arXiv papersarXiv 论文 · 2026-11-11

Memory-augmented vision-language-action (VLA) policies are meant to remember what happened. Many of them, however, fill memory by time: they sample frames uniformly across the episode and stamp each frame with its time step. Because time passes even when nothing happens, such a memory may not tell waiting from working. We show that it does not. On the counting tasks of RoboMME, we make the robot briefly pause or fidget its wrist. Such a null event changes nothing the task depends on, yet a released memory VLA counts the interval as work done and stops early. We call this failure phantom …

Understanding 4D scenes is a core challenge in visual intelligence, requiring models to jointly capture scene geometry, appearance, and dynamics from partial observations. However, existing approaches are subdivided into feedforward models for direct geometric prediction, and generative models for visual synthesis. We introduce UGG, a unified framework for 4D scene understanding that jointly models RGB video and geometric representations such as depth and camera pose. By assigning different noise levels across modalities and time, UGG formulates visual generation and geometric prediction as …

We describe our solution for the 2026 BEHAVIOR Challenge: 100 long-horizon household tasks in the OmniGibson simulator. We placed 9th on the final leaderboard, the only independent team in the top 10. The core of the solution is a single vision-language-action (VLA) model, one checkpoint for all 100 tasks, built on our 1st-place 2025 solution, which is based on $\pi_{0.5}$. On the 50 tasks shared with 2025, its Q rises from 0.260 to 0.371; across all 100 tasks it scores 0.392. Our main conclusion from 2025 was that the model was undertrained, so most of the 2026 work went into training the …

Pretrained video diffusion models (VDMs) offer a powerful foundation for World Action Models (WAMs), which jointly predict robot actions and future observations. Building such models requires injecting low-dimensional robot signals (e.g. proprioception, actions, and values) into a latent space shaped by natural videos, and a key design choice is the interface through which these signals enter: existing schemes treat it as a formatting detail, spending a separate latent frame on each signal or bolting on dedicated encoders and decoders. We argue that signal injection is instead a …

We study how to generate diverse, physically executable robot demonstrations for dexterous vision-language-action (VLA) learning. Existing demonstration-generation methods typically rely on costly teleoperated examples. Meanwhile, human hand--object datasets provide a reusable source, but existing transfer methods mainly reproduce given interactions. Turning these interactions into VLA training data further requires coverage of different objects and manipulation locations, together with executable arm and finger actions, and visual observations. To achieve this, we present DexSeed, a …

Real-time robotic perception requires accurate LiDAR semantics under limited resources. Bird's-eye-view (BEV) aggregation is efficient but can mix differently labeled surfaces in columns. We present HiPFuse, a point-BEV fusion framework that exchanges point and height-partitioned BEV features across horizontal scales, combining point-wise detail with 2D spatial context from one LiDAR scan. Fixed height assignments preserve separate vertical aggregation groups, with auxiliary supervision of initial BEV features using targets from the same 3D cells. A dual-scale BEV context module adds broader …

This work presents the 2nd-place solution (Team IF1001) to the 2026 BEHAVIOR Challenge, which evaluates mobile manipulation across 100 household tasks. Our method is built on a powerful world action model (WAM), Cosmos 3. We improve Cosmos 3 by using richer visual history, task-progress conditioning, and task-group and skill-specific LoRA adapters. During inference, we apply a separate progress estimator to supply task-progress context, and use task- and progress-conditioned routing to select a task-group or skill-specific policy, complemented by action-candidate aggregation, rolling …

In this paper, we investigate how human egocentric videos can benefit robot policy learning without action supervision. Building on a pretrained VLM, we propose Shared Prediction on Action and Representation (SPAR), an MoT architecture in which future visual state prediction can provide independent and complementary learning signals alongside action prediction. We find that representations learned from egocentric videos improve downstream performance on out-of-distribution robot tasks, with further gains as video data scales. We also study the effects of objective choices and data curation, …

Predicting long action chunks, often spanning dozens of timesteps, has become a key ingredient in increasingly capable robot policies. In this paper, we find that adapting these long-chunk policies with existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods can require many online samples due to the high dimensionality of the action chunks being optimized, making such adaptation impractical in real-world scenarios where interaction data are costly to collect. Our key insight is to shift adaptation from optimizing actions to optimizing how long to execute each predicted action chunk. This keeps the …

Maze navigation requires localization from sparse, repetitive geometry, planning through narrow corridors, and control that stays safe when the estimate or the map is wrong. We present Maze Runner, an open autonomy stack in C++ and ROS 2 that addresses these needs end to end on a simulated Husarion ROSbot XL with a 2D LiDAR in Gazebo. Perception extracts wall lines from each scan with RANSAC and total least squares, with per-line uncertainty. The same line front end feeds two estimators: an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) that localizes against a line map built from the maze mesh, and an EKF …

Preventing human error in physical assembly tasks requires assistance systems that can intervene before mistakes are made. This is especially challenging in settings where users are free to choose the construction order and correctness depends on the evolving assembly rather than a fixed next step. We present TanCRAFT, a four-stage real-time predictive assistance system that tracks the scene state, reasons about the current partial assembly, forecasts the near-future motion of manipulated pieces, and intervenes when the predicted placement is incompatible with the target. We instantiate our …

Despite the widespread adoption of autonomous vehicle technologies, reliable navigation within cluttered environments remains arduous due to the necessity of interaction-aware strategies; example scenarios include: narrow passages with multiple agents, lane changing in dense traffic, and crossing unsignalized intersections. These scenarios often require highly proactive strategies, simultaneously demanding interpretability and quick adaptability, which challenge end-to-end and data-driven methods. An effective strategy requires: scalability to multiple agents, adaptability to changes in other …

Small, holonomic Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) enable close-range inspection of underwater structures from arbitrary viewpoints, requiring accurate position and attitude tracking under state and input constraints. Model Predictive Contouring Control (MPCC) naturally handles these requirements, but relies on an accurate dynamics model, which is difficult to obtain underwater. In this paper, we present a nonlinear MPCC in all six Degrees of Freedom (DoF) for a holonomic AUV and alleviate the inaccuracies in the dynamics by augmenting the nominal model employed with residual dynamics …

Generative driving planners can represent diverse ego futures, but a downstream scorer can choose only among sampled candidates; it cannot recover an absent maneuver. We present ForeseeDrive, which turns future scene evolution into a deployable interface for shaping candidate generation. Rather than reconstructing dense future states or scoring a fixed menu, ForeseeDrive derives query-indexed tokens from logged actor motion, occupancy evolution, route interactions, and TTC margins, and predicts the same token space from present context at deployment. The tokens condition trajectory geometry …

A representation that accurately predicts a deformable object's response is not necessarily the one most useful for choosing manipulation actions. We study this distinction between predictive utility and decision utility in planar single-grasp shape control of Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs). As a common decision backbone, we introduce Geometry-Pointer-Flow (GPF), a geometry-grounded policy that separates grasp-location selection from grasp-conditioned motion generation. Its geometry-only variant reduces one-step executed shape error by 32.8% relative to a DLO-specific diffusion policy, …

World-Action Models improve robot control by predicting future visual dynamics, but iterative video denoising incurs substantial inference overhead. Recent approaches reduce this cost through partial future denoising, yet typically rely on fixed refinement budgets. Our empirical observations reveal that preferred refinement depths vary across tasks and states, while different future regions exhibit varying relevance to action generation. Motivated by these findings, we propose Elastic-WAM, which adaptively allocates world refinement computation across temporal denoising time and spatial …

Self-interested intelligent agents that negotiate with humans should interpret nonverbal expressions and adapt their behavior accordingly. However, generic facial-affect models degrade across individuals and contexts, creating a generalization gap. We introduce an affect-adaptive negotiation strategy that incorporates Continual Learning with Imagination for Facial Expression Recognition (CLIFER) to personalize valence-arousal perception in real time. Differential feedback converts changes in valence-arousal direction and intensity into adjustments of the agent's target utility. An …

We propose a Koopman model-based reinforcement learning (K-MBRL) algorithm for controlling nonlinear robotic systems with unknown dynamics. The K-MBRL learns a control policy by minimizing an approximate policy objective that combines the analytical immediate cost with an estimate of the future cost evaluated at the one-step predicted state. To this end, we develop a stochastic Koopman operator-based learning method to approximate the unknown nonlinear dynamics in a linear representation, while a critic function estimates the remaining future cost. This formulation offers two key advantages. …

Foundation models such as GPT and Claude have shown strong capabilities in spatial understanding and embodied intelligence. These advances make agentic robotics a promising path toward artificial general intelligence in robotics. However, we find that using foundation models to control robots poses serious safety risks, and comprehensive safety evaluation is still lacking. We introduce RoboRisk, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating safety in agentic robotics. Its 92 simulated tasks and 13 physical-robot tasks fall into five categories: Task-level Refusal (T), Plan Repair (P), …

Autonomous systems increasingly monitor physical kinematics, environmental states and task completion outcomes. While existing work provides methods to plan information seeking actions and interpret acquired observations, current approaches do not monitor whether the live process of information gathering is functioning properly. Consequently, such systems can remain operationally active without resolving outstanding mission requirements. To address this limitation, we introduce Acquisition-State Telemetry (AST), a model free architecture that evaluates ongoing information acquisition from …

Construction tasks in hazardous and unstructured environments require both human adaptability and robotic precision, yet existing approaches often treat teleoperation and autonomy as separate control modes. This paper presents a human-in-the-loop control paradigm that enables structured transitions among VR-guided teleoperation, semi-autonomous shared control, and rule-based autonomous execution for contact-rich dual-arm construction tasks. The proposed system combines immersive VR guidance, a manually defined library of reusable skill primitives, and a shared-autonomy framework with explicit …

Humanoid motion interfaces should accommodate application-specific movement constraints while retaining useful reference behavior. Local content redaction requires a controller to replace selected movements even when it continues to receive the original reference. Removing the tracking incentive for those movements leaves their replacement unspecified. We introduce RedirectMimic, which separates the reference observed by the actor from the target used to train its execution. A rule-generated edited reference guides tracking rewards during proximal policy optimization, while the deployed …

World Action Models (WAMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, endowing policies with strong capabilities for modeling temporal and physical dynamics. Existing WAMs, encompassing both video-first action prediction and joint video-action modeling, directly transfer global physical representations from world models to action generation. However, global scene representations may underemphasize local robot-object interactions, creating a mismatch between representations optimized for world evolution and those required for manipulation. To bridge this gap, we …

Robotic additive manufacturing requires joint paths that reconcile robot feasibility with process-specific geometry. We develop an offline optimization-based path planner that combines joint-path regularity and self-collision penalties with process costs and constraints, so that a new process enters through its own reference, residuals, and tolerances. Full-path and boundary-coupled chunked optimization handle references of different lengths. Iterative Weight Tuning (IWT) determines the cost weights from the gaps between Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and their targets. In carbon-fiber …

Intraoperative scene perception in ophthalmic microsurgery is limited by instrument occlusion: when a tool enters the high-magnification field, it conceals tissue from both the surgeon and the perception components of robot-assisted systems that process the video. Generative inpainting can remove the occluder but replaces the missing image content with synthesis, which is unsuitable when visual provenance matters. Many video inpainters also depend on future frames and cannot operate online. We present TransGHOST, a causal reference-guided reconstruction pipeline whose non-generative safe mode …

In recent years, humanoid loco-manipulation has progressed to whole-body grasping, lifting, and transport. A basic requirement underlying these tasks is carrying the object to its destination, which depends on the locomotion controller accurately executing velocity commands from the navigation policy. However, carrying an object in one hand introduces a persistent asymmetric upper-body load that can degrade velocity tracking. Persistent tracking biases can accumulate into position and heading deviations, increasing the risk of collisions and navigation failure. To address this problem, we …

Three-dimensional scene graphs (3DSGs) can provide robots with persistent metric-semantic representations for spatial reasoning, but the existing methods have primarily been developed for indoor and terrestrial environments. In this paper we investigate how a representative outdoor open-vocabulary method transfers to maritime environments and which adaptations are needed. Our experiments show that zero-shot representative outdoor 3DSG descriptions agree with our labeled ground truth for a majority of geometry-supported objects on our data, but the resulting map exhibits considerable …

Motion planning for stochastic systems aims to find a sequence of control inputs that drives a system to a goal set while avoiding unsafe states with high probability. Existing approaches, however, are either restricted to linear dynamics with perfect knowledge of the underlying distributions or lack formal correctness guarantees. To address these limitations, we propose \emph{Learn-To-Propagate Distributionally-Robust Forest (L2P-DR-Forest)}, a distributionally-robust sampling-based planning algorithm for \emph{nonlinear} stochastic systems with \emph{unknown} initial state and process noise …

While symbolic reasoning for task allocation requires grounding a robot's physical capabilities, standard Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) files provide only low-level kinematics without the formal semantic context needed for reasoning. We present URDF2Ontology, an automated, taxonomy-agnostic neurosymbolic framework that transforms raw URDF files into populated, grounded OWL ontologies. It leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) for targeted semantic reasoning, coupled with an iterative sequential graph-purging mechanism to prevent context window saturation. To process complex …

Biological intelligence emerges from neural activity that connects sensation, memory and action. Synaptic plasticity, neuronal assemblies and oscillations provide principles for biomimetic computing, but translating them into reusable operations requires a defined computational unit. We introduce Oscillatory Processing Units (OPUs), groups of synthetic neurons sharing a rhythm. Their directed interactions transform incoming activity and prior receiving state into an Oscillatory Occupancy Space (OOS), which becomes available to subsequent computation. We show that source--receiver conditions …

Human gameplay supplies paired observations, actions, and visual consequences that can supplement robot-policy training. We study event-and-foresight pretraining for InternVLA-A1.5, combining recorded keyboard/mouse event prediction with history-conditioned visual supervision through a frozen video model. Coverage-preserving anchor selection constructs one-second targets, and an attention mask prevents teacher-forced future actions from entering foresight queries. The selected corpus contains 394 recordings across 20 games, with 223.36 hours of recorded timestamp span and 2,072,084 training …

Real-robot benchmarks of learned visuomotor policies often record room illuminance as the lighting condition. We show that, on a typical low-cost rig, room light and image light can be almost unrelated. Four imitation-learning policies (ACT, SmolVLA, Diffusion Policy and pi0.5) were trained on the same 50 demonstrations of a pick-and-place task on an SO-101 arm. Each was run for ten rollouts at about 520 lux and again at about 45 lux, an 11.5x reduction. Success was 20/40 in normal light and 19/40 in low light: a change of -2.5 percentage points (95% CI -23 to +19), with no evidence that the …

End-to-end autonomous driving systems increasingly rely on generating multiple trajectory candidates and selecting one for execution. In this setting, a central challenge is no longer only candidate generation, but how to evaluate candidates according to their long-horizon consequences under uncertainty. Existing methods still mainly use deterministic point scores, heuristic subscores, or single-outcome evaluations, which makes it difficult to capture delayed failures, tail risk, and ranking instability under plausible future perturbations. We present RiSE-Drive, a framework for …

A great gap in adaptivity, flexibility, and dexterity still exists between intelligent robots, whether they are made of rigid or (partially) compliant components, and their naturally evolved animal and vegetal counterparts. One reason could be of `paradigm' nature. On the one hand, most robots (both rigid and soft) are still designed by following a `Cartesian' approach, with top-down control and a clear mind-body separation. Designing artificial agents on the basis of the principles that we observe in biology is not an easy task. The principles of organization of animals and plants rely on …

Monocular depth foundation models make it tempting to replace depth sensors on mobile robots with a single RGB camera. We show that, used off the shelf, this is unsafe: in a simulated indoor navigation benchmark, a standard Nav2 stack driven by Depth Anything V2 (metric) collides in 63\% of 120 episodes, because the model systematically over-estimates the distance to nearby obstacles. We propose a lightweight plug-in module that turns predicted depth into \emph{safe depth}. A 0.58\,M-parameter head on top of the \emph{frozen} depth model predicts, per pixel, a log-depth correction $\mu$ and …

We present FAME-QP, a GPU-accelerated solver for dense quadratic programs arising in linear model predictive control. FAME-QP combines constraint-dependent operator representations with fused single- and two-kernel iterations replayed through CUDA graphs, automatically selecting the execution configuration through device calibration and problem-specific timing. It probes a cached operator bank to select the initial penalty and updates operators lazily when problem matrices change. Numerical benchmarks and simulated humanoid and quadrotor control experiments demonstrate reduced latency …

Robot demonstrations contain reusable manipulation knowledge, but transferring this knowledge across embodiments requires representations that bridge differences in control interfaces. Action reconstruction alone does not ensure that similar behaviors across robots share a representation. To address this gap, we introduce CIALLO, an action codec that aligns actions, visual changes, and observation-grounded language in a shared space of short-horizon behavioral intent. An embodiment-conditioned decoder maps this intent back to robot-specific actions, allowing a shared representation to support …

Reliable state feedback of excavator front-end mechanisms is essential for autonomous excavation, yet retrofitting existing machines with dedicated joint sensors, external cameras, or visual markers can increase deployment and maintenance burdens. This paper proposes a closed-loop autonomous excavation framework for continuous inference of excavator joint states using onboard visual observations and control-related temporal information. The framework encodes structural cues from the current cab-view image, models short-term motion trends from historical joystick commands, and introduces a …

Reasoning about people's plans and goals based on their actions is fundamental to human social interaction and essential for cooperative, embodied artificial intelligence. Formalizing this capacity in naturalistic, embodied settings has been a longstanding challenge. Here, we present GenEA, a novel agent representation capable of reasoning over multi-step, long-horizon embodied plans. At the heart of GenEA lies a multilevel state-space that couples the coarse biomechanics of an articulated body and its interactions with nearby objects by extending the task-and-motion planning framework from …

Conventional visual--inertial odometry (VIO) assumes that observations from cameras and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) are jointly consistent in an inertial reference frame. However, this assumption breaks down under non-inertial conditions. Inside accelerating or rotating carriers, visual observations of the interior reflect carrier-relative motion, while IMU measurements contain additional carrier-induced components, which can compromise conventional fusion. We therefore present NIF-VIO for localization relative to the local environment across inertial and non-inertial reference frames. …

Smart industrial solutions that can address multiple tasks require models that understand the underlying processes. We examine representation learning for modeling the injection moulding process as an example of such solutions. We consider its data efficiency and multi-modal benefit compared to classical machine learning alternatives. To this end, we synthesize a process-informed dataset based on a real reference cycle of an Erlanger Tr\"ager part. We then introduce MouldIt, a temporal convolution and attention based variational autoencoder that reconstructs in-mould signals, while …

KAIST Indoor Localization System (KAILOS) was introduced in 2014 and became one of the world-first complete indoor positioning solutions. It is mainly based on the WiFi signal to estimate location and provide positioning service via mobile application that has many restrictions by the Operating System. This study proposes an extended architecture of KAILOS to make use of the IoT device for removing the barriers of the mobile-app-based approach and conveniently providing indoor positioning service. Design of the IoT device that contains hardware and software is also presented. Via this study, …

Egocentric human video (EHV) records close-range hand-object interaction (HOI) and the temporal structure of everyday activities, offering a potentially scalable source of experience for robot manipulation. Using this experience for robot control requires recovering useful supervision without recorded robot actions and accounting for differences in morphology, viewpoint, and action space. We define Ego2Robot learning as the process of learning or adapting robot manipulation policies from EHV, organized into four learning paradigms: explicit embodiment transfer, explicit action and task …

Pretrained latent world models can support visual planning and control, but their predictions may fail when physical dynamics change at deployment. We study whether such models can adapt from only a few interactions without modifying their pretrained weights or identifying the changed physical parameters. We introduce a few-shot residual adaptation approach that learns self-supervised corrections from latent prediction errors. The corrections are applied both inside the latent predictor and directly to its predicted latent state, while the pretrained world model remains frozen. We evaluate …

Photorealistic and metrically consistent world representations are a primary requirement for LiDAR--inertial--visual SLAM systems that serve robots over continuous operation. 3D Gaussian splatting makes such representations attainable by supplying an explicit, renderable, and queryable scene model. We present GEMOR-GS (Global Extrinsic-calibration-refined Mapping and Online Relocalization for 3D Gaussian-Splatting SLAM) to make the Gaussian map geometrically accurate, globally refined, and re-enterable, providing a better appearance for robot perception and decision-making. To improve the …

Accurate inertial odometry is critical for autonomous systems but suffers from unbounded drift caused by the integration of sensor noise and biases. In approaches such as TLIO, neural pseudo-measurements are trained independently of their downstream filter. This paper introduces Differentiable Filtering for Inertial Odometry (DFIO), a learning framework that embeds the update stages of an error-state Kalman filter directly into a computational graph. Following standalone pre-training, DFIO jointly optimizes the displacement and covariance output heads using posterior-position supervision …

End-to-end navigation in cluttered environments relies on compact visual representations to support collision avoidance and goal-directed motion. Existing methods typically learn these representations jointly with the policy or through observation reconstruction, which does not explicitly specify what information the representation should preserve. Moreover, they are usually evaluated with a single downstream policy learner, although the benefit of a representation may depend on how the policy is learned. It therefore remains unclear how different representation-learning objectives affect …

Existing cooperative end-to-end driving works at Class A (status-sharing) of the SAE J3216 classes of cooperative driving automation (CDA): vehicles exchange what they perceive, not what they intend, so each plans alone when to go, which limits cooperation and leads to deadlock when both vehicles yield or to collisions when both go. We present When2Go, a cooperative end-to-end driving system that learns when to go by sharing intent under CDA Class B or higher. Each vehicle broadcasts its LiDAR detections with forecast motion as instance tokens, together with its plan and intended trajectory. …

Co-speech gestures can increase engagement and improve speech understanding. Yet, most data-driven robot systems generate either rhythmic beat-like motion or semantically meaningful iconic gestures, but not both. We present an emotion-aware rhythmic-semantic co-speech gesture system that generates iconic and beat behaviors in real time from text and the robot's internal emotional state. We formalize the task of beat-iconic gesture generation using emotion and propose lightweight models that predict iconic timing and intensity, then fill the remaining spans with emotion-conditioned beats at an …

Decision making in multi-agent and multi-robot systems often involves discrete decision variables, leading to NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems that must be solved within seconds for near real-time implementation. Denoising diffusion has emerged as a powerful tool for such problems, but existing approaches face a trade-off: Model-Based Diffusion (MBD) incorporates diffusion in sampling-based optimization (SBO) without training but only over continuous spaces, while existing diffusion-based combinatorial solvers operate over discrete spaces but require offline training. To this end, …

Design-stage disassemblability assessment requires knowledge of product structure and the operations available in each assembly state, but CAD assemblies do not directly specify state-dependent disassembly operations. This paper proposes a fastener-centric virtual-disassembly framework that acquires such knowledge from CAD-derived virtual assemblies. Fasteners jointly releasing the same constraint are grouped into operation-level sets, avoiding enumeration of arbitrary individual-fastener orders. Their removability is evaluated through state-dependent visibility and tool-access checks and …

A humanoid that dances to streamed music must commit each motion chunk before it has heard the music that chunk accompanies, and must continue from motion it has already committed. We present AHEADance, a robot-native streaming dance generator executed on a humanoid robot by a whole-body tracker. ListenAhead conditions each chunk on heard music and a frozen music model's forecasts of the coming music, aligned to their target times and weighted by reliability. The forecasts carry the timing of upcoming beats almost as well as the actual future; with them, the generator is better synchronized …

Task-driven design of soft robots requires the consideration of factors such as geometry, morphology, material properties, and actuation, resulting in a large and complex design space that is challenging to explore. Computational optimisation methods leverage signals from simulation to iteratively improve designs to achieve task objectives. However, these methods typically demand high computational load for both optimisation and simulation. We present PneuGen, an agentic co-design framework for soft robots that leverages Large Language Model (LLM) agents to search over the soft robot design …

Flow matching robot policies commonly use a fixed Euler step count selected from offline accuracy sweeps. At inference time, however, each policy input (visual observation, robot state, and language instruction) together with a source-noise draw defines a different ODE trajectory and sequence of local Jacobians. We ask whether a step count that accurately follows the nominal noise-to-action trajectory can still be too coarse for strongly contracting directions around it. An exact two-coordinate system and a controlled augmentation of six trained flow models show that trajectory accuracy and …

Purpose: Robot-based haptic dyads, where two users exchange forces through robots, have been proposed for robot-assisted neurorehabilitation. This intervention could increase motor learning by promoting motor variability, providing an implicit communication channel, and facilitating social interaction. Despite the potential benefits, few studies have investigated robot-based haptic dyads for neurological populations, and none have included a comprehensive clinical assessment. Design/Methodology/Approach: We present a pilot study investigation of individuals with chronic stroke learning a …

Planning planetary rover trajectories under probabilistic uncertainty is a multi-objective optimization problem that science teams currently iteratively solve and verify by hand. This process becomes impractical when timelines and constraints frequently shift throughout the mission planning phase. Sampling-based planners such as Monte Carlo tree search can speed up this process, but their outputs do not preserve traceability to the science objectives that justify each plan, which the science team needs to verify. We propose an interactive assistant based on a large language model (LLM) that …

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar provides weather-robust sensing and direct Doppler measurements, yet automotive perception pipelines often reduce its output to sparse point clouds or two-dimensional projections, leaving raw range-azimuth-Doppler (RAD) cubes underutilized. Ego motion induces Doppler responses from world-static structures, while Doppler wrapping aliases radial velocities, complicating moving-object detection and velocity estimation. We present RaMOD (Radar-based Moving-Object Detection), a real-time framework for moving-object detection and velocity estimation from raw RAD cubes …

In cooperative object manipulation, the placement of pushing contacts determines whether force closure can be achieved and agents can generate arbitrary forces and torques on the object correspondingly. This study derives a necessary and sufficient closed-form condition for the planar force closure of a rectangular object, a common object shape in everyday settings, under four frictionless pushing contacts. For a rectangle of length $b$ and width $a$, force closure holds if and only if $(l_1+l_3-b)(l_2+l_4-a)<0$, where $l_1,l_2,l_3,l_4$ are the four edge contact locations. This condition is …

A person running a bench experiment works from a printed instruction sheet, tells identical containers apart by the labels written on them, and looks at the bench again before each step. Lab automation usually works the other way around: the procedure is written as a script, and containers stand at fixed positions or carry fiducial markers. We present Curie's Jarvis, a system that lets a robot arm carry out a chemistry experiment on a bench set up for people. It reads the steps from a photo of the printed sheet, finds containers on an ordinary bench with no fixed positions or markers, tells …

Efficient robotic 3D reconstruction requires selecting views that contribute new surface measurements with few physical captures. Pretrained world models can guide this choice, but a predicted surface may not produce valid depth measurements under the operating conditions of the deployed sensor. We present a deployment adaptation methodology for next-best-view selection that learns a sensor-return adapter from limited local calibration data while keeping the pretrained predictor fixed. The adapter estimates measurement dropout over each predicted surface, allowing the selection method to …

We introduce Latent Barrier Steering (LBS), a hierarchical semantic-to-path framework for safe flow-matching-based generative planning. Existing control-barrier-function (CBF) safety filters for diffusion and flow-matching planners act locally on generated samples, either during sampling or after prediction. Such repair is effective for small violations, but can struggle when a new constraint blocks the whole selected behavior mode rather than merely perturbing it locally. LBS decouples behavior selection from path certification through two coordinated interventions: it first steers the …

Many rehabilitation robots execute prescribed motions using reactive tracking controllers that do not explicitly incorporate the user's instantaneous human-ground interaction. This paper presents Ground Reaction Force-Aware Model Predictive Control (GRF-MPC), a framework for upright physical assistance. By integrating live GRF and center of pressure (CoP) measurements directly into a human centroidal dynamics model, GRF-MPC formulates a real-time quadratic program (QP) that optimizes assistive forces and moments over a receding horizon. We deployed GRF-MPC on the Robotic Upright Stand Trainer …

Effective search and rescue (SAR) operations require autonomous systems capable of coordinating multiple heterogeneous agents, adapting to dynamic hazards, and aligning with human mission intent. Existing language-guided reinforcement learning (RL) methods primarily focus on single-agent instruction following and lack mechanisms for team-level coordination in complex, partially observable environments. This paper presents a Cognitive Multi-Agent Framework based on Language-Grounded Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (LG-HRL) that integrates natural-language understanding, hierarchical policy …

Vision-language-action (VLA) models now exceed 95% success on the LIBERO simulation benchmark, yet it remains unclear how much of this performance requires generalization beyond the training demonstrations. In this work, we show that retrieving nearby demonstrations and reusing their action chunks achieves a success rate of 91.7 % on LIBERO without policy training. Under LIBERO-Plus perturbations, retrieval shows the smallest drop of all evaluated policies. Across nine publicly available VLAs, fine-tuning mostly makes the vision-language backbone a better retrieval key, and the actions of the …

Learning-based decentralized collision avoidance must remain reliable under state-estimation uncertainty and heterogeneous agent dynamics. Existing methods typically address these factors through training-domain variation or by exposing uncertainty and capability estimates to the policy at runtime. However, both leave the policy to infer how these quantities should alter the physical separation required for safe interaction, which can couple collision-avoidance behavior to relationships learned from the training distribution. We introduce the Dynamic Oriented Bounding Box (DOBB), an online …

System identification requires expert decisions on the identification method, incorporation of prior physical knowledge, and model validation. We propose ASPIRE, a framework for nonlinear system identification in which a large language model agent selects and executes the identification method. ASPIRE constructs closed-form, nonlinear static or dynamic models from measured data, optionally supplemented by a system description, the intended use of the model, and physical requirements expressed formally or in natural language. Each model includes its parameters, an estimation record, an …

Reliable medical laboratory automation requires robots to complete entire workflows in protocol order while handling changes during execution. A robot may execute each motion correctly yet fail the workflow by confusing visually similar stages or stalling after human intervention. We present Robo-MLT, a dual-system framework that couples explicit workflow monitoring with learned action generation. A vision--language planner composes an ordered atomic-skill sequence from the protocol and the initial workspace observation. A multiframe execution monitor detects when the active skill has …

Robot agents can improve reusable skills, planning procedures, and recovery strategies from execution feedback, yet a fixed practice source leaves the search for new weaknesses unchanged. Useful practice depends on the agent's current capabilities, so the procedure that chooses practice must also be revisable. We present RoboACE (Robot Adversarial Co-Evolution), a framework that jointly evolves curriculum and execution harnesses around frozen foundation models. The curriculum harness uses accumulated capability evidence to propose informative challenges, while the execution harness responds …

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet processing dense visual tokens often incurs high inference latency. Visual token pruning offers a practical way to reduce this cost, but identifying a compact set of tokens that preserves reliable action generation remains challenging. Existing methods largely rely on static or immediate heuristic cues to estimate token importance. We introduce APS-VLA, a framework that learns visual token selection from robot demonstrations while keeping the pretrained VLA backbone frozen. A lightweight …

Embodied Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are backbones for robotic planning and manipulation. However, for coordinate prediction in grounding tasks, existing architectures suffer from two distinct bottlenecks: discrete tokenization disrupts spatial continuity with high decoding latency, while standard point regression fails on multi-contact affordances and irregularly shaped targets. To resolve these challenges, we propose PhysMoE, introducing three core contributions: (1) sharing lower layers for multimodal context while routing upper layers to specialized spatial (pixel) and linguistic (text) …

Scene-driven robot autonomy requires selecting tasks from observations as well as executing them. We study scene-driven task formulation and execution under predefined cleaning, safety, and storage/organization categories, without instance-specific goals or action sequences. CAFE maintains online memory of objects, functional zones, and execution states. A rule-guided Trigger-LLM admits formulation from accumulated evidence; Draft, Complete, and Audit propose goals, resolve execution details, and check dependencies. Outcomes update memory for correction and subsequent discovery. Evaluation in …

Recent advances in large models have accelerated AI for Science toward agentic science, where AI agents autonomously conduct scientific discovery. Realising this vision requires closing the loop between computational reasoning and physical experimentation, positioning self-driving laboratories (SDLs) as critical enablers. However, existing SDLs exhibit a fundamental paradox: foundation model integration has increased linguistic sophistication while severing physical grounding. By treating models as disembodied planners that output symbolic workflows for separate robotic systems, current …