Nachrichten & Forschung

arXiv:2610.12386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prevailing approach to improving robot foundation models (RFMs) relies on larger models, more robot demonstrations, and costly training at scale. We show that there exists an effective and efficient complementary approach: the right reasoning recipe can substantially improve the zero-shot task performance of existing state-of-the-art RFMs. We refer to this recipe as ARC. It consists of three key ingredients: a reasoning trace, a scalable automatic labeling pipeline, and a strategy for adapting pretrained RFMs to use these traces for control. First, we find that effective reasoning traces should be grounded in the robot's next action and explain its causal structure: why the action is appropriate and what effect it should produce. Second, we show that these traces can be generated automatically from existing demonstrations, enabling us to construct ARC-Trace-DROID from DROID without collecting new robot data. Third, we show how state-o

arXiv:2610.12369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most robot policies keep a model in the control loop: a VLA maps observations to actions, and an Agent Harness, such as Agent-as-Policy or Harness VLA queries a VLM for decision making at run time. We propose a different view: the embodied world is an Embodied Turing Machine, whose tape is the robot and environment state and rules are the policy. If this state can be represented accurately, the decision making can be written entirely in code. We therefore propose Code-Only-as-Policy (COAP): code measures and tracks the robot, environment, and task state from camera images and proprioception, and makes every decision from it. The same code applies across episodes, and different tasks share one library without a VLM or VLA in the loop. Compared with VLAs and Agent Harnesses, we analyze three advantages of COAP: (i) Explicit State: the state can be stored in code; (ii) Execution: code makes decision making controllable, recovers from failure

arXiv:2610.12368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct visual navigation policies generate trajectories efficiently but do not explicitly evaluate their future consequences. Generative navigation world models provide this foresight through visual rollouts, which are costly when evaluating multiple candidates. We present LiteNWM, a latent navigation world model that shares visual encoding across candidates and jointly predicts their action-conditioned future representations at multiple horizons, while a learned scorer uses these predictions to select trajectories. In offline evaluations on RECON, SCAND, and SACSoN, LiteNWM reduces macro-averaged trajectory error by 17.56% relative to NoMaD+NWM-XL and achieves a 128.00-fold end-to-end speedup on an RTX 5090. The same evaluator transfers from NoMaD to MBRA without proposer-specific retraining, reducing MBRA's macro-averaged trajectory error by 16.2%. In real-robot experiments in unseen indoor and outdoor environments, LiteNWM improves nav

arXiv:2610.12285v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning to predict how the world evolves can provide vision-language-action (VLA) policies with predictive context for long-horizon control, but its effectiveness depends on what future representation is modeled and how it conditions action generation. We introduce PLaW-VLA, which models task-relevant future states in a pretrained prediction-oriented representation space, reducing the need to predict control-irrelevant visual details. Built on a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture, PLaW-VLA conditions action generation on observation history, current task semantics, and predicted future states through structured causal attention. Experiments show a +11.8 percentage-point (pp) gain over reactive policies on RoboTwin Hard Horizon III and a +1.77 pp gain over reconstruction-oriented latent prediction on zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, supporting improved long-horizon control and generalization under distribution shift, respectively. By avoiding low

arXiv:2610.12276v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legged robots are promising candidates for future lunar surface missions because they can traverse steep, loose, and obstacle-rich terrain that challenges conventional wheeled rovers. However, readiness for lunar deployment is limited by uncertainties in foot-regolith interaction, dust generation, illumination-driven perception degradation, and operational constraints. This paper reports lessons from the 2025 LUNA analogue campaign, where ANYmal-D and Magnecko traversed loose regolith simulant and crater-like terrain and collected long-horizon navigation and visual-inertial data under challenging lighting. We show that quadrupedal robots can traverse regolith simulant, but performance is affected by sinkage and slip, dust-generating contacts, and perception failures caused by overexposure, shadows, and low-texture regions. These results motivate tighter integration of regolith-aware locomotion policies, illumination-robust perception, rep

arXiv:2610.12272v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates the feasibility of deploying quadruped walking robots for the automation of work in roof environments. While quadrupeds have demonstrated versatility across various domains, their large-scale deployment remains limited, partly due to lack of application-specific designs. Roof environments represent a novel and unexplored use case, combining high safety risks for human workers with repetitive, strenuous tasks that could benefit from robotic assistance. A dedicated test rig of a roof's surface was designed to evaluate the baseline performance of a commercial quadruped, the \emph{Unitree Go2}, in this new environment. Experiments revealed that standard ball feet are inherently inadequate for locomotion on sloped roofs: slippage increased quadratically with incline angle, get-up and lie-down sequences were only possible on small inclines, and critical failures already occurred regularly on moderate inclines of 25{\deg}

arXiv:2610.12249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study real-time motion planning in dynamic hazard fields through a controlled comparison between classical planning and learning-based methods. Rather than introducing a new planner, we construct a unified benchmark in which representative classical and learning-based methods face the same environments, motion constraints, information assumptions, and evaluation metrics. The test environment consists of planar domains populated with rotating sprinkler-like hazards that generate time-varying forbidden regions via sweeping angular sectors. Our results show a clear regime shift. In deterministic environments, classical planners achieve near-perfect success and higher-quality paths, though sometimes at the cost of substantial planning or replanning time. Under stochastic obstacle dynamics, however, online search becomes strongly budget-sensitive: low budgets lead to frequent failure, while high budgets improve success at the cost of latenc

arXiv:2610.12245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Social and service robots in public spaces need to anticipate which nearby person is about to approach and touch them, so that a response can be prepared before contact. It is largely unknown which cues support this anticipation when a model trained with one robot is used on another robot at a different site. We study this question with a fixed-reference pose residual (FRPR) model: a geometry predictor built from the person's bounding box and mask is trained and frozen, and a temporal network then learns from body pose an additive correction to its logit, so that every prediction splits exactly into a geometry term and a pose term. Between two public egocentric datasets recorded by different robots, HUI360 and SSUP-A, with every choice made on source data, the pose correction raised average precision (AP) from 0.277 to 0.321 from SSUP-A to HUI360 and gave no measurable gain in the opposite direction; the same asymmetry held over a stronge

arXiv:2610.12241v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Microscopic robots require accurate task geometry despite changes in language, parts, and focus. We present a semantic-to-physical framework that maps instructions to constrained geometric operators, reuses frozen open-vocabulary perception, and integrates locally reliable focal-plane trajectories by confidence weighting and dynamic programming. Calibrated multi-view geometry connects 2-D paths to physical execution. Prompt, unseen-part, and geometry reconfiguration tests yield 6.30-6.59-pixel RMSE. Relative to part-specific U-Net training with 20-100 labels, the proposed zero-new-label configuration takes 15 rather than 72-165 min. Across nine part-illumination conditions, trajectory-space integration reduces RMSE from 14.41 to 6.28 pixels (56.4%) and P95 error from 20.07 to 8.13 pixels (59.5%) compared with image-first multi-focus fusion. An ablation isolates the roles of confidence and path-wise selection. In representative robot exper

arXiv:2610.12231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from demonstration has enabled impressive robot behaviors. A common choice for policy learning is to use diffusion or flow matching (Flow-Policies), which often outperforms direct action regression trained with mean squared error (MSE-Policies). This gap is commonly attributed to multimodal demonstrations. We revisit this gap from the perspective of statistical modeling: how action-prediction residuals shape policy optimization. Our analysis of real-world robot demonstration data reveals substantial state-dependent variation in residual scales and heavier-than-Gaussian tails. While both MSE-Policies and Flow-Policies exhibit heavy-tailed action residuals, their training gradients behave differently: MSE allocates more gradient magnitude to observations with large action residuals, which hurts optimization. Motivated by these findings, we introduce heteroscedastic Student-t action regression (HT-Policies), which learns input-depen

arXiv:2610.12202v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) operating in dynamic marine environments require robust control policies for tasks such as path following and station keeping, making reinforcement learning (RL) a promising alternative to classical controllers. However, existing ASV simulators rarely support parallel environments for RL training. Such existing simulators require accurate hydrodynamic modeling from computational fluid dynamics solvers or towing tank tests for setting hydrodynamic parameters to address the sim-to-real gap. To address these challenges, we present an ASV simulator and accompanying pipeline that enables training policies starting from unknown vehicle dynamics. Our framework uses only a CAD model and brief set of open-water field trajectories for approximating and refining both hydrodynamic and thruster parameters. Real-world deployments on a BlueBoat ASV demonstrate successful zero-shot sim-to-real transfer in path following

arXiv:2610.12194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World modeling has emerged as an effective co-training objective for robot policies, giving rise to World Action Models (WAMs) that jointly predict actions and future states. However, most WAMs predict future states in the native representation space of pretrained visual backbones, resulting in high-dimensional targets with substantial training cost. We introduce MiniWAM, which instead predicts compact future representations learned from privileged current-future transitions. To construct these targets, we propose Predictive Representations via Inverse Spatiotemporal Modeling (PRISM), which combines inverse-dynamics supervision with feature reconstruction to emphasize control-relevant transition information while preserving useful future-state information. With the learned PRISM encoder frozen, MiniWAM is trained to jointly predict the resulting targets and robot actions from current observations. With 65$\times$ fewer native future featu

arXiv:2610.12185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable robotic manipulation requires timely intervention to correct emerging deviations and restore progress after execution errors. However, recovery methods based on repeated vision-language reasoning or iterative online optimization can incur substantial latency, delaying intervention. To address these challenges, we introduce RESETTLE(Robotic rEcovery through diSagrEement-Triggered reTrievaL and Efficient Corrective Control), a model-agnostic framework that provides computationally efficient recovery at the action-execution interface of frozen robot policies. RESETTLE triggers recovery when two action proposals independently sampled under identical conditioning persistently disagree. It retrieves a same-task demonstration reference using an adapted V-JEPA encoder and combines a state-servo prior with a guarded visual residual to execute one corrective action without online trajectory optimization or additional vision-language reason

arXiv:2610.12172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning how actions change scene geometry can provide complementary supervision for goal-directed manipulation. We introduce Spatial Language Modeling, which represents scene contours, goals, action targets, and future states with a shared vocabulary of discrete coordinates and semantic tokens. A task-specific grammar organizes these elements into spatial sequences, allowing one autoregressive Transformer to learn action generation and action-conditioned state prediction through a common next-token objective. We train the model from scratch using random-play transition pretraining followed by joint action and state training on expert demonstrations. During pretraining, recorded action coordinates condition subsequent state predictions and are excluded from the prediction loss. During control, the model decodes only executable action targets and updates its history with newly observed states. We evaluate the approach on Push-T in simulati

arXiv:2610.12157v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A robot that assists people must often act on what a person has shown rather than said: which of several identical cartons was pointed at, or which box was handled. The plan is executed from the final scene, whereas the evidence occurs earlier, possibly on objects that have since moved. We propose instance-anchored interaction evidence (IAE), which registers every object of the final scene to its public identifier, keeps each identity through the video by backward mask propagation, and describes every frame by the geometry between hands, forearms and these instances. An evidence network trained only from task outcomes scores the instances. For pointing tasks, a grammar-constrained dynamic program trained with a structured loss decodes object-destination programs; symbolic programs handle reference disambiguation and, without learning, episodic tasks. On 1,255 WatchAct benchmark requests, scored by symbolic execution, IAE reaches 64.2% pla