Noticias e Investigación

arXiv:2609.06629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advancements in deep learning allow robotic agents to interact with dynamic and unstructured environments. Of special interest is the integration of physico-geospatial world knowledge into such systems, either by using physics-aware machine learning models, knowledge graphs to model relationships or spatio-temporal and logical reasoning. In the present work, we introduce an approach to augment the output of pre-trained, unmodified VLMs used for scene interpretation by integrating semantic descriptions, OpenStreetMap building data and street information with positional, temporal and metric information obtained from our sensory systems, fusing this information using LLMs. We apply this concept to an outdoor recording within a university campus, achieving an F1-Score of 0.83 in the task of grounding buildings and 0.64 for path surface grounding on our pilot evaluation set. The results demonstrate the conceptual capability of the pro

arXiv:2609.06434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can people distinguish between human and AI agency in humanoid teleoperation? To explore this question, we developed \textit{Ghost-in-the-Loop}, a teleoperation framework that supports both human-operated and AI-generated control of a robot's voice, facial expressions, and gestures while maintaining a consistent embodiment. We conducted a preliminary online study ($N=50$) in which participants viewed short interaction clips generated by either a Human Operator or an AI Control and judged the perceived source of control. Results suggest that participants often struggled to distinguish between the two conditions in brief interactions. Qualitative responses indicate that judgments were primarily influenced by perceived naturalness, temporal coordination, and consistency across speech, facial expression, and gesture. These findings provide initial insights into agency perception in embodied human--AI communication and motivate future invest

arXiv:2609.06326v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalist robots promise to transform our society: the same system that prepares a meal or folds laundry might also repair a car, inspect infrastructure, or care for a loved one. Yet this versatility introduces risks far beyond the collision- and force-based safety notions that have long dominated robotics. Notions of safety must now consider context (e.g., turning off a building's electricity is only safe during scheduled maintenance), user intent (e.g., asking the robot to ``clean the kitchen'' includes unspoken expectations that the robot should not mix dangerous but powerful cleaning agents like bleach and ammonia), hard-to-model physical consequences (e.g., burning food during meal preparation), and more. We argue the need for a new era of robot safety---embodied AI safety---that broadens the hazards considered across the robot's lifecycle while recognizing that the safety of bits cannot be separated from the safety of atoms. We p

arXiv:2609.06302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied visual tracking requires a robot not only to react to the current view, but to choose actions that preserve or recover future evidence of a moving target under ego-motion, occlusion, and distractors. It is therefore a predictive decision problem over future target observability and apparent scale. A central difficulty is a task-specific form of causal hallucination: in action-conditioned prediction, a model can exploit the strong correlation between robot control and target-related observations by hallucinating a direct causal effect from the current action to target evidence, rather than letting action influence that evidence only through robot motion and the resulting observation change. The shortcut yields plausible futures with the wrong semantics for tracking-oriented planning and re-acquisition. We propose CST-WM, a causally structured world model that decomposes the latent state into target-evidence, robot, and observati

arXiv:2609.06251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Grounding natural-language instructions into reliable and executable actions remains a fundamental challenge for vision-language-action (VLA) systems on mobile robots, due to the persistent gap between high-level semantic reasoning and low-level locomotion and manipulation control. Existing approaches often rely on implicit reasoning or monolithic action prediction, making it difficult to maintain coherent long-horizon decision making while producing precise and adaptable robot actions. To address this challenge, we propose MobileVLA-R1 2.0, an RL-enhanced VLA framework that explicitly couples structured embodied reasoning with executable mobile robot control. The framework learns multi-granularity reasoning over embodied trajectories through supervised Chain-of-Thought (CoT) alignment and reinforcement learning, improving reasoning-to-action consistency beyond purely behavioral supervision. To support both locomotion and manipulation,

arXiv:2609.06195v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper proposes a transferable Map of Dynamics (MoD) framework that generalizes to unknown environments using only egocentric 3D LiDAR point clouds to overcome the long-standing limitation of traditional MoD methods. While MoDs are essential for encoding human motion characteristics to enable accurate pedestrian trajectory prediction or safe robot navigation, traditional approaches suffer from site-specificity, requiring exhaustive trajectory accumulation at every new location. Extending recent advances in neural implicit modeling, our framework trains a continuous, LiDAR-based MoD estimator across diverse environments. To mitigate the inherent sparsity and temporal bias of real-world trajectory data, we introduce a position-balanced sampling strategy and a multi-task learning architecture that jointly predicts motion distributions and a spatial frequency score map. The latter is further augmented by visibility-aware losses to compe

arXiv:2609.05533v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-horizon manipulation is partially observable: the information needed to choose the next action may appear only in observations from minutes earlier. Existing memory mechanisms: retrieval banks, learned compressors, recurrent states must decide what to keep from the past before knowing what a future decision will require. This was motivated by the assumption that minute-scale history is too large to process directly, which modern VLM backbones no longer make true. In this work, we introduce SimpleMemVLA, a VLA without a dedicated memory module. It keeps the sampled history intact and passes it to the backbone in the timestamped video format the backbone was pretrained to process; the hidden states of a generated sub-task then form the only channel from history to a standard flow-matching action head. Since consecutive decisions share most of their history, prefilling the shared prefix during action execution keeps latency close to a

arXiv:2609.05487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a robotic electrospinning platform and design method for depositing nanofiber membranes onto non-planar, three-dimensional conductive geometries. Conventional electrospinning relies on fixed emitters and planar grounded collectors, which restricts deposition to flat substrates: on concave geometries, field shielding prevents fibers from reaching recessed regions, and material bridges across elevated features instead. We address this with a custom end-effector integrated with a six-axis UR20 arm. The tool carries a localized stepper-driven syringe pump that maintains consistent polymer flow independent of orientation, and routes high-voltage DC (up to 25 kV) directly to a robot-mounted needle, turning the arm into a mobile emitter with full kinematic control over position, orientation, working distance, and traversal velocity. Toolpaths that continuously reorient the emitter along surface normals give access to concave topolog

arXiv:2609.05461v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reward-free latent world models plan by scoring candidate actions with distances in a frozen latent space: an action is preferred if its predicted future embedding lands closer to the goal embedding. This silently assumes that latent closeness is action-rankable, i.e., that ordering candidates by latent distance agrees with ordering them by true cost. We audit this assumption directly. We introduce ARC-Bench, a no-leak, fixed-candidate protocol that measures whether frozen JEPA-style objectives rank candidate actions correctly, and apply it to official released JEPA-WM checkpoints across navigation and manipulation-style control. The assumption fails, severely and structurally: on the official manipulation audits the top-scored candidate is almost always suboptimal, and the same inversion appears in the maze domains. A controlled visual-backbone extension shows that the defect persists when DINOv2 is replaced by video-pretrained V-JEPA

arXiv:2609.09158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of navigating cluttered indoor environments with a humanoid robot. Unlike conventional methods that model navigation as a 2D path planning problem, humanoid traversal in cluttered environments requires continuous geometry-aware whole-body adaptation, including coordinated arm placement, torso adjustment, and gait modulation for collision-free movement through complex 3D spaces. We introduce TANGO, the first whole-body vision-language navigation framework for language-conditioned humanoid traversal in cluttered environments. Given a natural-language instruction and egocentric RGB observations, TANGO directly predicts 29-DoF joint-space actions for downstream whole-body control. We train TANGO entirely in simulation by synthesizing diverse collision-free traversal behaviors via global path planning, kinematic whole-body motion generation, obstacle-aware motion editing, and RL-based tracking. This pipeline provides dynam

arXiv:2609.09148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalist robot policies carry broad manipulation priors from large-scale data, but specializing them to a new task remains the deployment bottleneck. This requires eliciting task-specific behavior from limited demonstrations without degrading their broad capabilities. We introduce Proxy Policy Steering (PPS), an inference-time adaptation method that resolves this challenge by training two lightweight proxy policies whose calibrated velocity-space difference steers the frozen base sampler. A reference proxy models the frozen base's behavior on target-task observations, and a task proxy, initialized from the reference, captures how this behavior changes under task supervision. Their difference forms a calibrated velocity-space residual that steers the frozen base sampler at every denoising step. We identify the conditions under which this residual isolates the change induced by task supervision, and validate them empirically. Because the

arXiv:2609.09119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dexterous manipulation involves contact-rich and fine-grained interactions with the physical world, posing significant challenges for existing vision-language-action (VLA) models due to severe visual occlusions and complex contact dynamics. While recent works have incorporated tactile sensing into robotic manipulation, most approaches still rely on homogeneous multimodal fusion, lacking adaptive tactile integration and explicit modeling of physical dynamics. In this work, we present DeCAL, a physically-grounded dexterous vision-language-action model that unifies understanding, imagination and action generation for contact-rich dexterous manipulation. Built upon a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture, DeCAL leverages specialized experts for each capability while enabling efficient information flow among them. To effectively leverage tactile information, we introduce Adaptive Visuo-Tactile Fusion that dynamically regulates tactile int

arXiv:2609.09073v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sampling-Based Model-Predictive Control (MPC) algorithms are a flexible class of controllers used for navigation on a wide range of robotic systems. Historically, such approaches have lacked hard safety guarantees, a shortcoming which we remedy in this work by computing guaranteed reachable-set overapproximations online with a fast, interval-based pipeline. We show that our method achieves similar performance to a state-of-the-art reachability-based planner without the need for the expensive pre-computation step, and can be scaled to systems that are infeasible using existing approaches. Finally, we demonstrate that our technique reduces safety violations by over 99% in a racing simulation and successfully controls a model racecar on real hardware experiments without crashes.

arXiv:2609.09069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous 3D active mapping requires a space robot to choose where to sense while building the geometry needed for navigation. Learned occupancy completion extends spatial context beyond the current field of view, but one predicted map often serves two planning roles: it scores expected surface gain and constrains collision-free motion. Unsupported occupancy can therefore distort both where the robot looks and where it believes it can travel. We study this coupled interface in a controlled closed-loop benchmark by holding the active-mapping system fixed and varying only its planner-facing occupancy across observation-only, learned, oracle-corrected, and ground-truth conditions. Improving occupancy accuracy does not monotonically improve closed-loop coverage: across 25 starts, planning with ground-truth occupancy reaches 70% of the learned baseline's final coverage 12.7 steps earlier on average, while increasing final coverage by only 0.0

arXiv:2609.08958v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tensegrity robots offer lightweight, compliant mobility over challenging terrain but remain difficult to model and control due to complex contact-rich dynamics and partial observability. This work presents a model predictive path integral (MPPI) controller for a three-bar tensegrity robot driven by a learned graph neural network (GNN) dynamics model. This work first extends prior GNN-based models with a differentiable contact detection module. The extension allows the dynamics model to reason over non-horizontal planar terrains, obstacles, as well as self-collisions. Then, the learned dynamics model and the MPPI controller operate in a closed data-collection loop, iteratively improving model accuracy and control performance. This work further introduces a hybrid MPPI strategy that combines MPPI with turning motion primitives to improve maneuverability. Experiments are performed in MuJoCo across five navigation tasks, which include, wall o