ニュース＆研究

arXiv:2611.03410v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wearable robot interfaces must connect user input to timely physical action. We present the proposed platform, an open smart-ring platform for studying this connection across task stages. The ring integrates a microphone, an inertial measurement unit, photoplethysmography, and skin-temperature sensing. Its software architecture separates acquisition, event interpretation, interaction policy, and robot execution. We characterize seven operating modes and evaluate speech and gesture control with 10 participants. Across five commands and 250 trials per modality, speech and gestures achieved task success rates of 90.4% and 88.8%, respectively. Recognition accuracy exceeded task success for both modalities. Gaussian hidden Markov models achieved higher accuracy than a support vector machine across three vocabulary sizes, with longer scoring times. Following a shared spoken task start, gesture-based adjustments had shorter median response times

arXiv:2611.03307v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ball-balancing robots (ballbots) must lean to accelerate, and the lean is limited by the wheel torques and by safety. Planners that use the full robot model are expensive, while planners that ignore the balance dynamics produce references that cannot be followed. This paper presents a two-layer navigation scheme for a three-omni-wheel ballbot. The upper layer is a model predictive controller on a \emph{jerk model} of the ball position, with discrete-time control barrier functions for static, moving, rotating and concave obstacles. The lower layer is a hierarchical sliding mode controller with an extended state observer and a robust exponential control barrier function on the tilt (HSMC-ESO-ECBF). The layers are linked by an acceleration bound derived in closed form from the largest steady tilt that the barrier function admits, so that the plan never asks for a lean the tracker refuses. For obstacles whose motion is only predicted, the obs

arXiv:2611.03294v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation requires fine-grained control and complex physical interactions with the environment, posing significant challenges for robot policy learning. Vision-only policies struggle with such tasks, as contact states and interaction forces are difficult to infer from visual observations alone. Existing methods mitigate this issue by incorporating force or tactile sensing. However, they often treat these signals as auxiliary observations without fully exploiting their role in modeling future interaction dynamics. To address this, we propose ForceLDM, a force-aware latent dynamics model that learns future contact and motion dynamics to guide action generation. Rather than directly predicting future observations, which can entangle task-relevant dynamics with irrelevant sensory details, ForceLDM learns a compact representation of future dynamics through knowledge distillation. Specifically, a teacher network with privileged

arXiv:2611.03268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many manipulation goals are easier to visualize than to specify numerically through explicit geometric constraints. We present VerifLM, a framework that converts image-edited goal configurations into physically verified 6-DoF object poses for planning. Using an edited image, VerifLM recovers an initial relative pose between an active object and a passive object, then prompts a vision-language model to generate axis-wise sampling constraints and a task-specific validation program. Candidate poses are evaluated in a physics simulator, and the VLM selects the most task-consistent retained candidate. To operate without predefined object meshes or physical parameters, VerifLM reconstructs metric object geometry from RGB-D observations and constructs multiple hypothetical simulations with varying physics and geometry. Parallel-world validation evaluates candidates across geometry--physics variations and ranks them by the number of worlds in whi

arXiv:2611.03254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Virtual reality experiments involving navigation and simulated robot motion often require large, realistic environments and numerous distinct trajectories to avoid repetitive navigation while providing sufficient variation for controlled experiments. Designing such scenarios manually is labor-intensive, particularly when trajectories must satisfy predefined geometric and kinematic constraints while remaining diverse and comparable across experimental conditions. This paper presents TRAILS, an automated framework for generating complete virtual navigation scenarios consisting of an environment layout, a path, and a time-parameterized motion profile. The framework combines a constraint-based procedural environment generator inspired by Wave Function Collapse, trajectory generation using optimized cubic B\'ezier curves, and speed-profile generation subject to kinematic constraints. The generated scenarios provide diverse indoor environments

arXiv:2611.03216v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soft robot co-design methods can jointly optimise morphology and control, but the resulting designs are often difficult to manufacture, while manufacturable approaches typically restrict actuator placement or require manual assembly. We present a simulation-based co-design framework that jointly optimises material distribution, pneumatic actuator placement and orientation, and control, while producing designs that can be fabricated monolithically using fused deposition modelling. The framework uses a differentiable 2D plane-stress Material Point Method simulator, incorporating an experimentally validated material model and an empirically derived surrogate model of a 3D-printed inflatable actuator. We demonstrate gradient-based optimisation soft robotic arms for prescribed tip trajectories. Optimised designs are transferred directly from simulation to one-shot monolithic FDM fabrication, with integrated actuators and no post-assembly. Phys

arXiv:2611.03168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We release all 3,718 episodes from the ArmnetBench v0.1 evaluation (arXiv:2607.24481), which contains 600 teleoperated demonstrations and 3,118 rollouts of seven imitation-learning and vision-language-action policies on 12 tabletop tasks, recorded on low-cost SO-101 arms; 73% of the rollouts are failures. Every policy for a task was trained or fine-tuned on the same 50 demonstrations and rolled out on the same cell, so the corpus contains many policies' failures on shared tasks. An operator labelled every rollout successful, suboptimal or failure. Each episode has three camera views, joint states and actions and is available on the Hugging Face Hub in LeRobot v3.0 and a reward-model format. This note documents how the episodes were collected and the limitations that could affect their use.

arXiv:2611.03163v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-grained manipulation couples instruction grounding, local visual precision, and sustained execution. We present FineCraft, a framework that adapts pretrained models for fine-grained manipulation in the MetaFine Challenge. A task-routed mixture of policies selects independently adapted DINOv2-DiT or pretrained $\pi_{0.5}$ policies through a common observation-action interface. Local visual features help identify the instructed object parts, demonstrations and expert continuations teach the required actions, and new observations guide replanning during execution. FineCraft ranks fourth with an overall score of $0.878$, exceeding the published reference on all five tasks. Official results and local diagnostics characterize performance across visual perturbations, instruction changes, and multi-stage manipulation. Code is available at https://github.com/eqcy/FineCraft

arXiv:2611.03138v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Progress in robot learning, particularly physical multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), is currently challenged by a limited availability of accessible, standardized benchmarks. While simulation-based MARL has produced remarkable emergent behaviors, from coordinated team play to complex tool use, translating these advances to physical systems remains difficult. A key barrier is infrastructural: physical platforms are often prohibitively expensive, require specialized facilities, or lack open mechanisms and designs for reproducibility. We introduce KlaskTron, an open-source, low-cost (<\$2500 USD), desktop-scale robotic testbed for adversarial MARL based on the dynamic tabletop game KLASK. The platform features dual CoreXY gantries with high-torque brushless motors, enabling the high-speed, precise manipulation required for competitive play. Crucially, we provide a complete ecosystem: hardware designs (CAD, BOM), a GPU-native digital

arXiv:2611.03106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Field robots operating in mines, tunnels, and disaster areas require reliable localization despite GNSS denial and degraded camera and LiDAR measurements caused by dust, smoke, or poor illumination. Missions involving both ground and aerial robots further motivate complementary sensing modalities that do not depend on visibility, preinstalled infrastructure, or wheel contact. This letter presents MISLAM, a tightly coupled magnetic-inertial simultaneous localization and mapping system using an IMU and a nine-magnetometer array, without relying on external odometry or platform-specific motion assumptions. The system combines the inertial navigation model with local polynomial magnetic-field models for short-term motion estimation and a global Gaussian process model for drift correction using an error-state Kalman filter. Offline evaluation on three indoor datasets collected with a handheld rig shows reductions in total endpoint closure erro

arXiv:2611.03103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models offer a promising path toward general-purpose robot manipulation. While inference latency can affect task success in a constantly evolving physical world, the relationship between latency and task success rate remains poorly understood. In this paper, we introduce VLALagBench, a comprehensive benchmark for studying VLA inference latency sensitivity across task types, object speeds, execution modes (synchronous and asynchronous), and VLA policies. Using VLALagBench, we find that even a modest inference latency of 100 ms can nearly halve task success on moving targets, with sensitivity varying substantially across tasks and policies. These differences reflect task-specific requirements for precision and continuous motion. By overlapping inference with action execution, asynchronous execution can recover some of the lost success at the cost of more frequent inference requests. Building on these findings, w

arXiv:2611.03091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: KlaskTron is an open-hardware physical platform for two-player adversarial reinforcement learning, with a learned actuator model that supports zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of trained policies. Building on this platform, we contribute KlaskTron-IL: a multi-tier imitation learning dataset (80k human demonstration timesteps collected directly on the physical robot, 320k symmetry-augmented timesteps, and synthetic expert trajectories up to 5M steps generated by the zero-shot-validated PPO policy), and diagnostic baselines that expose three characteristic failure modes of standard IL methods under contact-rich adversarial dynamics: BC's data scaling plateau, GAIL's interpretable but weak-gradient discriminator (Spearman $\rho = -1.0$ peg-ball proximity recovery, but a logit span under 0.1), and an asymmetric BC-prior x reward-density interaction. Because the policy interface used throughout this paper is the same one the actuator model bridg

arXiv:2611.03059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-based robotic manipulation is constrained by end-effector reachability and the mechanical properties of objects. Airflow can exert forces without direct robot-object contact, enabling manipulation of objects beyond the reach or when direct contact is undesirable. However, the lack of suitable simulation has hindered the application of reinforcement learning to airflow-based manipulation, limiting the broader adoption of this mechanism compared with contact-based methods. To address this gap, we developed a robot- and task-agnostic airflow extension for Isaac Lab that supports massively parallel training. The extension uses experimentally identified airflow models to compute the forces and torques exerted on objects. Based on this extension, we train a hybrid push-blow (HPB) policy that combines contact-based pushing with airflow manipulation and a rectangular reorientation (RR) policy that controls a cuboid's heading using airflow

arXiv:2611.03016v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a decentralized guiding vector field framework for rigid formation path following in multi- UAV systems based on the superposition of simple rule-driven vector fields. Each control objective is encoded as a dedicated vector-field component: a normalized tangential term to ensure progression along a prescribed geometric path at a desired speed, a convergence term driving the formation toward the path, a local coordination term that preserves the desired formation shape through a pseudo-path parameter, and a local separation term for inter-agent collision avoidance. The coordination mechanism requires the exchange of only a single scalar per agent, resulting in low communication bandwidth. Partial theoretical results establish convergence of the swarm to the desired path and formation in the absence of the sepa- ration term, while collision avoidance is formally guaranteed. The approach is experimentally validated using

arXiv:2611.02999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Markerless hand-eye calibration under continuous motion requires jointly resolving camera geometry and the time offset between images and joint states. We present SyncHeC (Synchronized Hand-Eye Calibration), a dense differentiable-rendering framework that estimates both from a single robot trajectory. Continuous-time forward kinematics makes latency differentiable, metric depth complements mask contours, and an offline planner combines spatial sensitivity with temporal excitation. Alternating updates support Eye-to-Hand, Eye-in-Hand, and multi-camera calibration. On a 7-DoF arm, one $6.5$\,s motion yields $0.21$\,cm translation error against a marker-board reference, $0.34$\,cm touch-test error, and $2.7$\,ms latency error relative to an $87$\,ms reference with $95\%$ uncertainty of $\pm1.5$\,ms. Against CM-Calib on matched recordings, translation and nominal latency errors improve by $3.7\times$ and $2.3\times$. Experiments span seven ar