Nachrichten & Forschung

arXiv:2608.17600v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual cues are increasingly adopted to guide robot learning, but whether Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models can reliably follow authorized cues while disregarding unauthorized ones remains unclear. Existing work covers only a narrow range of cue forms and focuses on final task success, providing only a coarse assessment of cue-following capability. Treating all visual cues as authorized also leaves safety risks of unauthorized following unexplored. To address these gaps, we introduce LIBERO-VIFO, a benchmark to evaluate both the capability and safety of visual cue following in VLA models. LIBERO-VIFO defines eight visual cue families spanning diverse forms. A total of four protocols in two parts are defined: Part I tests cue understanding and authorized following, while Part II evaluates unauthorized visual cue following under language-cue conflict and empty language conditions. Evaluating seven VLA models reveals that although visual c

arXiv:2608.17596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this study, we investigate developmental mechanisms that enable small, resource-constrained systems such as cm-sized millirobots to autonomously explore, learn, and adapt their capabilities throughout their lifespan. Reinforcement learning algorithms guide the agent's skill acquisition and adaptation through the interplay of our proposed tinyDSM, which integrates intrinsic motivation and fitness-based assessment. We strive for minimal, hard-wired skills while encouraging the open-ended development of new skills. A key emphasis in our approach is to encode minimal a-priori general knowledge, which serves as a foundational starting point for the system as it further learns system-specific dependencies from the initial knowledge provided. Thus, by design, our approach attempts to cover very generic application domains. The methodology is based on (a) developmental mechanism with intrinsic motivation, and (b) a cognitive architecture (know

arXiv:2608.17584v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose HODAgent, a System-2 embodied agent for humanoid robots in service settings, addressing situated intent, responsive execution, task revision, and outcome verification. Its semi-duplex architecture integrates an Env-Interactor, Planner, Executor, and hierarchical Memory to maintain coherent interaction, planning, and task state during service episodes. This allows handling new requests during motion, retaining progress, revising actions, and grounding closure in execution outcomes. A shared interface connects simulation and physical robots (Unitree G1), isolating platform-specific control. In an interactive simulation with 164 cases, HODAgent achieves 84.8% and 91.5% Joint Success under two VLM backbones, outperforming baselines by 9.8 and 18.9 points. On physical robots, pass rates are 92% (atomic), 72% (composite), and 63.3% (complete tasks). On multiple embodied benchmarks, it improves over baselines by 0.7-9.0 points. Re

arXiv:2608.17553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cameras are ubiquitous sensors in robotics due to their compact form factor and the perceptual richness captured through visual information. Monocular SLAM enables robots to understand the environment with a minimum setup, however, it inherently suffers from scale ambiguity. A common solution is to provide multi-modal sensor configurations, such as visual-inertial systems, where scale is observable unless the robot navigates under a constant-velocity motion, a common scenario in mobile robotics. With the advent of deep-learning, geometric foundation models have been used to address this problem, but the depths maps are often noisy and scale-inconsistent across frames. In this paper, we propose Scalix, a real-time monocular SLAM framework that achieves metric-scale state estimation by integrating learned depth cues into a probabilistic factor-graph formulation. By augmenting existing monocular depth models with both per-pixel depth uncerta

arXiv:2608.17512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly advanced embodied navigation, their direct deployment remains challenging, as existing methods often force VLMs into unnatural action spaces that misalign with their 2D pre-training priors, compounded by rigid reasoning schedules and inefficient memory management. To overcome these limitations, we propose TAMP-Nav, a unified framework for efficient embodied navigation. First, we introduce a Pixel-to-3D Action Formulation (Point) that reformulates navigation into 2D visual prompting. Specifically, the VLM merely selects 2D pixels, which are then projected into 3D coordinates for a low-level SLAM controller. This design naturally aligns embodied execution with the VLM's inherent 2D visual capabilities. Second, we propose an integrated Selective Reasoning and Anchor-Trajectory Memory mechanism (Think and Memorize), which dynamically triggers Chain-of-Thought and retains high-fid

arXiv:2608.17496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action policies generalize broadly but provide no execution-time guarantees; classical model-based planners respect kinematic and geometric constraints but generalize poorly. We study whether an action-conditioned Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) world model can predict, before execution, both task progress and physical risk for candidate action chunks, and whether coupling these predictions to an embodiment-specific model-based safety shield yields a deployable pipeline for heterogeneous robots. We propose a receding-horizon decision pipeline: (1) a proposer produces K candidate action chunks; (2) an action-conditioned JEPA rolls each candidate forward in a frozen-encoder latent space conditioned on an embodiment embedding; (3) calibrated risk and progress heads score each rollout and report uncertainty; (4) a deterministic per-embodiment safety shield filters inadmissible candidates; (5) a fallback ladder h

arXiv:2608.17453v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-horizon humanoid vision--language--action (VLA) control with head-mounted stereo cameras requires visual interfaces that can exploit complementary views while maintaining compatibility with pretrained representations. Existing interfaces often discard complementary stereo evidence or fuse additional observations without preserving the native primary-view pathway and adapting auxiliary information to robot embodiment. We present EATR-Stereo, an embodiment-aware token-routing framework that retains primary-view tokens and constructs primary-aligned Cross-View Auxiliary Tokens (CVATs) by querying the synchronized auxiliary-view token sequence. A body-segmented proprioceptive encoder further conditions token-wise auxiliary usage on robot configuration history, enabling selective incorporation of stereo evidence during action generation. The routed auxiliary stream augments the language and primary-visual context of a pretrained VLA w

arXiv:2608.17423v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: GRPO is increasingly used for reinforcement learning of vision-language-action (VLA) policies because, unlike PPO, it does not require training a critic. This simplification comes with a sampling cost: group-relative advantages require multiple rollouts from each scene. Under binary success rewards, groups whose rollouts all succeed or all fail have zero advantage and are discarded by dynamic sampling. These groups are especially common early in training, when most rollouts fail, wasting much of the expensive robotic rollout budget. We introduce Prism-GRPO, which augments binary outcome reward with a weighted trajectory-level execution-quality score. By splitting same-outcome groups into a quality spectrum, Prism-GRPO recovers training signal while ensuring that every success still outranks every failure. Quality scores can be derived from simulator contacts, executed actions, or visual observations, avoiding task-specific progress reward

arXiv:2608.17416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper addresses the multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) problem, which is essential for delivery and logistics applications. Our approach first defines a new cost function that transforms the MRTA into a unified optimization problem capturing both task assignment and routing. A bi-layer ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is then introduced, integrating two interdependent decision layers within a single colony process to solve the problem. This hierarchical framework enables simultaneous optimization of task allocation and route planning across multiple robots. Comparative experiments with mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) demonstrate that the proposed bi-layer ACO achieves the shortest total travel distance and fastest completion time across all task sizes. Specifically, it reduces total travel distance by up to 17.7% and completion time by nearly 20% compared with baseline methods. The

arXiv:2608.17386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation-model policies for robotic manipulation are advancing rapidly on task success, but rigorous evaluation of whether they succeed safely is still lacking. We introduce ManiGuard, a specification-grounded framework for evaluating and improving the safety of foundation-model manipulation, comprising the ManiGuard-Bench task suite and a paired safety-annotated trajectory-generation pipeline. ManiGuard-Bench organizes six contact-rich household task families into 200 locked base tasks along a skill $\times$ constraint taxonomy, with safety specified independently of task success. Each task is evaluated under one in-distribution and four single-axis out-of-distribution perturbations that hold the safety specification fixed, giving 1,000 locked scenarios. Every rollout is runtime-checked by LTL$_f$-grounded automaton monitors over physics-grounded predicates rather than learned classifiers or LLM judges, in simulation and on a physical

arXiv:2608.17324v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The continuously deformable geometry of modular robots makes it difficult to define a fixed representation for reconfiguration planning and analysis. This letter introduces a square-cell abstraction that maps deformable rhombus modules to fixed-size grid cells while retaining physically interpretable local motions through two primitives, pivoting and shearing. Under this abstraction, we prove that every non-straight edge-connected configuration with $N \geq 7$ can be transformed to a fixed canonical staircase using only admissible primitive motions. Since these motions are reversible, any two configurations in this class are mutually reconfigurable. The proof is constructive and directly yields a staircase-canonicalization planner that transports removable boundary modules while preserving connectivity. As a practical enhancement, we further introduce a boundary-to-delivery lookahead selector that ranks admissible high level choices witho

arXiv:2608.17323v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic manipulation policies trained via imitation learning, such as Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT), can achieve strong performance under ideal conditions but often remain sensitive to small execution errors and distribution shifts. Correcting these failures typically requires dataset aggregation and full-policy retraining, which is computationally expensive and unsuitable for real-time deployment. In this work, we propose Online Residual Policy Adaptation (ORPA), a framework that enables immediate, feedback-driven correction of robot actions without modifying the underlying policy parameters. ORPA augments a pretrained control policy with a lightweight, feedback-conditioned module that predicts residual adjustments directly in joint space, allowing the system to adapt its behavior at runtime. We evaluate ORPA on a set of precision-sensitive manipulation tasks using the ALOHA platform, demonstrating improvements in success rate

arXiv:2608.17320v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Brachiation is a form of locomotion in which primates move primarily using their arms, enabling traversal in environments without footholds. However, this motion requires highly coordinated whole-body movement and precise timing control for bar grasping and release. As a result, achieving robust behavior on life-sized robotic platforms remains challenging. In this study, we present a reinforcement learning-based method to realize brachiation on a life-sized dual-arm robot. The core of the proposed approach is Waypoint-Guided Reinforcement Learning (WGRL), a learning framework for inducing non-linear and complex motions. For high-difficulty tasks where imitation learning data are unavailable, WGRL guides behavior acquisition by sparsely specifying waypoints for the end-effector trajectory, while whole-body motion is generated through reinforcement learning. In addition, by integrating the waypoint-following guidance with rewards based on t

arXiv:2608.17209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: End-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models offer an elegant route to general-purpose robotics, but their reliability is bounded by validated physical coverage. When an unfamiliar object, sensor, embodiment, or contact falls outside that coverage and no validated fallback exists, correcting the failure requires new robot data, a policy update, and regression testing. This recurring burden is the retraining tax. Unlike text, embodied data must often be created by operating machines. We present Teach-and-Grow Learning (TGL), an agent-centered architecture for general robot learning. In its general form, a multimodal agent turns a few successful demonstrations into reusable Skill Blocks: closed-loop behaviors for meaningful subgoals. In a new scene, the agent grounds and composes these blocks, selects learned or geometric tools, observes the physical outcome, and revises the route when execution departs from intent. A Ski

arXiv:2608.17146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symbolic planning with PDDL offers a principled framework for long-horizon robot manipulation, but constructing accurate PDDL domain and problem descriptions remains a significant bottleneck, typically requiring substantial domain expertise. We present a Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based approach called PDDL-ART, a framework that autonomously generates task-specific PDDL domain and problem descriptions from a single expert demonstration, a natural language task description, and a library of available high-level action names. PDDL-ART does not require any domain templates, action signatures, or fine-tuning. To ensure the generated descriptions are not only syntactically valid but semantically aligned with the demonstrated task, PDDL-ART introduces a multi-stage correction pipeline operating at syntactic, semantic, and execution levels. A key component of execution-guided correction is symbolic predicate grounding. Instead of relying solely