News & Research

arXiv:2503.05226v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Monte Carlo tree search is attractive for robotic manipulation because it can improve action selection through simulation without requiring a fully differentiable policy. In uncertain domains, however, sparse terminal rewards and noisy transitions can make shallow search brittle: many candidate branches remain indistinguishable until late rollouts, and small simulation budgets amplify this ambiguity. This paper presents Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS, a decision-making framework that decomposes intermediate feedback into rule, heuristic, optional neural, and value-estimation channels, centers the resulting process signal against matched task contexts, and uses it to bias or repair search while preserving terminal-task evaluation. The primary evidence is intentionally tiered. Local tasks and matched ManiSkill diagnostics isolate reward-center mechanisms and ablations; matched option-level ManiSkill sweeps test robustness under primitive fai

arXiv:2606.24234v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous robotic inspection in maritime environments presents unique challenges for Visual Place Recognition (VPR) due to cross-scene perceptual shifts. Robots navigating ship-borne environments must transition between visually distinct domains: open decks with sparse textures and severe illumination changes, and enclosed cabins with repetitive structures and high visual ambiguity. Existing VPR methods, designed primarily for urban or indoor scenes, fail to generalize reliably across these starkly different scenarios. To address this, we propose ProteusVPR, a two-stage retrieval-refinement framework. The first stage employs any standard VPR model for initial image retrieval. The second stage introduces a geometric-visual estimation network that fuses the retrieved image with two temporally preceding frames, incorporating geometric descriptors, a local affine coordinate system, and camera azimuth encoding to achieve precise loc

arXiv:2606.24068v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied reasoning and exploration are increasingly considered crucial abilities for robots operating in complex and unfamiliar environments. To accomplish tasks in such settings, an agent must identify and acquire the information necessary for the task through exploration. We propose ObsGraph, an observation-centric hierarchical scene graph that unifies scene representation, retrieval, and exploration. It retains visual evidence and organizes it into room-view-object layers: rooms provide coarse semantic anchors, views preserve contextual object covisibility, and objects store fine-grained details. On top of this representation, we perform coarse-to-fine hierarchical retrieval under a bounded budget, and crucially use retrieval outcomes to structure the exploration candidate space--activating room-level exploration, view refinement, or frontier exploration--thereby tightly coupling representation, retrieval, and adaptive multi-scale ex

arXiv:2606.24884v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models can learn manipulation skills from demonstrations, but their capabilities are bounded by the skills in the training data. We present InSight, a framework that unlocks autonomous skill acquisition by rendering VLAs steerable at the primitive-action level (e.g., "move gripper to the bowl", "lift upward", "pour the bottle"). InSight consists of two primary stages: (1) an automated segmentation pipeline that partitions demonstrations into labeled primitives via VLM plan decomposition and end-effector poses to enable VLA primitive steerability, and (2) a VLM-guided data flywheel that identifies missing primitives required to accomplish a novel task, autonomously attempts demonstrations of the missing primitives with VLM-proposed low-level control, and automatically labels, stores, and integrates successful demonstrations into the VLA training set. We evaluate InSight across simulation and real-world manipula

arXiv:2606.24814v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous mobile robots operating in intralogistics environments rely on geometric maps for localization and navigation, but lack semantic understanding of objects and their contextual properties. We present a contextual semantic mapping pipeline that combines SLAM-based geometric mapping, SAM-based instance segmentation, instance clustering, and VLM multi-view reasoning to produce a contextual semantic map representation encoding geometric structure, object class, and object movability. By aggregating observations across multiple viewpoints and querying a VLM in a zero-shot, open-vocabulary setting, the pipeline infers contextual object properties--here demonstrated through movability--without requiring task-specific training or predefined object categories. We evaluate three VLMs under two prompting strategies and conduct a component-wise analysis of the pipeline. The proposed pipeline achieves 98.93 % mIoU for semantic classificat

arXiv:2606.24742v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalist value models play a pivotal role in scaling robotic policy learning from large-scale, mixed-quality data. Mathematically, accurate value estimation demands deep temporal understanding, requiring models to both ground the current belief using historical context and plan over future outcomes. However, most existing robotic value models are built on Vision-Language Model (VLM) backbones that are pretrained primarily on static or temporally sparse visual observations, lacking the requisite temporal modeling capabilities for value estimation. Unlike VLMs, world models naturally excel at temporal modeling and future planning, making them ideal foundations for learning generalizable value functions. Driven by this insight, we marry world models with value estimation to construct a new generalist robotic value model, World Value Model (WVM), that offers accurate task progressions to assess data quality. On standard benchmarks, WVM deli

arXiv:2606.24712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans effortlessly locate and identify objects by touch alone, even without vision. In contrast, robotic systems rely heavily on vision and struggle with autonomous tactile exploration and object identification. We present TACTFUL, a vision-free tactile exploration framework that enables a multi-fingered robot to autonomously explore confined workspaces, discover objects through contact, and identify them via tactile reconstruction. Trained entirely on real hardware without simulation, our system learns a single policy that balances global workspace exploration with local surface refinement through a dynamic reward schedule. Our results demonstrate that tactile sensing, when paired with structured learning, can serve as an effective primary modality for object-level reasoning, achieving 77% success with 0.015 m average reconstruction error and outperforming baseline approaches on real-world objects.

arXiv:2606.24633v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Human demonstrations for robot imitation learning often contain mistakes and corrective behaviors, such as imprecise grasps, object misalignment, unstable contact, and repeated attempts. While these segments are commonly treated as noisy or suboptimal data, they provide valuable evidence about when execution deviates from a desirable path and how task feasibility can be restored. However, existing reward and value models often rely on monotonic progress assumptions, which capture coarse task advancement but may overlook local execution errors and corrective behaviors in imperfect demonstrations. In this work, we propose ReTVL (ReTry-Supervised Value Learning), a framework for learning mistake-sensitive value functions from mixed-quality robot demonstrations by leveraging retry events as sparse supervision. ReTVL captures the local degradation-and-recovery structure around mistakes by combining global progress calibration with local pa

arXiv:2606.24628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deploying robots in unstructured real-world environments needs accurate, interactive models of the objects. Constructing these models at scale remains a critical bottleneck for robotic system integration. We present ArtiTwinSplat, a framework that automatically constructs articulated, photo-realistic digital twins of objects directly from RGB-D videos, requiring no CAD models, simulation assets, or manual annotations. Our method is built on 3D Gaussian Splatting that preserve geometric fidelity and photometric realism, coupled with an unsupervised articulation discovery pipeline that recovers part structure and joint kinematics from observed motion alone. With tracking and optimization stages our method provides stable, queryable digital twins that support real-time rendering, viewpoint control, and interactive manipulation. Unlike prior methods confined to simulation, ArtiTwinSplat operates directly on real-world observations and produce

arXiv:2606.24552v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulator-in-the-loop optimization offers a promising inference-time mechanism for robot manipulation. It uses a physical simulator as a backend rollout engine to evaluate candidate trajectories in parallel and refine nominal actions online, a paradigm proven effective in rigid-body manipulation where state and contact are relatively tractable. We bring this paradigm to real-world cloth manipulation from a single RGB input through three pillars. (i) We design a scalable synthetic-data generation and inference-time rollout pipeline built on FLASH, a deformable-object simulator that provides a practical balance among physical fidelity, numerical stability, and rollout efficiency. (ii) We develop a real-to-sim module, trained purely on synthetic data, that maps a single RGB observation to simulation-compatible cloth state by fusing pretrained visual features with learnable canonical tokens. (iii) We perform online planning by coupling a spar

arXiv:2606.24546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), such as self-driving cars, face increasingly complex demands, and yet are expected to act reliably. The black-box nature often characterizing such systems, especially those relying on neural components, makes it impossible to fully verify the system behavior prior to deployment. Unfortunately, unexpected failures-when the system does not comply with its specification-are inevitable and may have catastrophic implications. To improve trust in the system and facilitate future mitigation after a failure occurs, it is important to try to derive an explanation for the unexpected system behavior. This paper introduces the novel concept of leveraging the framework of actual causality for CPS failure explanation. Up until now, this framework was only used to derive explanations in the context of simple systems, such as image classifiers. This paper addresses the theoretical gaps and provides the gui

arXiv:2606.24489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pose graph optimization (PGO) is a key back-end component for state estimation in networked multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). In object-based multi-robot SLAM, the problem becomes more tightly coupled because robots must jointly estimate both their trajectories and the poses of persistent objects observed by multiple agents. Existing decentralized solutions often assume that the communication graph closely matches the physical interaction topology, which is restrictive in realistic deployments where communication is sparse, intermittent, or time-varying. This paper presents a fully decentralized Riemannian optimization framework for object-based multi-robot PGO that decouples the coupled estimation problem via a consensus mechanism, enabling flexible communication topologies. To improve convergence under limited communication budgets, we further develop a distributed approximate-Newton scheme that exploits local se

arXiv:2606.24472v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have made rapid progress in generalist robot manipulation by harnessing semantic knowledge from pretrained vision-language backbones, but their visual tokens remain grounded in 2D image coordinates rather than the calibrated geometry of the robot's cameras -- a mismatch especially pronounced in multi-camera setups, where views are coupled by known intrinsics and extrinsics yet processed as independent images. We propose G$^3$VLA, a camera-aware geometric module that injects calibrated structure into the visual-token stream of a pretrained VLA without altering its action space or imitation objective, combining intrinsic-conditioned ray embeddings, projective positional encoding (PRoPE), and bidirectional cross-view fusion. Geometric supervision is provided either from ground-truth point maps when available, or from confidence-gated $\pi^3$X teacher predictions, requiring no depth sensors or manual annota

arXiv:2606.24466v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Legged manipulators combine the mobility of legged platforms with the manipulation capability of robotic arms. However, arm-induced Center-of-Mass shifts and dynamic disturbances make the system more prone to instability under actuator failures, potentially leading to falls, task failures, or safety risks. Existing fault-tolerant control methods mainly focus on locomotion alone, leaving the coupled problem of whole-body stability and arm reachability in fault-tolerant loco-manipulation largely unaddressed. To bridge this gap, we propose FT-WBC, a fault-tolerant loco-manipulation framework for robust whole-body control of legged manipulators under actuator failures. FT-WBC adopts a decoupled upper- and lower-body policy architecture and introduces two key modules: a Fault Estimator (FE) and a Posture Adaptation Module (PAM). The FE predicts faulty joints from lower-body proprioceptive histories, while the PAM uses this fault informatio

arXiv:2606.24462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a scalable framework for multi-robot task allocation in complex environments where estimating task execution costs is computationally expensive. While combinatorial auction-based approaches offer reliable solutions, the exponential complexity of bundle generation typically renders them intractable for real-time reactive applications, particularly when accurate path planning is required for cost validation. We address this through a distributed, two-stage multi-fidelity bundle generation approach. Agents utilize a local search tree guided by a low-fidelity heuristic (such as euclidean distance) to rapidly explore the bundle space, applying high-fidelity path planning only to the most promising candidates in a best-first manner. These refined bids are then submitted to a central coordinator that solves a set packing problem to ensure global feasibility and maximize the overall utility. Simulation results in multiple envi