News & Research

arXiv:2603.08961v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Maintaining balance under external hand forces is critical for humanoid bimanual manipulation, where interaction forces propagate through the kinematic chain and constrain the feasible manipulation envelope. We propose FAME, a force-adaptive reinforcement learning framework that conditions a standing policy on a learned latent context encoding upper-body joint configuration and bimanual interaction forces jointly, since the base moment a load induces depends on the arm configuration through which it acts. Training applies isotropically sampled 3D forces at each hand under an upper-body pose curriculum, exposing the policy to manipulation-induced perturbations across continuously varying arm configurations. At deployment the interaction force is not measured but reconstructed online from joint torques and states through rigid-body inverse dynamics, requiring no wrist force/torque sensing. We evaluate over $100$ upper-body configuration

arXiv:2602.14363v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents Adaptive Whole-body Loco-Manipulation, AdaptManip, a fully autonomous framework for humanoid robots to perform integrated navigation, object lifting, and delivery. Unlike prior imitation learning-based approaches that rely on human demonstrations and are often brittle to disturbances, AdaptManip aims to train a robust loco-manipulation policy via reinforcement learning without human demonstrations or teleoperation data. The proposed framework consists of three coupled components: (1) a recurrent object state estimator that tracks the manipulated object in real time under limited field-of-view and occlusions; (2) a whole-body base policy for robust locomotion with residual manipulation control for stable object lifting and delivery; and (3) a LiDAR-based robot global position estimator that provides drift-robust localization. All components are trained in simulation using reinforcement learning and deployed on real

arXiv:2602.02269v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present $multipanda\_ros2$, a novel open-source ROS2 architecture for multi-robot control of Franka Robotics robots. Leveraging ros2 control, this framework provides native ROS2 interfaces for controlling any number of robots from a single process. Our core contributions address key challenges in real-time torque control, including interaction control and robot-environment modeling. A central focus of this work is sustaining a 1kHz control frequency, a necessity for real-time control and a minimum frequency required by safety standards. Moreover, we introduce a controllet-feature design pattern that enables controller-switching delays of $\le 2$ ms, facilitating reproducible benchmarking and complex multi-robot interaction scenarios. To bridge the simulation-to-reality (sim2real) gap, we integrate a high-fidelity MuJoCo simulation with quantitative metrics for both kinematic accuracy and dynamic consistency (torques, forces, and co

arXiv:2601.22153v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Manipulating dynamic objects remains an open challenge for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. Although recent VLAs generalize well in static manipulation, dynamic scenes introduce a latency-induced perception-execution mismatch: object states continue to evolve during inference, making actions predicted from past observations stale at execution time. We present DynamicVLA, a latency-aware VLA model for dynamic object manipulation. It combines a compact 0.4B architecture and convolutional vision encoder for efficient multimodal inference with a continuous inference schedule that overlaps reasoning and execution for non-blocking control. Latent-aware Action Streaming then discards latency-invalid action prefixes and executes only the temporally valid suffix of each predicted chunk, preserving action-time alignment under dynamic object motion. To fill the missing foundation of dynamic manipulation data, we introduce the Dynamic Object

arXiv:2512.00939v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent progress in contact-rich robotic manipulation has been striking, yet most deployed systems remain confined to simple, scripted routines. One of the barriers is the lack of motion planning algorithms that can provide verifiable guarantees for safety, efficiency and reliability. Constant-Time Motion Planning (CTMP) is a recent step toward such guarantees for collision-free motion in a priori known environments:: a preprocessing phase enables queries to be answered within a fixed, user-specified time budget (e.g., 10 milliseconds). However, CTMP certifies only reachability---a binary predicate---and ignores the manipulation behavior that completes the task, which is increasingly stochastic (e.g., a learned skill) and whose success no single offline rollout can establish, let alone certify. We introduce the Behavioral Constant-Time Motion Planner (B-CTMP), which extends CTMP to two-step manipulation tasks in semi-structured environ

arXiv:2511.06754v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Inspired by how humans reason over discrete objects and their relationships, we explore whether compact object-centric and object-relation representations can form a foundation for multitask robotic manipulation. Most existing robotic multitask models rely on dense embeddings that entangle both object and background cues, raising concerns about both efficiency and interpretability. In contrast, we study object-relation-centric representations as a pathway to more structured, efficient, and explainable visuomotor control. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we introduce LIBERO+, a fine-grained benchmark dataset designed to enable and evaluate object-relation reasoning in robotic manipulation. Unlike prior datasets, LIBERO+ provides object-centric annotations that enrich demonstrations with box- and mask-level labels as well as instance-level temporal tracking, supporting compact and interpretable visuomotor representations. Second,

arXiv:2511.06311v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a tactile sensing method enabled by the mechanical compliance of soft robots; an externally attachable photoreflective module reads surface deformation of silicone skin to estimate contact force without embedding tactile transducers. Locating the sensor off the contact interface reduces damage risk, preserves softness, and simplifies fabrication and maintenance. We first characterize the optical sensing element and the compliant skin, thendetermine the design of a prototype tactile sensor. Compression experiments validate the approach, exhibiting a monotonic force output relationship consistent with theory, low hysteresis, high repeatability over repeated cycles, and small response indentation speeds. We further demonstrate integration on a soft robotic gripper, where the module reliably detects grasp events. Compared with liquid filled or wireembedded tactile skins, the proposed modular add on architecture enhances durabil

arXiv:2510.23576v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Urban micromobility applications, such as delivery robots, demand reliable navigation across large-scale urban environments while following long-horizon route instructions. This task is particularly challenging due to the dynamic and unstructured nature of real-world city areas, yet most existing navigation methods remain tailored to short-scale and controllable scenarios. Effective urban micromobility requires two complementary levels of navigation skills: low-level capabilities such as point-goal reaching and obstacle avoidance, and high-level capabilities, such as route-visual alignment. To this end, we propose UrbanVLA, a route-conditioned Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework designed for scalable urban navigation. Our method explicitly aligns noisy route waypoints with visual observations during execution, and subsequently plans trajectories to drive the robot. To enable UrbanVLA to master both levels of navigation, we employ a

arXiv:2504.10416v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous exploration for mapping unknown large scale environments is a fundamental challenge in robotics, with efficiency in time, stability against map corruption and computational resources being crucial. This paper presents a novel approach to indoor exploration that addresses these key issues in existing methods. We introduce a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)-aware region-based exploration strategy that partitions the environment into discrete regions, allowing the robot to incrementally explore and stabilize each region before moving to the next one. This approach significantly reduces redundant exploration and improves overall efficiency. As the device finishes exploring a region and stabilizes it, we also perform SLAM keyframe marginalization, a technique which reduces problem complexity by eliminating variables, while preserving their essential information. To improves robustness and further enhance efficiency,

arXiv:2610.01820v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When the system model is not fully known, measurement error and limited excitation can leave several models consistent with the same finite data. A command judged safe for one model may fail for another, while limited control authority can prevent the corrective action needed to preserve safety. To ensure safety under model uncertainty and asymmetric input limits, we develop a finite-data certificate that determines whether a command can enforce a prescribed safety inequality. For a linearly parameterized safety channel with exactly known regressors and bounded aggregate residual error, we derive a support formula for the worst-case safety contribution of all data-consistent models. The formula identifies the regressor directions that admit a finite bound, allowing rank-deficient records to contribute to safety certification. Using certified componentwise bounds on actuator tracking error yields an affine inequality with a necessary and

arXiv:2610.01744v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robot manipulation models primarily reason from 2D observations while acting in the 3D physical world. To bridge this gap, recent work has augmented robot data with geometric priors such as depth, point clouds, and 3D trajectories, while renderable 3D Gaussian representations provide another promising form of 3D supervision. However, 3DGS representation is designed mainly for photometric fidelity and may not preserve real-world metric scale, particularly when the supplied camera extrinsics are unreliable. We study the effect of extrinsic reliability and pose conditioning on feed-forward 3DGS, and propose a calibration-aware pipeline that anchors reconstructed scenes to the robot's metric workspace. Our experiments show that pose conditioning improves novel-view fidelity, while its geometric benefit depends on the reliability of the injected extrinsics. Using this pipeline, we present a renderable, metric-pose-anchored dataset with scene

arXiv:2610.01569v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms increasingly rely on language-model agents to provide adaptive mission-level reasoning in uncertain environments. Fully distributed control, in which each UAV hosts an independent Small Language Model (SLM), removes reliance on a centralized coordinator but introduces an information-management problem: long-running interaction histories can degrade the reasoning context, while indiscriminate information dissemination increases communication and inference overhead. We address these challenges with a distributed UAV-agent architecture that enables continuous local SLM control through an event-driven reason-act-observe lifecycle. Runtime knowledge is represented as structured atomic notes and organized into core, local, and peer-specific memory. A deterministic interest-aware gossip engine selectively disseminates these notes according to recipient-specific semantic novelty and recency. We evaluate the

arXiv:2610.01162v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable video world models could provide scalable predictive environments for robot learning, planning, and evaluation. However, generated robot videos can violate physical principles and complete tasks through physically implausible behavior, limiting their reliability for robot learning and planning. Current video-generation benchmarks exclude physics that are inherently hidden by visuals (e.g., weight, viscosity, friction). Due to this, video models are evaluated on the fidelity of physics, not the underlying accuracy of physics. We introduce PhysicsLENS, a dataset and benchmark for evaluating plausibility of physical properties grounded in robotics. PhysicsLENS uses matched scenario pairs that hold the same conditioning frame and task, while varying underlying physics in the scene description. Scenarios are curated from public robot video sources and annotated across seven physical domains: collision, gravity, momentum, friction, d

arXiv:2610.01019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic world models predict action-conditioned future scenes, providing a foundation for understanding action outcomes. However, turning alternative predictions into useful learning signals remains challenging: similar candidates limit informative quality comparisons, while diverging trajectories require persistent maintenance of their individual histories. We introduce FutureWorlds, a framework that unifies candidate construction, history maintenance, and learning from relative quality. Built on a multimodal discrete autoregressive model, FutureWorlds uses diverse beam search during reinforcement learning to construct candidate futures that balance confidence and diversity. Candidate-specific bounded memory preserves scene states and ensures that generation and policy scoring use matching histories. We further propose MemSPO (Memory-Conditioned Search-Guided Policy Optimization), which converts video trajectory rewards into group-rela

arXiv:2610.01004v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we explore the impulsive dynamics common to single-joint, two-link models of walking and brachiating gaits with respect to slope and switching time. In particular, we investigate how the stability of a gait and bifurcations encountered within a family of gaits change under time-based and state-based switching of the impulsive dynamics.