Actualités & Recherche

arXiv:2610.18650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies perform manipulation tasks using camera images and language instructions, but object slip or visual occlusion can disrupt execution. Recovery is typically learned during policy training or delegated to a monitor that triggers a scripted repair after detecting a failure. We introduce ForkCast, a predictive recovery framework that compares counterfactual futures to determine whether and how to intervene in a frozen VLA policy. At each decision point, ForkCast evaluates three candidates: executing the policy's nominal action chunk (Commit), adjusting the camera viewpoint (Reobserve), and replanning the arm trajectory (Replan). A candidate-conditioned world model forecasts the latent outcome of each candidate at a common future horizon, and a shared task-progress head scores the predicted outcomes. By evaluating the policy's own continuation alongside the repair candidates, a single comparison based on ta

arXiv:2610.18637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A robot's world model must remember objects that leave the camera's view. FloWM, a learned world model, keeps them in a spatial grid of features that it moves with five built-in velocities. A node memory instead keeps each object's position and velocity as numbers. We compare them in FloWM's own block world, with an oracle-fed Kalman tracker as the node memory. How the grid is read changes its score: a single-cell probe finds 66% of out-of-view blocks, while FloWM's own probe 89%. FloWM also scores 8 points higher in view although no frame is shown, which we attribute to its write-back of its own predictions. Out of view, the tracker reaches FloWM's range in 14KB against 5.6MB, with no probe. On diagonal motion, outside its five velocities, FloWM finds 11% of blocks even after fine-tuning, while the unchanged tracker keeps 93%. Faster blocks defeat both until one more allowed speed takes the tracker to 94%, where FloWM's built-in shifts w

arXiv:2610.18596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training improves robot foundation models (RFMs) beyond their demonstrations, but real-world deployment demands more: learning new tasks efficiently while retaining previously acquired behaviors. Existing continual RL methods on top of VLAs mitigate forgetting but rely on on-policy updates with limited forward transfer, whereas off-policy methods improve single-task sample efficiency without addressing learner persistence across tasks. We propose ACCRUE, a continual off-policy RL framework that carries lightweight actor and critic networks across tasks, allowing each stage to reuse behavioral and value knowledge acquired through prior RL. The inherited critic adapts only on current-task transitions and guides current-task actor learning, while prior behavior is preserved by distilling the actor toward cached targets on a small number of retained episodes. Fixed visual features keep the inherited learner an

arXiv:2610.18568v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies excel at generalist robotic manipulation but generate actions without explicitly modeling their environmental consequences. World action models (WAMs) incorporate future prediction, yet most rely on costly video generation, while latent alternatives either use predicted futures only as auxiliary targets or infer latent actions from suboptimal visual transitions through costly large-scale video pretraining. We introduce WAVE-0 (World-model-Augmented VLA Execution), a framework that bridges VLAs and WAMs through a lightweight latent world model. By connecting the semantic understanding of pretrained VLAs with explicit future prediction, WAVE-0 allows anticipated action consequences to directly guide action generation. Built on a pretrained VLA, its 257M world model translates VLM-generated latent action plans into predicted future representations that condition the action expert, unifying latent plannin

arXiv:2610.18523v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Task planning for robots in off-site construction prefabrication is primarily manual, leading to planning inefficiencies and reluctance to adopt robotic solutions. Existing approaches provide limited support for scalable, modular automated task planning and localized runtime replanning. This paper proposes APTree, a model-driven framework that integrates automated task planning with modular task execution using behavior trees as the execution model. APTree repeatedly applies and coordinates heterogeneous symbolic planners to automatically generate and compose modular task plans at runtime. To support this approach, we develop a domain-specific language for the formal specification and validation of task plans, together with a compatible execution engine. We evaluate APTree on the real-world livMatS Biomimetic Shell pavilion, where it models the construction robotic fabrication domain, detects injected specification and planning errors at

arXiv:2610.18479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sonar was one of the first sensors with which mobile robots built maps, and in-air sonar keeps working where cameras and lidar fail, in darkness, smoke, dust and next to glass. Classical sonar SLAM, however, relied on geometric features or occupancy grids built from sparse range readings, and both struggle with the specular reflections that dominate indoor sonar. In this letter, we introduce RTISSLAM, a novel sonar-only SLAM system for an embedded 3D imaging sonar, which combines the robust pose graph of BatSLAM 2.0 as back-end with an occupancy grid as map. Energyscapes from delay-multiply-and-sum beamforming with a range-wise CFAR serve as place descriptors for sequence-verified loop closures, acoustic odometry calibrates the wheel odometry online, recognized revisits are registered metrically, and the grid is stored per keyframe and anchored to the pose-graph nodes, so that it follows every loop closure. In simulated worlds with specul

arXiv:2610.18443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The fidelity of teleoperated demonstrations used for imitation learning is determined by how faithfully a robot hand can replicate the operator's posture. The posture retargeting law that the robot will execute is typically selected only once the hardware has been finalized, and conventional hand designs often neglect human-like grasping postures. We introduce PACT, an optimization based on human grasping postures that jointly optimizes the mechanical parameters of a 17-servo robot hand (link lengths, joint offsets, mounting angles, and base placements) and its nonlinear posture retargeter (a linear human-to-robot joint map, per-joint posture-IK weights, and damping). The optimization enforces full-finger correspondence (MCP, PIP, DIP, and tip of each finger) to human poses from the DexYCB dataset, and is constrained by servo interference, assembly clearances, and flat-hand protrusion, so the resulting design can be physically assembled.

arXiv:2610.18425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cooperative aerial manipulation is difficult under wind, payload motion, and noisy goal broadcasts because multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are coupled through a shared payload. We present CALM (Cooperative Aerial Learned Manipulation), a decentralized controller for aerial manipulators carrying a basket while tracking a moving ground robot. CALM combines a parameter-shared Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) policy, trained using Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO), with goal estimation, per-UAV Extended State Observers (ESOs), basket-mass estimation, and anticipatory formation-yaw feedforward. The anticipatory formation-yaw feedforward uses estimated goal motion to rotate the formation before position error develops, reducing basket-yaw lag without adding net commanded force. A disturbance-conditioned critic supports centralized training while execution remains decentralized. Across held-out trajectories, CALM

arXiv:2610.18386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Manipulation tasks such as unscrewing a cap or sliding a part in contact with a surface require imposing force along a high-friction direction: the robot must overcome a resistance rather than yield to it. Generative visuomotor policies predict the motion for such tasks but not the authority needed to realize it, and that authority is bounded by the impedance controller beneath them: when the resistance exceeds what a compliant controller can exert under a bounded tracking error, the task is unattainable however accurate the prediction is. The required amount cannot be anticipated either, since it depends on a contact state the observation does not reveal. In this paper, we propose a residual stiffening layer placed underneath an unmodified policy. Resistance is recognized, without force sensing, from the mismatch between the motion the policy commands and the motion the robot realizes, and a four-mode supervisor raises the stiffness alon

arXiv:2610.18381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aerial mobile manipulation requires unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to traverse heterogeneous environments such as indoor and outdoor domains, and connect navigation with subsequent physical interaction within the same trajectories. Existing aerial benchmarks are typically confined to single-environment settings, limiting evaluation of agents across continuous environmental transitions. When interaction is evaluated, agents are often initialized near the target, leaving the transition from navigation to interaction largely unassessed. This work introduces CrossFly, a benchmark for long-horizon interaction-oriented aerial mobility across heterogeneous environments. CrossFly contains 15K trajectories across more than 20 reconstructed scenes under a unified simulation and evaluation framework, covering Indoor, Outdoor, and Indoor$\leftrightarrow$Outdoor trajectories. It further introduces Interaction Readiness Rate (IRR) to assess whether te

arXiv:2610.18373v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quadruped robots performing outdoor deliveries must interpret complex scenes, anticipate changes, and navigate in socially compliant ways. Robot demonstrations are costly to collect at the scale needed for generalization. Egocentric web videos offer abundant human navigation experience, but differences in viewpoint and motion make this experience difficult to transfer to robots. We introduce DR-VLA, a Mixture-of-Transformers framework that transfers human navigation experience through a domain-invariant scene representation (DISR). The framework combines vision-language understanding and latent world modeling with a flow-matching action expert. We introduce EgoLynx, comprising 10,000 hours of curated egocentric web video (EgoLynx-Web) and 2,000 clips of teleoperated robot navigation collected during real-world deliveries (EgoLynx-Robot). We pretrain the understanding and world experts on EgoLynx-Web without action labels, then adapt the m

arXiv:2610.18352v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A robot following a multi-step instruction needs to act on the right objects in the right order, even as the scene changes. It must also maintain awareness of task progress and determine when to advance. To address these challenges, we introduce Orchestra, an agent harness that separates task planning and execution management from action generation. Orchestra decomposes a complete multimodal instruction into ordered subtasks, tracks completed steps, and updates the locations of relevant objects and destinations during execution. It maintains a shared context containing the active subtask, spatial grounding, and recent observations. An action policy uses this context to generate actions, while a separately trained progress evaluator estimates when to advance to the next subtask. To evaluate whether robots trained on atomic instructions and short trajectories can execute longer subtask sequences, we introduce a benchmark named RMBench-Compo

arXiv:2610.18321v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe autonomous navigation requires not only geometric obstacle avoidance but also semantic awareness. Different object categories demand different safety clearances, and the set of relevant categories may expand as the robot explores novel environments. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer rich semantic representations for building maps of unknown scenes, yet their confidence scores are poorly calibrated, making raw predictions unreliable for safety-critical planning. Conformal prediction (CP) can provide coverage guarantees, but existing methods assume a fixed label set and stationary data, limiting their use in open-world settings. We propose Conformal Semantic Mapping for Open-World Safe Robot Navigation (CoSMO), a semantic safety mapping framework that transforms VLM embeddings into calibrated coverage sets and safety-aware obstacle dilations over a dynamically expanding hazard vocabulary, even under distribution shift. Experiments on

arXiv:2610.18307v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Service and delivery robots often need to complete long-horizon navigation missions spanning indoor and outdoor environments. Existing embodied navigation benchmarks primarily evaluate isolated stages or partial cross-domain journeys, providing limited support for assessing how heterogeneous navigation capabilities compose under continuous execution. We introduce I2O2I-Nav, a physics-enabled benchmark of 20 real-world composite scenes spanning over 115,000 square meters across multiple buildings and floors, with aligned 3DGS rendering and collision geometry. Its three-level evaluation progresses from independent primitives to two-stage compositions and complete four-stage I2O2I missions. Each stage starts from its predecessor's actual endpoint, while stage-conditional metrics track completion and localize failures along the mission. We further propose the MODULAR-Agent that coordinates frozen navigation policies through completion verific

arXiv:2610.18194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic manipulation systems commonly learn object affordances from human-annotated datasets, which reflect interaction possibilities for a human hand rather than the physical constraints of a specific robot. For example, a surface region of an object identified as graspable by a human annotator may be geometrically unreachable or mechanically infeasible for a robot, yet this mismatch is rarely addressed explicitly. To tackle this challenge, we proposed a framework that translates human affordance annotations into robot-executable affordance predictions conditioned on the physical properties of the robot. The network predicts which surface regions of an object are physically executable by the robot, given a 3D point cloud of an object and a descriptor encoding the robot's geometry and constraints. The model was trained using human-annotated affordances together with robotic execution outcomes from multiple sampled approach trials in simul