News & Research

arXiv:2604.04554v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A key component of Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (VSLAM) is estimating relative camera poses using matched keypoints. Accurate estimation is challenged by noisy correspondences. Classical methods rely on stochastic hypothesis sampling and iterative estimation, while learning-based methods often lack explicit geometric structure. In this work, we reformulate relative pose estimation as a relational inference problem over epipolar correspondence graphs, where matched keypoints are nodes and nearby ones are connected by edges. Graph operations such as pruning, message passing, and pooling estimate a quaternion rotation, translation vector, and the Essential Matrix (EM). Minimizing a loss comprising (i) $\mathcal{L}_2$ differences with ground truth (GT), (ii) Frobenius norm between estimated and GT EMs, (iii) singular value differences, (iv) heading angle differences, and (v) scale differences, yields the relative pos

arXiv:2602.18020v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as backbones to map images and instructions to actions, demonstrating remarkable potential for generalizable robotic manipulation. To enhance performance, existing methods often incorporate extra observation cues (e.g., depth maps, point clouds) or auxiliary modules (e.g., object detectors, encoders) to enable more precise and reliable task execution, yet these typically require costly data collection and additional training. Inspired by the finding that Feed-Forward Network (FFN) in language models can act as "key-value memory", we propose Uncertainty-aware Observation Reinjection (UAOR), an effective, training-free and plug-and-play module for VLA models. Specifically, when the current language model layer exhibits high uncertainty, measured by Action Entropy, it reinjects key observation information into the next layer's Feed-Forward Network

arXiv:2602.12246v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The convergence of robotics and next-generation communication is a critical driver of technological advancement. As the world transitions from 5G to 6G, the foundational capabilities of wireless networks are evolving to support increasingly complex and autonomous systems. We examine the transformative impact of 6G on enhancing key robotics functionalities. It provides a systematic mapping of IMT-2030 key performance indicators to robotic functional blocks, including sensing, perception, cognition, actuation, and self-learning. Building upon this mapping, we propose a high-level architectural framework integrating robotic, intelligent, and network service planes, underscoring the need for a holistic approach. As an example, use case, we present a real-time, dynamic safety framework enabled by IMT-2030 capabilities for safe and efficient human-robot collaboration in shared spaces.

arXiv:2511.17855v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robots must learn from both what people do and what they say, but either modality alone is often incomplete: physical corrections are grounded but ambiguous in intent, while language expresses high-level goals but lacks physical grounding. We introduce QuickLAP: Quick Language-Action Preference learning, a Bayesian framework that fuses physical and language feedback to infer reward functions in real time. Our key insight is to treat language as a probabilistic observation over the user's latent preferences, clarifying which reward features matter and how physical corrections should be interpreted. QuickLAP uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract reward feature attention masks and preference shifts from free-form utterances, which it integrates with physical feedback in a closed-form update rule. This enables fast, real-time, and robust reward learning that handles ambiguous feedback. In a semi-autonomous driving simulator,

arXiv:2509.20906v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: 3D object localisation based on a sequence of camera measurements is essential for safety-critical surveillance tasks, such as drone-based wildfire monitoring. Localisation of objects detected with a camera can typically be solved with specialised sensor configurations or 3D scene reconstruction. However, in the context of distant objects or tasks limited by the amount of available computational resources, neither solution is feasible. In this paper, we show that the task can be solved with either multi-view triangulation or particle filters, with the latter also providing shape and uncertainty estimates. We studied the solutions using 3D simulation and drone-based image segmentation sequences with global navigation satellite system (GNSS) based camera pose estimates. The results suggest that combining the proposed methods with pre-existing image segmentation models and drone-carried computational resources yields a reliable sys

arXiv:2503.14229v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) has been studied mainly in either discrete or continuous spaces, with little attention to dynamic, crowded environments. We present HA-VLN 2.0, a unified benchmark introducing explicit social-awareness constraints. Our contributions are: (i) a standardized task and metrics capturing both goal accuracy and personal-space adherence; (ii) HAPS 2.0 dataset and simulators modeling multi-human interactions, outdoor contexts, and finer language-motion alignment; (iii) benchmarks on 16,844 socially grounded instructions, revealing sharp performance drops of leading agents under human dynamics and partial observability; and (iv) real-world robot experiments validating sim-to-real transfer, with an open leaderboard enabling transparent comparison. Results show that explicit social modeling improves navigation robustness and reduces collisions, underscoring necessity of human-centric approaches. By rele

arXiv:2605.30226v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for grounding visual-language understanding into real-world robotic manipulation. However, dexterous manipulation remains challenging for VLA policies due to high-dimensional hand control and compounding execution errors, which makes real-world RL post-training essential for bridging the gap between visually grounded action generation and physically reliable dexterous execution. However, high-dimensional dexterous exploration often triggers temporal inconsistency, sample inefficiency and hardware risks in the real world. To address these challenges, we propose BORA, an offline-to-online RL post-training framework designed for real-world dexterous VLA models. In the offline phase, BORA constructs a critic that takes both the VLM's cognition tokens and action chunks as inputs. This design enables action-conditioned value guidance, allowing the critic to evaluate de

arXiv:2604.22238v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models promise generalist robot manipulation, but are typically trained and deployed as short-horizon policies that assume the latest observation is sufficient for action reasoning. This assumption breaks in non-Markovian long-horizon tasks, where task-relevant evidence can be occluded or appear only earlier in the trajectory, and where clutter and distractors make fine-grained visual grounding brittle. We present CodeGraphVLP, a hierarchical framework that enables reliable long-horizon manipulation by combining a persistent semantic-graph state with an executable code-based planner and progress-guided visual-language prompting. The semantic-graph maintains task-relevant entities and relations under partial observability. The synthesized planner executes over this semantic-graph to perform efficient progress checks and outputs a subtask instruction together with subtask-relevant objects. We use these outpu

arXiv:2604.20689v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Dexterous robotic manipulation requires perception that remains informative from pre-contact approach to contact initiation and post-contact control. We introduce FingerEye, a sensing and learning framework that strengthens robotic dexterity through continuous vision-tactile feedback throughout interaction. On the sensing side, FingerEye integrates binocular RGB cameras with a compliant contact interface to support perception both before and after contact. Before contact, the fingertip cameras provide close-range visual cues and implicit stereo for precise approach and object localization. After contact, marker-tracked deformation of the compliant ring provides a proxy for contact wrench sensing. On the learning side, we build real-and-sim infrastructure for data collection and evaluation, systematically study policy-interface designs for learning with multiple FingerEye sensors, and develop FingerEye Policy, which applies group-struc

arXiv:2603.24238v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decentralized cooperative pursuit in cluttered environments is challenging for autonomous aerial swarms, especially under partial and noisy perception. Existing methods often rely on abstracted geometric features or privileged ground-truth states, and therefore sidestep perceptual uncertainty in real-world settings. We propose a decentralized end-to-end multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework that maps raw LiDAR observations directly to continuous control commands. Central to the framework is the Predictive Spatio-Temporal Observation (PSTO), an egocentric grid representation that aligns obstacle geometry with predictive adversarial intent and teammate motion in a unified, fixed-resolution projection. Built on PSTO, a single decentralized policy enables agents to navigate static obstacles, intercept dynamic targets, and maintain cooperative encirclement. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior ca

arXiv:2603.19183v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising approach for general-purpose robot manipulation. However, little research has mechanistically explored when and why they generalize across objects, scenes, and instructions. To probe internal representations, we train Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) on the VLA's hidden-layer activations. SAEs learn sparse dictionaries over model activations, often revealing features that correspond to interpretable directions in the model's representation space. We identify SAE features corresponding to motion primitives and semantic concepts, including features that are general across episodes and causally steerable. We propose a metric to categorize features as general transferable primitives or episode-specific memorizations, offering a promising glimpse towards VLA generalization. We validate these findings through steering experiments on both the LIBERO simulation benchmark and on real-wo

arXiv:2602.22243v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The online fusion and tracking of static objects from heterogeneous sensor detections is a fundamental problem in robotics, autonomous systems, and environmental mapping. Although classical data association approaches such as JPDA are well suited for dynamic targets, they are less effective for static objects observed intermittently and with heterogeneous uncertainties, where motion models provide minimal discriminative power with respect to clutter. In this paper, we propose a novel method for static object data association by clustering multi-modal sensor detections online (SODA-CitrON), while simultaneously estimating positions and maintaining persistent tracks for an unknown number of objects. The proposed unsupervised machine learning approach operates in a fully online manner and handles temporally uncorrelated and multi-sensor measurements. Additionally, it has a worst-case loglinear complexity in the number of sensor detection

arXiv:2602.11934v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robot manipulation often fails in the final millimeters: a policy may recognize the right object yet miss the pose offsets, boundaries, or pre-contact alignments needed for action. We argue that such failures arise when semantic invariance suppresses correspondence cues for closed-loop control, or when these cues are not exposed to the policy in a usable form. Modern visual encoders provide strong semantic abstractions, but contact-rich manipulation requires correspondence sensitivity: discriminative feature responses to action-relevant changes in pose, boundary, and contact geometry. Diffusion features provide a strong prior for dense correspondence, but direct use is impractical due to stochasticity, latency, and representation drift. We introduce Robot-DIFT, a deterministic diffusion-derived backbone for real-time control. Through Manifold Distillation, Robot-DIFT converts a noise-conditioned diffusion Teacher into a clean-input, s

arXiv:2601.14871v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RMIS), accurate tool localization is crucial to ensure patient safety and successful task execution. However, this remains challenging for cable-driven robots, such as the da Vinci robot, because erroneous encoder readings lead to pose estimation errors. In this study, we propose a calibration framework to produce accurate tool localization results through computing the hand-eye transformation matrix on-the-fly. The framework consists of two interrelated algorithms: the feature association block and the hand-eye calibration block, which provide robust correspondences for key points detected on monocular images without pre-training, and offer the versatility to accommodate various surgical scenarios by adopting an array of filter approaches, respectively. To validate its efficacy, we test the framework extensively on publicly available video datasets that feature multiple surgical instrumen

arXiv:2601.02085v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Strawberry-harvesting robots faced challenges such as poor visual perception, gripper misalignment, empty grasp/misgrasp, and slippage, which reduced harvesting stability and efficiency.To overcome these issues, this paper proposes a visual fault diagnosis and self-recovery framework. An end-to-end SRR-Net achieved unified perception and fault diagnosis through joint detection, segmentation, and ripeness regression of the fruit and gripper. Leveraging this integrated perception, a relative error compensation method driven by simultaneous target-gripper detection was designed to correct positional misalignments exceeding the tolerance threshold. A micro-optical camera integrated within the end-effector delivered real-time visual feedback. Based on the micro-optical camera, a MobileNet V3-Small classifier was utilized for grasp adjustment during the deflating stage, enabling the early abort of the harvesting cycle in cases of empty gras