Nachrichten & Forschung

arXiv:2605.20561v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Isoperimetric robotic trusses can adapt to different tasks and environments due to their high strength-to-weight ratio and the ability to reconfigure dramatically into new shapes. However, motor failures in operational environments can severely limit capability if not properly addressed. This paper presents a fault-tolerant control framework for an inflatable robotic truss that maintains functionality despite motor failures, demonstrated through three key contributions. First, we extend the kinematic optimization to handle arbitrary combinations of motor failures by imposing equality constraints to ensure failed actuators are not used. Second, we introduce discrete-time control barrier function (DTCBF) constraints that, under the assumed kinematic model, mathematically guarantee structural rigidity while maximizing workspace utilization. Third, we implement closed-loop position control using onboard encoder feedback and a forward-kine

arXiv:2604.25323v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in open-vocabulary mobile manipulation have brought robots into real domestic environments. In such settings, reliable long-horizon execution under open-set object references and frequent disturbances becomes essential. However, many failures persist. These are not caused by semantic misunderstanding but by inconsistencies between symbolic plans and the evolving physical world, manifested as three recurring limitations: (i) existing systems often rely on pre-scanned semantic maps that become inconsistent after scene changes and disturbances; (ii) they select navigation endpoints without considering downstream manipulation feasibility, causing the "arrived but inoperable" problem; and (iii) they handle anomalies through undifferentiated global replanning, which often fails to contain local errors. To address this execution inconsistency, we present ANCHOR, a physically grounded closed-loop framework that aligns symbolic

arXiv:2604.11757v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for building general-purpose robotic agents. However, the VLA landscape remains highly fragmented and complex: as existing approaches vary substantially in architectures, training data, embodiment configurations, and benchmark-specific engineering. In this work, we introduce StarVLA-$\alpha$, a simple yet strong baseline designed to study VLA design choices under controlled conditions. StarVLA-$\alpha$ deliberately minimizes architectural and pipeline complexity to reduce experimental confounders and enable systematic analysis. Specifically, we re-evaluate several key design axes, including action modeling strategies, robot-specific pretraining, and interface engineering. Across unified multi-benchmark training on LIBERO, SimplerEnv, RoboTwin, and RoboCasa, the same simple baseline remains highly competitive, indicating that a strong VLM backbone combine

arXiv:2601.19406v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real-robot demonstrations are prohibitively expensive, while simulation data and real-world human demonstrations are both scalable but each leaves a distinct gap: simulation suffers from a sim-to-real visual gap, and human data suffers from a human-to-robot embodiment gap. In this work, we identify a natural yet underexplored complementarity between these sources: simulation contributes robot-valid actions absent in human data, while human data provides real-world observations that simulation struggles to render. Building on this insight, we present SimHum, a co-training recipe that extracts kinematic priors from simulation and visual priors from human observations, then fine-tunes on a small real-robot dataset. SimHum exhibits strong scene-generalizable and data-efficient capabilities. With only 80 real-robot episodes per task, it achieves 62.5% success on held-out OOD scenes across four bimanual tabletop tasks, 53.7% higher than Rea

arXiv:2511.15227v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Model-based development accelerates prototyping, enables earlier experimentation, and ensures rigorous validation of system design intents. In multi-agent systems with complex asynchronous interactions and concurrency, formal verification, particularly model-checking, offers an automated means of confirming that desired properties hold. Timed Rebeca, an actor-based modelling language supporting reactive, concurrent, and timed behaviors, together with its model-checking tool, provides a powerful framework for this purpose. By leveraging these capabilities, Timed Rebeca can intuitively capture ROS2 node graphs, recurring physical signals, motion primitives, and other time-convertible behaviors. Nevertheless, modelling and verifying multi-robot systems entail significant challenges: abstracting intricate information, bridging the gap between discrete models and continuous system dynamics, and managing large state spaces while preserving

arXiv:2509.12390v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper addresses collaborative formation control for multi-agent systems with limited resources. We consider a team of robots tasked with achieving a desired formation from an arbitrary initial configuration. To reduce unnecessary control updates and conserve resources, we propose a distributed event-triggered formation controller. Unlike the well-studied linear formation controllers, the proposed controller is nonlinear and relies on inter-agent distance measurements. Control updates are triggered only when the measurement error exceeds a state-dependent threshold, ensuring system stability while reducing actuation effort. We also employ a distributed control barrier function to guarantee inter-agent collision avoidance. The proposed controller is validated through simulations and real-world experiments involving different communication topologies, scalability tests, and variations in design parameters, and is also compared to pe

arXiv:2506.12374v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Natural-language manipulation instructions specify the task goal but leave the underlying robot trajectory unspecified. We present AntiGrounding, a visual action-selection framework built around a dual geometric-visual trajectory interface. After feasibility filtering, each retained short trajectory is both an explicit motion plan for execution and a rendered prompt for instruction-conditioned vision-language model (VLM) evaluation. Structured multi-view visual question answering (VQA) scores safety, task alignment, efficiency, and physical plausibility; weighted view fusion aggregates the trajectory scores. These scores guide subsequent translational trajectory proposals; separate orientation and gripper controls coordinate interaction. An initialized digital twin provides the planning state and validates selected segments before the real robot executes the same waypoint sequences. Across eight real-world manipulation tasks, AntiGrou

arXiv:2609.20673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To operate effectively in human environments, robots must identify articulated objects, segment their movable and interactive parts, and estimate their kinematic models. Existing articulated scene representations typically recover kinematics from observed interactions, while methods operating on static scans often decouple articulation from functional interactive elements. We present FunArt, a framework that constructs articulation-aware functional 3D scene graphs from posed RGB-D observations captured in a single static configuration. FunArt reconstructs object instances, converts their fused geometry directly into the O-Voxel representation of TRELLIS.2, and exploits its frozen, sparse-compression VAE as a structural prior. A lightweight query-based decoder combines compact object-level latents with dense, surface-aligned features to jointly segment movable parts and functional interactive elements while estimating motion type, axis,

arXiv:2609.20475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-vocabulary scene understanding is fundamental for robotics, laying the groundwork for spatial reasoning and object manipulation. While closed-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation heavily leverages 3D shape information, state-of-the-art open-vocabulary methods remain predominantly restricted to 2D image features or image-distilled representations during mask labeling. In this paper, we propose SenseFuse, a label-free fusion method that balances 2D image and 3D shape encoders for robust open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation, refining only the mask-labeling stage of existing pipelines. We reveal that 2D image and 3D shape encoders exhibit largely disjoint failure patterns and rarely share identical wrong labels, whereas two 2D image encoders frequently repeat the same errors. This distinct behavior makes the 2D and 3D pair inherently complementary. We introduce an adaptive mechanism that selects a scene-level fusion weight to maximi

arXiv:2609.20277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) have demonstrated strong robotic manipulation capabilities by augmenting pretrained video generative models with action experts. However, current WAMs still show limited instruction-following ability when conditioned solely on text instructions. We argue that this limitation stems in part from a structural imbalance in robot-learning data: rich visual-action trajectories are often paired with sparse and repetitive language annotations, allowing policies to identify tasks from visual context and motion regularities rather than grounding the instruction itself. To address this limitation, we introduce JEPA-WAM, which augments each text instruction with a bank of stochastically generated visual instructions, providing diverse visual cues for instruction following. Specifically, JEPA-WAM uses an off-the-shelf text-to-image generator to sample multiple task-completion images conditioned on the text instruction, wit

arXiv:2609.20235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indoor mobile robots require open-vocabulary scene understanding that grounds natural-language queries in a consistent 3D map. Many existing systems ultimately rely on cosine-similarity retrieval with contrastive image--text encoders, which is efficient but brittle when labels are near-synonymous or multiple similar instances appear. We present Scene-Q, a confidence-aware coarse-to-fine querying framework that normalizes encoder scores with temperature scaling and selectively invokes a reasoning VLM only for low-confidence cases. High-confidence queries are answered by fast retrieval, while ambiguous ones are reranked over a small top-K candidate set using the original multi-view images and instance bounding boxes, enabling context-aware disambiguation at low cost. Scene-Q improves open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation on ScanNet200 and natural-language 3D instance retrieval on real-world reconstructions, with the largest gains on sp

arXiv:2609.19592v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study developed and evaluated a deep-learning-based perception framework for selective robotic cotton picking. The dataset contained 1,008 annotated field images collected using three cameras under varying natural lighting and weather conditions. Object-detection models from the YOLOv8 through YOLOv13 families were evaluated using their default configurations, while segmentation performance was assessed using YOLOv8-seg, YOLOv11-seg, YOLOv12-seg, the Segment Anything Model (SAM), SAMv2.1, FastSAM, and Grounded-SAM with the Recognize Anything Model (RAM). Among the detection models, GELAN-s achieved the most favorable balance between mean average precision (mAP) and inference speed, obtaining an mAP of 86.1%, precision of 81.6%, recall of 76.6%, and an F1-score of 79.0%, with an average inference time of 42.3 ms per image. Among the direct segmentation models, YOLOv12-m-seg provided the most favorable balance between AP@0.5 and FPS,

arXiv:2609.19542v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-vocabulary segmentation enables rich semantic perception for UAVs, but frame-wise predictions can remain temporally inconsistent across repeated observations and changing viewpoints. We present PerSeM, a training-free persistent semantic memory framework for long-horizon open-vocabulary UAV mapping. PerSeM associates frame-wise semantic observations with persistent world-space voxels and constructs a majority-based semantic memory, which is conservatively refined through history-preserving spatial refinement, trust-aware replay, and context-guided verification. Experiments on the Forest and UAVScenes benchmarks show that persistent 3D memory provides substantial gains in semantic correctness and temporal stability over frame-wise predictions. Beyond this strong persistent-memory baseline, PerSeM provides consistent additional improvements, improving both semantic accuracy and temporal stability across all five evaluated UAVScenes s

arXiv:2609.19518v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present AMB3R-SLAM, a real-time monocular SLAM system capable of reconstructing kilometer-scale trajectories over 10k frames on a single consumer-grade GPU. Our model couples a lightweight front-end for low-latency online tracking with a hierarchical backend that progressively enforces local, mid-level, and global consistency. By avoiding bundle adjustment that relies on the static world assumption, our system naturally handles complex dynamic scenes out of the box. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method can be extended to leverage stereo, RGB-D, and LiDAR as additional inputs. AMB3R-SLAM achieves strong camera tracking performance across 9 datasets, reducing the absolute trajectory error (ATE) of previous state-of-the-art methods on VBR and Oxford Spires by over 70%. With additional LiDAR input, our model further reduces ATE to sub-meter level on KITTI and VBR datasets.

arXiv:2609.19463v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present ParticleSplat, a self-supervised object-centric learning method that decomposes scenes into a set of latent ''particles'' representing semantic entities through feedforward 3D Gaussian Splatting. Building on the Deep Latent Particles (DLP) framework, which represents images as a set of particles with attributes such as position, scale, and visual appearance, we address a key limitation of DLP: its inherently 2D nature, which prevents explicit 3D spatial and geometric reasoning that are critical for downstream tasks such as robotic manipulation. Leveraging the structural similarity between latent particles and 3D Gaussian primitives, we introduce a 3D latent particle space trained with a novel view synthesis objective. Our model jointly encodes multiple views with camera poses into a shared 3D object-centric latent space, then transforms particles into particle-aligned 3D Gaussians whose composition reconstructs the full scene