News & Research

arXiv:2608.01855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fast dynamic obstacle avoidance (DOA) on uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) demands not only low-latency control and actuation but also reliable perception with sufficient sensing range for accurate obstacle detection and speed estimation. This letter presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first mmWave RADAR-based perception-and-control system for fast onboard DOA. We derive and analyze latency and spatial bounds that relate sensing range, relative speed, and control delay, yielding sufficient conditions for successful avoidance. Our system adopts a lightweight tracker based on interacting multiple models and a controller based on control-barrier functions that directly outputs evasive accelerations. It achieves position errors of less than 0.15 m, 0.93 m, and 0.87 m in x, y, and z directions for 300 experiments with three different object sizes and varying visibility (light and dark), and a similar spread for 90 experiments in smoke. A

arXiv:2608.01851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot learning is splitting into two bets: policies that bake competence into frozen weights (vision-language-action, or VLA, models), and agents that write and refine their own executable skills as code. This survey organises the field around that axis of weights versus skills. Its central analytical contribution is a deep-dive that arranges code-as-policy methods by their degree of self-improvement, from zero-shot program synthesis, through closed-loop self-repair and persistent skill memory, to the sparsely populated cell in which execution feedback, skill memory, and evolutionary search combine into one open-ended loop; only a few very recent systems (for example ASPIRE, ENPIRE, and RoboClaw) occupy that cell. We map the complementary "skills" pole, from unsupervised reinforcement-learning skill discovery to large-language-model skill libraries, and show that the word "skill" is used in at least five distinct senses, of which only the

arXiv:2608.01834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid teleoperation for demonstration collection requires coordinated whole-body motion, continuous dexterous hand control, and viewpoint control. Existing systems either simplify hand commands or depend on dedicated wearable sensors for fine-grained hand motion. We introduce Teleopit, a full-embodiment teleoperation system that maps body, hand, and head signals from VR to a humanoid body, configurable dexterous hands, and a 2-DoF active vision module. A history encoder and failure-aware rewind sampling improve the motion tracker on both motion-capture and live VR references. An optimization-based hand retargeter combines normalized finger directions, fingertip closure, and thumb-frame alignment to map human hand motion to different dexterous hands without tuning hand-specific objective or solver hyperparameters. Component experiments evaluate tracking success rate and retargeting behavior, while real-robot teleoperation demonstrates c

arXiv:2608.01826v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet complex contact-rich tasks often benefit from multi-camera observations that jointly capture the end effector, objects, and targets under occlusion. Existing multi-camera VLAs usually concatenate view tokens, leaving action representations weak in metric depth and inconsistent across cameras. We introduce Multi-View Unified Camera Fields (MVUCF), a training-only framework that forms a shared action-facing latent field across views. A coordinate-query depth objective makes metric depth recoverable, while a preprocessing-aware correspondence objective aligns tokens observing the same physical point from different cameras. Both directly shape the hidden states consumed by the action module. After geometry injection, depth, camera calibration, and auxiliary heads are removed, so deployment uses the original RGB-only graph with no extra inference

arXiv:2608.01824v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fusing tactile signals has proven effective for contact-rich manipulation, enabling robots to perceive contact states and adapt to rapidly changing physical interactions. Yet effectively integrating tactile feedback into dexterous manipulation remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce ReTouch, a vision-language-action model (VLA) that supports contact-rich dexterous manipulation through tactile predictions continually refined online using execution-time feedback. ReTouch builds on two main innovations for tactile representation and closed-loop action generation. First, its Tactile-Patch Encoder represents tactile observations as structured tactile patch features that preserve finger identity and local contact structure, providing contact cues for fine-grained dexterous control. Second, its high-frequency action module jointly predicts future tactile states and action chunks and refines both using incoming tactile feedback duri

arXiv:2608.01800v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-link aerial robots can actively deform their articulated structures during flight, giving them strong potential for aerial manipulation. However, they still face substantial challenges in contact-rich aerial manipulation tasks such as surface sliding, which requires both disturbance robustness and compliance to uncertain surface geometry. Force-control strategies such as impedance and admittance control are commonly employed to address these requirements. Although impedance control can provide disturbance-resistant interaction and admittance control can offer compliant adaptation, their opposite force--motion causalities prevent their simultaneous implementation when applied through the same actuation source, such as the rotor thrusts used by conventional aerial robots. To overcome this limitation, we propose a hybrid impedance--admittance control strategy for a multi-link aerial robot. The articulated morphology enables a functiona

arXiv:2608.01736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Maintaining a stable pose during physical interaction is a significant challenge for aerial robots, often limiting their use in contact-based tasks. This paper presents a novel uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) platform designed to transition from unconstrained flight to a stable, constrained work platform via environmental anchoring. Our system comprises: 1) a multirotor with a tilt-rotor mechanism that decouples pitch from forward motion, enabling stable hover at non-zero pitch angles, and 2) a novel underactuated, cable-driven, prismatic gripper featuring compliance to adapt to irregular geometries, designed to stabilize the UAV by anchoring it to its environment. We present the design and prototyping of the complete system and validate its performance through a series of real-robot flight tests. Results demonstrate that anchoring significantly improves stability for interaction tasks, reducing positional drift RMSE by over 95% compared to

arXiv:2608.01733v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in robot learning for manipulation have increased the importance of collecting real-world demonstration data. However, existing robotic systems primarily focus on end-effector manipulation, making it difficult to teach and execute manipulation tasks involving body-surface contact with the arms and chest. This paper presents TWINS (Tactile Wearable Isomorphic Arm Networked System), a robotic system for manipulation involving body-surface contact. TWINS consists of a Wearable Dual-Arm Device, which is worn by the operator, and an Isomorphic Robot with the same joint configuration and external dimensions. Distributed tactile sensors embedded in the chest and arms enable the measurement of body-surface contact synchronized with joint motion. Using the Wearable Dual-Arm Device, we collected demonstrations for four manipulation tasks involving body-surface contact. We then trained imitation learning policies using the collected

arXiv:2608.01697v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper addresses the sim-to-real gap in dynamics arising when a parallel-link mechanism is represented by a serial-tree surrogate in simulation. Conventional Jacobian-based state and torque mappings preserve consistency with the kinematic and virtual-work relations but do not account for the coordinate-induced redistribution of actuator inertia and damping and the linkage inertia omitted during serial-tree reduction. To address this gap, Simulator-Side System Normalization (S3N) is proposed to normalize the serial-tree simulator's effective dynamics while preserving its tree topology. S3N-Act incorporates actuator inertia and damping into the serial-coordinate dynamics through coordinate transformation, whereas S3N-Full restores residual linkage inertia by separately identifying actuator- and leg-level frequency responses. In the 2-DoF validation, S3N-Full reduced the joint-position and torque RMSEs by 80.9% and 82.1%, respectivel

arXiv:2608.01690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Biological wet-lab protocols are written for trained researchers and often leave routine operations, state-dependent conditions, and contextual parameters implicit, making them difficult to translate into robot-executable actions. We present ProtoAct, a structured protocol-grounding framework that converts free-form biological procedures into state-aware, embodiment-ready action sequences. ProtoAct uses ProtoRAG to retrieve manually annotated examples for context-sensitive parsing, employs RefineChecker to detect and revise missing or inconsistent steps, and applies ActSchema to map the refined procedure into constrained JSON function sequences. We further introduce BioP2E, for which we manually annotate 22 cell-culture protocols into 258 monitoring conditions, 910 executable subtasks, and 962 grounded action calls. Evaluation across seven large language models demonstrates that ProtoAct can be effectively instantiated with different back

arXiv:2608.01603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Affordance-guided imitation learning has shown impressive performance in robotic manipulation tasks by compressing visual perception into task-specific geometric constraints (e.g., fixed contact points). However, the commonly used static affordances can become inconsistent in precision-critical tasks or under object location perturbations, leading to post-contact trajectory drift. To address this issue, we propose AffordTrajDP, a dynamic framework that constructs affordance trajectories via object-centric temporal propagation to guide the progressive manipulation process. Specifically, given an RGB-D observation, our core insight is that a retrieved anchor affordance, which captures the desired contact point between the end-effector and the target object, can be propagated forward via affordance propagation, using the object's SE(3) pose as a natural propagation medium, to yield an affordance trajectory that provides temporally consistent

arXiv:2608.01600v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid robots, with their human-like shape and multi-tasking capabilities, are well-aligned with human-dominated workplaces, like those in civil and construction engineering, where they could collaborate with human workers or autonomously perform physically demanding and hazardous tasks. Despite this promise, limited research has explored how to endow these robots with the practical capabilities needed to perform construction tasks. To this end, this study proposes a novel perception-and-action system that enables humanoid robots to learn and perform construction tasks from worker demonstrations. This system contains two deep networks: Humanoid-PoseNet, which extracts human postures and translates them into mechanically feasible poses for a humanoid robot; and Humanoid-ActionNet, which learns robot-executable actions based on these translated poses. Experimental results demonstrate that the humanoid robot reliably executed eight constru

arXiv:2608.01573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve promising performance in robotic manipulation, typically measured by success rates aggregated over predefined object configurations, an evaluation that implicitly assumes spatially uniform competence across the workspace. However, this assumption does not hold: even with the instruction and every other scene factor held fixed, merely relocating a task-irrelevant distractor can sharply raise the failure probability within localized, spatially coherent regions, which we term Positional Blind Spots (PBS). In this paper, we propose a two-stage black-box framework to uncover and mitigate PBS. During the uncovering stage, we grid the workspace and apply a one-sided log-likelihood-ratio test to localize PBS cells with significantly elevated risk. During the mitigation stage, we fine-tune the policy via LoRA on demonstrations collected from these PBS regions, improving competence there while larg

arXiv:2608.01562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimal trajectory generation for rigid-body motions on Lie groups can be formulated as a variational problem that minimizes energy functionals defined by Riemannian metrics. While closed-form solutions exist for special cases such as product metrics and rest-to-rest boundary conditions, solving the general problem with arbitrary boundary states and coupled rotational-translational metrics often requires computationally expensive numerical boundary value solvers. These limitations restrict the use of geometrically consistent trajectory generation in real-time robotic planning and control. This paper presents a learning-based framework for approximating higher-order smooth trajectories on SE(3) under general left-invariant Riemannian metrics. The method parameterizes body-twist trajectories using high-order polynomials and relies on a neural network to learn a subset of the polynomial coefficients and the trajectory duration. The remaining

arXiv:2608.01506v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Humans readily adapt their movements as their bodies change through aging, injury, or load carrying, but learning-based robot policies often break when hardware properties shift. We introduce an online embodiment adaptation framework for quadrupedal locomotion that infers embodiment parameters from short interaction histories and conditions control on the inferred hardware state. Our method pairs a generalist policy trained under embodiment randomization with a lightweight adaptation module that identifies physical changes within half a second. We evaluate two representative forms of embodiment variation: joint-range constraints and trunk-mass changes, corresponding to joint-level kinematic degradation and body-level dynamic variation. In simulation, the module accurately estimates these changes and enables closed-loop control that substantially outperforms policies conditioned directly on interaction history. On a real Unitree Go2 ro