News & Research

arXiv:2609.08250v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How far a pushed object slides depends on its mass and friction, which no single image reveals. Pretrained visual encoders are increasingly used as the perception front end of world models for manipulation, and their physical competence is assessed with perturbation benchmarks and linear probes, almost always in a clean, fixed-camera scene. We show that these assessments cannot distinguish an encoder that infers physics from one that does not. CALIPER (calibrate, then predict) is a direct test: an object of unknown mass and friction is struck twice at known speeds, a third strike is shown only up to the moment of contact, and a linear readout on frozen features must predict how far the object slides. Swapping in another object's calibration clips checks that the evidence is actually used. Across 2,000 simulated episodes and eight representations, from V-JEPA 2 to a randomly initialised ViT and raw pixels, calibration adds +0.50 R^2 and th

arXiv:2609.08224v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Intermediate representations are key to bridging the modality gap between generalizable manipulation policies and large-scale pretrained vision-language models (VLMs). Among these, trajectory-based representations compactly represent motion-relevant cues, yet most existing approaches predict trajectories in 2D image space, resulting in intrinsic 3D ambiguity. Moreover, using 2D trajectories with depth still leaves the free-space waypoints ambiguous, limiting reliable 3D reasoning. To address this, we propose predicting 3D consistent waypoints (3DWay) from multi-view images. By reformulating 3D waypoints prediction as generating multi-view consistent 2D waypoints followed by geometric triangulation, we enable explicit 3D motion specification while preserving the strong priors of pretrained VLMs. The predicted waypoints can guide existing VLA models for better generalization or be directly executed on simple tasks. Extensive experiments sho

arXiv:2609.08220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a promising tool for automating robot design from high-level specifications, yet they remain ineffective for robots operating under complex physical interactions. This limitation stems from the gap between language-based reasoning and the physical consequences of embodiment, often resulting in designs with low physical validity. In this work, we propose a multi-layered framework, AID-SR, that establishes a closed loop by translating simulator-observed physical states into structured feedback for the LLM designer. Combined with semantic critique, human feedback, and iterative refinement, the framework promotes the generation of physically feasible and functionally meaningful robot designs. We evaluate our approach on tendon-driven continuum robots across a benchmark of 14 tasks spanning reaching, grasping, locomotion, and manipulation. The proposed framework achieves 96.2% rate for pass

arXiv:2609.08209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from Observation (LfO) is a fundamental robotic capability that replicates how humans and animals socially learn from each other. Beyond its biological parallels, this modality provides a practical solution for data scaling in sample-inefficient and data-starved domains like robotics. Recent work has demonstrated promising results in learning manipulation skills from human videos, yet progress in this area remains difficult to assess. Existing methods vary widely in assumptions, hardware choices, and environment setups making it difficult to draw meaningful comparisons and identify advances in the field. To address these challenges, we introduce RoboReel: a unified benchmark for evaluating models that learn policies from human videos. RoboReel consists of bundled real-world human demonstration videos, simulated robot trajectories, and evaluation environments on ten manipulation tasks. We develop four test suites to evaluate the m

arXiv:2609.08164v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aerial Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) requires an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to locate a described target in an unknown outdoor environment using onboard visual observations. Vision-language models (VLMs) can interpret open-ended target descriptions and visual observations, but their frame-level outputs are often noisy, sparse, and spatially transient. We propose AeroBelief, a dual-layer semantic-spatial belief mapping framework that transforms transient VLM observations into persistent spatial guidance. It separates broad contextual plausibility from target-specific evidence: an intuition layer accumulates scene-level semantic cues for exploration, while an evidence layer preserves qualified target-specific observations for approach and confirmation. Evidence-gated fusion combines the two layers into spatial belief hotspots. We further introduce object-conditioned visual reasoning with conservative evidence qualification to improv

arXiv:2609.08159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon target navigation requires a robot to sustain task execution across evolving observations, decisions, and physical interactions. This requires three coupled capabilities: maintaining valid scene memory, revising target beliefs under partial observability, and selecting interaction-feasible navigation endpoints. However, the state underlying each capability is only conditionally valid: scene representations become stale when objects move or disappear, unsuccessful searches alter beliefs over target locations, and geometrically convenient endpoints may still be infeasible for manipulation. To address these challenges, we present OmniNav, which formulates long-horizon navigation as continual inference over a factorized task state posterior coupling scene validity, target belief, and interaction feasibility. For representation, OmniNav incrementally constructs an updatable 3D object scene memory, preventing stale scene evidence f

arXiv:2609.08123v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A robot that can be taught a new task from a handful of demonstrations has to work out for itself what it still cannot do, and then ask for exactly that. Interactive imitation learning takes a step in that direction by letting a policy practice on its own and calling an expert when it goes wrong. Existing methods decide when to interrupt the learner. A further 2 decisions are left to whichever episode happened to trigger the interruption: which failure to correct, and where the demonstration should start. This paper is a first attempt at making both of them deliberately. DISEIL (Demonstration dIstillation for Sample-Efficient Imitation Learning) marks each failed episode at the step where the policy first becomes unreliable, represents that moment with a geometric descriptor, and groups the failures into recurring failure modes. A vision-language model and a language model read the selected mode and write a request for the next demonstrat

arXiv:2609.08010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a general framework for simulating multi-body space robots with contact. We bring efficient, large-scale robot simulation to in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing applications. First, we perform an empirical trade study of methods for coupling orbit propagation with existing robotics simulation frameworks. Next, we present mjorbit, a general, flexible, and performant framework built on the MuJoCo engine widely used in robotics, to which we add key spacecraft dynamics, actuators, and sensors. We provide a low-latency C++ CPU backend and a high-throughput GPU backend behind a simple Python API. We demonstrate mjorbit by solving several realistic on-orbit case studies with both model-predictive control and reinforcement learning. Open-source code and examples are available at: https://johnzhang3.github.io/mjorbit/

arXiv:2609.07933v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality demonstration data is becoming a central bottleneck for training general-purpose humanoid robots. While recent humanoid teleoperation systems have made substantial progress in retargeting human motion to robot motion, long-horizon loco-manipulation requires another capability: operators must maintain task-relevant spatial awareness over time, e.g., object locations, surrounding environments, the robot's pose. We call the extent of this awareness the operator's perceptual horizon. However, existing methods often shorten this: narrow views miss peripheral events, robot-mounted cameras become unstable during locomotion, and coupled head-view control makes looking around interfere with robot motion. We present SPOT, a Spatial Perception-Oriented VR Teleoperation system for collecting long-horizon humanoid demonstration data by providing extended perceptual horizon. SPOT combines a robot-mounted binocular fisheye camera, a wide-fi

arXiv:2609.07930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning models have been increasingly applied to Time Series Forecasting (TSF) in recent years. Transformer-based and MLP-based models have both been used effectively on many real-world TSF regression benchmarks, and there is ongoing debate as to which family of methods is best. While these benchmarks have drawn much attention, it is also worth noting that many current datasets and methods assume approximate periodicity in the time series. In this work, we focus on a new TSF task without periodicity: anticipating falls during humanoid locomotion, on the basis of egocentric vision and proprioception. When the locomotion trajectories are sufficiently diverse, periodicity is violated. We contribute two new benchmark datasets (one from simulation, one from real hardware), showing that periodicity is violated and recent deep TSF methods struggle on these benchmarks. We also propose a novel deep learning architecture that exploits both en

arXiv:2609.07905v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Timed Partial Orders (TPOs), originally proposed for workflows, provide an interpretable framework for robot task specification with planning algorithms based on mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). However, TPOs are limited in expressivity, capturing only partial-order events with simple timing constraints. In this paper, we introduce Conditional TPOs (cTPOs), which extend TPOs with richer relative-timing constraints and conditional event activations based on environmental conditions. We show that planning for cTPOs also reduces to an MILP problem; however, the added expressivity results in significantly larger MILPs that can become computationally intractable. To address this challenge, we propose a decomposition algorithm that partitions a cTPO into smaller sub-TPOs, yielding a sequence of smaller MILP problems. We prove that this decomposition is complete and preserves plan optimality while improving the interpretability of comple

arXiv:2609.07859v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Executing contact-rich tasks efficiently requires the seamless integration of whole-body coordination and physical compliance regulation. However, existing teleoperation and data-collection frameworks often overlook the joint consideration of multimodal perception and coordinated whole-body operation. This limitation can reduce the efficiency and quality of demonstration collection, thereby affecting the effectiveness of downstream policy learning. In this work, we present \textbf{M3-Tele}: A Unified \underline{M}ultimodal \underline{Tele}operational Framework for Compliant Whole-Body \underline{M}obile \underline{M}anipulation, enabling stable physical interaction and capturing aligned visual, tactile, force, and proprioceptive observations during task execution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly improves contact-rich teleoperation performance. The proposed controller reduces the force tracking e

arXiv:2609.07857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic ophthalmic surgery offers high precision but introduces a "sensory gap" by decoupling the surgeon from their instrument, resulting in a loss of tactile feedback. This paper presents a novel haptic feedback system for subretinal injection tasks leveraging Scene Graphs (SG). The system bridges the sensory gap by analyzing a physically simulated intraoperative Optical Coherence Tomography (iOCT) feed to construct a real-time surgical SG. The SG serves as a semantic abstraction layer for the surgical scene, which is then utilized by a deterministic, rule-based engine to generate state-dependent haptic feedback on a robotic input device. The system was evaluated in a user study (N=16) using an anthropomorphic head phantom and a custom-built surgical robot. Results demonstrate that the SG-driven haptic feedback improved surgical precision, reducing needle alignment error by 14% (p = 0.044) and improving System Usability Scale (SUS) scor

arXiv:2609.07838v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Connected robotics is an emerging 6G application where mobile robots follow natural-language instructions to manipulate physical objects. The Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models that enable this are too large to run on the robot; a common trend is to offload inference to the cloud. The wireless link, however, limits how much sensing data the edge can transmit per control step. Two recent lines address this constraint: semantic communication codecs compress sensor data but require channel-specific retraining, and VLA token pruners select tokens from image but ignore the channel. Our insight is that the dense semantic information contained in the language already indicates which visual tokens matter. We propose ComVLA, a framework that uses this language guidance to adapt the VLA token budget to the channel capacity. Transmitting 32 tokens instead of 512 on the LIBERO benchmark, ComVLA cuts inference compute by 74% and inference latency by

arXiv:2609.07747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human videos are an abundant source of dexterous manipulation behaviors, but they lack tactile information that is crucial for contact-rich interaction. This raises a fundamental question: can robots learn deployable visual-tactile dexterous manipulation policies from human video demonstrations without robot-side data collection? We present DEX-X, a framework for learning visual-tactile dexterous manipulation from human videos through simulation. Our key insight is that simulation can serve as a tactile completion engine. Given monocular human demonstrations, DEX-X reconstructs hand-object interactions in simulation, where physically grounded contact dynamics provide tactile supervision unavailable in the original videos. Leveraging this recovered tactile information, we train visual-tactile dexterous manipulation policies and distill them into deployable policies operating on point-cloud observations and tactile sensing. We demonstrate z