Noticias e Investigación

arXiv:2609.21307v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although conventional controllers and disturbance observers (DOBs) are the standard for precision tracking in manipulators, they suffer from parameter uncertainty, nonlinear friction, and compound disturbances. This study proposes a residual reinforcement learning DOB framework that pairs an analytical observer with an RL policy. The deterministic baseline operates within a reliable region, whereas the RL policy explicitly targets the residuals that the model cannot capture. To make this compensation disturbance-aware, an estimator network aligns the observation history with a privileged disturbance context, organizing the latent space by disturbance regime and enabling rapid adaptation across disturbance transitions. To guarantee stability, we derived and enforced a state-dependent action bound on the RL policy from an input-to-state stability (ISS) analysis such that the closed loop provably confines the tracking error to a certified en

arXiv:2609.21275v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Learned Optimal Inverse Kinematics (LOInK), a method to generate approximately optimal solutions to an inverse kinematics problem. When trained on data consisting of sampled configurations and associated task variables and a given cost function, LOInK learns a bi-Lipschitz invertible mapping from configuration space to a decoupled task/latent space, and moreover, the latent space is structured so as to place cost-minimizing solutions at the origin. This enables efficient sampling of cost-minimizing solutions via a network-inversion algorithm based on operator splitting. We demonstrate the proposed approach on three problems: an illustrative three degree-of-freedom manipulator problem; a quadrupedal climbing robot for which LOInK can generate near-optimal solutions on average 31 times faster and up to 100 times faster than a constrained optimization approach; and a simulated soft actuator as a purely data-driven example, in wh

arXiv:2609.21246v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models map visual observations and natural-language instructions to robotic actions, but distribution shifts can compromise their reliability. Because these models may still succeed under out-of-distribution (OOD) conditions, detecting OOD inputs alone is insufficient to predict execution failure. In this paper, we introduce VLA-Scope, a two-stage framework that combines input-shift characterization with execution history to predict failure during OOD rollouts. The first stage uses pooled image and language representations to detect OOD inputs and classify their shift categories. For inputs flagged as OOD, the second stage combines the predicted category, action-prefix features, and execution progress features. A logistic regression model shared across shift categories updates failure risk as execution proceeds. We evaluate the framework with OpenVLA on ten LIBERO-Spatial tasks using leave-one-group-out cross-

arXiv:2609.21229v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning robot manipulation policies typically requires substantial demonstration data, which are costly to collect on real robots. Recent methods generate robot demonstrations from human videos by adapting recovered motion and validating the resulting trajectories in simulation. However, methods centered on motion-reference adaptation can limit behavioral diversity by retaining the demonstrated contact strategies and subtask orders, while insufficient understanding of task requirements and scene relations can reduce demonstration generation efficiency by generating invalid candidates. To address these limitations, we propose KnowDemo, a framework that uses structured manipulation knowledge from human videos to generate diverse robot demonstrations for a target workspace. To distinguish task requirements from demonstration-specific choices, we develop a knowledge extraction and reasoning module based on a vision-language model (VLM) that

arXiv:2609.21228v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models built on pretrained vision-language models have demonstrated strong performance across diverse robotic manipulation tasks. However, VLA models that directly map current 2D observations to actions often lack sufficient spatial and temporal understanding, limiting their performance in precise and long-horizon manipulation. Recent methods enhance VLA models through geometric supervision and future-state prediction across the entire scene. However, these methods can suffer from redundant scene information, distracting the model from learning the geometry and dynamics relevant to the current interaction. To address this issue, we propose FOCAL-VLA, a framework that combines subtask-guided geometry distillation with implicit world modeling to learn representations of current spatial structure and future interaction dynamics. To focus geometric learning on the current subtask, we transfer geometric knowledge f

arXiv:2609.21226v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quadrotors are increasingly deployed in applications such as agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and maintenance. In each of these applications, the robot must navigate complex scene geometry while remaining strictly collision-free. Unlike in ground domains, even minor collisions for aerial vehicles can result in the loss of the robot. This safety requirement induces a pair of technical challenges. First, the environment must be represented with sufficient fidelity to encode complex structure, even when no ground-truth obstacle data is available. Second, a motion planner must leverage this representation to determine a collision-free path to the goal. This paper proposes a system that addresses these complementary challenges. The proposed method, AirSplan, adopts a normalized variant of 3D Gaussian Splatting that encodes high-fidelity scene geometry. It then applies a novel reachability-based motion planner that leverages the differen

arXiv:2609.21223v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-conditioned robot policies integrate perception, language understanding, and control for general-purpose manipulation. However, existing evaluations often focus on task success, isolated physical constraints, semantic refusal, or realized physical damage, providing limited insight into where safety fails during closed-loop manipulation. We introduce SafeStage, a lifecycle-structured benchmark for evaluating manipulation safety before, during, and after task execution. SafeStage contains 97 purpose-built risk scenarios organized into three stages. Initial-State Hazards captures safety-relevant relations that must be resolved before manipulating the target. Execution-Time Safety evaluates unsafe contacts, trajectories, region entries, and object interactions during execution. Final-State Hazards capture unstable or otherwise unsafe conditions remaining after nominal task completion. The benchmark evaluates realized interacti

arXiv:2609.21220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative robot policies can represent diverse, multimodal behaviors, but adapting pretrained policies to deployment-time constraints such as collision avoidance and orientation maintenance remains challenging. Existing inference-time steering methods typically apply gradient guidance through iterative diffusion or flow processes, which can be computationally expensive for real-time control. We propose INSPO, which formulates inference-time steering of one-step generative policies as trajectory optimization in the policy's input noise space. By optimizing the input noise while evaluating constraints on the induced state trajectory, INSPO searches the policy-induced behavior space without directly modifying generated actions. The optimization includes a regularization term that encourages solutions to remain consistent with the policy's input distribution and is solved online using population-based particle optimization. We evaluate INSPO

arXiv:2609.21216v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies based on flow matching generate action chunks through repeated evaluations of an action expert. Increasing the number of integration steps raises inference cost, but does not necessarily improve closed-loop success. We propose Coda, which reallocates part of this integration budget to a single learned endpoint correction. A frozen policy first completes a few-step noise-to-action trajectory; a lightweight Transformer then predicts a demonstration-supervised residual using the candidate action, source noise, and shared observation-prefix cache. Only the corrector is trained. On 50 RoboTwin Easy tasks, five-step Coda improves success from 71.64% to 74.68% over the matched five-step baseline, while reducing forward latency by 30.2% relative to the default ten-step policy. A two-step configuration achieves 71.88% success with a 2.12$\times$ speedup. An independent 13-task control shows a 5.69-percentage-p

arXiv:2609.21211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collision-free motion planning requires reliable collision models from sensed environments and validation of states along a continuous trajectory. To make this tractable, most planners check for collision at discrete states along continuous trajectories against a single determinized model of the environment, introducing a trade-off between safety and computational efficiency. While continuous collision checking approaches that approximate the swept volume of the robot exist, they are computationally expensive or overly conservative. Data-driven approaches can learn the swept volume; however, these neural models are susceptible to approximation errors and are therefore often limited to serving as coarse filters for downstream collision checkers. In this work, we propose to learn a signed distance function of the swept volume as a probabilistic field, enabling quantification of epistemic uncertainty, incorporation of perception noise, and e

arXiv:2609.21185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-friction surfaces challenge bipedal locomotion by limiting the contact forces available during stepping. Inspired by penguin waddling, we investigate how lateral torso motion and center of mass (COM) placement affect locomotion as surface friction changes. Using a five-actuator biped, we compare an upright-gait strategy with a penguin-inspired torso-over-stance-leg strategy across multiple COM placements in simulation and hardware. In the 3-D simulator MuJoCo, we sweep through sinusoidal leg and hip actuation parameters across four friction coefficients mu = 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7. In simulation, torso-over-stance-leg motion produces more successful controllers and higher forward speeds at low friction, with the highest speed occurring for the high-COM configuration. Hardware experiments show the same low-friction speed trend: at mu=0.12, torso-over-stance-leg motion increases forward speed and reduces cost of transport at both tested COM

arXiv:2609.21178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Service applications for human-robot interaction are commonly written against the hardware-specific interfaces of one platform, so a change of hardware forces a rewrite of the application. The Robotic Interaction Service (RoIS) Framework 2.0, standardized by the Object Management Group (OMG), addresses this fragmentation by defining a platform-independent model in which Service Applications interact with Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Engines through standardized interfaces and hardware-independent symbolic messages. A specification alone, however, does not provide the maintained implementation, Software Development Kits (SDKs), and adapters needed for practical adoption. This paper presents OpenRoIS, a community-driven open-source middleware providing a concrete implementation of the RoIS Framework 2.0. It takes the position that an openly developed, paradigm-neutral implementation is what carries the standard from specification to practi

arXiv:2609.21167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Field robotics missions often require physical samples to be returned to laboratories for analysis, making path planning inherently load-aware and order-dependent as accumulated samples increase payload and traversal energy costs. In single-robot Load-Aware Informative Path Planning (LIPP), this rigidly couples sensing with hauling: a solitary robot must transport every collected sample, forcing frequent depot returns that severely restrict its spatial coverage. Heterogeneous multi-robot teams can overcome this bottleneck by dividing labor---enabling high-precision samplers to collect while high-capacity carriers handle transport. However, this introduces a complex coordination challenge regarding when, where, what, and to whom handoffs should occur on top of the LIPP problem. To address this tightly coupled problem, we introduce Multi-Agent LIPP (MA-LIPP), which enables teams to cooperate through asynchronous "dead drops," allowing one r

arXiv:2609.21138v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Octopus crawling motivates soft robots that exploit redundancy, yet discovering and organizing diverse coordination modes for adaptation remains challenging. To address this, we introduce a Diffusion-based Uncertainty-aware Optimization (DUO) algorithm that learns demonstration-free crawling controllers for a simulated, muscle-actuated CyberOctopus. This work represents the first application of diffusion-based control to soft multi-arm robots in contact-rich simulations. By embedding a variety of locomotion behaviors within a shared control distribution, this approach enables the simulated octopus to navigate dynamic physical constraints, demonstrating that learned coordination diversity inherently facilitates robust adaptation. The main contributions include: (i) a symmetry-structured policy representation that folds radially equivalent controllers into a canonical directional sector, (ii) an online black-box optimization strategy, the D

arXiv:2609.21130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-party human-robot collaboration poses a dual challenge: robot decisions should remain interpretable and auditable, while executed actions must satisfy safety constraints during physical interaction. Combining explainable decision-tree policies with control-barrier-function (CBF) filtering provides a promising architecture but creates two learning mismatches in multi-agent reinforcement learning. Safety projection changes the action applied to the environment, while the coupled proposal graph can misalign independently optimized actor updates with a team-level update. We present safety-aligned gradient enforcement (SAGE) to address both mismatches. Its shield-annealed internalization layer (SAIL) uses a differentiable finite-penalty proposal map while retaining the exact CBF quadratic program for execution, preserving constraint-normal sensitivity to internalize repeatedly active safety constraints. Team-averaged Lyapunov policy opti