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arXiv:2609.22611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid robots can acquire complex skills by imitating kinematic humanoid motion references, yet reliable references for contact-rich interactions remain difficult to obtain: motion capture deteriorates under occlusion and close physical contact, while retargeting introduces additional contact and geometric inconsistencies. We present HIGenNTO, a framework that synthesizes humanoid-scene interaction motion references by optimizing the initial noise of a pretrained text-conditioned motion model under sparse spatiotemporal and scene constraints. The same formulation satisfies desired contacts, avoids collisions, and maintains stable support while retaining the prior's realism and temporal coherence, generating interaction motions from scratch and composing long-horizon behaviors stage-wise. Across robot-environment and robot-object tasks, HIGenNTO produces motions that can be executed by tracking policies in simulation and used to train de

arXiv:2609.22609v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Insertion is a fundamental operation in robotic construction assembly, where variations in material properties and assembly conditions make it difficult to select contact forces that complete the task without exceeding the assembly's capacity. Although construction documents encode engineering knowledge about materials and their conditions, translating this knowledge into load limits for a specific assembly remains difficult. This paper presents SAGE (Source-grounded Assembly Gating and Execution), a system that converts documented material evidence into capacity estimates for robotic insertion. SAGE restricts a large language model (LLM) to extracting tensile and compressive strengths from retrieved passages and tables and records their sources. A response model then interpolates offline finite element (FE) solutions to convert these strengths and the assembly conditions into axial load capacity. For fits with positive clearance, the est

arXiv:2609.22608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Projectile interception is a challenging dynamic manipulation problem. Intercepting a thrown object with a robot arm requires reaching a point on the object's path as the object passes through it. Slicing also fixes the blade's velocity and orientation at contact. The goal is therefore a subset of the states of the robot and arrival times that moves as the object falls, and the arm must reach it within its actuator limits in milliseconds. We present FRUITNINJA, an anytime sampling-based planner that grows a tree on the GPU in batches toward the interception manifold. Each edge is an exact cubic whose travel time is found by a parallel search against the arm's dynamics, so every edge satisfies the actuator limits. Plans are ranked by a risk-aware objective over the uncertainty in the object's position and the arm's arrival time. We evaluate on a Franka Research 3 against six baselines in a calibrated real-time simulator, where FRUITNINJA c

arXiv:2609.22606v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Tactile-Language-Action (VTLA) models have demonstrated clear advantages over Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in contact-rich manipulation. However, developing VTLA models is severely constrained by the massive amounts of vision-tactile data and computational resources required. To address this bottleneck, we propose VT-Bridge, a lightweight residual adaptation strategy that bridges pretrained foundation VLAs to VTLAs. Rather than training a VTLA model from scratch or modifying the original architecture of a pretrained VLA, VT-Bridge employs an identical lightweight residual-adapter architecture across VLA backbones and uses backbone-specific weights to refine actions at the robot execution frequency. This design substantially lowers the data and training barriers. Specifically, it requires up to 50 vision-tactile demonstrations per task to fine-tune a VLA backbone and train a 0.98M-parameter residual adapter. Experiments with

arXiv:2609.22594v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are a promising alternative to divers for scalable collection of natural ocean ecology data. However, these robots may disturb local fauna and cause drastic behavioral differences compared to other monitoring techniques, decreasing their value as scientific tools. A promising prospect is to make AUVs that are more biomimetic, with the hope that taking on the form and behavior of a non-predatory animal may reduce adverse responses. We present the first dataset comparing fish disturbance in response to a conventional thruster-driven AUV, a sea turtle inspired flipper-driven AUV, and a diver. Experiments were conducted at a biodiversity hotspot in a Caribbean reef, and images of the scene were analyzed using computer vision to localize and study fish behavior change. Both AUVs cause measurable changes in fish behavior. Although no between-robot differences remain significant after correction for multiple

arXiv:2609.22591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot learning policies fail in characteristic ways: they stall in uncertain states, drift during contact-rich alignment, and miss targets by millimetres in precision tasks. Yet training datasets consist largely of successful demonstrations, while real-world benchmarks often reduce performance to binary success. This limits both supervision for recovery and analysis of where failures occur. We introduce REBOOT (Recovery Episode Benchmark for Off-nominal Trajectories), the first robot manipulation benchmark designed around failure as a first-class signal. REBOOT contains 2,160 demonstrations across 18 precision assembly tasks, each decomposed into five shared phases: Align(pick), Engage(pick), Transport, Align(place), and Engage(place), enabling phase-level evaluation beyond terminal success. Failures are introduced across phases and paired with expert recovery trajectories that return the system to a valid continuation state. Tasks are an

arXiv:2609.22538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) planners can decompose natural-language instructions and select reusable robot skills, but choosing the correct skill does not guarantee successful physical execution. This gap is especially important in humanoid loco-manipulation, where errors during approach, grasping, transport, or placement can invalidate the remainder of a long-horizon plan. We present FRAMES, a failure-aware supervisory framework for the Unitree G1 humanoid that operates above the CEER whole-body controller. A Planner Agent selects subtasks through parameterized mid-level skills, while a vision-language-model-based Monitor Agent evaluates each skill using temporal multi-view observations and structured robot and contact evidence. Detected failures stop the active skill and provide grounded feedback to a Recovery Agent. The framework further includes a Memory Module for reusing prior skill experience, and geometric grounding via depth and s

arXiv:2609.22521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The performance of learned robot visuomotor policies depends heavily on the size and quality of their training data, yet collecting high-quality demonstrations remains costly for robots in the real world. Although large-scale robot and human datasets are increasingly available, embodiment gaps and mismatched action spaces make them difficult to leverage directly. Cross-embodiment transfer, reusing experience from other embodiments to improve learning on a target embodiment, is therefore crucial for scaling robot learning beyond per-robot data collection. In this work, we find that efficient transfer can be achieved by learning from what is shared across embodiments, the visual dynamics of how the world responds to motion, and by effectively exploiting the scarce target-embodiment data at test time. The proposed framework, called Latent Policy Steering (LPS), implements an embodiment-agnostic pretraining phase, which trains an image-based

arXiv:2609.22493v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a stacked two-layer force-sensing resistor (FSR) array designed for robotic fingertips that combines high-resolution pressure mapping with shear-force estimation. A compliant lattice elastomer spacer converts shear loading into a measurable inter-layer displacement, producing relative center-of-pressure (CoP) shifts between layers. A physics-based moment balance links inter-layer CoP displacement to shear force, while an end-to-end CNN--GRU model captures nonlinear effects from load-dependent compression and contact redistribution. This model, with both layers as input, achieves coefficients of determination $R^2 = 0.914$ for $F_x$ and $R^2 = 0.944$ for $F_y$, consistently outperforming single-layer baselines for shear-force estimation. Robotic manipulation experiments show that, for contact-motion tracking, the deep layer tracks the translation and rotation imposed by the robot arm, whereas the superficial layer track

arXiv:2609.22483v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic ultrasound (US) calibration is essential for accurately relating US images to the robot coordinate system, but accurate and automated calibration remains challenging because existing methods often require complex phantoms or external 3D trackers. In this work, we develop a tracker-free robotic US calibration framework using a spherical-marker phantom and a highly automated perception pipeline for sphere-center localization. The proposed threshold-free image-processing method localizes the spherical feature based on each US image's intensity distribution, eliminating hand-tuned intensity thresholds and improving robustness across imaging settings without per-system retuning. Multi-pose observations of the spherical fiducial are then used to estimate the US-to-EE transformation without external tracking or prior localization of the sphere center in the robot base frame. We validate the proposed framework on a robotic US platform thr

arXiv:2609.22462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models enable increasingly general-purpose robotic manipulation, but such learned policies do not provide safety guarantees for collision avoidance---especially in environments outside of training distributions. This work presents Vision-Language-Poisson-Safe Actions (VLPSA), a safety filtering framework that provides full-body safety for VLA policies in cluttered and dynamic environments without retraining. VLPSA synthesizes Poisson Safety Functions (PSF) online from perception data, yielding a Control Barrier Function (CBF) that is enforced through a CBF-QP safety filter over the full body and any grasped object, treated as an extension of the final robot link. To enable real-time deployment while maintaining fine spatial resolution in critical task regions, VLPSA combines dual resolutions of this PSF using Boolean CBF compositions. We evaluate VLPSA on SafeLIBERO against safety-filtering baselines, where it

arXiv:2609.22404v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Over the last decade, behavior trees (BT) have become one of the dominant behavior models for coordinating missions of robotic systems. Yet empirical evidence on BT adoption in real-world contexts remains limited, especially regarding practitioners experiences and practices. Without practitioner-grounded evidence from both academic and industrial settings, the research community risks developing guidelines and tools that are plausible in principle but only partly aligned with real challenges. This scarcity of evidence leads to ad-hoc practices, impeding software reuse, maintenance, and evolution. This paper reports a mixed-methods study combining a technical action research investigation at an automotive company with a survey of 34 robotics practitioners. Our results indicate that BTs improve team communication and the understandability of robotic decision-making logic, reflecting BTs practical value beyond mission coordination. At the sa

arXiv:2609.22332v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalizable robot manipulation requires predicting how a scene will evolve, identifying where interactions are feasible, and determining how to act. Action-labeled robot videos directly supervise control but are costly and limited in diversity, whereas egocentric human videos capture diverse interactions but lack robot actions and differ in embodiment and appearance. We introduce AffordanceWAM, an affordance-aware generative World Action Model that represents object-centric spatiotemporal affordance through Scalar Affordance and Affordance Heatmap, within the generated future World. This representation grounds visual prediction in task-relevant objects and interaction regions for action generation, and provides shared interaction targets across human and robot videos. Built on a pretrained video diffusion Transformer, AffordanceWAM uses separately parameterized World and Action Experts, coupled through Masked Joint Self-Attention, to jo

arXiv:2609.22319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid progress of artificial intelligence is reshaping robotics and accelerating the adoption of learning-based approaches. While purely data-driven methods have achieved remarkable success in computer vision and natural language processing, robotics remains constrained by limited data, complex real-world interactions, and the need for reliable operation. These challenges have motivated the exploration of physics-embedded robot learning, which embeds physics priors into learning algorithms. By encoding the underlying physical laws and constraints, physics priors can complement limited data with robotics-specific inductive biases, potentially improving generalization, interpretability, and sample efficiency. However, the literature on physics-embedded robot learning remains fragmented across terminology, methodologies, and application domains, making it difficult to assess this growing body of work. This survey reviews physics-embedded

arXiv:2609.22299v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When a robot faces unfamiliar physical conditions, a common approach is to collect evidence about what changed and adapt. For such diagnosis to improve behavior, six ordered empirical conditions must hold: a meaningful reference, identifiability of the physical condition, use of the acquired evidence, decision value, selection value over a fixed alternative, and safe realization. We test this chain in controlled and public environments. In our controlled environments the frozen policy chooses correctly on every decision, but which evidence it buys is fixed by how the panels assign decisions to evidence strata. On three mechanisms absent from training, the frozen decoder fails its registered transfer gate. On all 96 decisions of the transfer panel, its full-trace input lies far outside its training range, and on such inputs it returns one answer whatever the trace contains. All 15 of its errors fall in the 30 decisions from which cheap