ニュース＆研究

arXiv:2611.02462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Treating morphology and control as separate design problems has constrained the efficiency and adaptability of quadrupedal robots, while current co-design approaches are often constrained by restricted design spaces. We overcome this limit by introducing Dogger, a bio-inspired quadruped with modular three-segment legs, four-bar linkages and adjustable passive knee compliance. A two-stage framework combining reinforcement learning and Bayesian optimization is developed: the morphology-conditioned control policy is trained across designs and then held fixed during task-specific design selection. The resulting designs and policies deployed zero-shot reduce the cost of transport by 18.6% and 35.7% for inspection and payload-carrying tasks. Comparisons demonstrate that full geometry-compliance co-design outperforms fixed and restricted design scopes. Cross-task tests further reveal distinct task-specific morphologies with shared mechanical tra

arXiv:2611.02391v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: No algorithm is best on all problems, but a real warehouse is a narrow problem: its layout and processes rarely change. Operators still run one general multi-robot planner at many sites, because experts cannot tune it for each one. In this work, which we call Late Autumn, we explore whether LLM coding agents running autonomous research can specialize a general planner for one site, trading generality for throughput, much as post-training adapts a pretrained LLM to one task. We study six campaigns on a lifelong planner that combines task assignment with multi-agent path finding, on a floor modeled on an existing automated warehouse. We find that (1) the agents raise throughput by 22--60%, and the gains hold on unseen seeds; (2) they rediscover known MAPF mechanisms, such as corridor-exit priorities, local guidance, and rollouts, and independent campaigns find the same bottleneck; (3) the gains largely carry over to another layout, a larger

arXiv:2611.02240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe navigation in interactive traffic requires autonomous vehicles to reason about unobservable human characteristics and the reciprocal nature of multi-agent interactions. Traditional architectures often decouple prediction from planning, leading to the "Frozen Robot Problem" or unsafe maneuvers under high ambiguity because they treat risk assessment and information acquisition as independent objectives. We argue that the notion of safety should not remain static but must instead dynamically co-evolve with the system's internal confidence: the robot should actively clarify ambiguity when necessary while also recognizing the diminishing returns of information, and naturally transition toward task execution. We introduce a unified belief-space Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework that couples multistep information planning with a clarity-adaptive Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) barrier mechanism. By treating clarity, a scalar informa

arXiv:2611.02218v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RL locomotion policies trained under nominal simulation conditions may encounter distribution shifts that compromise safety. Predictive monitors could anticipate violations, but their world-model forecasts may become unreliable under shift, and ensemble disagreement is not calibrated. We evaluate predictive Signal Temporal Logic (STL) monitoring for frozen Ant-v5 and HalfCheetah-v5 policies using closed-loop world-model rollouts and a three-model ensemble. Across external-force, observation-noise, and mass shifts, predicted robustness ranks HalfCheetah's future STL violations strongly, whereas disagreement does not reliably track observation prediction error or violations. Under severe noise, violations remain common ($64.2\pm24.4\%$ at $K{=}20$ across three PPO seeds), yet current-state robustness without prediction comes within $0.03$ AUROC of predictive robustness. Penalizing predicted robustness by disagreement does not consistently i

arXiv:2611.02181v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In human-robot co-manipulation, the robot's trajectory should accommodate the human's, where human sensorimotor behavior is affected by the task's spatial and temporal constraints, as well as personal factors. Several robot trajectory planning methods have been proposed to embed human sensorimotor models in the robot trajectory planning, but these methods do not consider temporal constraints that adapt to how the human behaves when interacting with the robot. To better align human and robot collaborative motion, this work adapts a stochastic optimal control problem with a final state constraint from the task constraints and a temporal constraint from Fitts' law. A recursive least squares method is used to estimate the Fitts' law parameters, adapting the robot's motion duration to that of the human, thus allowing the robot to adapt to how the human behaves when interacting with the robot. It is hypothesized that a speed increase can result

arXiv:2611.02171v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dexterous in-hand manipulation is commonly formulated around explicit object pose estimation, yet reliable pose tracking is challenging under severe hand-object occlusions and often requires object-specific supervision. This dependence creates a bottleneck between perception and control that can limit robustness and scalability. We present an end-to-end visuomotor framework for dexterous in-hand reorientation that operates on RGB observations and proprioception without intermediate pose estimation. Our approach jointly learns visual representations and control policies through behavior distillation from privileged state teachers and auxiliary reconstruction objectives. Furthermore, we introduce image-goal-conditioned reorientation, allowing desired object configurations to be specified directly through images rather than canonical pose representations. We evaluate our approach across a diverse set of object geometries and instances in sim

arXiv:2611.02140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanical hysteresis and pneumatic loading complicate contact force estimation from deformation measurements in soft robots. This work presents a 3D-printed polyether block amide (PEBA) Kresling cell with magnetic angular sensing that supports three operating modes: force sensing at zero gauge pressure, force sensing with tunable stiffness under gauge positive pressure, and self-sensing actuation under negative gauge pressure. A multiscale gated recurrent unit (GRU) network estimates contact force from angular histories to account for the the combined effects of geometric deformation and material response. At zero gauge pressure, the model achieves a test RMSE of 0.76~N. Positive gauge pressure approximately doubles the average axial loading stiffness at +20~kPa over the first 3~mm of compression, while pressure-specific models maintain RMSEs below 0.93~N. Under negative gauge pressure, an energy-based compensation model enables contact

arXiv:2611.02101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot foundation models now act in a closed loop, yet their safety is evaluated one variation at a time: robustness benchmarks perturb the scene while assuming instantaneous inference, and real-time execution methods study inference delay in nominal scenes. We argue that physical safety is not a property of the model alone, but emerges from how variations in the physical environment, the model, the computing platform, and execution interact in closed loop. We formalize this as cross-layer variation propagation across these system layers and use an interaction contrast to measure when joint variation creates more risk than the sum of its parts. In 4,000 paired closed-loop episodes of the pi0.5 vision-language-action model on LIBERO, a 400 ms inference delay raises the safety-violation rate by 3.5 percentage points under the training viewpoint but by 37 percentage points under a 60-degree camera shift: 33.5 percentage points (95% CI: 25-43)

arXiv:2611.02090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-robot systems in automated warehouses must efficiently attend to a constant stream of pickup-and-delivery tasks while avoiding collisions. Existing Multi-Agent Pickup-and-Delivery (MAPD) solutions generate plans that are globally feasible but often locally inefficient. In large-scale, long-horizon deployments, these inefficiencies, such as robots backtracking from target goal locations and idling in congested areas, accumulate over time and degrade performance. This paper contributes Local Solution Repair (LSR), a goal replanning approach that detects suboptimal behaviors at run-time and locally improves plans to reduce conflict between agents. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by repairing solutions generated by state-of-the-art MAPD baselines, M2M and LNS-PBS. Our results in long-horizon warehouse simulations over three environments show upwards of 5.9% improvement in task throughput over current state-of-the-art methods

arXiv:2611.01844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Navigation world models predict future observations conditioned on navigation actions to support planning, but their generalization across real-world environments remains constrained by the limited coverage of action-labeled data. Action-free navigation videos provide diverse visual experience, yet lack the recorded actions required for action-conditioned training. We introduce OpenNWM, a generalist navigation world model with latent action pretraining. It learns universal latent actions from large-scale action-free videos through visual prediction pretraining, and further aligns them with physical motions via action-conditioned post-training. To support video pretraining, we curate NavAnywhere, a large-scale action-free navigation video dataset comprising 17.5 million visual observations from 15 heterogeneous sources. It captures navigation by ground robots, humans, and drones, with diverse viewpoints and motion patterns across five broa

arXiv:2611.01814v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent-space path planning (LSPP) compresses the configuration space of a robotic manipulator into a compact, differentiable manifold learned by a variational autoencoder, enabling fast gradient-based planning without explicit inverse kinematics. Existing LSPP frameworks enforce obstacle avoidance with a binary collision classifier, whose saturated gradients near obstacle boundaries and lack of temporal structure cause the optimizer to stall and provide no forward-invariance guarantee. We replace the classifier with a neural control barrier function (CBF) learned directly in the latent space. The barrier is trained with a three-term objective that combines safe and unsafe sign constraints with a discrete-time decrease condition evaluated on transitions of an obstacle-blind nominal planner, and it is enforced at planning time by a closed-form, first-order correction that projects each goal-directed latent step back onto the CBF constraint.

arXiv:2611.01748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid controllers need the ability to yield to external forces while retaining the capacity to resume their original tasks. However, tracking objectives penalize the deviations needed for yielding, while relaxing tracking goals persistently can make task recovery harder. Existing approaches often rely on task-specific interaction command interfaces or constructed compliant motion data and reference trajectories, limiting the direct reuse of their compliance-training mechanisms across different task interfaces. We introduce CompliantBot, a compliance-training framework for motion tracking and velocity-command locomotion. It preserves the original task inputs and requires no preconstructed compliant data or target trajectories. A state-dependent interaction force field couples applied loads to the robot's motion, enabling local articulation and whole-body movement to change the forces experienced. A complementary force-magnitude reward e

arXiv:2611.01729v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most robot policies, whether trained by imitation learning (IL) or reinforcement learning (RL), map observations to action values at discrete control steps and leave the continuity of physical motion to be learned implicitly. We propose ODE policy, which learns the dynamics of the action rather than the action itself. A neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) learns the vector field of the action by matching the integrated actions to the targets over short action chunks in IL and single control steps in RL. A lightweight diversity head captures multi-modal behavior by randomizing the direction of the field. At deployment, each action is integrated from the previous one, so the executed trajectory is continuous by construction. We evaluate it as a visuomotor policy, as the action head of vision-language-action (VLA) and world action models (WAMs), and as the actor of model-based RL against 14 baselines on unimanual, bimanual, dexterous

arXiv:2611.01659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Acquiring objects in human environments is hard for humanoids: targets are partially occluded under egocentric viewpoints, and reaching them demands coordinated whole-body motion that keeps the target visible and reachable while the base stays stable. We present HuG, a framework for whole-body affordance-aware grasping with active perception that couples perception and action through a Perceive-Align-Grasp pipeline: belief-driven active perception resolves occlusion by treating viewpoint as an explicit decision variable; a point-cloud-conditioned affordance policy proposes whole-body grasps; and an affordance-aware alignment stage repositions the body to the most executable configuration. A key insight is that, on a floating base, kinematic validity is not enough: we curate training data with controller-in-the-loop dynamics simulation, rejecting 73% of kinematically valid grasps that would destabilize the deployment controller, so the pol

arXiv:2611.01609v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic surface exploration benefits from tactile interfaces that accommodate contact and capture variations in surface characteristics. Herein, we report MagPillar, a tactile sensor inspired by spider tactile hairs that combines a magnetic pillar array with three-axis Hall sensing. A full-array mechanical and magnetic-field model characterizes how pillar deformation affects the superposed fields measured across the array, providing a physical basis for interpreting its contact responses. The compliant pillar architecture translates contact with surface textures and geometric features into distinct magnetic response patterns. Then, in robotic surface perception experiments, spectral features and logistic regression distinguish six material surfaces with an offline accuracy of 99.34% under within-session temporally blocked cross-validation. Continuous scans over periodic protrusions produce amplitude and peak-spacing variations consistent