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arXiv:2610.32188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact angle (CA) is a common parameter measured in the development of novel contact lens materials and surface coating technologies. Existing literature on in vitro CA of contact lenses via the sessile drop method is hindered in repeatability, reliability, and comparability due to inter-laboratory and inter-operator protocol variation. In this work, the Robotic Autonomous Imaging Surface Evaluator for vision applications (RAISE-Vision) is introduced as an automated platform for CA measurement on curved hydrogel surfaces, with specific application to in vitro contact lens wettability analysis throughout air exposure. Customized 3D printed hardware, such as lens mounts, camera holders and drying apparatuses, was designed to facilitate an automated repeated sessile drop workflow within a liquid handler. Collected images were directly fed to a custom open-source image processing script for CA determination on a curved surface that combines

arXiv:2610.32143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot-assisted dressing is particularly challenging due to narrow openings and articulated body parts. Even small errors in the relative pose between the body part and garment opening can cause snagging, missed insertion, or incomplete dressing. To address these challenges, we formulate dressing as a geometry-aware insertion problem that represents task-relevant spatial relationships between the body part and object opening, rather than relying on the full deformable-object state. Based on this formulation, we propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework combining a staged curriculum, which progressively guides the policy from coarse alignment to insertion and final placement, with a finger-wise insertion soft gate that provides continuous feedback on individual finger insertion progress and helps suppress premature insertion. We evaluate the framework on rigid and deformable bracelet dressing tasks through component ablations, systema

arXiv:2610.32130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traversability analysis in off-road settings remains a fundamental challenge for mobile robots. Key difficulties include constructing an accurate and expressive local map from multimodal sensor data, and using the map to design traversability rules that yield desirable navigation behavior. Importantly, this system must be resilient to the limited sensing regime brought about by complex environments and high speeds. In this paper, we present TravSUITE, a traversability system suitable for high-speed navigation in off-road environments. TravSUITE consists of two major components: 1) an efficient voxel mapper that leverages visual foundation models (VFMs) to build a rich geometric-semantic local map from streams of on-board sensor data, and 2) a unified neural network that jointly predicts traversability-relevant quantities in bird's eye view (BEV), including geometry, semantics, speed and cost. Our training strategy is entirely annotation-f

arXiv:2610.32102v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow-matching Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generate expressive continuous trajectories for robotic manipulation, yet balancing real-time responsiveness with execution stability remains a persistent challenge. Standard deployment workflows typically treat numerical solver depth and execution horizon as decoupled choices. The horizon amortizes inference latency, while solver depth is kept high to preserve integration fidelity. In this paper, we reveal a fundamental compute-execution coupling in flow-matching VLAs governed by a systematic sign reversal. While coarse numerical integration degrades precision under rapid replanning, it markedly improves task performance under extended open-loop commitment. Geometrically, numerical truncation contracts lateral action dispersion around an invariant trajectory centroid, serving as an implicit regularizer that suppresses compounding open-loop drift. Across LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and real-worl

arXiv:2610.32094v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon robot tasks require retaining and using past information. We integrate Test-Time Training (TTT), which stores context in fast weights, into InternVLA-A1 and Pi0.5 to study action generation conditioned on human demonstrations through training on paired demonstrations and robot trajectories. We implement memory transfer between the two phases and truncated backpropagation, and examine training objectives, gradient coverage, and contrastive regularization across video, short-video, and single-frame cue tasks. In our experiments, adding TTT and training on paired data at the current scale did not lead to consistent target selection based on demonstrations. Under the tested settings, shorter sequences, full trajectory gradient connectivity, and contrastive regularization did not clearly improve responsiveness to demonstrations. When demonstrations were reduced to single-frame cues, real-robot execution still showed a preference f

arXiv:2610.32093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavior cloning for robotic manipulation is highly sensitive to the coverage of its training data, yet collecting diverse successful demonstrations remains costly. We study reinforcement learning (RL) not as a deployable controller, but as a data generator for downstream visuomotor imitation learning. Our key premise is that multiple successful solution modes cover a broader range of successful trajectories than repeatedly collecting a single narrow solution. We introduce DiscoDemo, which trains a privileged latent-conditioned RL generator with a parallel reverse curriculum and a success-gated diversity objective to discover diverse solutions while preserving task success. The trained generator produces multiple successful closed-loop behaviors, which are safety-filtered and exported as a static dataset for downstream imitation learning. Across four manipulation tasks, DiscoDemo produces broader successful-state coverage and improves dow

arXiv:2610.31929v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical self-reproduction in modular robots remains difficult because a robot must not only move, but also collect, align, dock, and separate modules reliably in hardware. Taking inspiration from how genetically identical cells form the varied tissues of an organism, we introduce a single standardized robotic module that combines a magnetic docking interface with two actuated joints and folds from a flat, two-dimensional configuration into three-dimensional structures. Modules of this single design can be assembled into two morphologies: a three-module "trilobite" and a five-module "seal". Using a small set of discrete motion commands, a human operator steers an assembled parent robot to dock magnetically with a sequence of spare modules, which are assembled into a second, structurally identical individual that then separates from the parent. Because the parent retains all of its original modules, this is a budding-style form of physical

arXiv:2610.31900v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Swarm morphogenesis requires robots to assemble desired shapes through local interactions. We present a modular framework integrating neural cellular automata (NCA) with existing site selection and collision-aware control. Within this framework, we introduce a decentralized attachment-site discovery mechanism. Robots already in the formation update and share local NCA states to identify new attachment sites, enabling progressive growth without a predefined list of sites during deployment. To bridge the mismatch between conventional NCA growth and gradual physical assembly, we additionally propose offline sparse-retention fine-tuning that simulates partial attachment, together with a false-positive loss that penalizes invalid site activations. Simulations demonstrate formation of diverse lattice morphologies, scaling to several hundred robots, and substantial improvements in morphology accuracy from the proposed fine-tuning. Experiments wi

arXiv:2610.31891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data-driven robots must learn to avoid collisions with as few demonstrations as possible to avoid collecting large datasets of destructive collision examples. We explore whole-body proximity sensors as inductive biases for learning reflexive collision-dodging behavior and find that lossy sensors with low resolution were stronger biases than high-resolution coverage. We also found that, perhaps unintuitively, anticipating when and where contact happens on the body of a robot reduced its learning sample efficiency. We investigated eight candidate representations in a reinforcement learning environment, which included latent compression, future contact anticipation, lossy corruption, and privileged state estimation. The candidate representations were tested by training over 200 humanoid robots to play a simplified version of dodgeball end-to-end under an intentionally constrained sample and compute budget.

arXiv:2610.31868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Swarms of small robots are an attractive way to survey lunar caves and lava tubes. Missions such as NASA's CADRE will fly cooperating rovers for distributed mapping, but only in daylight. The 354 h lunar night drops the surface towards 95 K, and the radioisotope heaters that let single rovers survive it cannot be supplied at swarm scale. In this study we investigate whether a swarm can instead use its own members as thermal shielding. We train one policy, shared by all twenty robots, by reinforcement learning with an evolution-strategies estimator. The policy receives a single reward, once, at the end of the night: the mean temperature of the five coldest robots. Nothing in that reward refers to position, spacing, exposure or motion. Two behaviors nonetheless emerge. The swarm aggregates, and robots circulate between the sheltered core and the exposed rim, the same pair of behaviors with which emperor penguins survive the Antarctic winter

arXiv:2610.31859v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a vision-language-action (VLA) model is fine-tuned with its trainable weights in bfloat16 (bf16) and no fp32 master copy, AdamW writes each update straight into bf16, silently rounding away any update smaller than 1/512 of a weight. In 9 of 12 open VLA codebases a default or documented recipe trains this way, 4 on full weight matrices, including LeRobot's SmolVLA default and its $\pi_0$/$\pi_{0.5}$ guides. In our LIBERO runs without the copy, a probe every 100 steps finds at least 79% of updates to bf16 weights erased. On the Hugging Face Hub, 99% of sampled full-weight SmolVLA fine-tunes store the action expert in bf16, and 84% of recent $\pi_{0.5}$ fine-tunes with a training configuration set the bf16 flag. On LIBERO-Object, with rules fixed in advance, an fp32 copy raises success over LeRobot's storage from 4.3% to 49.3% for SmolVLA and from 5.1% to 80.9% for $\pi_{0.5}$ at a ten-times lower learning rate, where both models are un

arXiv:2610.31852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamic manipulation of deformable linear objects (DLOs) remains challenging due to underactuated, high-dimensional dynamics, delayed deformation responses, and the presence of multiple feasible motions under obstacle constraints. This paper presents BM2PC, a Bayesian Multimodal MPC framework for agile manipulation of DLOs. Building on the control-as-inference posterior, BM2PC formulates multimodal planning as a set optimization problem that balances control quality and behavioral diversity. An efficient incremental update maintains multiple promising control modes with low additional computational overhead. For real-world deployment, BM2PC incorporates an execution dynamics model that predicts actual end-effector motion and compensates for execution mismatch during fast manipulation. We evaluate BM2PC on rope tracking and obstacle avoidance in simulation and hardware, and on simulated disturbance rejection. In trajectory tracking, BM2PC

arXiv:2610.31845v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling policy learning requires broad experience and reliable supervision. Robot demonstrations provide high-quality trajectory supervision but are costly to collect. Egocentric videos broaden task and environment coverage, yet motion reconstruction and retargeting introduce noisy action labels. To address this challenge, we introduce EgoForesight, a vision-language-action framework that learns jointly from both sources by reducing the influence of unreliable action labels and exploiting demonstrated outcomes as complementary supervision. A joint vision-action flow couples future visual representation prediction with action generation, unifying reliability-aware action learning with outcome-informed representation transfer. Specifically, reliability-conditioned corruption allocates action supervision across noise levels according to source reliability, while reliability-weighted regression regulates each source's contribution. Complement

arXiv:2610.31841v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coding agents can translate language instructions into robot programs. For contact-rich manipulation, a key challenge is to generate and refine control logic that responds to physical interaction. We present FORCA, a coding agent that takes visual observations and wrist force/torque (F/T) measurements as input to write Python programs for contact probing and force-responsive motion. Between executions, the agent inspects force records alongside visual outcomes to diagnose failures and revise both motion and force-feedback control logic. FORCA requires no demonstrations, task-specific training, or simulation. Across five real-robot tasks, we demonstrate its effectiveness in three forms of contact-rich manipulation: improving manipulation accuracy, adapting to changes in object or surface properties, and regulating contact under surface variation and object motion. Compared with a vision-only variant of the same agent, FORCA improves grasp

arXiv:2610.31834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing approaches for robot learning in simulation often require substantial manual effort to construct scenes and specify tasks, limiting training scalability and data diversity. Meanwhile, in-the-wild robot demonstrations naturally provide diverse and realistic observations of real-world interactions. Leveraging these demonstrations for simulation requires both high-fidelity visual reconstruction and physically consistent interactions. General-purpose agents offer flexible adaptation to diverse scenarios and strong reasoning about 3D spatial relationships, while specialized generative models provide high-fidelity reconstruction of scene appearance and geometry. We introduce WorldMirror, an agentic real-to-sim framework that constructs interactive digital twins from in-the-wild robot demonstrations. Our central idea is to formulate real-to-sim construction as the iterative refinement of an executable world program. A coding agent decom