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arXiv:2610.41625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low inference latency is critical for closed-loop robotic manipulation, especially under asynchronous inference, where action chunks must be updated promptly to correct accumulated deviations. However, existing visuomotor policies rely on computationally expensive visual backbones, resulting in high inference latency and deployment overhead. In this paper, we propose RTPolicy, a multi-view visuomotor policy that attains accurate manipulation with high inference efficiency. Its core design combines view-aware feature fusion with visual compression to aggregate complementary information across camera views into a compact token representation. The representation conditions a flow-matching action generator with the robot state and flow time, reducing the cost of action generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this design reduces the computational cost of visual representation and action generation while preserving visual information

arXiv:2610.41609v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A robot should act only on an instruction from a person or on an intent that the robot explicitly represents and generates. Unintended actions taken without such an instruction can cause risk or inconvenience to people and the environment. We examine how recent vision-language-action (VLA) policies respond when the instruction is missing or meaningless. We apply a paired protocol with empty, neutral, nonsense, infeasible, and wrong-task instructions to six model checkpoints in LIBERO-Goal simulation. Holding the initial state fixed and varying only the instruction, we ask three questions: whether the robot starts to move, which task it completes, and what the instruction determines. Even when the instruction was empty, the robot started moving in every episode with all six checkpoints, and with five of them it often completed a task that the instruction had not specified. On two GR00T checkpoints, the instruction determined which task was

arXiv:2610.41558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collision-free motion planning for multi-agent robotic systems remains an active research area because of the complexity of coordinating robot trajectories, with applications ranging from coordinated drone shows to autonomous operations on land, in the air, and on water. Importantly, the analytical difficulty of nonconvex collision-avoidance constraints has so far driven the development of exclusively numerical methods. We derive a complete analytical characterization of the optimal trajectories for two robots that start and end at rest, under double-integrator dynamics and a squared-acceleration objective. We prove that these trajectories belong to eight distinct contact families and determine which family applies for each configuration of initial and final positions. We analyze the geometrical properties of the optimal trajectories, provide a numerical algorithm for computing them, and discuss how these insights may improve the performa

arXiv:2610.41548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent robotic systems have attracted growing interest in recent years, with applications ranging from coordinated drone shows to autonomous operations on land, in the air, and on water. At the planning level, robot motion is often modeled using double-integrator dynamics (with low-level controllers handling the physical dynamics during execution) with a minimum-energy objective subject to collision-avoidance constraints and limits on position, velocity, and acceleration. The complexity of the problem resides in the constraints, which couple the trajectories and make the optimization problem nonconvex. Existing numerical approaches typically discretize and optimize entire trajectories, which becomes expensive for large fleets. We exploit the structure of optimal trajectories by organizing optimization around contacts, at which robots reach the minimum allowed separation. We formulate a coupled algebraic system in contact variables an

arXiv:2610.41477v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving safe navigation in confined dynamic environments remains a challenging problem, as robots must balance navigation efficiency with safety. Existing actor--critic MPC architectures typically employ differentiable MPC layers, but this way cannot readily accommodate explicit state constraints, making it intractable to involve collision avoidance within learning-based planning. To address this issue, we propose an actor--critic model predictive control framework with state constraints. We first use vertices to represent the robot and obstacles, and half-spaces to represent the workspace. Based on these, the nonlinear robot dynamics is locally linearized and the hyperplane-based collision avoidance constraints are convexified into the differentiable MPC layer, and then the actor exploits closed-loop feedback to adjust the MPC objective parameters that shape local motion behavior, while the critic evaluates long-term task performance.

arXiv:2610.41456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic exploration can reduce human exposure to hazardous environments by autonomously searching unknown areas for objects of interest while constructing a complete, risk-aware map. However, existing autonomous exploration approaches typically prioritize geometric coverage or information gain, without explicitly coupling semantic object detection and the risk associated with operating near potentially hazardous objects. Moreover, many systems have been demonstrated primarily in simulation or controlled environments, leaving limited validation of risk-aware semantic exploration in complex, unstructured field settings. To address this gap, we propose SAFARI, a framework that treats object detection as a native channel of a unified probabilistic map, thereby jointly informing exploration and planning with both geometric and semantic evidence. We evaluated SAFARI in 11 missions across three field sites on a quadruped platform. The framework

arXiv:2610.41429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Percutaneous needle insertion is a common practice in minimally invasive procedures whose clinical success depends on accurate needle placement. However, achieving the necessary precision is a challenge for manual operators. Robotic assistance can improve targeting accuracy and reduce operator dependence, but residual millimeter-scale errors persist because nominal kinematic models do not fully represent the physical manipulator. This paper presents a robust bound-constrained kinematic calibration method designed to improve positional accuracy for a 6-Degree-of-Freedom (6-DoF) robotic needle-guidance manipulator. The approach uses physically plausible parameter ranges to regularize a compact 19-parameter geometric identification model. By treating these bounds as active optimization constraints rather than mere numerical safeguards, the framework effectively mitigates parameter coupling and overfitting, ensuring highly stable parameter id

arXiv:2610.41383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Executing an unfamiliar laboratory protocol requires a robot to identify missing capabilities and determine whether each operation remains valid as the experiment progresses. This letter presents BioAgent, an embodied agent that addresses these coupled challenges of capability sufficiency and experimental validity. It matches human-reviewed requirements to validated skills and task packages, selects tool-based implementations for missing behaviors, and requests human teaching when needed during learning. Learned skills undergo sequential task-package validation to check outcomes and compatibility between successive operations. During execution, precondition, outcome, and experimental-state checks govern progression, autonomous recovery, or termination. Execution evidence guides tool selection, while accepted experience supports offline policy updates and task packaging. On the second task, BioAgent reuses 17 skill types unchanged, revises

arXiv:2610.41377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world robotic manipulation requires reasoning about cluttered scenes, partially observable or hidden objects, and semantically appropriate actions, in addition to low-level execution within those scenes. However, existing simulation benchmarks primarily test the latter and remain dominated by comparatively clean environments with limited clutter and narrowly scoped task structure, leaving many forms of commonsense reasoning untested. We address this by introducing a taxonomy of reasoning processes for robotic manipulation grounded in developmental cognitive science. We operationalize this taxonomy through a new benchmark of robot tasks, MolmoSpaces-CommonSense, that requires reasoning about occlusion, containment, support relations, semantically correct grasp points, spatial affordances, and hidden objects. These evaluations require policies not only to recognize relevant scene structure but also to execute correct actions in them. W

arXiv:2610.41354v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General humanoid motion trackers typically rely on deterministic policies that cannot adapt online without brittle reference editing or costly retraining. We present DiffWBC, shifting whole-body control to a generative paradigm via a one-step diffusion model. By modeling distributions over future trajectories, DiffWBC unifies general tracking, test-time steering, and simulation-free failure discovery within a single controller: (1) Generative general tracking: DiffWBC requires a single forward pass per 50 Hz control step and can be distilled from an RL teacher or trained from scratch via model-based RL, achieving the lowest local tracking error among six general trackers on held-out benchmarks (20.1 mm on BONES) and deploying on a physical Unitree G1. (2) Zero-shot test-time steering: differentiable cost gradients and body-group masks modulate the frozen controller online, substantially outperforming kinematic reference editing (0.84 clea

arXiv:2610.41352v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Camera--LiDAR perception on mobile robots and intelligent vehicles depends on reliable sensor geometry throughout deployment. Installation variations create uncertainty in the initial extrinsics, while changing observation quality makes frame-wise estimates fluctuate during operation. This paper presents CalibSwitch, an observation-driven framework that separates absolute extrinsic recovery from selective state maintenance. A cross-modal absolute extrinsic generator (CAEG) combines projection-free bidirectional feature interaction with geometry-regularized learning to recover complete SE(3) candidates from image--point observations and coarse view context, without a supplied numerical initial transform. A selective recurrent calibration policy (SRCP) combines observation quality and temporal history to determine when a candidate should replace the working geometry consumed by a frozen multimodal detector. On nuScenes, CAEG achieves mean t

arXiv:2610.41349v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we focus on interaction-preserving motion retargeting, which transfers human demonstrations to humanoids while maintaining spatial relationships with objects and terrain. Previous work, such as OmniRetarget, addresses this task through temporally coupled constrained optimization, requiring repeated sequential quadratic programming (SQP) iterations at each frame. We study this problem from an ordinary differential equation (ODE) perspective by modeling the continuous-time limit of its framewise Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions as an ODE on the robot configuration manifold. This viewpoint offers two benefits: (i) it connects OmniRetarget's SQP iterations to a backward discretization of the ODE, enabling us to establish their local convergence under suitable regularity assumptions; and (ii) it leads to TaSP-KKT (tangent-space parametrization for KKT flow), a new retargeting method based on a forward discretization of the KK

arXiv:2610.41348v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots deployed in unstructured environments are susceptible to actuator-authority degradation, which reduces the effective control authority of individual actuators and can cause reinforcement learning policies trained under nominal dynamics to fail. Existing robustness approaches rely on discrete fault labels, broad domain randomization, or global latent variables, often without explicitly modeling continuous per-joint residual actuation capability. We propose a joint-health-aware reinforcement learning framework for robust robot control under simulated actuator degradation. Our framework encodes actuator condition in a continuous joint-health vector and models degradation as multiplicative attenuation of executed actions. A dedicated HealthNet estimator infers per-joint health from recent observations and actions, allowing the policy to redistribute control effort across healthy and degraded joints. We evaluate the method on Walker, Go

arXiv:2610.41336v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning dexterous manipulation from human videos remains an open challenge, particularly in the context of transferring a single demonstration into a spatially generalizable robotic skill and maintaining physically plausible human-like interactions. Unlike prior works that emphasize hand-motion imitation, we introduce an object-centric framework for acquiring dexterous skills from egocentric human RGB-D videos. Within our framework, we formulate the reinforcement learning (RL) objective in terms of object motion to decouple the underlying skill from the specific hand trajectory and impose constraints on hand-object interaction states to promote more anatomically natural hand configurations. Extensive experiments in simulation and on real robots demonstrate that our method enables efficient learning from human videos and generalizable skill transfer across novel spatial configurations.

arXiv:2610.41334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent generative models are widely used to provide whole-body motion for humanoid tracking. Current methods combine motion generators with controllers in an open-loop paradigm, which leads to critical issues: tracking errors can accumulate into spatial drift, and the planner cannot adapt to unexpected physical disturbances without feedback from physical execution. However, directly feeding realized states back to the planner in a closed loop can cause discontinuities, resulting in physical jitter and even falls, since such states are out of distribution during training. To bridge this gap, we propose HIPC, a real-time Humanoid Iterative Planning and Control framework that couples a generative model with motion tracking into a unified planning-and-control paradigm. HIPC introduces a goal-conditioned motion planning trained with a canonical motion representation that avoids gimbal-lock singularities under extreme orientations and supports