News & Research

arXiv:2606.06870v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Assistive robots operating under shared autonomy must balance user control with autonomous assistance. Because robot actions depend on internal intent inference that is not directly observable, mismatches between inferred and intended goals can undermine coordination and trust. We investigate how interface-level transparency, including feedback modality (visual vs. auditory) and information richness (sparse vs. rich), shapes interaction in a vision-based shared autonomy system. In a user study with N=25 participants across two assistive manipulation tasks, we evaluate how these designs influence coordination and trust. Providing feedback significantly improves intent alignment and reduces corrective intervention, indicating that making the inferred goal legible accelerates convergence in shared control. Participants preferred visual over auditory feedback, while preferences for sparse versus rich information depended on task complexit

arXiv:2606.06836v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-guided UAV agents must execute long-horizon semantic instructions while producing smooth, physically feasible continuous flight commands, yet existing Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) benchmarks typically use discrete or coarse actions and existing UAV Vision-Language-Action (VLA) tasks focus on short, atomic maneuvers. To address this gap in UAV task settings, we introduce \textbf{FLIGHT}, a \textbf{F}ine-grained \textbf{L}ong-horizon \textbf{I}nstruction-\textbf{G}uided benchmark for \textbf{H}ybrid UAV navigation and reasoning \textbf{T}asks, which combines multi-stage instructions with dense 6-DoF trajectory annotations across two dataset splits: Fine-grained VLN and Long-horizon Flow. To endow the UAV agent with the capability of real-time in-flight reasoning over task execution status and mission planning, while simultaneously accommodating high-frequency, real-time precise control, we further propose \textbf{FLIGHT VLA}, a

arXiv:2606.06832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots performing long-horizon visual manipulation observe high-dimensional images, but successful plans depend on action-relevant facts: what can be done now and what changes afterward. A useful planning representation should discard irrelevant visual details while preserving action applicability and effects. Classical task planners exploit this structure through symbolic operators with preconditions and effects, but obtaining such representations from raw visual experience remains challenging. We study a visual task-planning setting in which a robot receives only image transitions: the current image, executed high-level action, and the resulting image. At test time, given a start image and a goal image, the robot must produce a sequence of high-level actions that reaches the goal. To address this problem, we introduce STRIPS-WM, a framework for learning image-grounded STRIPS-style world models directly from visual transitions. STRIPS-WM

arXiv:2606.06829v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aquatic robots have expanded human access to underwater environments, yet many underwater spaces contain obstacles that can disrupt open-water locomotion. In "hydro-cluttered" environments, water is interspersed with rigid and flexible clutter, making body-obstacle contact unavoidable. Operating in these spaces requires robots that can regulate and exploit contact, but this regime remains difficult to model or simulate. Building on recent advances in mechanical intelligence in terradynamically capable limbless robotics, we develop principles for 3D aquatic locomotion using AquaMILR, an elongate limbless robot that combines bilateral cable-driven actuation, programmable body compliance, distributed depth regulation, corrosion-resistant enclosures, and onboard power and electronics for untethered field operation. Systematic robophysical experiments reveal that programmable body compliance regulates body deformation and converts body-environ

arXiv:2606.06790v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents ERNEST, a four-wheeled planetary rover concept equipped with a two-degree-of-freedom Active Gimbal Suspension that combines yaw and roll actuation to enable wheel reconfiguration, steering, and active load redistribution. A single neural network controller, trained to track a desired path across challenging terrain, fully unlocks the capabilities of this actuated suspension system for autonomous obstacle negotiation. A reinforcement learning framework is developed using the high-fidelity DARTS simulation engine, which combines rigid-contact dynamics and Bekker-Wong terramechanics, enabling the emergence of locomotion strategies adapted to loose-soil conditions. To obtain a single unified controller across heterogeneous terrains, a policy consolidation strategy merges the experience of terrain-specialized agents into one neural network, eliminating the need for explicit terrain classification and controller switchin

arXiv:2606.06762v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Off-board control of mobile robots from cameras embedded in the environment offers a practical path to scalable autonomy, moving sensing and compute off the robots. We extend this idea from the single-robot case to coordinated fleets in a real warehouse, driving multiple robots with only a distributed CCTV network and edge compute. The system operates entirely in image space over an uncalibrated, pixel-wise topological camera graph, enabling wide-area operation with flexible camera placement. A hierarchical planner selects a camera sequence per robot and plans its image-space motion through each view, coordinating robots with a prioritised-then-joint strategy and treating overlapping camera regions as shared resources held by one robot at a time to prevent collisions and deadlocks. We validate the approach in a real warehouse with four robots and 30 cameras across six 27 m aisles, reporting mission times and coordination statistics. To ou

arXiv:2606.06761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visuomotor manipulation policies trained via large-scale behavior cloning have achieved strong semantic scene understanding, yet often fail to reliably execute correct low-level actions under distribution shifts. For example, even in a simple pickup task with identical scene layouts, camera viewpoints, and illumination, performance can degrade substantially when the object is placed at unseen locations. We argue that this gap arises from insufficient action understanding, namely the inability to interpret the robot's base-frame action coordinate system in image space. To address this issue, we introduce AxisGuide, a lightweight guidance method that bridges semantic scene understanding and action-coordinate interpretation. Using camera parameters and end-effector poses, AxisGuide renders the robot base-frame axes in each camera view and augments RGB observations with a small set of cue channels that explicitly visualize the meaning of the

arXiv:2606.06721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots that operate over extended periods should not merely visit space; they should progressively understand it. Yet most 3D scene graph pipelines treat perception as a post-processing stage over a fixed dataset, decoupling scene representation from the decisions that determine what is observed in the first place. We present SCOUT, an online semantic exploration framework that closes this loop by coupling active traversal with probabilistic scene graph construction. Given a prior 2D occupancy map and posed RGB-D observations, SCOUT incrementally builds an uncertainty-aware 3D scene graph whose nodes maintain fused geometry and posterior beliefs over open-vocabulary object labels, while edges encode structural relations such as on, inside, belong, and next to. These beliefs are fed back to an uncertainty-guided traversal planner, which selects viewpoints by balancing expected semantic certainty gain, geometric coverage gain, and travel co

arXiv:2606.06704v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-prehensile object manipulation skills are important for real-world robot interactions, enabling highly dynamic tasks such as balancing a glass on a tray or the controlled sliding of items on a table. Among such tasks, those characterised by high-speed manipulation requirements and general sensitivity of the resulting hybrid dynamics are particularly hard to accomplish. Within these, juggling can be seen as a highly challenging maneuver to be solved. The key to robotic juggling is achieving dynamic stabilisation of an underactuated object. Since the object does not possess the ability of self-correction, its stability is entirely dependent on the forces applied to it. This creates a system that is sensitive to control inputs, where timing is critical to continuously counteract deviations and maintain the desired behavior. We develop a systematic method to control a 7-degree-of-freedom manipulator performing non-prehensile ball juggling

arXiv:2606.06627v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human video datasets used for cotraining robot manipulation policies largely consist of curated demonstrations where motions are orchestrated to resemble robot behavior and 3D hand poses are captured with specialized hardware. A more plentiful source of data is everyday Internet video, but it is an open question what factors enable transfer from such videos to robots. We investigate this using a new dataset of 532 human videos with 28 hours of high-quality triangulated hand labels and natural motions. We find that hand pose quality affects transfer, but even with accurate hands, the inherent motion gap hinders transfer unless the vision and policy networks specialize to each embodiment. Our cotraining recipe yields consistent improvements, with an absolute success rate gain of $29.7\%$ in the low-robot-data regime across six manipulation tasks.

arXiv:2606.06569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot manipulation of physical puzzles is important for automatic assembly and disassembly tasks. However, to enable robots to solve physical puzzles, manipulation skills need to be learned, which requires large training datasets, the generation of which is often time consuming and tedious. To overcome this problem, we propose the Physical Robot Manipulation Puzzle Generation framework (PhyRoGen), which leverages procedural content generation (PCG) for automated generation of synthetic datasets of manipulation puzzles. PhyRoGen is a general-purpose puzzle generator, which can generate physical puzzles with interlocking object dependencies, where one articulated object must be manipulated before another can be moved. Based upon PhyRoGen, we define six concrete generators which we use to generate 24 physical puzzles. By using a benchmarking framework, we are able to solve all puzzles in 1 to 300 seconds using sampling-based planning algorit

arXiv:2606.06556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalist robot intelligence is often framed as a policy-scaling problem: collect more robot demonstrations, train larger Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, and expect broader generalisation. In this position paper, we argue that this framing is incomplete. The central bottleneck is not only policy learning, but the absence of mechanisms that convert the world's abundant unstructured behavioural data into grounded robot supervision. Human motion, internet video, simulation rollouts, and interactive demonstrations contain rich information about tasks, goals, contacts, failures, and physical constraints, yet most of this information is not directly usable by robot policies because it lacks embodiment-specific action labels, task semantics, and reward structure. We identify four missing components for the next generation of robotics: data interfaces for autolabelling unstructured behaviour, embodiment interfaces for retargeting human moti