News & Research

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

arXiv:2512.12320v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conventional soft pneumatic actuators, typically based on hollow elastomeric chambers, often suffer from small structural support and require costly geometry-specific redesigns for multimodal functionality. Porous materials such as foam, filled into chambers, can provide structural stability for the actuators. However, methods to achieve programmable deformation by tailoring the porous body itself remain underexplored. In this paper, a novel design method is presented to realize soft porous actuators with programmable deformation by incising specific patterns into the porous foam body. This approach introduces localized structural anisotropy of the foam guiding the material's deformation under a global vacuum input. Furthermore, three fundamental patterns on a cylindrical foam substrate are discussed: transverse for bending, longitudinal for tilting, and diagonal for twisting. A computational model is built with Finite Element Analysi

arXiv:2512.07998v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present DIJIT, a novel binocular robotic head expressly designed for mobile agents that behave as active observers. DIJIT's unique breadth of functionality enables active vision research and the study of human-like eye and head-neck motions, their interrelationships, and how each contributes to visual ability. DIJIT is also being used to explore the differences between how human vision employs eye/head movements to solve visual tasks and current computer vision methods. DIJIT's design features nine mechanical degrees of freedom, while the cameras and lenses provide an additional four optical degrees of freedom. The ranges and speeds of the mechanical design are comparable to human performance. DIJIT attains 85\% of the peak human saccade speed. Our design includes the ranges of motion required for convergent stereo, namely, vergence, version, and cyclotorsion. Here, we present DIJIT and some aspects of its performance. We also pres

arXiv:2510.06492v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Latent world models are a promising approach for learning state representations and dynamics directly from high-dimensional observations, enabling robot control in hard-to-model settings. However, control performance ultimately depends on the latent representation encoding the required information for the task. In this work, we study latent-space safe control problems and show how partial observability can induce control failures when safety-relevant information is not preserved in the latent state. Specifically, we identify two world model failure modes: estimation gaps, where current observations do not reveal safety-critical quantities (e.g., temperature in a cooking task), and prediction gaps, where failures are observable once they occur but cannot be reliably anticipated from available observations. We introduce two diagnostics for these gaps: a mutual-information-based measure of safety observability and a rollout-based measure

arXiv:2510.01661v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-step manipulation in dynamic environments remains challenging. Imitation learning (IL) is reactive but lacks compositional generalization, since monolithic policies do not decide which skill to reuse when scenes change. Classical task-and-motion planning (TAMP) offers compositionality, but its high planning latency prevents real-time failure recovery. We introduce SymSkill, a unified framework that jointly learns predicates, operators, and skills from unlabeled, unsegmented demonstrations, combining compositional generalization with real-time recovery. Offline, SymSkill learns symbolic abstractions and goal-oriented skills directly from demonstrations. Online, given a conjunction of learned predicates, it uses a symbolic planner to compose and reorder skills to achieve symbolic goals while recovering from failures at both the motion and symbolic levels in real time. Coupled with a compliant controller, SymSkill supports safe exe

arXiv:2508.00917v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) must simultaneously perform multiple tasks, such as perception, prediction, planning, and control, to ensure safe and reliable navigation in complex environments. Moreover, through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, cooperative perception and driving among CAVs can be enabled, thereby mitigating the limitations of individual vehicles, while it also introduces stringent latency, reliability, and bandwidth constraints. Traditionally, tasks are addressed using separate models, which leads to high deployment costs, increased computational overhead, and challenges in achieving real-time performance. Multi-task learning (MTL) has recently emerged as a promising solution that enables the joint learning of multiple tasks within a unified model. This offers improved efficiency and resource utilization. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the first comprehensive review focusing on deep MTL i

arXiv:2504.19399v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robust and flexible leader-following is a critical capability for robots to integrate into human society. While existing methods struggle to generalize to leaders of arbitrary form and often fail when the leader temporarily leaves the robot's field of view, this work introduces a unified framework addressing both challenges. First, traditional detection models are replaced with a segmentation model, allowing the leader to be anything. To enhance recognition robustness, a distance frame buffer is implemented that stores leader embeddings at multiple distances, accounting for the unique characteristics of leader-following tasks. Second, a goal-aware adaptation mechanism is designed to govern robot planning states based on the leader's visibility and motion, complemented by a graph-based planner that generates candidate trajectories for each state, ensuring efficient following with obstacle avoidance. Simulations and real-world experimen

arXiv:2503.01125v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Although acrobatic flight control has been studied extensively, one key limitation of the existing methods is that they are usually restricted to specific maneuver tasks and cannot change flight pattern parameters online. In this work, we propose a target-and-command-oriented reinforcement learning (TACO) framework, which can handle different maneuver tasks in a unified way and allows online parameter changes. Additionally, we propose a spectral normalization method with input-output rescaling to enhance the policy's temporal and spatial smoothness, independence, and symmetry, thereby overcoming the sim-to-real gap. We validate the TACO approach through extensive simulation and real-world experiments, demonstrating its capability to achieve high-speed circular flights and continuous multi-flips.

arXiv:2412.01324v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work presents a novel and efficient nonlinear programming framework that tightly integrates hierarchical decision-making with whole-body inverse kinematic planning and control. Decision-making plays a central role in many aspects of robotics, from sparse inverse kinematic control with a minimal number of joints, to inverse kinematic planning while simultaneously selecting a discrete end-effector location from multiple candidates. Current approaches often rely on heavy computations using mixed-integer nonlinear programming, separate decision-making from inverse kinematics (some times approximated by reachability methods), or employ efficient but less versatile $\ell_1$-norm formulations of linear sparse programming, without addressing the underlying nonlinear problem formulations. In contrast, the proposed sparse hierarchical nonlinear programming solver is efficient, versatile, and accurate by exploiting sparse hierarchical struc

arXiv:2104.12183v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The general inverse kinematics (IK) problem of a manipulator, namely that of acquiring the self-motion manifold (SMM) of all admissible joint angles for a desired end-effector pose, plays a vital role in robotics modeling, planning and control. To efficiently solve the generalized IK, this paper proposes an interval branch-and-bound-based approach, which is augmented with a fast numerical IK-solver-enabled search heuristics. In comparison to independent solutions generated by sampling based methods, our approach generates patches of neighboring solutions to provide richer information of the inherent geometry of the SMM for optimal planning and other applications. It can also be utilized in an anytime fashion to obtain solutions with sub-optimal resolution for applications within a limited period. The performance of our approach is verified by numerical experiments on both non-redundant and redundant manipulators.

arXiv:2606.09559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) enables policy learning without online interactions, making it suitable for safety-critical systems such as robotics systems. However, its reliance on static datasets exposes offline Safe RL to data poisoning attacks, where adversaries inject malicious samples that compromise safety and induce unsafe policy behavior. In this work, we propose a new learning paradigm, named safe reinforcement unlearning (Safe-RULE), used as a defense framework to remove the influence of poisoned data without retraining from scratch or requiring access to the original training environment. We further extend reinforcement unlearning to offline Safe RL by explicitly accounting for both task performance and safety constraints during the unlearning process. Experiments across benchmark Safe RL tasks demonstrate that our approach effectively enhances safety performance against data poisoning attacks.

arXiv:2606.09390v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Body movement communicates intent at distances and in conditions where neither the face, nor speech can be captured. We study the recognition of communicative intent from 2D body pose alone. We argue that body motion is a reliable signal especially in scenarios that require real time low-cost on-device person-to-robot communication in long distance environments, such as rescue missions. However, existing resources do not isolate this signal. Affective corpora combine body, face, voice and text, while skeleton action-recognition benchmarks label the action performed rather than the message conveyed. We release a dataset of real frames of full-body pose covering ten communicative intents and we compare it against other real (IPC) and synthetic (MotionLCM, VEO3.1, Kimodo) ones that span a range of difficulty. We target systems that can run on a robot's limited onboard hardware. We benchmark multiple models, from skeleton graph classifiers

arXiv:2606.08962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) generalize better than standard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies to novel motions and environments, because a video-modeling objective lets them learn from abundant unlabeled video rather than scarce labeled robot demonstrations. This generalization is computationally expensive. To complete a task, a WAM runs over multiple inference chunks, and each chunk requires a costly denoising process. Existing acceleration methods reduce this cost by caching and reusing computation within a single chunk's denoising trajectory. Our empirical analysis reveals a substantial source of redundancy they overlook: redundancy across chunks. When a robot executes a smooth behavior, the residuals computed at a given denoising step are strongly correlated from one chunk to the next. We introduce C$^3$ache, a training-free method that caches and reuses these residuals across inference chunks at the same denoising step. Experime