News & Research

arXiv:2610.06955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans inherently understand the physical world through an active process. When sensory evidence is insufficient to infer physical properties, we naturally interact with the environment by deciding what information is missing, how to acquire it, and when sufficient evidence has been obtained. In stark contrast, existing multi-sensory robot systems mainly integrate sensory inputs rather than actively acquiring missing evidence through interactions. In this work, we introduce ROMA, an LLM-based system for Real-World Object-Centric Multi-Sensory Active Perception. ROMA integrates vision, audio, tactile, and force sensing into a reasoning-interaction-feedback loop. The model identifies missing evidence and determines the target objects, interactions, and modalities, while a physical interface executes the selected interactions and collects the multi-sensory feedback. To support this capability, we construct ROMI-2K, a large-scale real-world m

arXiv:2610.06929v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improvements in human-robot physical interaction (pHRI) can have major implications for physical therapy, search and rescue, and telemedicine. However, a major challenge concerns human constraints and safety in human-robot physical experiments. Concerns about human studies also include repeatability, scalability, and participant diversity. To conduct such experiments, an IRB and willing human participants are required. In this work, we present an improved phantom device, a physical twin, that enables real-world RL-type testing for physically interactive algorithms. The new device not only replicates the ball-and-socket motion of the shoulder but also renders scapular and protraction/retraction motions. The experiments showcase the device's ability to render multiple 3D joint limits and demonstrate a Franka Panda arm sensing limits and interacting with the device as an arm for ADLs (activities of daily living) and pHRI tasks.

arXiv:2610.06926v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot manipulation systems using Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model backbones typically use just one VLA for task execution. However, individual VLAs do not perform well across different task states and environments. We introduce a framework for dynamically composing multiple VLA policies during execution: StepWise Action Policy Routing (SWAP). SWAP formulates policy routing as an offline reinforcement learning problem, learning a routing critic that selects the most appropriate policy at each decision step given the current observation. SWAP enables robots to select new policies to execute online rather than committing to a single policy for the duration of an episode. We evaluate SWAP on both real-world DROID manipulation tasks and LIBERO simulation experiments. SWAP improves over fixed-policy execution and routing baselines, giving absolute improvements in real-world task success up to 33% while reducing successful trajectory robot act

arXiv:2610.06921v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Before deploying runtime recovery for a frozen vision-language-action (VLA) policy, one must establish that an intervention improves success beyond ordinary run-to-run variation and that its complexity adds value over a simple action. We evaluate these questions on frozen $\pi_{0.5}$ across four RoboTwin tasks. For each test seed, we pair rollouts with and without correction and include a same-seed base-policy re-run as a placebo. Seed-cluster intervals and prespecified comparison rules assess net gains against stochastic outcome changes. Across 3,888 paired episodes, the full pipeline raises success on beat_allowbreak block_allowbreak hammer by $+13.5$\,pp (95\% interval $[+9.4,+17.7]$), with no detectable gain on the other three tasks at the deployed weight. Among failed base episodes on the responsive task, $43.2\%$ succeed on a plain re-run, compared with $63.5\%$ after correction; many nominal rescues therefore reflect the base polic

arXiv:2610.06863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a motion planning framework that unifies equality and inequality constraints within a single geometric formulation for sampling-based planning in high-dimensional robotic systems. In conventional sampling-based planners, equality constraints are typically enforced through projection, whereas inequality constraints are handled separately through binary validity checks such as collision testing, often leading to inefficient exploration. To address this limitation, we propose Riemannian Barrier Metric RRT (RMRRT), which constructs a unified local geometry for planning on equality-constrained manifolds. RMRRT first builds an ambient barrier metric from inequality-sensitive barrier terms and then induces a tangent-space metric via a (G)-orthogonal projection associated with the equality constraints. The resulting tangent-space metric is used consistently in both steering and nearest-neighbor selection, biasing exploration a

arXiv:2610.06862v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: **Context:** Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) increasingly control Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), yet small input perturbations can cause unsafe system-level behavior. Existing approaches often optimize perturbations for individual images and evaluate them only in simulation, limiting their generalizability and practical validity. **Objectives:** This work aims to generate robustness tests that remain effective across operational observations and to evaluate whether the resulting failures transfer from simulation to a physical robot. **Methods:** We propose an explainability-guided multi-objective evolutionary approach that generates sparse perturbations over representative images selected through visual and behavioral clustering. Aggregated Integrated Gradients guide mutations toward influential image regions. We evaluate the approach on a DNN-controlled LeoRover in Gazebo, conduct an ablation study, and validate a stratified subset of pertur

arXiv:2511.19453v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous vehicles continuously generate large volumes of heterogeneous sensor and state data streams. While this data supports real-time autonomy, it also enables emerging vehicle computing applications that require retained historical context. Existing in-vehicle logging stacks are largely replay- or compliance-oriented: rich sensor streams are often discarded after online processing or recorded only in limited windows for offline replay. This creates a new onboard vehicle-data operating point: transforming transient multimodal streams into compact, long-horizon, queryable history under embedded resource constraints. We present Autonomous Vehicle Storage (AVS), a computational and hierarchical in-vehicle data management system for this operating point. AVS introduces a vehicle-specialized architecture including (i) utility-aware modality preprocessing before persistence, (ii) a chunk-indexed append-only logger for sustained i

arXiv:2510.23087v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery, accurate 3D reconstruction from endoscopic video is vital for downstream tasks and improved outcomes. However, endoscopic scenarios present unique challenges, including photometric inconsistencies, non-rigid tissue motion, and view-dependent highlights. Most 3DGS-based methods that rely solely on appearance constraints for optimizing 3DGS are often insufficient in this context, as these dynamic visual artifacts can mislead the optimization process and lead to inaccurate reconstructions. To address these limitations, we present EndoWave, a unified spatio-temporal Gaussian Splatting framework by incorporating an optical flow-based geometric constraint and a multi-resolution rational wavelet supervision. First, we adopt a unified spatio-temporal Gaussian representation that directly optimizes primitives in a 4D domain. Second, we propose a geometric constraint derived from optical flow

arXiv:2412.12740v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robots need to be able to understand their surroundings in order to operate safely and robustly, and to interact with the surrounding environment. Robots deployed in unconstrained real-world scenarios must additionally be able to deal with novel situations and objects that have never been seen before. In this article, we tackle the problem of open-world panoptic segmentation, i.e., the task of discovering new semantic categories and new object instances at test time, while enforcing consistency among the categories that we incrementally discover. We present Con2MAV, a general method for open-world panoptic segmentation. Experiments across a wide range of datasets, from road scenes to underwater environments, highlight its compelling capabilities in open-world segmentation and its competitive performance on known classes. We will open-source the implementation of our approach upon acceptance. In addition, we propose PANIC (Panopt

arXiv:2609.26868v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning-based models (e.g., visuomotor and Vision-Language-Action (VLA)) are increasingly explored for industrial robotic manipulation, where model predictions are directly translated into physical actions. This tight coupling between model behavior and physical execution makes hidden security vulnerabilities particularly consequential. While backdoor attacks have been widely studied in conventional AI models, their effects on deployed learning-based robotic arm manipulation systems remain less understood: a backdoored robot can behave normally during benign operation while inducing attacker-specified behaviors only when specific triggers are present, posing potentially serious risks in physical environments. In this work, we present a preliminary empirical security study of backdoor attacks and defenses in learning-based robotic manipulation on two real commercial industrial robotic arms (FANUC and xArm). We investigate whether a ba

arXiv:2606.03335v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: GPU-parallel simulation provides abundant robot interaction, but existing benchmarks rarely combine this scale with heterogeneous manipulation tasks and standardized multi-task RL evaluation. We introduce Hebero (Heterogeneous Benchmark for Robot Learning), a GPU-parallel Isaac Lab benchmark that enables efficient joint training and evaluation of a single policy across all 40 heterogeneous tasks. Scaling experiments show that increasing parallel replicas per task improves success under a fixed wall-clock budget. To support learning with sparse rewards and limited demonstrations, we propose Demonstration-Guided Policy Optimization (DGPO), which reuses demonstrations for dense tracking rewards and asymmetric value learning. Its shared stack supports controlled comparisons of learner-specific demonstration interfaces within PPO. Within DGPO framework, we introduce IW-ABC, which uses a lightweight per-task learning progress signal to coor

arXiv:2605.31067v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Open-set task execution can significantly benefit from seamlessly switching between coarse and fine scene representations depending on the context and the evolving information as the robot explores the environment. For example, it is often sufficient to start with a coarse scene representation initially and only employ a finer, more granular scene representation when the robot encounters regions which are likely to contain the task relevant objects. Hence, in this work, we propose BiMoSG, a bimodal 3D scene graph generation approach for open-set tasks. BiMoSG employs a "fast" mode by default to efficiently generate a coarse 3D scene graph and can switch to a "slow" mode for generating a finer open vocabulary 3D scene graph of task relevant objects. We demonstrate that our proposed 3D scene graph generation approach is significantly faster than the open-source state-of-the-art approaches. This allows us to integrate the scene graph gen

arXiv:2605.29564v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When using reinforcement learning (RL) for contact-rich robotic manipulation, vision can provide task-relevant information that complements robot proprioception. However, vision-enabled policies tend to overfit to the visual conditions seen during training, limiting their robustness and transferability. We present a human-in-the-loop RL framework that employs teacher-student distillation to achieve robust performance across multiple task variants, trained entirely in the real world without requiring domain randomization or data augmentation. A vision-enabled teacher distills its knowledge into a vision-free student that relies solely on pose, twist, and wrench sensing, combining fast training with strong task generalization. On the real-world NIST assembly benchmark board, our approach achieves 95% overall success after approximately 50 minutes of training on 3 representative tasks, including robust generalization to 8 unseen task var