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arXiv:2609.26304v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tendon-driven continuum manipulators are widely used in medical applications, where accurate tip-position estimation is essential for precise navigation and instrument positioning. However, patient anatomy and procedural setup impose task-dependent unknown shaft configurations, while friction, slack, and compliance introduce hysteresis, making tip estimation challenging. This paper presents a motor-history-conditioned gated recurrent unit (GRU) residual estimator for three-dimensional catheter tip estimation without direct shaft-configuration sensing. First, an initial multidirectional sweep strategy is applied to calibrate a geometric catheter model backbone, and encode the motor-angle and drive-torque response into a shaft-configuration context vector. During subsequent motion, the context conditions a GRU that predicts a task-space residual correcting this backbone, relying on motor measurements alone. The context remains fixed for the

arXiv:2609.26292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical-condition diversity is largely missing from current benchmarks for robot manipulation. While large-scale simulation benchmarks increasingly incorporate variations in object appearance, scene layout, and visual observations, they typically keep the underlying physical parameters fixed. As a result, important sources of real-world variability, such as changes in mass, friction, and joint dynamics, remain largely untested. We introduce RoboTwin-Phys, a physics-diverse benchmark that treats physical-condition diversity as an explicit dimension of robot manipulation evaluation. The benchmark continuously varies 13 physical attributes within physically plausible ranges, providing a unified setting for evaluating policies across diverse physical operating conditions. We further release more than 5,000 expert demonstrations with ground-truth physical parameters, enabling physical-attribute estimation, condition-aware modeling, and physic

arXiv:2609.26267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Free-floating space manipulator systems face operational challenges due to dynamic coupling. While traditional reactionless manipulation eliminates base disturbances, enforcing the null-space projections across all rotational axes imposes excessive constraints on the system and drastically reduces the available workspace. To address this limitation, this work proposes a multi-axis selective decoupling framework that nullifies momentum transfer exclusively along mission-critical directions. By leveraging a directionally constrained sub-coupling matrix, the framework relaxes the null-space constraints. Numerical simulations confirm that this approach mathematically eliminates constrained directional disturbances along the targeted axes while preserving the remaining degrees of freedom, enabling the manipulator to execute task-space operations successfully.

arXiv:2609.26256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-fidelity tactile feedback is essential for robotic teleoperation, enabling precise manipulation and critical decision-making. While biomimetic fingertip sensors can capture surface-texture features, how their design shapes the tactile transparency of rendered feedback remains poorly understood. This paper presents a biomimetic fingertip replicating the human finger's multilayer mechanical gradient and fingerprint morphology, with an embedded high-sensitivity inertial measurement unit capturing texture-induced vibrations for remote vibrotactile rendering. Three variants are compared with the human fingertip through temporal and spectral analyses and a user study spanning three perceptual dimensions, establishing a transmission chain from fingertip design through signal characteristics to tactile transparency. The multilayer mechanical gradient yields the clearest improvements in signal intensity and texture-feature representation, whe

arXiv:2609.26238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The manipulation of Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs) such as cables poses a significant challenge for automation due to their infinite degrees of freedom and non-linear dynamics. In this paper we present a machine learning based optimal control approach for the manipulation of DLOs. This approach is divided into two main components: modeling and control. For modeling the dynamics of the DLO, we propose a learning based approach using a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (biLSTM) network. The biLSTM network is trained on synthetic data generated by the MuJoCo physics engine. For manipulating the DLO, a model predictive control strategy that employs Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control is selected. The proposed approach is evaluated through simulation and experiments. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving accurate and efficient manipulation of DLOs.

arXiv:2609.26184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into robotic control systems is enabling a new generation of autonomous agents capable of complex reasoning and planning. While this paradigm shift accelerates progress, it also introduces novel security risks that remain largely unexplored. Current research into LLM backdoors has focused on attacks triggered by external stimuli, such as specific words, visual objects, or environmental states. These attacks, while potent, overlook a more insidious class of vulnerability where the trigger is internal to the agent's own operational logic. This paper presents the first comprehensive study of history-based backdoor attacks on LLM-powered robotic systems. We demonstrate that an attacker can embed a stealthy backdoor into an LLM-based robot controller by manipulating its instructions. This backdoor is triggered not by an external cue, but by a specific, rare sequence of the robot's own past action

arXiv:2609.26155v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ubiquitous robotic systems often lack traditional visual interfaces, making natural language interaction important for maintenance and repair. This paper presents a goal-oriented agentic AI architecture that enables non-expert users to complete technical repair tasks through situated dialogue. The architecture separates pre-interaction goal decomposition, persistent state tracking, strategic goal management, and real-time conversational execution. We evaluated the system in a physical hardware repair task with twenty participants. Nineteen participants completed the task, corresponding to a 95% completion rate. Participants rated the system as helpful and competent, and the agent remained robust to conversational diversions such as meta-queries and code-switching. A comparison with a prior online baseline showed that physical interaction significantly reduced perceived social presence, (p=.0005), and trust and competence, (p=.037), while

arXiv:2609.26131v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models and vision-language models are increasingly used as high-level planners in robotic systems, using task goals and sensor summaries to select navigation or manipulation actions. This creates a new backdoor surface: a compromised planner can behave normally in most runs, yet change its target selection when a hidden trigger is present. Prior attacks on LLM-powered or embodied agents mainly rely on triggers that appear in language, camera-visible objects, scene semantics, or specific sequences of past actions. This paper presents StepTrigger, a contact-state-triggered backdoor attack for VLM-powered legged robots. The trigger is not a prompt token or a visible marker. It is produced by pressure and foot-ground contact patterns that arise when a Unitree Go1 quadruped walks across a dense terrain patch. Unlike conventional visual or textual triggers, contact signals are inherently noisy and may also arise during benign loc

arXiv:2609.26130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Crack detection is a crucial process to ensure the safety and longevity of buildings and other infrastructure. In this paper, we developed a low-cost, automated crack detection robot that leverages CNN, EfficientNet-B0, and YOLOv8 for efficient identification of cracks in concrete surfaces with a curated crack image dataset introduced to support training and evaluation. YOLOv8's real-time object detection enhances crack localization, while CNN and EfficientNet-B0 provide binary classification, ensuring high precision and recall. The system consists of two stages. In the first stage, YOLOv8 detects and localizes wall regions from the video frame, and the bounding boxes are cropped. The second stage performs crack detection using one of three models by analyzing the cropped regions. Cost-effective approaches are also taken for robot design. The robot features a fan-based negative pressure adhesion system, a 4-wheeled skid-steering drive, an

arXiv:2609.26084v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The integration of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offers unprecedented semantic reasoning capabilities. However, real-time closed-loop navigation requires not only low inference latency but also obedience to structured flight commands. This paper proposes a hybrid FSM-VLM control architecture for UAVs in GPS-free environments. The system combines a deterministic Finite State Machine (FSM) for low-level physical control with an asynchronous VLM copilot for high-level semantic pathfinding. We evaluate three models with different parameter scales in a Software-In-The-Loop (SITL) simulation. The framework isolates and measures syntax errors at the format level versus semantic hallucinations at the logic level in a normal and degraded scenario. This study demonstrates that parameter scaling, and not pure latency, remains the primary bottleneck for the safe and compatible integration of VLM into auto

arXiv:2609.26083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a situation aware locomotion framework for two mobile collaborative robots operating in shared industrial environments. The proposed method models situation awareness through perception, comprehension, and projection to support locomotion decisions. Robot pose, load state, manipulator state, shared zone occupancy, obstacle state, and predicted inter robot conflict were used to select safe locomotion actions. The framework was implemented in simulation and evaluated in simulated industrial scenarios designed to match a feasible 4 m by 4 m physical test area. The proposed method was compared with two other baselines over multiple trials and randomized seeds. The results show that the situation aware method achieved 100% task success across all scenarios, while the independent and fixed priority baselines each achieved 33.3% overall success. The proposed method eliminated shared zone conflicts and safety stops, maintained

arXiv:2609.26071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models inherit strong semantic priors from large-scale vision-language pretraining, yet remain limited in robotic manipulation by insufficient 3D spatial awareness. Existing approaches either require explicit depth or point-cloud inputs, compress geometry into training-time supervision, or inject it only at the model input or action expert, leaving the vision-language backbone without persistent access to task-relevant spatial information. We introduce StrataVLA, a plug-and-play framework for hierarchical geometric grounding. A frozen geometry foundation model extracts shared geometric features from RGB observations, while sparse, layer-specific Geometry Adapters allow visual representations at selected backbone depths to retrieve relevant geometric evidence through cross-attention. To make inference-time geometry practical, StrataVLA further combines task-aware routing with an LRU feature cache that exploits

arXiv:2609.26051v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the challenges of enabling effective collaboration between human operators and heterogeneous autonomous agents in complex, dynamic environments by developing an interaction platform that allows study of operator behavior and supports intent inference and decision-making using state-of-the-art frameworks. We demonstrate the extent to which the operator's perception, decisions, and actions could be supported by autonomous systems during search-and-rescue operations with our platform.

arXiv:2609.26007v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monocular drone navigation requires reaching a goal in an unseen environment from a single forward-facing camera, which offers few cues for depth and scale. World models address this by modelling how observations evolve under actions, but they are built to be executed: the prediction is produced at deployment and fed back into action generation at every control step. We argue that what a policy needs from a world model is not the prediction but the representation required to produce it: in flight the executed action explains almost all of the change between observations, so prediction reduces to reprojecting a static scene under a known displacement. We therefore introduce skytopia, a policy built on an action-conditioned latent world model, and the 3D Gaussian Splatting platform on which it is trained. A forward objective predicts the representation of the next observation from the intended motion, and an inverse objective recovers that

arXiv:2609.26004v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most research on the manipulation of deformable objects focuses on lightweight systems with negligible mechanical response, effectively restricting attention to quasi-static regimes. This assumption excludes a broad class of practically relevant objects, such as hoses, pipes, and wiring harnesses, whose dynamics cannot be ignored during manipulation. In this work, we address this limitation by introducing a closed-loop control architecture that explicitly accounts for object dynamics and recasts manipulation as a shape-regulation problem. Control is achieved by modulating forces and torques applied at multiple fixed points along the object. This approach builds on three methodological contributions: a fully dynamic model of linear deformable objects based on discrete strain parameterizations; an extension of the notion of actuation coordinates to SE(3), yielding a structured and inherently underactuated control architecture; and nonlinear