Actualités & Recherche

arXiv:2609.21504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) has advanced rapidly in static indoor environments, but robots operating in human-populated spaces must ground language while responding to moving pedestrians and social-safety constraints. We present DPed-VLN, a Habitat 3.0 benchmark for dynamic-pedestrian VLN that couples 33,093 navigation episodes with paired global and prior-augmented instructions, ORCA-controlled humanoid pedestrians, socially constrained expert paths, and metrics that jointly assess navigation efficiency and social safety. DPed-VLN separates ordinary goal-oriented route guidance from prior-augmented instructions that expose dynamic-pedestrian cues for controlled analysis. To instantiate the benchmark, we introduce DPet (Dynamic Pedestrian-aware Network), a pedestrian-aware policy network trained with reinforcement learning and imitation learning. We further adapt representative state-of-the-art VLM-based navigation models, includ

arXiv:2609.21497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective physical interaction control in robotic manipulation requires not only kinematically feasible motion but also sufficient force-interaction capability. Existing redundancy resolution methods often ignore task-specific force demands or maximize the force capability indiscriminately, sacrificing dexterity when large force margins are unnecessary. We propose a task-oriented force capability optimization framework for redundant mobile manipulators. A Vision-Language Model (VLM) infers object physical properties from an RGB image and a task description, generating a desired task-force sequence that captures gravitational and inertial demands. We then define a task-oriented force capability metric as the signed distance between a task-force uncertainty ball and the dynamic residual force polytope (RFP), quantifying compatibility between task demands and the robot's remaining actuation capacity. This metric is incorporated, alongside ma

arXiv:2609.21482v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate neural world models are central to model-based robotics, where they enable robots to predict future states from previously observed trajectories. Multi-step autoregressive training improves long-horizon prediction, but fixed rollout horizons also increase computational cost and can amplify early training errors when the model is still inaccurate. Existing training schemes typically use the same rollout length throughout optimization, independent of the model's current predictive reliability. We propose an epistemic uncertainty-driven adaptive rollout strategy for offline world model training following an auto-curriculum training scheme. Instead of always unrolling to a fixed horizon, the model terminates autoregressive rollouts once epistemic uncertainty exceeds a threshold calibrated from a warm-up phase. We study two uncertainty estimators: a five-head ensemble with a shared recurrent backbone and Monte Carlo Dropout. A two-sta

arXiv:2609.21467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motion tracking can reproduce humanoid loco-manipulation from a single retargeted motion clip, but a policy trained on a fixed reference primarily reproduces its demonstrated transport outcome. Although the source trajectory visits intermediate object displacements, transport termination is demonstrated only at its endpoint. We identify this mismatch as the termination-versus-passage gap: intermediate displacements are observed as passage states rather than termination-complete outcomes. We introduce Distance-Conditioned Reference Recomposition (DCRR), which relocates the demonstrated termination segment to intermediate transport states. A frozen tracking teacher replays the recomposed references under closed-loop dynamics, and the retained trajectories are relabeled by their achieved object placements and distilled into a reference-free policy. This procedure constructs distance-conditioned supervision from the interaction behavior encod

arXiv:2609.21461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied foundation models are constrained by the limited scale and diversity of robot demonstrations, motivating the use of large-scale egocentric human interaction data. However, how to effectively incorporate such data into embodied-model pre-training remains unclear because of substantial embodiment and action-space gaps between humans and robots. We present AtomEgo, a systematic study of ego--robot co-training supported by a curated corpus of approximately 2,659 hours and a scalable data processing pipeline. Across vision--language--action and world--action model architectures, we investigate three representative paradigms: joint co-training with domain-specific action heads, progressive ego-to-robot transfer through embodiment alignment, and joint video--action modeling. We evaluate these paradigms through multi-task real-robot experiments and language-conditioned cross-embodiment representation analysis. Our results reveal a simple

arXiv:2609.21448v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work presents \textit{Robotic Multiphase Interaction (RMI)}, a setting in which liquid enters a porous material and interacts mechanically with its deforming solid skeleton. Manipulation can therefore change pore volume, expel or redistribute retained liquid, and alter grasp stability at the same time. Spilled liquid can also create safety risks in domestic and manufacturing settings. This differs from most manipulation of solid objects and from tasks that involve both liquid and solid while keeping the phases spatially separate. We study a sponge filled with water as the first RMI example. We use implicit incompressible porous flow with smoothed particle hydrodynamics as the dynamics engine and enable robotic manipulation by adding Coulomb contact memory, hybrid velocity and force regulation, and a stability gate for lifting. The resulting environment connects robot commands to changes in the coupled liquid and solid state. A world

arXiv:2609.21447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid locomotion over complex terrain requires anticipating footholds that may no longer be visible at touchdown. Limited camera coverage and self-occlusion make it necessary to retrieve relevant terrain information from earlier observations. We present FootQuery, a perceptive locomotion framework that queries depth history using each foot's predicted next touchdown. The policy predicts touchdown locations and uncertainty from proprioception and uses these distributions, together with per-foot features, to query sparsely sampled historical depth frames. During training, realized contacts are projected into historical images to supervise retrieval at the regions where those contacts were visible. The retrieved per-foot features are fused with global visual memory to generate control actions. A progressive force-assistance curriculum supports early exploration, while event-consistent tread-midline shaping encourages coordinated stair con

arXiv:2609.21416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collaborative robots are increasingly deployed in industrial scenarios characterized by frequent product changeovers. As an intuitive programming method, kinesthetic teaching facilitates rapid robot deployment. However, users may overlook the configuration of the robot during kinesthetic teaching, leading to degradation in operational performance. Operational performance refers to the capability of the robot to generate motion and can be quantified by the Minimum Singular Value of the Jacobian matrix. To address this issue, this paper proposes an online dynamic force guidance method that integrates performance constraint and optimization mechanisms. Specifically, variable admittance control maintains the operational performance of the robot above a predefined threshold, while a virtual force actively guides the user to drag the robot towards configurations with improved performance. Experiments are conducted on a 6-DOF collaborative robot

arXiv:2609.21396v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Underwater robot development is often hindered by the complexities of waterproofing and wiring, which significantly delay the rapid prototyping process. This paper presents MarineCraft, a modular toolkit designed to accelerate the development cycle through structural reconfiguration. The system features self-contained, waterproof propulsion modules that integrate power, wireless communication, and actuation. By eliminating centralized wiring and the need for repeated sealing, MarineCraft allows diverse robot geometries to be assembled and tested in minutes rather than days. Experimental results demonstrate that this reconfigurable architecture enables fast, iterative design cycles while maintaining reliable operation and leak-free performance at depths of up to 2.5 meters. Our toolkit effectively lowers the barrier to underwater robotics by transforming modularity into a vehicle for rapid physical prototyping.

arXiv:2609.21377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic fabric comparison needs to actively combine visual appearance and tactile cues. Here, we present AVT-Fabric, an RGB-first framework that allocates tactile evidence according to the difficulty of each comparison. A dual-scale gate evaluates answer-token confidence and raw logit separation to determine whether another force-tagged GelSight observation is needed. Compact textual memory preserves the executed history, and majority voting consolidates the selected predictions. On 400 held-out comparisons, AVT-Fabric achieves 98.0% accuracy with a compact 7B Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), surpassing the 94.0% reported by the 90B MLLM-Fabric baseline by 4.0 percentage points while processing only 1.60 of five available stages on average. It improves on matched passive inference by 9.25 percentage points and reduces model-side latency by 61.8%, while also improving on RGB-only accuracy. Four additional MLLM backbones support the

arXiv:2609.21369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a comprehensive framework for robot manipulation failure analysis that includes binary failure detection, failure categorization, explanation generation, and the additional capability of failure onset localization, which aims to identify the earliest moment at which a robot execution deviates from a valid task-completion trajectory and is ultimately followed by task failure. To address these tasks, we propose ProTracer, a training-free framework that leverages existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) together with proprioceptive signals for failure analysis. Our method uses proprioceptive dynamics to identify temporally informative action boundaries and converts richer robot-state signals into structured natural-language descriptions that can be jointly analyzed together with visual observations by the VLM. This design combines the temporal precision of proprioceptive signals with the multimodal reasoning capabilities of

arXiv:2609.21358v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on large-scale, closed datasets have demonstrated remarkable success across diverse robotic manipulation tasks. However, their long-term real-world deployment necessitates continuously acquiring new skills while retaining previously learned capabilities. While pioneering works have explored continual VLA adaptation using techniques such as experience replay and reinforcement fine-tuning, they overlook a foundational mechanism: action normalization, which determines the underlying coordinate system in which policies perceive and execute physical actions. To bridge this gap, we systematically evaluate five normalization strategies across four real-world task streams covering single-arm and bimanual manipulation. Our analysis reveals that existing protocols induce severe failure modes due to inter-task coordinate drift, limited motion coverage, or train-test coordinate mismatches. Motivated by

arXiv:2609.21330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Event cameras detect per-pixel brightness changes asynchronously on microsecond timescales, with high dynamic range and low power draw. These are desirable properties for robots that move fast or work in difficult lighting conditions. However, integrating an event camera into a real-world robotic pipeline still requires substantial effort: plug-and-play drivers do not exist, event streams are recorded in a variety of incompatible file formats, and most projects rely on custom research-grade code. Here, we present EventCV, an open-source and extensible Rust library with OpenCV-style Python bindings that lowers the entry barrier to working with event cameras. EventCV provides a wide range of features: denoising filters and geometric transforms, augmentations, corner detection and unsupervised feature learning, contrast-maximization motion estimation, a video-to-events simulator, and Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) inference for deployme

arXiv:2609.21319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical control tasks in the natural world, such as driving or object manipulation, frequently exhibit dramatic variations in sensory and compute complexity over time. Correspondingly, a natural resource-efficient choice for robot control is to dynamically switch between control modes with varying resource allocations. However, such "mode-switching controllers" (MSCs) have historically required laborious, expert-driven design and synthesis for each new task. Driven by these design difficulties, modern robotic control architectures often fall back to a wasteful "monolithic" one-size-fits-all structure, where resource allocation is permanently anchored to the hardest, most resource-intensive task phases. To facilitate the design of performant yet efficient MSCs, we propose LLM-Guided synthesis of Efficient Mode-Switching Control Architectures (LEMCA). LEMCA represents MSC designs as interpretable programs to be iteratively refined in an ev

arXiv:2609.21316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human-readable maps provide an intuitive interface for specifying robot destinations, but connecting their schematic geometry to egocentric observations remains challenging. We present NaViRRator, a framework that translates user-specified start and goal locations on such maps into navigation instructions for a pretrained vision-and-language navigation (VLN) policy. Its core method, RouteScribe, separates route inference from verbalization by first generating an explicit route scaffold in map-image coordinates, which a pretrained vision-language model (VLM) converts into a navigation instruction. We construct the scaffold with start--goal line conditional flow matching (SGL-CFM), which deforms a straight start--goal waypoint sequence into a map-conditioned route. During execution, the VLN policy receives only the instruction and egocentric observations, while the map and scaffold remain upstream, allowing executor replacement without retr