Actualités & Recherche

arXiv:2610.08870v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unlike conventional teleoperation, wearable interfaces allow operators to collect dexterous demonstrations through their own hand motions while directly interacting with task objects. This direct interaction reduces dependence on the target robot during collection, but it also makes the collection hardware part of the physical process that generates each demonstration. Interface geometry can influence both how a task is performed and what tactile observations are recorded for learning. We study two versions of a DexUMI-family exoskeleton that share the same robot command definition, mapping procedure, and tactile module type but differ in hand-side geometry. The revised interface reduces reported physical demand, improves selected device ratings, enables tactile access in a precision grasp that is mechanically blocked by the baseline, and produces task-dependent changes in recorded contact. Lid twisting primarily exhibits a change in cont

arXiv:2610.08863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A common way for trajectory planning is to leverage generative models trained on large collections of expert trajectories. At inference time, the model generates executable trajectories by conditioning on task goal constraints. However, trajectory-based methods rely on costly supervision, scale poorly with sequence length, and often generalize poorly to unseen constraints such as novel start-goal pairs. We propose an alternative to learn the underlying state-space manifold and use the geometry of the manifold for trajectory planning. This approach requires only state observations and enables generalization to unseen constraints by con- structing trajectories on the learned manifold of the state space. Experiments on Maze2D and robotic motion-planning benchmarks show that Ariadne constructs feasible paths from state-only supervision and generalizes to unseen start-goal combinations. On high-dimensional dual-arm planning, it remains competi

arXiv:2610.08862v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Household robots must accommodate new user instructions while executing ongoing tasks. Existing agents often regenerate or extensively revise the remaining task sequence, introducing plan ambiguity, logical inconsistency, and redundant execution. We formulate continual instruction reconciliation and propose CIRRA (Continual Instruction Reconciliation for Robot Agents), a dual-level framework combining LLM-based semantic reasoning with rule-constrained structural integration. CIRRA first grounds incoming instructions to unique executable skills and resolves underspecified actions and execution locations. It then preserves the ongoing subtask sequence as an execution backbone and generates integration candidates by inserting incoming subtasks into location-matched segments. The semantic reasoner evaluates only modified segments to identify dependencies and conflicts and select the most logically coherent local integration. This structure-pr

arXiv:2610.08852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) are transforming chemical and materials discovery through closed-loop automation, yet automated infrastructure for physical manipulation of soft, deformable matter remains beyond current robotic platforms. A critical instance is autonomous droplet transport on an open surface, where contact-angle hysteresis, capillary pinning, and surface heterogeneity produce partially observable dynamics that pose significant challenges for classical model-based controllers. We introduce the first robotic platform for closed-loop autonomous liquid droplet navigation on an open, unconfined surface using model-based reinforcement learning. A two-axis tilting board coated with a thin silicone oil film drives the droplet, while an overhead camera provides real-time feedback. A learned policy was trained on just 50 to 150 physical episodes depending on geometric complexity, without simulation or analytical models. Beyond perf

arXiv:2610.08812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Go2-DrivoR, a goal-conditioned adaptation of the end-to-end autonomous driving trajectory planning framework DrivoR for urban navigation with quadrupedal robots. By conditioning trajectory generation on a local-frame subgoal through a goal token and adapting the vehicle-centric scoring formulation, the method extends DrivoR to short-horizon goal-conditioned local planning without redesigning its core decoders. Specifically, we redefine drivable-area compliance for sidewalk-oriented navigation and reformulate the original ego progress term as goal-conditioned ego progress. Trained exclusively on TartanGround simulation data, Go2-DrivoR improves waypoint-conditioned planning performance on unseen simulation environments and transfers zero-shot to open-loop real-world trajectory prediction.

arXiv:2610.08807v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Precision pesticide spraying is essential for optimizing application efficiency and ensuring uniform chemical distribution. Spraying performance is influenced by multiple factors, including environmental conditions such as temperature and wind speed, pesticide type, and the robot's capability to accurately perceive crops and target spray locations. Existing approaches predominantly emphasize crop detection and rely on predefined spraying parameters, whereas human operators dynamically adjust their spraying strategies by considering environmental conditions, region-specific crop characteristics, and the type of pesticide being applied. In this study, we propose a context-aware adaptive spraying framework based on Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which enables robots to leverage spatial reasoning and integrate information from multiple sources, including crop type, pesticide type, and weather data, to make adaptive and optimized spraying deci

arXiv:2610.08802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Manipulating fragile objects remains challenging as robots must understand the state of what they grasp, such as slip or fracture, to respond appropriately, especially when material properties are unknown. In this paper, we present SAFE: a low-cost, general-purpose sensing approach that detects both slip and fracture in real time using two passive polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) acoustic sensors and motor proprioception, without relying on vision or prior material knowledge. The sensors are mounted on a compliant Fin Ray gripper, and a unified HistGradientBoosting classifier reports the state (normal, slip, or fracture) from a 79-dimensional feature vector. Under leave-one-grasp-out cross-validation, SAFE achieves an Alert-F1 of 0.884 with near-zero slip-fracture confusion, and ablations confirm that acoustic sensing is indispensable. An adaptive grasp controller built on this detection layer runs at 104 Hz on a Jetson Orin Nano, achieving

arXiv:2610.08800v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Models based on graphs have emerged in robotics as a powerful foundation for internal world representations, where factor and scene graphs are among the most prominent model types found in the related literature and in successful robotic solutions. Initially, many of these models were assuming static environments as a simplification. Herein, factor graphs mainly provide uncertainty-aware geometric estimations while scene graphs enable a structured semantic abstraction. However, real-world robotic environments are often dynamic, posing severe challenges for purely static world representations. Therefore, this review presents a comprehensive view on how dynamic aspects of real-world environments can be addressed in such graph-based world models. We organize our assessments around three main aspects: (I) suitable representations, (II) pipelines to construct and update the representations, and (III) their exploitation for downstream tasks. We

arXiv:2510.01264v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Progress in adversarial multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for robotics has been hampered by a lack of shared, extensible infrastructure that supports heterogeneous agent morphologies in high-fidelity physics simulation. Existing frameworks either focus on cooperative tasks, rely on simplified physics engines, or provide isolated implementations that are difficult to extend. We present HARL-A, an open-source, actively maintained framework built on IsaacLab that enables scalable training and benchmarking of adversarial policies across morphologically diverse robot teams with any number of teams and any mix of robot morphologies per team. HARL-A extends the HARL algorithm library and IsaacLab with adversarial multi-agent support and contributes three components: (1) a modular software architecture that reduces the engineering overhead of defining new heterogeneous adversarial environments, (2) a suite of three benchmark env

arXiv:2606.04172v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Task-conditioned manipulation requires grounding instructions to task-relevant functional parts rather than object categories. This setting is scene-dependent and often one-to-many in cluttered scenes: the same object may afford different interactions across tasks, while a single task may correspond to either one functional region or multiple valid functional regions, depending on the scene layout. Existing affordance datasets and benchmarks remain misaligned with this setting, as they typically focus on grasping or object-level affordances, rely on synthetic scenes, or assume a single instruction-region correspondence. We present Affordance2Action (A2A), a benchmark-centered learning framework for scene-level, task-conditioned part affordance grounding. At its core is A2A-Bench, a manipulation-oriented benchmark that covers both single-region and multi-region instruction correspondences in everyday scenes, with the latter highlightin

arXiv:2606.03240v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often optimize for semantic grounding, whereas executable manipulation requires geometry-aware spatial alignment. We introduce GeoAlign, a state-guided spatial alignment architecture for VLA policy learning. Offline robot-domain RGB-D supervision post-trains an RGB geometry branch to produce Geometry-Enhanced Post-Trained (GEP) features; the depth head is then discarded, so policy training and rollout use RGB, language, and proprioceptive state. State-generated queries attend to the GEP grid to produce eight compact geometry tokens for action prediction. GeoAlign achieves 99.0% on LIBERO, 85.3% across three SimplerEnv-Fractal task families, and 78.8% on eight real-world ALOHA tasks, with ablations supporting the combined recipe of geometry post-training and state-guided querying on Isaac-GR00T N1.6-3B. Project website: https://chenyizhi123.github.io/geoalign-project/.

arXiv:2604.01064v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite advances in reinforcement and imitation learning, achieving both precise control and dynamic whole-body behaviors in long-horizon tasks remains challenging. Existing approaches typically follow two paradigms: coupled whole-body policies for global coordination and decoupled policies for modular precision. However, effectively combining these two types of controllers to achieve agility, robustness, and precision remains challenging. In this work, we propose BAT, an online policyswitching framework that dynamically selects between coupled and decoupled whole-body RL generalist controllers according to the evolving motion context. BAT employs two complementary switching predictors: OpVQ-VAE provides motion-token-based predictions with strong generalization, while OpHRL provides closed-loop, state-aware predictions. A Token-Familiarity Router (TFR) selects between their predictions, favoring OpHRL for familiar token sequences and