Noticias e Investigación

arXiv:2610.31562v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid growth of the space economy, alongside increasing orbital congestion and debris, is driving demand for reliable on-orbit transportation of large and non-cooperative objects. Performing such transportation with a swarm of small spacecraft distributes risk and removes the single point of failure inherent to monolithic architectures, but requires solving a non-convex trajectory optimization coupling every agent's cone-constrained thrust to the payload's rotational dynamics. Existing approaches span decentralized control laws with asymptotic guarantees but limited constraint enforcement, and centralized and partially centralized planners that reintroduce a single point of failure. In this work, we present a decentralized bi-level framework driven by exact gradients: the problem is split into an inner convex thrust allocation and an outer search over payload torque trajectories. This decomposition yields fuel-efficient solutions qu

arXiv:2610.31194v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) learn world models in latent space, enabling efficient planning but leaving their states opaque. We introduce Inside-JEPA, which places relational channels for ordered entity pairs inside the JEPA latent state and shows that an inverse-dynamics loss can ground these channels without relation labels when its head reads them, either alone or as part of the full state. On Something-Something V2, latent prediction alone performs no better than a random relation head, while inverse-dynamics supervision that recovers actions from channel changes improves relational AUROC by .065-.103 across ten settings with annotated boxes, by .081 on RH20T robot episodes with held-out tasks, and by .050-.061 across five relations using off-the-shelf detection and tracking. An inverse head on entity latents decodes actions more accurately but barely improves relational grounding; shuffled labels, two label-fre

arXiv:2610.31149v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This chapter explores how robotic systems and ambient intelligence can enhance care for older adults in residential aged care (RAC) homes and private homes. Although these settings differ, we frame both as extreme and challenging environments for human-robot interaction (HRI), characterised by cluttered and dynamic layouts, diverse resident needs, and limited on-site technical support. We review embodied and non-embodied systems that assist with daily living, safety monitoring, and social engagement, highlighting hybrid deployments where robots complement fixed and wearable sensors. To ensure these technologies are usable and effective, design considerations consider the cognitive, physical, and social needs of older adults. Interaction design prioritises accessibility for older adults with low digital literacy, using robust but simple voice interfaces, small sets of non-verbal cues, accessible screen-based companions, and safe object h

arXiv:0905.4950v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Legged locomotion on flowing ground ({\em e.g.} granular media) is unlike locomotion on hard ground because feet experience both solid- and fluid-like forces during surface penetration. Recent bio-inspired legged robots display speed relative to body size on hard ground comparable to high performing organisms like cockroaches but suffer significant performance loss on flowing materials like sand. In laboratory experiments we study the performance (speed) of a small (2.3 kg) six-legged robot, SandBot, as it runs on a bed of granular media (1 mm poppy seeds). For an alternating tripod gait on the granular bed, standard gait control parameters achieve speeds at best two orders of magnitude smaller than the 2 body lengths/s ($\approx 60$ cm/s) for motion on hard ground. However, empirical adjustment of these control parameters away from the hard ground settings, restores good performance, yielding top speeds of 30 cm/s. Robot speed depends s

arXiv:2610.31661v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present OpenTac, a novel sensor and a full-stack ecosystem for tactile skins that are highly customizable, scalable, and readily deployed in downstream robot control and learning applications. Our core contribution is twofold. First, we develop a scalable resistive tactile skin with a structured deformable overlay that converts tangential loading into spatially varying pressure. Differential responses across neighboring "taxels" support decoding of local shear vectors, and the common-mode response encodes normal force. Second, we provide a highly customizable sensor design tool that is able to automatically generate fabrication files for these tactile skins from 2D outlines and developable 3D surfaces, including from abstract descriptions such as text (e.g., "design a sensor for a size 9 shoe insole"). We develop an ecosystem around the OpenTac sensor, including the CAD design tool, a sensor simulator, cross-sensor transfer, and fast/a

arXiv:2610.31625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the offline generation of coordinated paths for N interchangeable robots and N goals in planar environments with polygonal obstacles. After a conformal map to a circular domain, starts and goals become the poles and zeros of a rational function R, and the paths are the branches of its Generalized Root Locus (GRL), i.e. the streamlines of the logarithmic potential -log R. We show that, for every phase outside a finite set of critical phases and a set of boundary phases, the induced gradient motion drives each robot to a distinct goal along pairwise disjoint paths that never reach the obstacles; the robot-goal assignment is produced by the construction, and with the gain used as a clock all robots move as the closed-loop roots of the GRL and arrive together at a prescribed time. Obstacles become streamlines through successive Milne-Thomson reflections, and for a finite number of reflections a finite test certifies safety for the

arXiv:2610.31617v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tasks such as quadrotor dynamic-gate racing require agents to anticipate external motion while maintaining precise high-frequency control. World-model-based reinforcement learning provides a natural solution by learning latent dynamics for future imagination, yet it often entangles environmental evolution and the robot's own dynamics in a single learned rollout, where model bias can affect policy optimization efficiency. We propose DiffDreamer, a differentiable reinforcement learning framework that tightly couples a learned world model with differentiable simulation for actor optimization. In one optimization step, the learned world model propagates latent states that capture external dynamics and history-dependent features, while the differentiable simulator propagates the robot's explicit physical state. We further decompose the actor objective into a critic-driven pathway for non-differentiable task rewards and a simulator-driven pathw

arXiv:2610.31613v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models can perform diverse manipulation tasks directly from visual observations and natural language instructions, but they remain prone to mistakes and unpredictable failures. Deploying these policies without continuous human supervision will require robust runtime monitors that detect when the policy has gone off-course. Existing monitors use external foundation models, such as vision-language models (VLMs) to supervise the policy, introducing significant complexity and computational cost for monitoring at runtime. In this work, we investigate an alternate approach: \textit{can a VLA's own internal activations provide the information needed to monitor its execution?} Our method trains linear probes on policy activations from demonstrations to estimate progress, then flags executions that deviate from expected progress. In experiments with the open-source VLA $\pi_{0.5}$ and across simulated and real-world ma

arXiv:2610.31608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid mobility over complex terrain requires accurate foot placement and coordinated whole-body motion capable of robust adaptation. Reinforcement learning (RL) policies trained without motion references generalize well across terrains, yet eliciting effective whole-body coordination through reward design and exploration alone remains challenging. In contrast, reference-based methods yield natural motions but struggle to adapt beyond the predefined trajectories in their training data. We introduce a learning framework that bridges these two approaches by using motion data strictly as a training prior. An explicit, self-supervised, attention-based contact planner predicts future body-environment contacts, while a contact-conditioned tracker translates these plans into coordinated whole-body motion. Together, they establish contact as an interface between sensory observations and control actions. This abstraction allows the policy to int

arXiv:2610.31569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recognizing task completion and failure enables robots to stop upon success and initiate recovery or replanning after failure. Existing methods augment Vision Language Action (VLA) policies with task status signal prediction to support these execution decisions. However, learning and integrating these signals can require fine-grained supervision, external monitoring models, or complex architectural designs. Moreover, the potential of task status signals to directly guide action generation remains underexplored. We present Echo, a framework that combines task status signal learning without frame-level progress annotations with a compact design for status prediction and action generation within a single VLA. Specifically, Echo represents task status with stop and failure signals, added as two dimensions of each action chunk and denoised together with robot actions. Their combination distinguishes ongoing execution, successful completion, an

arXiv:2610.31540v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-robot coordination of nonlinear systems is naturally formulated as joint-space optimal control subject to constraints over groups of robots. Existing methods that approach joint optimality remain largely centralized, offline, and confined to collision-free motion planning, while decentralized, real-time counterparts target safe navigation without pursuing the joint optimum. This paper develops a decentralized, real-time planner that approaches the joint optimum as an anytime process. We extend a recent single-robot framework that searches dispersive trees of forward-propagated commands for differentially flat systems to coordinate a multi-robot team near-optimally. We first show that the inter-robot coupling can be effectively replaced by some local constraints, under which locally grown dispersive trees contain a near-optimal agreement. It is this structure that the robots pursue by decentralized column generation, negotiating rent

arXiv:2610.31518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) stands as a fundamental challenge in robotics, essential for enabling autonomous agents to execute complex, long-horizon tasks in diverse environments. While Large Language Models (LLMs) introduce a new paradigm for TAMP by leveraging extensive common sense, their inherent reasoning limitations hinder direct application, and fine-tuning strategies to enhance these capabilities are currently bottlenecked by the scarcity of high-quality datasets. Existing automated generation methods often suffer from homogeneity, limiting model generalization, and unsolvability, where hallucinated scene graphs create physical mismatches with task goals. To address these issues, we propose Scene-graph Construction Optimized by Plan Error-correction (SCOPE), an automated framework designed to generate diverse and executable TAMP datasets. SCOPE incorporates multi-level diversity metrics to maximize the information entropy of s

arXiv:2610.31476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-vocabulary 3D semantic maps have emerged as a key spatial memory representation for long-horizon robot autonomy, enabling robots to reason about objects, their spatial relationships, and past observations across time. However, existing object-centric semantic maps are primarily designed for static environments and rely on an append-only point integration strategy, where newly observed points are accumulated but previously integrated points are rarely reevaluated. Consequently, perception errors accumulate over time, and outdated points persist after objects move or disappear. Although recent dynamic mapping methods update object-level representations in changing scenes, they do not explicitly revise noisy or obsolete points within each object. We propose an online refinable semantic mapping framework that continuously refines object representations through probabilistic point-level confidence updating. Each object point maintains a c

arXiv:2610.31474v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot world models simulate how environments evolve in response to robot actions. Latent action models enable learning dynamics from videos by encoding visual transitions as proxy actions. However, reconstruction-driven latent actions mix robot motion with object responses and other scene changes, complicating their correspondence with robot controls. We propose SkeLAM, a skeleton-guided latent action model for controllable robot world modeling. SkeLAM decomposes latent actions into a kinematic component grounded by robot skeleton supervision and a residual component retaining complementary visual dynamics. Cross-modal swap reconstruction encourages RGB-derived and skeleton-derived kinematic representations to be interchangeable during video reconstruction. The world model incorporates both components through separate conditioning pathways, while branch dropout reduces its dependence on future-derived residual information. A lightweight a

arXiv:2610.31472v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile sensing provides robots with contact information difficult to obtain from vision alone. Shear force is particularly important for understanding tangential contact, guiding corrective motions, and maintaining grasp stability, yet flexible and low-cost tactile arrays often measure only normal force. We introduce VecTile, a low-cost, 6 mm thin, flexible tactile array capable of three-axis force sensing. VecTile combines a piezoresistive layer with passive silicone nubs that convert normal and shear forces into distinguishable pressure patterns. The sensor can be fabricated in-house without specialized equipment. The complete system costs less than 35 USD for a 4x4 array. We validate the sensing mechanism through finite element analysis and hardware experiments. In controlled single-taxel tests over 1-5 N normal force and up to 1.5 N shear force, VecTile achieves root-mean-square errors of 0.39 N and 0.16 N for normal and shear forces