODE in a model predictive control scheme to demonstrate real-time precision control across various challenging …

Useful edge hardware can lose product support while retaining substantial computation. We treat this as systems design: compute regeneration here means re-productization, retaining the compute module while redesigning the surrounding product organization. Our case is GEdgeBot, a multilingual service robot built around a retired 32 GB Jetson AGX Xavier. A source-grounded inventory shows the box alone supplies inference, while the combined system exposes five on-device AI services, a seven-language speech chain, three sensing domains, and one deterministic seven-byte control boundary. AI and …

Understanding 3D scene dynamics in minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is a fundamental step toward physically intelligent and autonomous surgical systems. However, existing public datasets offer limited scalability and diversity in real-world clinical scenarios. Moreover, annotations typically focus on either tissue or instruments alone, overlooking tool-tissue interactions. This gap limits applications such as augmented reality guidance and autonomous surgery driven by vision-language-action (VLA) models or world models, which demand large-scale, high-quality 3D supervision. In this work, we …

Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) integrate laboratory robotics and automation with AI-driven decision-making to close the design-build-test-learn (DBTL) cycle. However, physical testbeds that combine off-the-shelf hardware and AI into a functioning closed-loop workflow remain in early stages of development, and their integration with commercial laboratory automation is comparatively less developed. In this work, we develop a physical testbed that assembles and integrates commercially available laboratory automation instruments and demonstrate continuous, closed-loop, autonomous operation over …

Failure monitors for vision-language-action (VLA) policies are trained offline and then frozen. After deployment, lighting, objects and cameras drift, and the policy itself is updated or moved to new tasks. On recorded real-robot runs, after a switch of task or policy version, a frozen monitor fit on the old task ranks failures little better than chance. We present Streaming Failure Forecasting (SFF), a monitor that keeps learning from the one label every episode provides: whether it succeeded. SFF keeps the offline monitor's network fixed and refits only its last linear layer after each …

Robot policies increasingly act through a small vocabulary of discrete latent actions learned from unlabeled video, yet training leaves open which motion receives which code. We find this choice highly unstable: two independently trained runs of Moto's latent motion tokenizer assign the same robot clips to nearly unrelated codes (adjusted Rand index 0.001), and evaluating one tokenizer in bf16 instead of fp32 reassigns 74% of its tokens. We use this freedom to impose the representational geometry of macaque ventral premotor cortex (PMv), recorded while a monkey drew shapes, on the tokenizer's …

Humanoid robots have achieved significant progress in locomotion and manipulation, enabling traversal over rough terrain and richer interaction with the environment, such as moving obstacles. However, most traditional navigation methods assume non-interactive environments and focus only on traversal. While Navigation Among Movable Obstacles (NAMO) approaches relax this assumption, prior efforts have largely focused on flat environments and reactive interaction, rather than predicting object movability and planning ahead. These limitations become critical in outdoor rough-terrain scenarios, …

Frequent heavy lifting is linked to musculoskeletal strain, with lower back pain affecting up to 40% of manual labourers. Inspired by animals using tails for balance, we developed a wearable robotic tail as a dynamic counterbalance. Ten participants performed an imitated shelf loading/unloading task across three conditions: active tail, passive tail, and no tail. Kinematics, centre of pressure, and muscle activation (gastrocnemius, erector spinae, tibialis anterior, biceps brachii) were measured. Compared with no tail, the active tail achieved >20 mm reduction in centre of pressure peak …

Large-scale pretraining is reducing the amount of adaptation required to deploy embodied foundation models, but it is not guaranteed that a pretrained model already provide the level of performance required in every deployment. Practitioners therefore need to understand how well a pretrained model matches a target deployment and how much adaptation data is left to be collected. We study whether a small set of successful target-domain demonstrations can reveal whether and how much target-domain data will be required before any adaptation. We introduce FlowEval, a set of training-free metrics …

Autonomous SaR requires robots to explore unknown or partially known environments, avoid hazards, coordinate team activities, and guide discovered victims to safety. Improving individual capabilities of robots does not necessarily improve mission outcomes: safer motion can restrict the exploration behavior, faster discovery can increase the rescue demand, and effective guidance depends on victim responses. We introduce PA-SaR, a mathematical and architectural framework for coordinating heterogeneous local control, learning-based exploration, supervisory task allocation, and adaptive …

Safe navigation for mobile robots in dynamic and uncertain environments requires planning paths that avoid collisions with other moving targets. Typically this involves forward propagating the robot motion and checking for collisions at sampled points in space and time. Such methods can miss collisions between sampled points and are not robust to uncertainty in the state estimates. We propose ColNav, a robust collision check formulation with geometric volumes. The key aspect of our approach is encoding the uncertainty in the targets' and the ego robot's positions and velocities into spacetime …

Hybrid quantum reinforcement learning has been explored for robotic decision-making, but evaluations often emphasize task success, return, or convergence, leaving unresolved whether quantum circuit outputs influence constrained actions and remain traceable through robot execution. We present \texttt{Qubit-to-Motion}, an evidence-centered framework for support-constrained sequencing and simulated robotic placement. Four Pauli-$Z$ readouts provide the sole learned input to the actor and critic, while a support mask enforces admissible object selection. Each decision is recorded and linked via …

In this letter, we consider trajectory tracking control and inertial parameter estimation of a quadrotor UAV whose center of mass (CoM) does not coincide with its geometric center. Onboard payloads like an IMU, a camera, or a battery are not necessarily placed at its geometric center. Moreover, during the flight these sensors might move because of external disturbances and cause a CoM offset. Thus, these events and equipment introduce an offset and cause the inertia matrix to be non-diagonal. We develop an integral concurrent learning (ICL)-based geometric controller that estimates the mass, …

World models learn internal simulators of environment dynamics for prediction, planning, and control, yet learning them from limited, noisy, and partial observations remains challenging. While much progress has focused on pixel-based observations, many physical systems instead provide vector-valued measurements that reveal only part of the underlying state. We introduce K-PWM, a probabilistic world model for prediction and control under partial observation. K-PWM couples Koopman-bilinear latent dynamics with a nonlinear observation decoder and performs probabilistic latent-state inference …

World models allow autonomous vehicles to imagine the consequences of candidate actions before execution, but their reliability depends on the futures represented in their training data. We identify a survivorship bias in driving world models: because the futures recorded in prevailing driving datasets almost always end safely, existing models often imagine benign outcomes even when a collision is imminent. We introduce a neutral world model (NWM) that learns both routine and safety-critical futures from a mixture of routine driving and real accident videos with a bounding-box-guided …

Recent studies of embodied agents based on frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) develop harness engineering around the MLLM, such as harnesses with post-trained policies and recursive self-improvement loops. Yet whether these additions exceed the native capability of the MLLM remains unexplored. We introduce SimplEvo to explore how far an MLLM can improve under direct control when it retains its execution experience in self-written text memories. It requires no weight updates, post-trained policies, or privileged information. The MLLM writes a coordinate-free task memory once …

Robotic manipulation requires representations that capture both scene geometry and its evolution during interaction. Existing approaches have largely treated these two aspects separately. World action models capture such dynamics by coupling action prediction with future video generation, but their reliance on iterative diffusion or rectified-flow inference leads to high computational cost, while their representations lack explicit spatial structure. Explicitly modeling scene geometry typically requires auxiliary modules that increase both parameter count and computational cost. Conversely, …

Autonomous UAV exploration is increasingly used for large-scale surveying and inspection in inaccessible or disaster-affected environments, where onboard memory and computational resources are often severely constrained. Most existing UAV exploration systems maintain globally queryable geometric map representations for motion planning and exploration decision-making, causing memory consumption and spatial-query costs to increase with the explored area. Robot-centric local mapping bounds dense-map memory and computation but discards global task context needed for long-horizon exploration.We …

Advances in spatial understanding have enabled frontier models to power coding agents that control a real robot arm zero-shot and end-to-end, without task-specific demonstrations or retraining. This brings two new safety challenges. First, the extensive knowledge of frontier models lets these agents perform tasks that earlier VLA and WAM paradigms could not, opening the door to new forms of capability misuse. Second, coding agents can access digital resources such as web pages and emails. Threats in these resources, such as indirect prompt injection, can carry over into the physical world …

Mobile robots operating in homes need reliable 3D perception of nearby furniture and surrounding structures, yet recovering this information on both sides of the robot's path with a single forward-mounted millimeter-wave radar remains challenging because of near-field wavefront curvature, viewpoint-dependent target visibility, and limited elevation diversity. This paper presents a motion-assisted framework for reconstructing structures on both sides of a robot's trajectory. Our near-field model relates scene reflectivity to stepped-frequency multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) observations …

Helically stranded cables in aerial towing systems experience oblique inflow, but are often modeled as smooth cylinders, neglecting three-dimensional cross-stream coupling and surface texture. We perform large-eddy simulations and spectral proper orthogonal decomposition for a smooth cylinder and four stranded cables at four inclinations from $22.5^\circ$ to $90^\circ$, all stationary, with $Re \approx 1.0 \times 10^4$. Aerodynamic differences are governed mainly by cross-sectional symmetry and strand-scale groove depth. Force-source decomposition shows that surface pressure contributes …

Estimating the motion of deformable bodies in soft robotics from proprioceptive sensing is challenging due to partial observability, as internal observations provide only indirect access to global motion, contact, and shape evolution. In such settings, instantaneous observations are insufficient, and accurate estimation requires temporally consistent latent representations. This paper studies deformable motion estimation under proprioceptive partial observability from a latent dynamics perspective. We argue that a key requirement for long-horizon estimation is latent temporal consistency, …

Dexterous manipulation requires rich spatial foresight over both the surrounding scene and the robot hand. Existing world-action models often acquire such predictive knowledge through explicit future prediction. We introduce DexForesight, a framework that learns spatial foresight implicitly by injecting dynamics-aware world representations into the latent space of a dexterous policy. During training, DexForesight learns an action-conditioned spatial world model from offline scene depth, kinematic hand geometry, and demonstration trajectories. The world model predicts 3D hand-point motion and …

This tutorial presents a step-by-step introduction to multi-robot formation control using differential- drive robots, an overhead camera, and Python. ArUco markers are used to estimate robot positions and orientations, while desired pairwise displacement vectors define a circular formation. By comparing measured and desired relative positions, the controller computes movement vectors that are converted into differential-drive wheel commands, with basic proximity-sensor-based obstacle avoidance. The tutorial guides readers through hardware and software setup, robot pose estimation, formation …

Robots that travel long distances through public outdoor spaces must do more than avoid obstacles: they must remain on terrain suited to their mobility and decide when to proceed, yield, or detour around pedestrians, cyclists, vehicles, traffic signals, and temporary restrictions. These decisions are difficult because their correctness often depends on how a scene evolves, such as whether an approaching car is slowing or a cyclist will cross the robot's path. Vision-language models (VLMs) can interpret such cues, but they reason over images that lack metric geometry and motion. Supplying this …

Training vision-language-action (VLA) models to follow gameplay instructions across diverse games is limited by the cost of collecting demonstrations. We introduce a framework that automatically generates game environments and expert demonstrations. An LLM-powered agent uses game-building tools to construct executable environments and tasks targeting specified skills. Programmatic experts then use privileged simulator state to generate aligned instructions, rendered observations, and keyboard and mouse actions. We train our game policy, Script2Play, by post-training a 4B vision-language model …

High-fidelity LiDAR simulation remains a bottleneck for scalable development and validation of autonomous systems. Existing generators can synthesize realistic scans, but they are typically constrained to a single sensor configuration, offer limited control over structure and geometry, and drift in long-horizon 4D generation. We present CrossLiDAR, a unified transformer-based framework capable of generating controllable and spatio-temporally consistent multi-sensor LiDAR sequences. Our approach leverages a rectified flow objective with a Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT) backbone, …

We present a pipeline for transferring Awa Odori, a traditional Japanese festival dance, from monocular video to a commercial Unitree G1 EDU humanoid. The pipeline combines human mesh recovery, kinematic retargeting, reinforcement learning for motion tracking in simulation, and onboard deployment via ONNX. Training ran on a single RTX 5070 GPU. An eleven-version deployment ladder evaluated on hardware examines three interventions. We detect and repair silent corruption of deployment artifacts, model state-estimator drift during training, and edit the reference motion to support stable …

Vision-language-action (VLA) models enable robots to understand and execute complex instructions, but their autoregressive (AR) action generation introduces significant latency on resource-constrained robotic platforms. Speculative decoding can accelerate AR-based inference by parallelizing action generation and verification; however, existing approaches rely on costly draft models, which are inefficient on edge platforms. In this paper, we propose Zora, a hardware-software co-design framework for accelerating AR-based VLA inference. Specifically, Zora introduces a lightweight …

Sparse hierarchical nonlinear programming (SH-NLP) based on the $\ell_0$-norm provides a powerful framework for integrated, efficient hierarchical decision-making in robot kinematic control, for example in the presence of a large set of possible end-effector candidate locations. While Sequential Sparse Hierarchical Quadratic Programming (S-SHQP) with interior-point method based SHQP sub-problem solvers exploit the hierarchical, sparse structure of such problems, they are less amenable to effective warm-starting between subsequent, coherent control steps. In this work, we formulate an …

Vision-based control policies, including vision-language-action models, have enabled robots to perform increasingly complex tasks. However, their execution speed is often limited by the high computational cost of action inference. In this work, we investigate what can be achieved at the control level without modifying the underlying policy learning process. We introduce an asynchronous inference and control framework that enables fast task execution while maintaining smooth and stable robot motions. By formulating the generation of continuous target positions from discontinuous model …

We present SoftPAT3D, a physics-augmented framework for text-to-3D scene generation in which deformable objects, such as cloth, stuffed toys and ropes, are generated as physically valid, simulation-ready bodies and placed in intersection-free contact with the furniture that supports them, with one another and with themselves. Existing physics-augmented pipelines simulate rigid bodies only and cannot accommodate a generated deformable object, which text-to-3D generation returns as a geometrically invalid mesh, sometimes self-intersecting, that has no rest shape, no material model and no …

Generative world modeling from large-scale visual data offers a promising path toward scalable robot manipulation. This calls for an intermediate representation that can be supervised at scale and remains actionable for downstream control. We propose 3D full-object flow, an object-centric motion representation that assigns dense 3D trajectories to points across the complete surface of a target object, including its occluded regions. By extending visible-surface object flow to the full object geometry, this representation makes complete object motion explicit and applies uniformly to both …

Designing real-time control for nonlinear systems to track periodic orbits can be challenging, especially for complex and coupled dynamical systems (e.g., tethered kites), where the true model parameters are hard to obtain. To address this, we propose a physics-informed Koopman learning approach that incorporates periodic-orbit stability directly into the learned linear predictor. The approach combines the underlying periodic structure of the dynamics along with periodic state-input trajectory data to learn physically consistent linear predictors (in lifted/observable space). We leverage …

Embodied intelligence systems rely on fast and reliable inference to enable real-time perception, reasoning, and control. Recent advances in large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models, including Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, have significantly enhanced the capabilities of embodied agents in complex environments. However, deploying these models remains challenging due to the limited computational resources and energy budgets of robotic platforms. A fundamental question is where inference should be executed. Collaborative inference, which partitions …

Humanoid robots must coordinate locomotion and manipulation to navigate complex environments and perform everyday tasks. Learning such behaviours from human demonstrations requires accurate whole-body motion paired with egocentric vision, particularly for lower-body movements and foot placements that are frequently invisible from a first-person perspective. However, existing egocentric datasets often lack high-fidelity optical motion capture or systematic coverage of diverse loco-manipulation behaviours. To address this gap, we introduce RoboMoCap, a large-scale multimodal dataset combining …

Dexterous manipulation with world action models (WAMs) relies on hand configuration and contact information, yet joint-state and whole-hand tactile observations may be partially or entirely missing. RGB images provide scene context and hand-object geometry but are insufficient to reliably recover these missing modalities. We further observe a correlation between hand state and tactile information. Motivated by this observation, we introduce BAT-WAM, a framework that bridges visual, joint-state, and tactile representations for WAMs. BAT-WAM learns separate codebooks and decoders for the …

The diversity of a distilled diffusion policy's outputs matters beyond how it impacts the policy's success rate. In particular, downstream applications like test-time search and policy improvement require exploration. Thus, we want to distill multi-modal demonstrators into diffusion policies which reproduce their conditional action distributions. Standard data collection for behavior cloning applies a sliding window to demonstration episodes, which pairs unique observation histories with actions. These datasets can be fit by a policy that is either multi-modal, or unimodal with high Lipschitz …

Disturbances encountered during autonomous navigation generally vary across space, often discontinuously, as obstacles redirect wind and changing terrain alters traction. Tracking controllers typically assume sufficient control authority to mitigate disturbances and maintain safety; the regime where this assumption fails remains underexplored. We present Belief-guided Residual Adaptive Control (BRACE), a hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) framework for reach-avoid navigation under unknown, bounded, spatially varying disturbances. BRACE infers a disturbance belief from model prediction …

We describe sudsho, a rule-based agent for the GLEE Competition that plays bargaining, negotiation, and persuasion with zero inference-time LLM calls. Games are scored as payoff percentiles against an empirical pool of prior play on the same configuration, so pool percentiles set our demand targets while clamped equilibrium shares bound demands and acceptance. Every move is a deterministic function of the visible state (persuasion mixing aside), so alignment is verified by replaying the post-freeze move log through the policy. Across 117,280 games the agent reached an overall rating of 2056 …

Surgical video understanding is an important foundation for intelligent assistance in robot-assisted surgery. Similar surgical views can reflect different actions or procedural stages. Interpreting these views requires access to earlier observations, yet frame-centric prompting leaves this history unavailable. We introduce MemSurg, a framework that remembers surgical observations before reasoning over them. Its structured memory graph stores timestamped entity categories, locations, motion cues, and interaction summaries. Chronological links preserve recent context, while entity-associated …

Pre-training large parametric "Vision-Language-Action" (VLA) models on large demonstration datasets has recently yielded promising results for general-purpose manipulation. However, these models still struggle under even small domain shifts relative to the training data, such as changes in camera viewpoint, background, object identity, or robot morphology. Motivated by the success of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in language models, we pursue retrieval to boost VLA performance. Specifically, we seek to leverage retrieval from domain-mismatched, "in-the-wild" demonstration datasets like …

Training vision-language-action (VLA) policies typically depends on substantial robot demonstration data, making human teleoperation a costly and cumbersome bottleneck, particularly for whole-body humanoid interaction. Reinforcement learning in simulation offers an alternative for scaling this data, but designing task-specific rewards remains challenging. To address this, we propose DreamVLA, which uses generated motion trajectories to guide reinforcement learning (RL) in simulation, converting them into reliable task execution trajectories. These trajectories train VLA models in simulation …

Selective data acquisition in Dataset Aggregation (DAgger) on robots requires deciding which learner rollouts to correct and when to intervene. In manipulation with ordered phases, router entropy from a phase-supervised soft mixture-of-experts (MoE) is insufficient: the same value can reflect either a normal adjacent-phase handoff or support for nonadjacent or earlier phases. We propose MoE-DAgger, which uses causal router history to distinguish these cases without providing the policy with a phase label, progress variable, or hard phase command during execution. The acquisition rule allows …

Iterative neural policies usually spend the same computation on every decision, although the benefit of additional processing varies across states. We introduce Adaptive Internal Computation (AIC), an iterative policy that learns when to stop refining its latent representation and act. In AIC, we train action selection and stopping jointly, an expected-depth penalty values computation and intermediate value predictions provide auxiliary supervision. We show that when only some states benefit from further refinement, an ideal state-dependent allocator outperforms every state-independent …

Real-time cooperative perception (CP) in multi-agent traffic environments is highly resource-intensive, which posing scalability challenges for large-scale deployment. Efficiency can be significantly improved by selectively performing CP only in safety-critical scenarios and for key occluding objects. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are well-suited for complex reasoning in dynamic and uncertain environments, making them a promising tool for this selective CP task. This study proposes a VLM-driven agentic framework for blind spot reasoning and dialogue-based CP. A mixed-model architecture is …

Variable impedance control enhances the interaction capability of robot manipulators by adapting impedance parameters online. However, time-varying impedance parameters may inject energy into the system and violate passivity, particularly when tasks demand rapid stiffness changes. Existing methods address this by increasing damping or limiting the stiffness profile, which often degrades the dynamic response. In this work, we propose a quadratic programming-based parameter optimization framework that guarantees passivity by modulating the desired inertia to compensate for energy injected by …

Search allows a robotic policy to evaluate candidate futures before committing to an action. Motivated by test-time planning for vision-language action (VLA) models, we study selective search over action chunks in PushT using a frozen Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT) policy. Beam search generates perturbed alternatives around the policy prediction and scores them through rollouts from cloned simulator states. Across 50 evaluation episodes, beam search raises task success from 0% to 18% and increases average cumulative reward from 39.44 to 103.2. We introduce One Step Ahead (OSA), a …

Learning whole-body musculoskeletal control from human motion is important for developing human-like robots, assistive devices, and rehabilitation systems. This task presents two main challenges, namely reference trajectories that are kinematically plausible but difficult to reproduce through muscle-driven dynamics, and a highly redundant 700-dimensional action space in which unstructured exploration can easily disrupt the target motion. In this paper, we propose a motion-to-policy pipeline that exploits muscle redundancy in two complementary stages. First, muscle-aware retargeting (MAR) …

This paper presents enhancements to the DINOBot framework for imitation learning of object-object interactions. We introduce two key contributions aimed at improving the accuracy and efficiency of alignment in imitation-based robotic tasks. First, we integrate RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) for outlier rejection during the alignment phase, effectively mitigating the impact of noisy depth data and spurious feature matches. This improves robustness when transferring demonstrations to real-world applications. Second, we refine the semantic correspondence process by focusing on task-relevant …

Latent world models enable visual control by planning action sequences in compact representation spaces, but a gap remains between how latent dynamics are learned and how they are used for planning. First, teacher-forced training does not expose the dynamics model to the recursively predicted latent states encountered during planning. Second, sampling-based planners typically initialize action search from goal-agnostic proposals, without exploiting the action-conditioned dynamics learned by the world model. We introduce Dynamics-Informed Action Learning (DIAL) to bridge these two gaps. During …

A rudderless dual vectored-thrust flying wing combines vertical takeoff and landing with efficient for- ward flight in a compact tailless configuration. Without aerodynamic control surfaces, vectored thrust couples translation and pitch control. Therefore, generating dy- namically compatible trajectories remains an open chal- lenge. To address this challenge, this study proposes a trajectory generation method that jointly optimizes path geometry and timing. Trajectory inversion yields state and control histories that satisfy the coupled equations of motion. The optimization balances …

Policies for dexterous manipulation depend on design choices made before training: which sensors enter the observation, where they are placed, and how their readings are arranged for the encoder. These choices are rarely examined. For tactile sensing, simulation studies place taxels uniformly over the hand, and this placement has become a default without being tested. We test this default under a single controlled protocol. The protocol holds the teacher, the training procedure, and the candidate taxels fixed and varies only the sensor configuration and the representation. We evaluate it on …

Reliable navigation with a single monocular limited field-of-view camera is challenging because the lack of depth measurements and limited spatial awareness complicate collision checking. Existing approaches to tackle these challenges fall into two categories. Model-based planners can incorporate explicit collision-avoidance guidance which leads to better generalization but are often computationally expensive and require manual tuning of the algorithmic parameters. In contrast, end-to-end approaches trained by imitation learning can be flexible but typically encode safety only implicitly and …

LiDAR-based localization and mapping systems produce registered point clouds that serve as geometric measurements for downstream estimation and navigation. Registration errors introduce duplicated surfaces and structural deformation into these measurements. In the absence of an independent reference, online assessment relies on geometry accumulated from earlier measurements. Such assessment requires tolerance to sampling variation and an accumulation process in which observations enter the history only after evaluation. We therefore formulate a recursive Bayesian comparison that couples …

In real homes, assistive robots must repeatedly locate targets from large furniture to tiny tabletop items, as people move objects between household surfaces. Uniformly instantiating detections at different scales as 3D objects can be brittle for small on-surface items; without explicit object-state validation, stale entries may persist after scene changes. Our key insight is to separate persistent 3D furniture entities from revisable surface-object hypotheses, retaining their visual evidence without requiring independent object geometry. We formalize this design as the Hypothesis Scene Graph …

Self-improvement on compositional manipulation tasks requires deciding what to reuse, where to improve, and which changes to retain. We present ReSkill, a selective self-improvement framework that concentrates revision on capability gaps. A coding agent constructs an object-centric task graph from an instruction and a skill library, then uses node-level execution records to locate failures. At the task level, it revises stage organization, hand-off conditions, and recovery routes; at the skill level, it strengthens perception, motion, manipulation, and verification capabilities that …

Mobile robotic sensing systems must adapt to operator requirements, limited resources, changing connectivity, and observation opportunities shaped by physical motion. Evaluating runtime strategies therefore requires assessing whether their decisions fulfill mission objectives, beyond isolated perception accuracy or execution efficiency. We present EmbodiedIntentBench, a benchmark for intent-driven runtime adaptation in mobile robotic missions. It represents mission intent through structured contracts for coverage, temporal evidence, reporting, urgency, and resources, and couples simulated …

Learned manipulation policies often rely on wrist-mounted cameras for close-range visual feedback that complements external views of the workspace. However, contact-rich manipulation requires establishing and maintaining contacts that can remain hidden even from wrist cameras. Tactile sensors mounted on fingers can reliably and directly measure contact, without needing visual access. In this work, we show that this feedback enables policies to recover the performance advantage of wrist cameras using scene and egocentric vision together with touch. Our approach incorporates two low-cost …

Most robotic handwriting rigidly mounts the pen and reduces writing to trajectory tracking. A freely held pen instead couples grasp stability, tip motion, and contact force. We present Grip, Trace, Write, a force-aware simulation environment and learning framework for high-DoF handwriting. A two-branch actor separates pen retention from arm-wrist writing while preserving their closed-loop coupling. Training learns a grasp controller, initializes writing from inverse-kinematics demonstrations by behavior cloning, and improves writing through reinforcement learning with rewards on ink, force, …

Autonomous robot teams deployed in remote, unstructured environments may face changes in the environment, hardware, and team composition that degrade previously effective policies. Shifting mission objectives can be handled by selecting a different solution from an existing Pareto set, but shifting deployment conditions can reorder the set itself, making previously dominated policies competitive or new policies necessary. However, evaluating these policies in new contexts while minimizing risk to the hardware remains an open problem. We argue that, although largely untested in this domain, …

In this work, we train agents to act under uncertainty according to specified, belief-dependent rules. Deep reinforcement learning (RL) can in theory train agents to follow rules if encoded into well-designed rewards, but in practice, RL fails to perfectly optimize these rewards, leading to ineffective or noncompliant agent behavior. Belief-space planners by construction produce behavior in line with developer specification, but require hand-programming online planners and belief-state estimators, adding significant engineering complexity at scale. We combine the two: we plan offline to …

Bimanual dexterous manipulation requires coordinated arm and hand control, yet specifying such coordination manually is challenging and often task-specific. In this work, we explore whether complex bimanual dexterity can emerge from a simple object-centric learning objective. We train reinforcement learning policies under a shared object-centric reward, varying their training environments rather than tuning separate rewards for each behavior. We find that the policies discover pre-grasp manipulation, grasping and regrasping, in-hand adjustment and handover to reach object-pose goals without …

Visuomotor policies can handle many robot manipulation tasks, but understanding their failures remains difficult. Unfamiliar conditions and small action errors can lead to failure, yet watching the robot alone tells us little about what went wrong inside the policy. We introduce MIND (Mechanistic Interpretability for Neural Diagnosis), a method that looks inside a trained policy to detect failures during execution and identify the internal concepts involved. MIND uses a sparse autoencoder to break down the policy's internal activations into features that can be studied individually. We give …

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) seeks collision-free paths for multiple agents from their respective starting locations to their respective goal locations while minimizing path costs. Although many MAPF algorithms were developed, most of them rely on a common assumption on synchronized actions, where the actions of all agents start at the same time and always take a time unit. This assumption may limit the use of MAPF planners in practice. To get rid of this assumption, recently, an algorithm called Loosely Synchronized Rule-based Planning (LSRP) was proposed, which can find sub-optimal …

Generative robot policies based on diffusion and flow matching can model complex, multimodal behaviors, but remain susceptible to covariate shift during closed-loop execution. Existing approaches mitigate such failures through additional demonstrations, policy fine-tuning, or test-time guidance, but often require human intervention, engineered rewards, or other task-specific signals. We introduce GUARD, an anomaly-informed Q-steering framework that leverages the policy's training distribution to construct a dense, failure-anticipatory steering signal. GUARD pairs sparse task rewards with …

Embedded AI is moving from perception to prediction. Robots now use world models$\unicode{x2014}$learned simulators that predict the outcome of candidate actions in a compressed latent space before any is executed. Every predicted step must be computed on board within a tight power and thermal budget, yet the energy these steps fundamentally require, and how far real hardware sits from it, have not been characterized. We derive lower bounds on the arithmetic operations and the CMOS dynamic energy of a latent state transition from information theory and Boolean circuit complexity. Profiling a …

Multiple robots operating in shared workspaces must adjust their speed, direction, and trajectories to coordinate with one another and respond to changing tasks and disturbances. The available maneuver freedom depends on the dynamics, uncertainty, and safety margins, even for a fixed fleet size and workspace. However, robot count, workspace occupancy, and task throughput do not quantify how much the fleet can vary its motion or how reliably these variations can be observed. We develop a mobility information capacity (MIC) framework that jointly characterizes these two aspects. Mobility …

A robot that keeps learning after deployment is corrected by several people in turn, and one of them may later ask to be removed. We show that whether the robot can forget that person depends on how people correct it. The goal of removal is the robot that would exist if the person had never been there, which we compute exactly in two simulated tasks with scripted users. When users correct the robot by taking over control, an ordered log of training updates is enough: retraining on the remaining sessions in their original order gives a robot as close to the goal as training noise allows. …

Dense bird's-eye-view (BEV) construction accounts for 60% of the parameters in a strong recent driving planner. This paper presents LOWP, a planner that looks only where it plans: two sets of sixteen learnable queries read the cameras through the known calibration, one by sampling image features at projected 3D anchors and one by attending to features labeled with their viewing rays, so no dense BEV is built and no object or map is supervised. Evaluations on open-loop nuScenes, pseudo-simulated NAVSIM and closed-loop Bench2Drive show competitive planning with a compact representation. On …

Feed-forward 3D reconstruction turns an uncalibrated monocular stream into a dense point cloud in a single inference pass, orders of magnitude faster than classical structure-from-motion (e.g., COLMAP), and reliable on the weakly textured, repetitive surfaces where keypoint matching fails outright. However, raw point clouds lack the object identity, physical properties, and watertight volume required for robot learning. This gap widens under robot-native capture. A camera mounted on a robot constrained to a few degrees of freedom sees each object only partially, and the repetitive, weakly …

Geometric foundation models estimate dense geometry and camera parameters from monocular images, but reliable SLAM also requires consistent scale and accurate data association across successive reconstructions. We present DASH-SLAM, a monocular SLAM system that integrates metric depth predictions from pretrained Depth Anything 3 into a shared-keyframe pose graph without task-specific fine-tuning. DASH-SLAM derives scale corrections from depth ratios at shared anchor images and accumulates them across reconstructions, with a damping factor controlling their influence. These corrections rescale …

Agricultural production faces persistent labor shortages and increasing demand for automation, yet progress in agricultural robotics remains constrained by the limited availability of affordable, flexible, and accessible research platforms. This paper presents Agibot, an open-source, modular, low-cost agricultural robotics platform designed for autonomy research and experimentation, with potential applications in hands-on robotics education. The platform integrates four-wheel independent swerve drive, swappable computing, distributed embedded control, multimodal sensing, and configurable …

A fundamental aspect of humanoid footstep planning is to jointly guarantee obstacle avoidance and locomotion stability. This paper presents a capturability-aware sequential Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework for Linear Inverted Pendulum (LIP)-based humanoid footstep planning in the presence of obstacles. The proposed method combines obstacle avoidance with capturability constraints through safe corridors constructed as sequences of intersecting rectangles, yielding a sequential MPC framework with recursive feasibility guarantees for the LIP-based planning layer. The planner autonomously …

Human demonstrations provide a scalable source of diverse manipulation data, but leveraging them for robot learning remains challenging due to differences in embodiment, viewpoint, action spaces, and temporal structure. We introduce BATCH, a cross-embodiment learning framework that explicitly aligns human and robot behaviors. BATCH learns self-supervised temporal representations with a cycle-consistency objective to establish cross-embodiment correspondences without manual annotation. We further introduce two complementary training objectives that leverage these correspondences within an …

Learning humanoid state estimation and language-grounded motion understanding from robot recordings ties training coverage to the robot's motion repertoire. Human motion datasets offer broader coverage, yet transferring this knowledge requires overcoming differences in body geometry, sensing, and physical disturbances. To enable this transfer, we propose a unified inertial encoder whose shared inertial interface uses kinematic IMU synthesis to represent human and humanoid motion at corresponding body sites. Within this common input space, joint training on human and kinematically retargeted …

Enabling robots to infer interaction-relevant physical properties from vision before contact would improve planning and control in unstructured environments. Vision provides useful pre-contact information, but appearance alone is often ambiguous: visually similar regions can induce different friction, stiffness, or sinkage responses upon contact. Existing approaches often collapse this ambiguity to a point estimate or aggregate experience through fixed semantic classes, limiting their ability to preserve distinct physical regimes. Instead, we propose a real-time estimator that replaces …

Robot datasets are costly to collect and are usually tied to a specific embodiment, making it difficult to reuse demonstrations across robots with different geometry, appearance, and kinematics. We introduce UniLatent, a cross-embodiment transfer framework that reduces the embodiment-induced observation gap in a shared latent space. UniLatent renders paired source-target robot observations in simulation and aligns a source visual encoder to a frozen target encoder. A policy trained on encoded source demonstrations can then run directly on target observations, with no pixel-level image …

Pretrained vision language action (VLA) models show strong zero-shot performance, but are rarely deployed directly and are often first post-trained on demonstrations from the target setting. Yet VLAs are typically compared by zero-shot or full-data fine-tuned success, revealing little about the data and compute required for adaptation. We study adaptation efficiency for six VLAs ($\pi_{0}$, $\pi_{0.5}$, and GR00T N1-N1.7) on four LIBERO suites, varying both demonstrations and training steps. This reveals differences hidden by full-data fine-tuning: models within two points on the full …

Differentiable model predictive control (MPC) enables structured, constraint-aware policies to be optimized end-to-end. However, learning MPC policies faces two bottlenecks: (1) nonsmooth sensitivities at active-set transitions and (2) expensive policy evaluation, since each requires an optimization solve. We first introduce SmoothedTurboMPC, a GPU-parallel differentiable MPC solver combining sequential quadratic programming (SQP) with a log-barrier-smoothed alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) inner solver. Its design enables smooth gradients, exact sensitivities at …

Ensuring safe and reliable navigation under diverse sources of uncertainty remains a central challenge for autonomous systems. Within distributional reinforcement learning (DistRL), Implicit Quantile Networks (IQN) have attracted interest for navigation under uncertainty because they enable risk adaptation through flexible quantile sampling. Existing approaches, however, typically use a fixed or randomly sampled Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) level during training and adjust the risk level during deployment using hand-tuned hyperparameters or external sensor signals. This scalar-CVaR …

Modern, neural-based ASR and TTS systems for speech communication are now very sophisticated, but they are frequently designed for average users in more idealized scenarios, which can underperform when interacting with users having specialized listening needs, or who speak in non-standard ways. Here we review recent TTS research, and note that industrial, production-level implementations of adaptive TTS systems are scarce. We describe how we implemented changes to TTS systems based on prior research, and then report qualitative results from two case studies, where adapted TTS techniques are …

As social robots become increasingly present in everyday environments, establishing rapport with users is critical for enabling sustained and meaningful human-robot interaction. In human-human communication, self-disclosure is a well-established mechanism for building rapport; however, its role and impact in human-robot interaction (HRI) are not yet well understood. Although recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have improved the linguistic competence of conversational robots, such systems are typically deployed as reactive information providers, offering limited social reciprocity …

This paper presents the design and preliminary evaluation of KR A1, a humanoid-robot interaction prototype that integrates personalized voice synthesis, contextual dialogue processing, and emotion-aware response generation for potential mental-healthcare applications. The system architecture combines a locally hosted large language model (Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, served via Ollama) for natural-language understanding and response generation, OpenVoice v2 for zero-shot speaker-adaptive speech synthesis, and a two-tier emotion-processing pipeline comprising a keyword heuristic and LLM-based …