News & Research

arXiv:2610.01351v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved high task success rates on robot manipulation task benchmarks. More recently, there has been an emphasis on evaluating the robustness of VLA models to perturbations. However, this robustness is still predominantly measured through Task Success Rate (TSR). In this work, we propose a benchmark-agnostic evaluation framework to measure the behavioural robustness of models by characterising how successful trajectories are executed under perturbation. We implement this methodology by extending the widely-used LIBERO and LIBERO-Plus benchmarks. Across three state-of-the-art VLA models, four LIBERO task suites and seven perturbation conditions, we evaluate changes in both typical successful behaviour and its variability, including metrics of motion smoothness, efficiency and gripper behaviour. We find that perturbations can alter the behaviour of successful trajectories, a phenomenon which cannot

arXiv:2610.01310v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Purpose: Pedicle screw placement is technically demanding in scoliosis treatment. High precision is required due to limited visibility, anatomical variability, and the risk of complications. Although robotic systems assist CT-based planning and execution, they still rely on ionizing intraoperative imaging and complex registration. This study proposes robotic pedicle drilling with real-time preventive breach detection using electrical bioimpedance sensing. Methods: We developed a robotic approach combined with a pedicle-drilling tool equipped with a proprioceptive electrical bioimpedance sensor developed by SpineGuard. A real-time detection algorithm was designed to analyze the electrical bioimpedance signal during drilling and identify abrupt changes in conductivity associated with potential breaches towards the spinal canal. The method operates without external devices or sensors. Results: The ex vivo experiments showed that the proposed

arXiv:2610.01301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most current grasp synthesis systems are trained offline and remain fixed during deployment. While this works well when deployment conditions resemble the training data, performance can degrade when robots encounter conditions they have not seen before, such as unfamiliar objects. In this work, we present a continual-learning framework for single-view 6-DoF grasp synthesis for a parallel-jaw gripper in cluttered scenes. Rather than finetuning a large parametric model, our method adapts through memory in a learned embedding space: grasp outcomes update future grasp scores, while optional user demonstrations are recalled and transferred to new scenes as additional candidate grasps. We evaluate our method in simulation and in extensive real-world experiments comprising over 1500 grasp trials. We show that our method matches the performance of existing 6-DoF grasping baselines even before adaptation, improves online on unseen objects from cat

arXiv:2610.01288v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMPs) provide a compact and stable formulation for trajectory representation and generalization in robot skill learning. However, their predefined basis layout limits the allocation of approximation capacity according to stage-dependent precision requirements. To address this issue, this article proposes Stage-Criticality-Guided Dynamic Movement Primitives (SC-DMPs) with adaptive basis allocation for precision-critical skill learning. Operator-robot interaction stiffness and a trajectory-consistency cue derived from cross-demonstration task-space variability are integrated to construct a stage-criticality index. Guided by this index, basis centers are redistributed in normalized time through inverse cumulative criticality and mapped to the canonical phase domain, while their bandwidths are refined to adjust local approximation support. This enables denser and more flexible representation at high-criticality st

arXiv:2610.01260v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quadrupedal locomotion requires balancing conflicting objectives such as command tracking, stability, and energy efficiency, yet conventional reinforcement learning (RL) hardcodes these priorities into a fixed scalar reward at training time. We present PROMO (Preference-Conditioned Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning), a semantic multi-objective approach that makes this trade-off an explicit runtime input to a single locomotion policy. PROMO conditions the policy on deployment facing preferences while keeping embodiment-specific locomotion priors fixed, thereby separating operator intent from reward shaping terms required for viable gait generation. Compared with fixed-objective controllers, multi-objective baselines, and independently trained specialists, PROMO achieves objective specialization and robustness from a single deployable policy. Across 100 sampled preferences in simulation, 67 behaviors are non-dominated under exact Paret

arXiv:2610.01258v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous colonoscopic navigation can reduce operator burden and the risk of loop formation or tissue trauma, but remains challenging due to deformable anatomy, weak-texture and specular endoscopic visuals, and contact-rich viscoelastic interactions. Existing methods either rely on geometry-driven pipelines, which are efficient and interpretable yet brittle due to manually engineered features and switching logic, or adopt learning-based policies, whose inferred depth/geometry can become temporally inconsistent or overly smooth under weak texture and specular highlights while simulation-trained variants (e.g., deep reinforcement learning) may further suffer from a sim-to-real gap. We propose ColoACT, an autonomous navigation system that integrates an RGB-D-E based Action Chunking Transformer policy (ColoACT policy) for a compact self-propelled Bevel-Gear-Based Endoscopic Robot (BGER). The ColoACT policy augments RGB with estimated relativ

arXiv:2610.01219v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation-to-robot transfer can fail when velocity commands produce motion and feedback that differ from those modeled during policy training. We present execution-interface dynamics adaptation (EIDA), which fits these responses from target-platform execution data without reconstructing actuator dynamics. A model of body-frame pose increments updates simulator geometry, while a separate model predicts the velocity feedback observed by the policy; a short history of velocity feedback is included in the policy input. The fitted models are used within a lightweight GPU-parallel simulator. On the full Jackal and Go2 validation sets, the fitted models reduced position and yaw prediction errors relative to the simulator's predefined motion model. Across 100 benchmark navigation environments evaluated in a separate physics-based simulator, EIDA achieved the highest success rate and navigation score among the compared learned policies, both with

arXiv:2610.01185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multiple UAVs can cooperatively transport heavy payloads while controlling their position and orientation. Trajectory-based methods offer high agility while satisfying system constraints, but can produce uneven force distributions when the tension-to-wrench allocation is redundant or ill-conditioned, particularly under geometric mismatch and low-level tracking errors. We propose a hybrid planning-and-control framework to address this problem. A global planner generates payload trajectories and cable-force references by exploring the allocation null space under a prescribed internal-force setting. These references augment the cost of a centralized local planner, promoting feasible force distributions while generating trajectories for all UAVs. An admittance filter then compares the planned forces with onboard cable-tension estimates and adjusts the kinematic references to improve force tracking in degenerate or near-degenerate configuratio

arXiv:2610.01178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Manipulation failures can leave scenes in states from which a task policy cannot recover. Learning corrective behaviors requires scalable failure exploration and physical grounding. We present Recova, an agent-guided framework that jointly develops task execution and recovery in a reconstructed digital twin, then verifies and refines both through real-world experience. In the twin, the agent diagnoses failures, tests corrective programs, and collects successful task and recovery rollouts for separate policies. During deployment, it monitors progress, invokes a learned or programmatic recovery, verifies scene restoration, and resumes execution. When no suitable recovery is available, a human demonstration resolves the failure and enters the learning loop, allowing the system to expand its recovery capabilities. Physical rollouts and human demonstrations are routed to the corresponding policy for DAgger training. Across six LIBERO-Pro setti

arXiv:2610.01171v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the increasing use of robot-free demonstration interfaces that provide state trajectories without action labels, imitation from observation has become a promising approach for learning robot behaviors from human demonstrations. However, due to differences in embodiment and dynamics between humans and robots, demonstrated human motions may not be feasible for the robot, potentially degrading policy performance. In this study, we propose Experience-Based Feasibility-Aware Generative Adversarial Imitation from Observation (EF-GAIfO), which estimates the feasibility of state-only demonstrations from the robot's own experience rather than relying on explicit dynamics models or large prior exploration datasets. A key feature of EF-GAIfO is that the notion of feasibility evolves with policy learning: as the policy improves and the robot experiences a broader range of state transitions, the feasible region is progressively expanded, allowing

arXiv:2610.01105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous robots on one-shot missions run over horizons far longer than the trajectories seen during training, under a fixed onboard compute budget. We present FRANK, a 507K-parameter recurrent architecture that combines tau-gated recurrent modules, content-addressable memory, and a feedforward reflex pathway. We evaluate it against recurrent, state-space, and reduced modular baselines at matched parameter count on four algorithmic sequence tasks, trained at length 5-20 and evaluated out to two million tokens. At 100,000x the maximum training length, 6 of 10 FRANK seeds retain exactly 100.0% accuracy, while none of the 50 baseline configurations does, five architectures at ten seeds each with none left incomplete (Fisher exact, two-sided p = 4.2E-6. Targeted lesions across the four tasks yield four distinct component-reliance profiles, consistent with task-dependent allocation across the recurrent, memory, and reflex pathways. Separately

arXiv:2610.01102v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coordinated multi-humanoid loco-manipulation is promising yet challenging due to high-dimensional whole-body control, decentralized decision making, and scalability. While recent reinforcement learning methods have improved single-humanoid whole-body control, extending them to the multi-humanoid setting remains nontrivial and often requires substantial reward engineering or task-specific design. We propose MASkillBlender, a general multi-agent reinforcement learning framework to achieve decentralized multi-humanoid whole-body coordination. By learning a shared decentralized high-level policy over reusable pre-trained single-humanoid skills, MASkillBlender enables coordinated behaviors using only task-level rewards, without requiring task-specific motion references. To improve learning efficiency, we further introduce a permutation-based data augmentation strategy for homogeneous multi-humanoid systems, and theoretically show that the perm

arXiv:2610.01093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spacecraft rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) are currently planned through an expertise-intensive process in which engineers translate high-level operational intent into safe, dynamically feasible trajectories, creating a bottleneck to scalable operations. Large language model (LLM)-based agents could offer an intuitive interface for this process, although their outputs are not inherently grounded in orbital dynamics, operational constraints, or the structure of admissible spacecraft maneuvers. To exploit their semantic reasoning while ensuring the generated plan's physical validity, this paper presents a hierarchical framework for spacecraft task-and-motion planning (TAMP) that grounds LLM reasoning in a graph of reusable behaviors and domain-specific planning modules. Within this framework, a pretrained LLM maps a natural-language command to a partial mission specification. The associated planners then resolve unspecified decisi

arXiv:2610.01083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generalizable robotic manipulation, but their deployment in the real world remains challenging due to potential collisions involving different parts of the robot, manipulated objects, and the surrounding environment. Existing inference-time VLA safety frameworks typically rely on simplified end-effector-centered representations that do not explicitly model the full articulated robot and attached-object geometry. In this paper, we present WBAG, a safety framework that models the robot's whole-body and grasp-dependent attached geometry. WBAG constructs a grasp-conditioned safe set that adapts the protected geometry as objects are grasped, then converts this evolving geometry into differentiable CBF constraints that minimally modify the VLA's native six-dimensional operational-space action for collision avoidance across robot, scene, and attached geometry. On

arXiv:2610.01072v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic manipulation of labware is difficult when transparent or reflective objects must be identified and localized. Coded planar fiducials are a practical retrofit: easy to print, they leave the marked face flat and graspable. Yet a single planar tag is least reliable in near-frontal views, where perspective cues fade. Non-planar geometries restore those cues but intrude on the flat face that a parallel-jaw gripper must contact. Our idea is to tilt multiple tags within one compact footprint, so that each tag is seen at a non-frontal angle even when the marker faces the camera. We propose the quARtet marker, a 3D-printable fiducial embodying this idea: all detected corners of its four tilted AprilTags enter one Perspective-n-Point solve, and a shared configuration defines the fabricated geometry and the detector model. Because tilting consumes flat area, its three layouts trade pose-estimation consistency against graspability. In robot-r