Noticias e Investigación

arXiv:2609.34018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation-trained manipulation policies can exploit privileged state information to learn effective contact-rich behaviours, but deployment requires acting from partial observations such as noisy camera images. A common solution is teacher-student distillation, in which a visuomotor policy is trained to reproduce the actions of the privileged expert. This requires the student to jointly infer the task-relevant state and relearn the expert's action mapping that is already available. An alternative is to reuse the state-based expert and learn only a perceptual interface that reconstructs its missing state inputs. However, minimising the state estimate error alone does not necessarily minimise the downstream control error induced by these estimates. To bridge this gap, we train a visual state estimator using both direct state supervision and an action-consistency loss backpropagated through the frozen, differentiable expert. A scheduled obj

arXiv:2609.34010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present ZeroBot, a real2sim framework for learning a robot manipulation task from scratch in minutes under challenging conditions: zero human demonstrations, zero policy pre-training, and zero known object models. Given only a single view of an object and a goal pose for that object, ZeroBot uses image-to-3D generative models to obtain a complete object mesh, which is used in simulation for large-scale parallel reinforcement learning. To accelerate training, we introduce an action space which leverages the generated geometry and learned value function to sample states involving robot-object contact. When evaluated on real-world tasks including grasping, pushing, articulated object interaction, and multi-stage manipulation, ZeroBot achieves an 87% success rate with an average training time of 119 seconds. These results show the value of using image-to-3D models in a real2sim framework for rapid, autonomous robot learning.

arXiv:2609.34006v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich policies often fail because distinct physical states look alike yet require different actions. Cameras may not reveal whether a connector is aligned or fully seated, while many normal-only tactile sensors can miss the tangential interactions perpendicular to the grasping direction that distinguish these states. We ask whether a learning policy needs calibrated shear measurements, or only a repeatable observation that separates shear-dependent contact states. We introduce TacGooseBumps (TacGB), a passive domed film that mechanically encodes tangential loading as pattern changes in an existing sensor's pressure map. Tangential loading tilts each dome and redistributes pressure across its footprint; an end-to-end policy consumes the resulting maps without added electronics, force reconstruction, or taxel-level dome alignment. Across four imitation-learning tasks and two data-collection pipelines, TacGB improves goal attainment,

arXiv:2609.33982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial reasoning is fundamental to general robot intelligence, as it enables robots to complete long-horizon tasks involving multi-object interaction. We introduce Simify, a training-free, test-time framework that performs explicit spatial reasoning via massively parallel physics simulation. From a single RGB-D image of a scene, Simify reconstructs simulation-ready assets leveraging 3D generative models and vision-language models. Then given a task specified by a reward function (e.g., build the tallest tower), Simify launches thousands of parallel rollouts in simulation and performs an evolutionary search to optimize object arrangements, typically converging within seconds. We conduct quantitative experiments on real-robot hardware to demonstrate the ability of our framework to execute complex object rearrangement tasks end-to-end with previously unseen objects. Results show that our framework outperforms prior work on foundation models

arXiv:2609.33951v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The increasing adoption of robotic systems in surgery, together with the expanding range of procedures they can support and the growing level of autonomy they provide, has substantially increased the complexity of surgical robots. As these systems integrate more sensors, controllers, communication interfaces, and model-driven control components, their attack surface continues to expand. A compromise of the integrity of a surgical robot can therefore cause unintended robot behavior and potentially threaten patient safety. In this paper, we characterize the detection boundary of malicious injections on RAVEN II using a public dataset that pairs the platform's telemetry with external high-resolution encoder ground truth. We identify three injection points spanning the command and observation paths and evaluate three injection patterns with increasing temporal dispersion. To capture different detection behaviors, we perform detection at two t

arXiv:2609.33939v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable 3D spatial understanding is essential for autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, and scene reconstruction. While state-of-the-art learned depth estimation techniques achieve high accuracy in-distribution, they often generalize poorly to novel viewpoints and altitudes. This paper presents a geometrically derived, training-free depth estimation method using epipolar transfer with only two monocular images and camera pose estimates. By leveraging camera motion to synthesize a virtual stereo pair with a freely chosen baseline, our approach transforms temporal correspondence into a stereo triangulation task while mitigating geometric degeneracies inherent to direct two-view triangulation. Validated across outdoor drone flights (to a maximum range of approximately 90\,m) and indoor OptiTrack environments against LiDAR ground truth, the method achieves an indoor AbsRel of 0.092 and $\delta < 1.25$ of 0.940, comparable to direct tria

arXiv:2609.33882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Glove-based motion capture is emerging as a scalable approach to collecting dexterous-hand demonstration data. However, due to the kinematic gap between the human and robot hand, the recorded human motions cannot be executed directly on the robot, especially for contact-rich tool-use tasks involving in-hand reorientation. Prior work bridges this gap in simulation through reinforcement learning (RL) or trajectory optimization, but the human contact pattern is hard to preserve under such formulations, often producing unnatural manipulation and unstable functional grasps. These methods also train a separate policy or solve a separate optimization for each reference trajectory, which is inefficient. To solve these problems, we propose DexTaG, a tactile-guided RL framework for dexterous manipulation. During training, tactile signals captured by the glove guide policy search toward the measured human contact pattern, reducing reliance on precis

arXiv:2609.33872v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic manipulation policies are advancing rapidly with increasing reliance on vision-language models for end-to-end decision making. However, reliable deployment remains challenging because many policies lack explicit mechanisms for predicting task outcomes and evaluating whether generated actions will achieve desired final states, causing execution errors to accumulate during long-horizon manipulation. We present Robot-GST, a geometry-aware spatio-temporal behaviour representation and evaluation framework that constructs a Gaussian-SAM robotic environment for real-to-sim policy verification and improves the reliability of real-world manipulation deployment. Our approach constructs a high-fidelity robotic environment from RGB-D observations using 3D Gaussian Splatting and SAM3D, enabling ``simulation and evaluation before acting''. It integrates visual observations and language instructions with spatio-temporal reasoning for long-horizo

arXiv:2609.33836v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Construction environments evolve continuously, causing large geometric changes that degrade static mapping and registration performance. This necessitates active perception, where robots deliberately select sensing configurations to resolve the environment's current state. We present DeltaSeek, an initial framework toward active perception in evolving built environments. While our broader objective is a system that reasons about where, how, and when to observe, this paper addresses a critical prerequisite: how a robot's sensing embodiment constrains the observations it can acquire. We formalize an embodiment's permissible observation set and evaluate with a Husky A300 equipped with a UR5e on an IFC-derived benchmark under chassis-mounted and wrist-mounted RGB-D configurations, scoring observations by geometric visibility and effort by drivable distance. In a room-scale scene with eight controlled changes spanning four observability condit

arXiv:2609.33832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World-action models can jointly predict future visual observations and robot actions. However, discrepancies may exist between their visual predictions and the consequences implied by generated actions. We observe that WAMs can often generate visually plausible task-completion outcomes before producing action sequences that reliably achieve them. Consequently, we treat the WAM-generated visual prediction as a goal-conditioned visual proposal rather than a directly executable plan. We use a frozen action-conditioned world model to predict action-conditioned consequences and construct feedback based on consistency between the two future predictions and alignment with the terminal goal. Leveraging this feedback, we employ Flow Policy Optimization (FPO) to optimize the action head of the WAM. This framework avoids online robot interaction and additional training of task-specific reward models. Across four real-world UR5 manipulation tasks, ou

arXiv:2609.33807v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How well can general-purpose multimodal models turn visual understanding and reasoning into embodied manipulation via executable code? We introduce CodeActionBench, a benchmark of 25 manipulation tasks that evaluates this capability through agentic Code-as-Policy. Without task-specific fine-tuning, demonstrations, external specialist perception or grasp modules, privileged scene state, or predefined task policies, agents should select visual evidence, form task-relevant 3D estimates, construct manipulation targets, and iteratively execute and revise their policies. A shared robot API provides RGB observations, calibrated geometric operations, robot feedback, and bounded motion, leaving task-dependent decisions to the evaluated agent. Fixed task instances, resource budgets, and a hidden physical-outcome verifier support controlled comparisons across models and harness configurations. Extensive evaluations across nine configurations and 675

arXiv:2609.33765v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative robot policies provide expressive behavior priors, but updating a large diffusion or flow-matching model through online interaction is costly. Latent-space reinforcement learning avoids updating the pretrained generator by controlling its initial sampling noise, yet high-dimensional noise can have strongly anisotropic effects on decoded actions. We introduce Principal Steering Subspaces (PSS), a forward-query interface that constructs a fixed low-dimensional control basis from finite-difference decoder responses. Soft Actor-Critic controls the leading response directions, while the orthogonal complement is independently resampled from the Gaussian prior at each query. On three RoboMimic tasks with diffusion and flow-matching policies, response spectra reveal substantial concentration. Across five matched task-generator pairs, the training curves indicate that PSS generally converges faster and exhibits more stable late-training

arXiv:2609.33748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World-action models (WAMs) couple predictive visual modeling with action generation, typically relying on iterative denoising with a fixed denoising steps. However, manipulation tasks contain actions chunks with varying sensitivity to generation errors: critical actions require precision, while less sensitive actions allow faster generation with fewer denoising steps. Here we introduce AnyStep World Action Model, a general framework for tunable-budget prediction and scene-dependent computation allocation. Our budget-aligned teacher-trajectory distillation trains interval-conditioned flow maps using explicit frozen-teacher transitions and shared low-rank adapters, supporting action generation from one-step prediction to multi-step refinement. Building on this capability, a lightweight risk-benefit scheduler predicts teacher-curvature-based difficulty and budget-specific student-teacher fidelity from a single one-step preview, selecting the

arXiv:2609.33737v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon planning enables autonomous vehicles to anticipate scene evolution and potential risks, supporting safe and stable decisions in complex interactions. However, existing methods struggle to propagate motion trends from observed history into the future. Long rollouts based on a single latent state may further attenuate useful dynamics, retain stale motion patterns, and disrupt reliable near-term plans. We introduce MomWorld, a momentum-aware latent world model for long-horizon planning. MomWorld extracts scene motion trends from historical-to-current observations and propagates latent momentum into future horizons, jointly predicting future configuration and momentum states. A learnable momentum persistence mechanism preserves stable trends, scene-conditioned momentum updates adapt future dynamics, and a scene-adaptive reset gate suppresses stale momentum under abrupt changes. We further propose MoFlow, a momentum-conditioned fl

arXiv:2609.33681v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents the application and experimental evaluation of a systematic method for optimal sensor placement in soft robots. Existing methods either lack generalizability across different soft robot morphologies or do not account for system dynamics. The applied method uses convex optimization to find the optimal sensor configuration that maximizes an observability Gramian-based metric. The framework is experimentally evaluated using position and strain measurements on a soft continuum arm. Kalman filter state estimates using optimal sensor placements yield lower reconstruction error than a baseline across all sinusoidal input trials, with improvements on the order of millimeters. This case study shows that linear control theory tools can guide optimal sensor placement in soft robots, suggesting an interpretable approach to sensor placement that may extend to other morphologies.