Actualités & Recherche

arXiv:2609.29132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Jellyfish-inspired robots offer a compliant and efficient approach to underwater locomotion, but achieving large deformation together with repeatable actuation and closed-loop control remains challenging. In this work, we present a tendon-driven robotic jellyfish with constrained soft actuation. Each actuator combines a flexible substrate with discrete constraints, enabling bending up to \(150^\circ\) with an approximately linear tendon displacement-bending relationship. Eight actuators driven by four servos allow the robot to perform stable swimming, attitude adjustment, and self-righting. Based on the linear actuation, a reinforcement-learning controller is further developed, enabling closed-loop depth regulation in both simulation and physical experiments. These results show that mechanical constraints can improve the controllability of soft actuation while preserving compliant jellyfish-like motion, providing a route toward manoeuvrab

arXiv:2609.29112v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Industrial robots are rarely used for machining tasks due to their limited path accuracy. This accuracy is mainly limited by inaccuracies in the drive trains. Compliance and transmission errors occur in the joint gearboxes. While transmission errors have been extensively studied for strain wave gears, there is little research on these errors in cycloidal drives. This gearbox type is commonly used in industrial robots for medium to heavy payloads. It is proposed to model the mainly periodic transmission errors using a Fourier series where amplitude and phase are defined as a polynomial function of the main influence factors load-torque, velocity, and temperature. Measurements of the transmission errors were conducted using an experimental setup representing a single robot joint. In the evaluation of the measurement data, harmonic frequencies were related to mechanical properties of the cycloidal drive. These frequencies were used to identi

arXiv:2609.29093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuum manipulators provide dexterous motion in confined spaces, but structural compliance, hysteresis, and load-dependent deformation leave residual position and orientation errors that can undermine reliable contact with rigid grippers. To address this limitation, this paper presents a lightweight support-enhanced granular-jamming gripper tailored to a continuum manipulator. The gripper maintains compliance before jamming while establishing a direct load path to the continuum manipulator tip after jamming. To improve its grasping performance, we systematically designed membrane materials, particles, filling ratios, and the internal support structure, and further identify geometry-dependent grasp boundaries with respect to contact offset and object shape. Building on these results, we construct a physical manipulation system integrating the continuum manipulator, granular-jamming gripper, visual feedback, tendon actuation, and pneumat

arXiv:2609.29092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-based legged locomotion methods assume clean depth at training time and rely on hand-tuned post-processing filters at deployment. However, filter parameters are rarely disclosed, hindering reproducibility, and performance degrades substantially when depth noise is left unaddressed. Building noise robustness directly into the learning pipeline would eliminate this dependency. While such robustness has been explored for proprioceptive inputs, analogous approaches for depth perception remain largely absent in legged locomotion. We propose DAWN (Denoising and Alignment in World models for Noise-robustness), a noise-robust perception framework for legged locomotion, which builds noise robustness directly into a world model via two modifications: (1) feeding noisy depth to the encoder while keeping clean depth as the reconstruction target, forcing the model to implicitly denoise its input; and (2) applying contrastive learning to align t

arXiv:2609.29091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in agentic systems have substantially enhanced the long-horizon capability of embodied manipulation. However, many existing frameworks still follow a passive execution paradigm, which limits their applicability to real-world scenarios involving textual semantic cues, distractors, and initially invisible targets. To bridge this gap, we propose an agent-based active exploration framework that enables robots to dynamically interact with the environment rather than merely execute predefined instructions. Specifically, our framework consists of three collaborative modules: a planning module for high-level task reasoning, a perception module for visual scene understanding, and an execution module for low-level manipulation. This design allows the robot to actively acquire task-relevant information, adapt its behavior based on environmental feedback, and complete manipulation tasks under partial observability. Furthermore, we int

arXiv:2609.29065v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grasping is a fundamental robotic capability that bridges perception and physical task execution. This paper studies grasp pose recovery under a perception-to-execution mismatch, where a grasp generated from visual perception may become spatially stale if the object moves before execution, using only sparse tactile interactions and no further visual observations. We propose DA-GRD, Decision-Aware Grasp-Relevant Disambiguation, which maintains a weighted planar belief over possible object configurations and selects tactile probes according to their ability to eliminate hypotheses and improve agreement among candidate task grasps. Rather than fully relocalizing the object, DA-GRD stops when the remaining hypotheses support a common executable grasp. In MuJoCo experiments on ten rigid objects with translations up to 5~cm and yaw perturbations up to $\pm45^\circ$, DA-GRD achieves an 84.7% physical lift success rate, compared with 9.1% for sta

arXiv:2609.29043v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General Purpose Service Robot (GPSR) tasks, as defined in the RoboCup@Home benchmark, require robots to interpret diverse natural language commands and generate multi-step action sequences in real home environments. Conventional Single Prompt (SP) approaches suffer from context bloat and the "Lost in the Middle" phenomenon, leading to unreliable task planning. We propose an LLM chaining architecture that separates instruction classification and action generation into two specialized stages, reducing per-inference prompt length by approximately 45% while improving planning consistency. We evaluate our method using 100 randomly generated GPSR commands across three language models spanning local open-source and frontier cloud deployment contexts. Results show consistent planning improvements over SP across all models, with gains of up to +37 percentage points on local models. Further, real-robot execution experiments on the Toyota Human Supp

arXiv:2609.29031v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Torque observations in reinforcement learning remain challenging because simulated and measured torque differ in scale, offset, and noise. In this paper, we propose a simple torque observation alignment method for robots with direct-drive (DD) actuators, in which motor current maps linearly to joint torque through a motor-type-specific torque constant K_tau. First, dynamometer calibration identifies K_tau* and corrects the scale mismatch between simulated and real torque. Second, the method uses delta_tau(t) = tau(t) - tau(t-1) as the observation in both domains to eliminate the constant offset instead of using the direct torque tau(t), which carries a domain-dependent bias. Third, Gaussian noise obtained from the dynamometer measurement data is injected during the learning process. To validate the proposed method, we train a teacher-student grasping policy entirely in simulation and deploy the distilled student on a multifingered DD grip

arXiv:2609.29021v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coordinated arm-hand motion planning is fundamental to dexterous robotic manipulation in complex and constrained environments. A straightforward solution is to decompose the problem into separate arm path planning and hand motion generation; however, this poses a dilemma: decomposition can miss feasible solutions that require coordinated arm-hand adaptation along the path. Alternatively, directly planning in the high-dimensional joint arm-hand configuration space captures such coupling but faces a substantially enlarged search space and nonconvex collision constraints. To characterize this coupling, we formulate feasible hand fibers that capture collision-free hand configurations for each arm configuration. Based on this formulation, we propose CAMP, a high-success and efficient cooperative arm-hand motion planner for constrained environments. CAMP constructs candidate trajectories through layered hand search with local arm relaxation, th

arXiv:2609.29020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Skilled humans can catch fast-moving objects softly by coordinating interception, velocity matching, and follow-through to mitigate impact. Learning such impact-aware catching with reinforcement learning (RL), however, is challenging, as the policy must achieve reliable interception and grasping while regulating the sensitive transition into contact. Moreover, even a capable privileged-state RL teacher may not provide ideal demonstrations for a deployable imitation-learning (IL) student: teacher failures limit task coverage, while small variations in pre-contact motion can produce substantially different impact and grasping outcomes. We characterize this phenomenon through interventional outcome sensitivity and introduce the outcome-sensitive window (OSW) to guide targeted demonstration construction. Building on this formulation, we propose Outcome-Sensitive Motion Search, which learns a task-conditioned manifold of successful OSW motions

arXiv:2609.29017v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most robots manipulate objects solely with their end effectors, whereas humans flexibly leverage different body parts, such as the forearm and elbow, especially when handling oversized objects. Learning such whole-arm manipulation is chal-lenging due to long-horizon sparse rewards, limited contact sens-ing, and the sim-to-real gap in contact and actuator dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose Current-Aligned Link Manipulation, a framework for learning long-horizon contact-rich manipulation using motor current as joint load related feedback. Three stage-specific policies first learn repositioning, grasping, and lifting using privileged simulation information, and a stage router sequences them to generate complete task demonstrations. For sim-to-real transfer, a causal current mapper predicts physical motor current from simulated joint histories, aligning the actuator current observation between simulation and hardware. A unified

arXiv:2609.28984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-embodiment learning has shown that a single model, such as a vision-language-action (VLA) model, can learn state representations and manipulation skills that can be applied across heterogeneous robots to accomplish various tasks. We hypothesize that the same holds for safety enforcement. The reasoning required to satisfy a safety constraint, such as detecting an obstacle, recognizing that it should be avoided, and selecting a safe abstract action, is largely shared across robots. What differs across embodiments is how the abstract safe action is realized: morphology, kinematics, and dynamics determine which actions are safe and feasible. Consequently, the same action can be safe for one robot and unsafe for another. This is especially important for generalist manipulation policies that operate in a common end-effector action space without explicitly capturing how safety depends on the robot's morphology and kinematics. We propose em

arXiv:2609.28976v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual Navigation Models (VNMs) enable robots to navigate from egocentric visual observations without geometric localization and planning, but long-range navigation still requires pre-built maps. This paper presents the Remote Visual Navigation Model (ReVNM), which uses a single remote surveillance camera to serve as both an observation source and an implicit environmental map for visual navigation. While the use of remote cameras could eliminate the need for pre-built maps as well as onboard vision processing, their limited field of view instead of egocentric observations makes it hard to achieve collision-free navigation. The lack of existing data with diverse remote viewpoints, which are crucial for training robust VNMs, further complicates the challenge. In this work, we propose a learning-by-synthesis approach to address this two-fold challenge. Our ReVNM extends a state-of-the-art VNM architecture with an exocentric-to-egocentric (e

arXiv:2609.28969v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While end-to-end autonomous driving systems show promise, their application to micromobility vehicles is hindered by simulators failing to capture specific kinematics, such as differential drives and omni-wheels. This paper pro- poses a sim-to-real-aware, vehicle-specific end-to-end learning environment for the WHILL Model CR on AWSIM and ROS 2. To minimize the sim-to-real gap, physical parameters are optimized via Bayesian optimization using real-world data, reducing trajectory errors across various driving scenarios. Additionally, this study introduces a synchronized architecture tailored for the stable training of world model-based agents. An end-to-end policy trained with DreamerV3 exhibited learning progress and achieved task completion in a simulated obstacle avoidance setting. Furthermore, this policy demonstrated direct sim-to-real transfer to the physical vehicle, enabling the vehicle to navigate around a cardboard box in a real-

arXiv:2609.28960v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While recent advances in perceptive locomotion have enabled humanoid robots to traverse structured terrains, agile parkour in highly discontinuous environments remains an open challenge. In particular, crossing sparse footholds and narrow support regions requires precise foothold selection, effective use of visual observations, and consistent alternating foot placement during fast transitions. In this paper, we present a perceptive humanoid parkour framework that enables stable traversal across terrains with limited foothold availability using only onboard depth observations. The framework features a saliency-guided temporal perception module that combines a saliency prior with gated memory. It retains informative depth features across frames, enabling reliable foot placement from partial observations. By introducing an alternation loss, our symmetry regularization encourages alternating gait patterns and improves traversal robustness. Ex