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arXiv:2609.06547v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time 3D mapping is fundamental for autonomous robotic navigation, with Euclidean Signed Distance Fields (ESDFs) serving as the standard representation for online motion planning. While recent advancements in non- projective distance fields yield highly accurate maps, their computational overhead remains a severe bottleneck. Conventional integrators redundantly re-fuse millions of depth pixels every frame, even long after the corresponding voxels have converged, wasting significant computational resources in environments dominated by large planar surfaces. In this paper, we present SHIFT (Surface-aware High-speed Integration For TSDFs), an efficient mapping framework designed to reduce this per-frame update cost. By exploiting structural redundancy directly from 3D depth geometry, SHIFT compresses flat local regions into weighted super-rays and freezes flat-voxel gradients. A compact ESDF voxel layout further reduces the memory footpr

arXiv:2609.06522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A hybrid hierarchical learning framework is proposed to achieve high-precision assembly of 170mm cylindrical components with tolerance of 0.1mm. The lower-level network integrates expert experience through Behavior Cloning (BC), giving the robot human-like intuition, and incorporates the Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) algorithm to enhance training stability and robustness. The upper-level network dynamically adjusts the lower-level decisions based on heuristic rules, ensuring flexibility in operations. A simulated model is constructed to learn before transferring to real world. An efficient and safe training is allowed. Comparisons show that the reward curve converges within 500 episodes, indicating high learning efficiency. It also demonstrates better adaptability to initial conditions and pose errors, achieving satisfactory success rates even under extreme conditions. Moreover, the method exhibits good stability u

arXiv:2609.06508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon robot manipulation with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies remains vulnerable to execution-time deviations, as final task success provides little information for diagnosing and correcting failures caused by action noise, object displacement, or goal misalignment. We introduce a stage-aware failure verification and Prompt Recovery framework that enables closed-loop correction of a fixed VLA policy without parameter updates or privileged simulator states. The framework introduces an observable-history-based Learned Verifier that jointly estimates manipulation progress and execution risk by temporally modeling multi-view visual observations, proprioceptive states, and executed actions. To provide interpretable task understanding, we represent manipulation execution through semantic progress stages, including approach, alignment, grasp, transport, and placement, and identify stage-specific failure patterns. Upon detecting abno

arXiv:2609.06433v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The generation of safety-critical traffic scenarios is essential for training and evaluating autonomous vehicles. Prior approaches typically perturb the trajectories of existing agents in a traffic scenario using simplified adversarial objectives to induce safety-critical interactions, which can limit the plausibility and diversity of the generated scenarios. Although inserting new adversarial vehicles can alleviate this limitation, determining when and where to introduce them in a scenario-specific manner remains challenging. In this work, we introduce \underline{CO}llision \underline{S}napshot guided \underline{T}im\underline{E}-\underline{R}eversed safety-critical scenario generation (COSTER), a framework that leverages learned traffic priors to determine plausible collision times and locations. COSTER first constructs a collision snapshot by inserting a new vehicle in contact with the target vehicle at the identified collision state w

arXiv:2609.06424v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Homes change between a robot's visits. Navigation benchmarks pose their goals in the world the agent currently sees, and the two-visit benchmarks that exist score recall or rearrangement rather than navigation. None of them can express go to the chair that was moved or go to where the vase used to be. OVMAN is a task in which an agent tours a scene, returns after a scripted change, and must navigate to a goal specified by the change itself. Two of its six change relations answer with a place an object has left, where nothing remains to be detected. We release 219 two-visit episodes, each certified solvable by an oracle agent that completes it three times. Two released systems fail as predicted. A zero-shot object-goal navigator reaches the change-defined target in 11.4% of episodes and essentially fails at vacated locations, 0.000 on former and 0.025 on removed. A self-maintaining open-vocabulary map answers past-tense queries at about a

arXiv:2609.06342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots navigating under occlusion may enter states from which no admissible input can avoid a dynamic obstacle once it becomes visible. We present OcclusionCBF, a safety filter that extends backup control barrier functions to reachable-occupancy predictions for potentially hidden dynamic obstacles in occluded regions. The method certifies a prescribed backup rollout against collision-inflated occupancy and a verified terminal set, yielding affine constraints for minimally invasive quadratic-program filtering. We establish recursive feasibility of the resulting safety filter, and collision avoidance for every hidden-obstacle motion covered by the occupancy prediction. Randomized benchmarks, MetaUrban simulations, and hardware experiments demonstrate improved task success over reactive and occlusion-aware predictive baselines with millisecond-scale computation.

arXiv:2609.06331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time control often sits between two limiting regimes. Predictive optimization and model-based control are powerful when dynamics, parameters, objectives, and online planning models are specified; reinforcement learning can relax this requirement, but must infer long-horizon value signals from sequential data and interaction, making training slow, high-variance, and hard to scale in large action spaces. This middle regime is common in systems including autonomous driving, warehouse robotics, traffic control, and delivery drones: partial geometry, physics, rules, or constraints are known, yet the local direction of task progress remains uncertain. Geometric Distributional Control (GDC) is designed for this partial-knowledge setting. It factorizes control into feasibility and progress: known geometry, rules, constraints, and response maps define an executable scaffold, while progress-weighted feasible data learns the missing directional

arXiv:2609.06279v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning-based manipulation requires supervision that is both semantically meaningful and physically executable, but current data pipelines often provide only one of these properties. Human demonstrations capture intent but are costly to collect and constrained by the human-robot embodiment gap, while simulation can scale data generation but often under-specifies functional behavior. We present IM-ENGINE, a simulator-grounded pipeline that uses image editing as an intermediate representation for embodied data generation. Given a rendered scene with known geometry, depth, segmentation, and camera parameters, IM-ENGINE edits the image to inject task-relevant semantics, recovers explicit 3D state using simulator priors and an unchanged anchor object, refines the state in physics, and converts it into robot-executable supervision. We instantiate the pipeline for dexterous grasp synthesis and goal-state generation. For grasping, IM-ENGINE gene

arXiv:2609.06273v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bundle length B is commonly fixed when configuring multi-task multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) algorithms. MinSum and MinMax are known to favor different task distributions, but the role of B in this objective tradeoff has not been systematically characterized. Additionally, degraded-communication evaluations also often retain settings selected under ideal communication, leaving whether nominal bundle-length tuning transfers under message loss unresolved. We examine both questions for ACBBA, PI, and HIPC across six bundle lengths in 300 paired ten-target Collaborative Visit scenarios under ideal communication and 25% Bernoulli packet loss. Under ideal communication, increasing B from 1 to 12 reduces MinSum cost by 19.0%, 23.0%, and 31.8% for ACBBA, PI, and HIPC, respectively, while increasing MinMax cost by 45.6%, 94.3%, and 67.6%. Under packet loss, the lowest-mean MinSum setting shifts from B = 12 to B = 2 for ACBBA and PI. Repeated p

arXiv:2609.06256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promising generalization for language-conditioned robot manipulation, but deploying them in unstructured environments remains challenging. A single end-to-end VLA policy must simultaneously solve long-range transport of the end effector to task-relevant regions and short-horizon, contact-rich interaction upon arrival. This formulation is inefficient and brittle: small visual shifts, distractors, clutter, occlusions, or unfavorable initial gripper poses can push the policy outside the local state distribution in which it was trained, leading to task failure. We introduce GloVLA, a hybrid framework that explicitly separates object-centric manipulation into two complementary regimes: a geometric transport controller moves the end-effector into interaction-centric handoff regions, and local VLA policies handle only the short-horizon interaction phases. GloVLA is model-agnostic and can be integrat

arXiv:2609.06221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have substantially advanced language-guided robot manipulation, yet reliable execution still hinges on identifying which physical object an instruction refers to. In cluttered scenes containing repeated objects, ambiguous anchors, or frame-dependent spatial terms, a robot can execute a geometrically valid action on a semantically compatible but unintended instance; we call this failure an identity switch. The referent is jointly determined by three coupled latent variables: the target, the anchor, and the reference frame, so committing to any one of them before execution turns residual ambiguity into a silent and irreversible error. We propose RefGuard, an identity-aware grounding framework that delays commitment by maintaining a joint posterior over all three variables. RefGuard builds a frame-conditioned object-centric scene graph from RGB-D observations, separating frame-independent geometry from dir

arXiv:2609.06061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Termination-based constrained reinforcement learning is attractive for safety-critical robotic deployments: it avoids online optimization at inference, scales easily to many constraints via a single scalar per constraint, and is simpler to implement than commonly used Lagrangian methods. Instead of pricing violations through summed cost penalties, this approach makes violations structurally unprofitable by shortening the effective horizon for each violation. We identify a structural failure mode of this method class on terminal-navigation tasks: reaching a precise goal configuration while satisfying safety constraints that tighten along the final approach. When the goal sits inside the region close to where the constraints become active, the survival-weighted objective makes dwelling outside the goal region strictly preferable to entering, producing high constraint compliance with low task completion. We formalize this pathology and show

arXiv:2609.06046v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a modular, high-fidelity simulation framework for the development and benchmarking of flight control strategies in fixed-wing aerial robots operating near the ground. Unlike existing simulators that rely on simplified or hover-oriented dynamics, our framework models full 6DoF rigid-body physics, semi-empirical ground-effect aerodynamics, actuator dynamics, sensor noise, and environmental disturbances. This physical realism, combined with modular component design, enables systematic analysis of low-altitude flight behavior under realistic conditions. The simulator supports both CPU and GPU backends via Torch and NVIDIA Warp, enabling high-throughput parallel execution suitable for large-scale reinforcement learning training and optimal control rollouts. A unified interface accommodates a range of controllers (both RL and optical control algorithms) across tasks such as altitude regulation and trajectory tracking. Cross-validatio

arXiv:2609.06009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-fingered dexterous manipulation remains a frontier for real-world reinforcement learning (RL) due to the high-dimensional action space and the prohibitive cost of hardware failures. While human-in-the-loop (HIL) RL allows operators to intervene before failures occur, current pipelines often treat these interventions as reactive corrections, discarding the rich safety signal inherent in the operator's decision to take control. In this paper, we ask: How can we learn from what a human would avoid? We present WHIRL, a safety-aware RL framework that transforms binary human interventions into forward-predictive signals for proactive risk avoidance. Our approach centers on an intervention-aware latent world model with four prediction heads: dynamics, reward, termination, and a novel per-state intervention-probability head that learns to predict the likelihood of a human takeover at future states. This head provides an actor-side risk-shap

arXiv:2609.05994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid loco-manipulation requires accurate whole-body motion tracking in the world frame for physical interaction. While local references preserve motion structure, they lack explicit constraints on absolute spatial placement, leading to accumulated global errors. Existing globally aware approaches augment teleoperation policies with global observations but do not explicitly integrate global correction with local motion guidance, limiting autonomous tracking accuracy. We present GLoRI, a closed-loop whole-body controller that integrates structured global reference and feedback with local motion guidance. Its GLoRI-Net uses Global-Local Cross Attention(GLCA) to refine local keypoint features with global target and pose-difference features, preserving motion structure while correcting world-frame placement. GLoRI achieves 100% completion and a g-MPJPE of 6.44cm on held-out HuMoTo motions. This accuracy remains robust under direct Isaac Gy