News & Research

arXiv:2609.06820v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Active mapping requires a robot to select camera viewpoints that efficiently reconstruct an unknown 3D scene. To reason about unobserved regions, recent systems use pretrained occupancy networks as world models that complete missing geometry. The predicted structure contributes to expected coverage gain and constrains feasible robot motion. Consequently, occupancy errors can change both what the robot chooses to explore and where it is able to move. We diagnose these effects by holding the planner fixed and varying only the occupancy representation provided to it. We consider planning without completion, with learned occupancy, with false positives removed by a ground truth oracle, with false negatives restored by an oracle, and with ground truth occupancy. Our experiments show that correcting false positives or false negatives alone does not consistently improve final coverage. This finding reveals a gap between occupancy accuracy and do

arXiv:2609.06813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Urban traffic monitoring plays a critical role in safety analysis, congestion management, and incident response. The growing deployment of robotaxis creates a new opportunity for network-level traffic monitoring. Although robotaxis are primarily designed to serve passengers, they can also be leveraged as drive-by sensors to collect traffic data. Compared to conventional infrastructure sensors or probe vehicles, a fleet of robotaxis forms a cooperative perception environment, which can collectively gather spatially and temporally continuous traffic information. This paper proposes a novel dynamic robotaxi routing framework that explicitly incorporates traffic monitoring tasks as an objective. The framework introduces: (1) a cell-based network representation that aligns with sensing capabilities of robotaxis; (2) a cell-level monitoring metric to quantify spatiotemporal robotaxi coverage; and (3) a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) fo

arXiv:2609.06810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optical coherence tomography (OCT) offers compact, contactless, micron-scale imaging suitable for intraoperative guidance, but native OCT volumes are discretely sampled, anisotropic, and currently inefficient for downstream geometric reasoning and robot integration. We present OCTN (pronounced "octane"), an implicit neural representation framework that converts volumetric OCT scans into a continuous, differentiable, and spatially faithful tissue-intensity field. OCTN uses a two-stage hybrid training strategy that combines supervision from acquired voxels with inter-slice interpolations, preserving B-scan fidelity while improving continuity in sparsely sampled regions. For versatility, we first show that OCTN enables fast volumetric reasoning by storing the learned tissue representation natively on the GPU, supporting intensity-based spatial queries with up to 43x speedup over conventional CPU processing. We then demonstrate OCTN-enabled O

arXiv:2609.06718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid soccer is a challenging testbed for dynamic whole-body control, requiring robots to coordinate balance, locomotion, object interaction, and skill switching over long horizons. Existing humanoid sports methods often rely on task-specific multi-stage pipelines, making it difficult to jointly learn and compose multiple object-interactive skills within a single deployable policy. To address this, we present SkillX, a unified reinforcement learning framework that learns and composes multiple atomic soccer skills through a single command-conditioned policy. SkillX integrates three core designs: skill-specific adversarial motion priors, skill-specific critics, and an object-aware temporal encoder, enabling the robot to execute atomic skills and transition among them such as dribbling, trapping, and shooting. Experiments in simulation and on a real Noetix E1 humanoid demonstrate robust multi-skill execution, long-horizon skill compositio

arXiv:2609.06623v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can exploratory UAV waypoint sequences be generated from multimodal onboard observations and a fixed-dimensional recurrent internal state without maintaining a persistent global map in the deployed policy? We investigate this question through CAVEAT, a diffusion policy conditioned on a recurrent internal state updated from fused LiDAR, visual, and pose features and trained from trajectories generated by the map-based FUELv2 expert. Rolling inference partially warm-starts consecutive predictions, while a temporary local signed distance field provides heuristic obstacle guidance. Simulation results evaluate both inference mechanisms and compare CAVEAT with its demonstration-generating expert. Proof-of-concept experiments on a Flyability Elios 3 demonstrate partial exploration of a previously unseen indoor environment and target-directed visual servoing using a separately trained policy.

arXiv:2609.06591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Developing unified physics-based humanoid controllers that can navigate complex 3D scenes and manipulate objects remains a longstanding challenge. Existing approaches are often specialized for either locomotion or object-centric manipulation, or rely on task-specific reward engineering that does not scale well across diverse behaviors. We present CHIP, a unified, physics-grounded framework for learning reusable humanoid interaction skills from heterogeneous motion data. Central to our approach is a conditional interaction prior that models a context-dependent distribution over these skills within a shared discrete space. Our method is trained in three stages. We first learn physics-based motion-imitation policies that acquire grounded teacher behaviors from heterogeneous interaction data. We then distill these behaviors into a context-conditioned interaction prior that captures reusable motion structure across locomotion and manipulation.

arXiv:2609.06547v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time 3D mapping is fundamental for autonomous robotic navigation, with Euclidean Signed Distance Fields (ESDFs) serving as the standard representation for online motion planning. While recent advancements in non- projective distance fields yield highly accurate maps, their computational overhead remains a severe bottleneck. Conventional integrators redundantly re-fuse millions of depth pixels every frame, even long after the corresponding voxels have converged, wasting significant computational resources in environments dominated by large planar surfaces. In this paper, we present SHIFT (Surface-aware High-speed Integration For TSDFs), an efficient mapping framework designed to reduce this per-frame update cost. By exploiting structural redundancy directly from 3D depth geometry, SHIFT compresses flat local regions into weighted super-rays and freezes flat-voxel gradients. A compact ESDF voxel layout further reduces the memory footpr

arXiv:2609.06522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A hybrid hierarchical learning framework is proposed to achieve high-precision assembly of 170mm cylindrical components with tolerance of 0.1mm. The lower-level network integrates expert experience through Behavior Cloning (BC), giving the robot human-like intuition, and incorporates the Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) algorithm to enhance training stability and robustness. The upper-level network dynamically adjusts the lower-level decisions based on heuristic rules, ensuring flexibility in operations. A simulated model is constructed to learn before transferring to real world. An efficient and safe training is allowed. Comparisons show that the reward curve converges within 500 episodes, indicating high learning efficiency. It also demonstrates better adaptability to initial conditions and pose errors, achieving satisfactory success rates even under extreme conditions. Moreover, the method exhibits good stability u

arXiv:2609.06508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon robot manipulation with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies remains vulnerable to execution-time deviations, as final task success provides little information for diagnosing and correcting failures caused by action noise, object displacement, or goal misalignment. We introduce a stage-aware failure verification and Prompt Recovery framework that enables closed-loop correction of a fixed VLA policy without parameter updates or privileged simulator states. The framework introduces an observable-history-based Learned Verifier that jointly estimates manipulation progress and execution risk by temporally modeling multi-view visual observations, proprioceptive states, and executed actions. To provide interpretable task understanding, we represent manipulation execution through semantic progress stages, including approach, alignment, grasp, transport, and placement, and identify stage-specific failure patterns. Upon detecting abno

arXiv:2609.06433v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The generation of safety-critical traffic scenarios is essential for training and evaluating autonomous vehicles. Prior approaches typically perturb the trajectories of existing agents in a traffic scenario using simplified adversarial objectives to induce safety-critical interactions, which can limit the plausibility and diversity of the generated scenarios. Although inserting new adversarial vehicles can alleviate this limitation, determining when and where to introduce them in a scenario-specific manner remains challenging. In this work, we introduce \underline{CO}llision \underline{S}napshot guided \underline{T}im\underline{E}-\underline{R}eversed safety-critical scenario generation (COSTER), a framework that leverages learned traffic priors to determine plausible collision times and locations. COSTER first constructs a collision snapshot by inserting a new vehicle in contact with the target vehicle at the identified collision state w

arXiv:2609.06424v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Homes change between a robot's visits. Navigation benchmarks pose their goals in the world the agent currently sees, and the two-visit benchmarks that exist score recall or rearrangement rather than navigation. None of them can express go to the chair that was moved or go to where the vase used to be. OVMAN is a task in which an agent tours a scene, returns after a scripted change, and must navigate to a goal specified by the change itself. Two of its six change relations answer with a place an object has left, where nothing remains to be detected. We release 219 two-visit episodes, each certified solvable by an oracle agent that completes it three times. Two released systems fail as predicted. A zero-shot object-goal navigator reaches the change-defined target in 11.4% of episodes and essentially fails at vacated locations, 0.000 on former and 0.025 on removed. A self-maintaining open-vocabulary map answers past-tense queries at about a

arXiv:2609.06342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots navigating under occlusion may enter states from which no admissible input can avoid a dynamic obstacle once it becomes visible. We present OcclusionCBF, a safety filter that extends backup control barrier functions to reachable-occupancy predictions for potentially hidden dynamic obstacles in occluded regions. The method certifies a prescribed backup rollout against collision-inflated occupancy and a verified terminal set, yielding affine constraints for minimally invasive quadratic-program filtering. We establish recursive feasibility of the resulting safety filter, and collision avoidance for every hidden-obstacle motion covered by the occupancy prediction. Randomized benchmarks, MetaUrban simulations, and hardware experiments demonstrate improved task success over reactive and occlusion-aware predictive baselines with millisecond-scale computation.

arXiv:2609.06331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time control often sits between two limiting regimes. Predictive optimization and model-based control are powerful when dynamics, parameters, objectives, and online planning models are specified; reinforcement learning can relax this requirement, but must infer long-horizon value signals from sequential data and interaction, making training slow, high-variance, and hard to scale in large action spaces. This middle regime is common in systems including autonomous driving, warehouse robotics, traffic control, and delivery drones: partial geometry, physics, rules, or constraints are known, yet the local direction of task progress remains uncertain. Geometric Distributional Control (GDC) is designed for this partial-knowledge setting. It factorizes control into feasibility and progress: known geometry, rules, constraints, and response maps define an executable scaffold, while progress-weighted feasible data learns the missing directional

arXiv:2609.06279v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning-based manipulation requires supervision that is both semantically meaningful and physically executable, but current data pipelines often provide only one of these properties. Human demonstrations capture intent but are costly to collect and constrained by the human-robot embodiment gap, while simulation can scale data generation but often under-specifies functional behavior. We present IM-ENGINE, a simulator-grounded pipeline that uses image editing as an intermediate representation for embodied data generation. Given a rendered scene with known geometry, depth, segmentation, and camera parameters, IM-ENGINE edits the image to inject task-relevant semantics, recovers explicit 3D state using simulator priors and an unchanged anchor object, refines the state in physics, and converts it into robot-executable supervision. We instantiate the pipeline for dexterous grasp synthesis and goal-state generation. For grasping, IM-ENGINE gene

arXiv:2609.06273v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bundle length B is commonly fixed when configuring multi-task multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) algorithms. MinSum and MinMax are known to favor different task distributions, but the role of B in this objective tradeoff has not been systematically characterized. Additionally, degraded-communication evaluations also often retain settings selected under ideal communication, leaving whether nominal bundle-length tuning transfers under message loss unresolved. We examine both questions for ACBBA, PI, and HIPC across six bundle lengths in 300 paired ten-target Collaborative Visit scenarios under ideal communication and 25% Bernoulli packet loss. Under ideal communication, increasing B from 1 to 12 reduces MinSum cost by 19.0%, 23.0%, and 31.8% for ACBBA, PI, and HIPC, respectively, while increasing MinMax cost by 45.6%, 94.3%, and 67.6%. Under packet loss, the lowest-mean MinSum setting shifts from B = 12 to B = 2 for ACBBA and PI. Repeated p