Nachrichten & Forschung

arXiv:2608.16642v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate throwing of the American football requires precise regulation of release conditions, where coupled linear and angular momentum determine flight stability and targeting accuracy. While prior work on robotic object throwing has largely focused on generating dynamically feasible release velocities using open-gripper paradigms, explicit control of spin injection at detachment remains underexplored, particularly for aerodynamically anisotropic objects like the American football. In this paper, we present the spin-stabilized controlled tight spiral throw of an American football by a humanoid robot. Achieving this requires (i) accurately reaching the desired coupled momentum, which often involves high degrees-of-freedom (DoF) movements completed within approximately half a second, and (ii) managing the complex transient contact dynamics that arise during the sub-100-millisecond release phase, when the football is effectively underactuat

arXiv:2608.16640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) often suffer from navigation failures in dead ends due to limited sensing accuracy and range. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a systematic solution for efficient dead-end prediction and avoidance. The proposed method introduces a lightweight neural network to predict the relative distance and bearing of potential dead ends within the current field of view using RGB-D inputs. These predictions prune a predefined, compact trajectory library, enabling the planner to proactively avoid dead ends while maintaining navigational smoothness. Notably, our approach transfers across real-world scenarios without manual annotation or fine-tuning on real-world data. The system achieves high-frequency replanning at 50 Hz onboard. Extensive simulation benchmarks demonstrate superior performance in success rate, flight time, and trajectory length, and real-world experiments further validate its ef

arXiv:2608.16590v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied agents are increasingly used to close the gap left by end-to-end policy models. Yet the agentic path has not realized closed-loop learning in physical execution: existing harnesses remain largely open-loop, following fixed skills during rollout and reflecting only after an episode completes. Such post-hoc reflection cannot govern execution as it unfolds, because physical interaction requires decisions to track rapidly changing robot-environment states at a frequency beyond today's large agentic models. We present Zetta, a closed-loop embodied harness that evolves code-based runtime critics and recovery skills online while keeping the base policy frozen. Through three timescale-separated loops, Zetta provides action-frequency governance, rollout-level critic-recovery proposal, and validation-gated skill updates. Together with Z-Infra, a rollout infrastructure decoupling agent logic from heterogeneous execution resources, Zetta ach

arXiv:2608.16572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from demonstration is a promising approach for dexterous manipulation, but collecting high-quality contact-critical demonstrations remains difficult with low-cost teleoperation hardware. We present ViHaTeleop, a lightweight (0.7 kg), low-cost (\$550) visual-haptic teleoperation system with SLAM-based wrist tracking, camera-based hand tracking, and finger-wise vibrotactile feedback through Linear Resonant Actuators (LRA). The system includes several design choices (LED illumination, fisheye hand camera, and tactile-aware retargeting constraints) and is deployed on Franka + LEAP Hand + 9DTact in both real and simulated environments. Under matched with/without-haptic conditions with nine participants across six contact-critical tasks, haptics improved success rates across all tasks (+2.2 to +15.6 percentage points), while completion-time effects were task-dependent. Subjective ratings showed significant gains in contact clarity and

arXiv:2608.16555v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in AI technologies have enabled the advanced design of complex control policies. In contrast, focusing on the body, many robots still employ simple bodies that can limit adaptability to environments. Studies in embodied robotics have shown that well-designed bodies can partially replace the role of control and computation with physical body-environment interactions, yet such designs still depend heavily on expert intuition. There is a need for a systematic theoretical framework for body design, as well as a method for joint optimization of the body and controller. To address this, we introduce the Embodied Perceptron, a theoretical framework that unifies neural networks and physical body systems. In this view, the body itself acts as a perceptron: mechanical parameters correspond to weights, and physical nonlinearities play the role of activation functions. By representing physical constraints as weights and nonlinear prop

arXiv:2608.16503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world deployment of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is often bottlenecked by efficiency-performance trade-offs, cross-embodiment generalization, and execution smoothness. We present NebulaVLA, an asynchronous dual-frequency architecture that decouples high-level semantic reasoning from low-level action control, optimizing computational resources and modularity. To bridge semantic gaps across heterogeneous robots, we introduce GESTURE-7, a unified language-grounded action representation. Furthermore, our Guide Action algorithm enforces kinematic continuity via mask-based smoothness constraints. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that NebulaVLA significantly outperforms synchronous baselines, achieving an 85.5\% average success rate on LIBERO-Plus and accelerating action generation by \textasciitilde 2.7$\times$. This asynchronous design enables highly efficient and responsive control for practical robotics.

arXiv:2608.16442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inspection is a core capability in many mobile robotics applications, including industrial facility monitoring, infrastructure maintenance, agriculture, and search and rescue. Observing the bottom of a cylindrical cavity, as required by ASTM search-task benchmarks for response robots, presents a representative challenge: the robot must position its camera precisely while satisfying visibility, kinematic, and collision constraints. This paper presents a fully autonomous method for observation-constrained inspection of cylindrical cavities in robot joint space. Rather than prescribing a single Cartesian camera pose, the method represents the inspection objective as a set of valid viewing geometries, thereby avoiding the rejection of reachable viewpoints and configurations with poor joint-limit margins. An RGB perception front end estimates the opening center and directed cavity axis from semantic masks using arc-supported ellipse fitting to

arXiv:2608.16433v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traversal Risk Graphs (TRGs) provide a compact, terrain-aware representation for global navigation, but native TRG costs are computed over circular node neighborhoods and edge-aligned terrain regions rather than the robot's oriented body footprint. For wheeled-legged robots, this abstraction can miss partial support loss and body-terrain interference, especially during turns. We present Robot-Body-Aware TRG planning (RB-TRG), which builds on the sparse TRG representation and lifts edge-wise terrain-risk search to heading- and turn-aware body-risk transitions. An oriented rectangular footprint is sampled along graph edges and yaw sweeps to measure longitudinal support variation, lateral inclination, terrain interference, and exposure to untrusted map regions. Mean-and-upper-tail features are incorporated into transition costs, whose accumulated value is minimized by A* over ordered node-pair states, preserving TRG construction and its plan

arXiv:2608.16351v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dexterous grasp generation that considers arm-related constraints is crucial in real-world scenarios involving arm environment collision avoidance, workspace boundary grasps, and consecutive grasping. Existing hand-centric grasp models, which primarily focus on the floating hand's pose, are insufficient for such cases. Conventional arm-aware methods either rely on rejection sampling to discard infeasible samples or require retraining on arm-specific data, leading to low sample efficiency under adverse conditions or limited generalization across different robots and environments. To overcome these limitations, this letter presents an arm-aware dexterous grasp generation framework that leverages pretrained arm-agnostic grasp models while integrating arm and environmental information only at inference time. Specifically, we formulate arm-aware constrained grasp generation as a joint optimization of hand pose and arm configuration, and derive

arXiv:2608.16335v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Allocation schemes that greedily maximize a readiness metric over the actuator fiber bundle of an overactuated multirotor produce commands that jump between disconnected optimal strata, demanding actuator rates no motor can deliver; effort-minimizing schemes are continuous but cannot guarantee that wrench-rate authority stays above any certified level. We reconcile the two by treating authority as a forward-invariant quantity: a control barrier function on the log-determinant of the drag-aware actuator-authority co-metric, enforced at torque level by a quadratic program in the allocation null space. A single design inequality renders the certified set compact and strictly interior to the actuator box, with the readiness cost of any rotor deactivation given in closed form as $\ln(n/(n{-}m))$ for symmetric designs. Tracking is sacrificed only through an explicit alignment ratio, with wrench error bounded by $\mathcal{O}(\rho^{-1/2})$ and a

arXiv:2608.16281v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous operation in GNSS-denied environments requires heterogeneous mapping pipelines to maintain a consistent spatial reference. This paper presents a framework using camouflage-matched fiducial markers fabricated from Cholesteric Spherical Reflectors (CSRs) as pre-surveyed visual anchors. The anchors georeference both a lightweight LiDAR-odometry trajectory and a dense RTAB-Map reconstruction, allowing their outputs to be expressed in a common LUREF frame (geodetic coordinate reference system used in Luxembourg) without requiring GNSS measurements during operation. The method combines coarse similarity alignment with marker-constrained pose-graph optimization. We evaluate it using two handheld acquisition sessions with ground-level and elevated motion profiles emulating UGV and UAV operation. A single iMarker was relocated among six surveyed positions, with the first position revisited to quantify drift correction. Marker-anchor cor

arXiv:2608.16264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conventionally, robotic perception relies heavily on cameras due to the rich semantic texture they provide. However, their performance degrades significantly in low-light or high-dynamic-range environments. Conversely, while Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) captures illumination-invariant geometric and intensity properties, the resulting data are typically single-channel and sparse, creating a significant modality gap when applying vision models pre-trained on RGB datasets. In this paper, we propose Cyclops, a framework that translates sparse Non-Repetitive Scanning LiDAR (NRS-LiDAR) intensity into RGB video, enabling camera-free inference for all-day perception tasks. Our approach first converts sparse LiDAR intensity projections into dense representations via a frozen pre-trained densification module, serving as a geometrically rich source condition. The dense intensity latent is then transported toward the target RGB distribution th

arXiv:2608.16222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid intelligence requires learning over an extremely diverse space of whole-body motions and physically grounded interactions. However, existing embodied datasets remain fundamentally limited: internet-scale video data lack precise physical states and interaction grounding, while laboratory motion datasets provide high fidelity but only narrow behavioral coverage. This mismatch creates a critical bottleneck for scalable humanoid policy learning. We present HiPHI, a 600+ hour scale high-fidelity whole-body human motion dataset designed to systematically maximize coverage of the human motion and interaction manifold. HiPHI is theoretically guided by FrameNet, a linguistic framework organizing human primitives. Created using an optical motion capture pipeline, HiPHI provides sub-millimeter spatial marker tracking accuracy for full-body human motion and mesh-level object trajectories. We further introduce a benchmark suite evaluating mot

arXiv:2608.16221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable gas source localization (GSL) is critical to safety in industrial and urban environments, yet remains challenging indoors because walls and obstacles interact with airflow to create complex gas dispersion. High-fidelity models such as computational fluid dynamics and filament models can capture these effects, but their computational cost limits online use. We propose a deep probabilistic framework that infers the source posterior from sparse and noisy measurements collected by a mobile robot. Unlike end-to-end models that directly infer source estimates from measurements, the proposed method incorporates physical dependencies of indoor gas transport, where wind and source location govern the concentration field. These dependencies are embedded through sequential conditional inference, in which inferred wind and concentration fields guide source posterior estimation. This structure improves localization under sparse and noisy obse

arXiv:2608.16195v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving human-level competitive intelligence and physical agility in humanoid robots remains a profound challenge, particularly in contact-rich and highly dynamic tasks such as boxing. While Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning offers a principled framework for strategic interaction, its direct application to unstructured raw motor spaces inevitably leads to joint-level physical collapse, preventing the emergence of any viable combat tactics. To resolve this fundamental conflict between strategic exploration and physical feasibility, we formulate the humanoid combat task as a novel two-player latent-space zero-sum Markov game. Under standard regularity and approximate best-response assumptions, we show that the latent formulation induces an equivalent game over the decoder-reachable action manifold, providing an approximate-Nash interpretation of the resulting self-play dynamics. To instantiate this theoretical formulation, we propose Rob