News & Research

arXiv:2606.00985v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable progress for mobile manipulation, but their performance on long-horizon tasks remains poor. These tasks are especially challenging because (1) progress toward high-level goals must be maintained across extended sequences of spatially distributed subtasks, and (2) early execution errors compound rapidly over the task horizon. These challenges persist despite finetuning on large human teleoperated mobile manipulation data, indicating that more data alone may not resolve the problem. To address these challenges, we propose MPVI: Motion Planner / VLA Interleaving, a framework that integrates model-based motion planning with VLAs to improve robustness without further training. The proposed integration enables localization and navigation to distant or occluded target objects through cluttered scenes using open-vocabulary object detection, frontier exploration and motion planning. However

arXiv:2606.00998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study cross-embodiment 6-DOF robot grasping. Unlike prior works, we require the model not only to generalize to novel objects / scenes but also to novel gripper morphologies and physical grasping processes. Our method extends diffusion model based generative 6-DOF grasping models to condition on the additional gripper's representation. We propose a swept-volume heuristic for encoding the gripper. We train our cross-embodiment model with procedural grippers and a large-scale dataset of 2 Billion grasps. In simulation experiments, our model has the best zero-shot generalization to novel real-world grippers and objects over baseline methods. Our model also serves as a good initialization for fine-tuning to adapt to novel grippers. In ablations, we demonstrate the efficiency of our sweep-volume gripper representation and our procedural gripper training dataset. Last, we show zero-shot generalization to real-world novel grippers for 6-DOF g

arXiv:2606.01015v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The convergence of Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, and Robotics is no longer a futuristic vision; it is rapidly becoming the foundation of real-time, intelligent, and context-aware systems. AI enables perception and reasoning, IoT provides scalable sensing and communication, and robotics delivers embodied actuation. Despite significant progress in pairwise combinations such as AIoT and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT), there remains a lack of unified design frameworks that fully integrate all three. This survey synthesizes the state-of-the-art across these domains, emphasizing the emerging role of Small Language Models (SLMs) at the edge and Large Language Models (LLMs) in the cloud for distributed cognition and autonomous decision-making. We propose a modular system architecture that aligns with these trends, analyze persistent gaps in interoperability and feedback control, and classify existing work by integration

arXiv:2606.01036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This position paper argues that to obtain reliable embodied reward models, the community must invest in ``bad'' robot data: failed, suboptimal, error-prone, and even hazardous behaviors. While reward models are central to any foundation model's lifecycle, today's embodied reward models are trained primarily on successful behaviors. We analyze three state-of-the-art embodied reward models and find that they systematically over-reward behaviors that real human evaluators would penalize, including unsafe interactions, poor execution, and shortcut strategies that only superficially satisfy tasks. We attribute these failures to a key data gap: the scarcity of negative embodied data which is costly to collect and often filtered out or withheld in existing robotics datasets. Furthermore, we show that even modest exposure to real bad behavior data can improve alignment with human preferences and reduce costly false positives. We therefore call on

arXiv:2606.01038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a new robust integrated planning and control (IPC) strategy for multirotor uncrewed aerial vehicles. We propose a nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) formulation that embeds control barrier functions (CBFs) as exponential penalties, improving feasibility while ensuring smooth obstacle avoidance under tight input bounds. The penalty weights provide a practical tuning knob to trade off tracking accuracy against avoidance aggressiveness. We enhance the system robustness by employing a high-gain disturbance observer (HGDO) to estimate and compensate for external disturbances. We also incorporate a Kalman filter (KF) for computationally efficient, real-time prediction of obstacle motion, enabling avoidance of moving obstacles. Comparative studies against both conventional NMPC and NMPC with hard CBF constraints, validated in Gazebo and hardware experiments, demonstrate superior feasibility, safety, and robustness. To

arXiv:2606.01095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies and World-Action Models (WAM) represent two increasingly important paradigms for robotic manipulation. However, it remains unclear whether future prediction in WAMs leads to behaviorally meaningful improvements beyond final task success. In this paper, we ask whether WAMs merely add future prediction, or whether they change robot behavior and internal representations in ways that are actionable for control. We introduce a model-agnostic diagnostic framework that compares WAMs and VLAs through two complementary lenses: behavioral rollout analysis and sparse-autoencoder-based feature analysis. The behavioral protocol measures action dynamics consistency, target-object progress, distractor disturbance, and runtime cost. The feature-space protocol characterizes internal representations as memorized, reactive, or predictive, revealing whether models encode future-oriented structure. Across LIBERO and RoboT

arXiv:2606.01098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative action policies based on diffusion or flow matching excel in behavior cloning, yet their iterative sampling is prohibitive for high-frequency robot control. While recent one-step formulations alleviate this latency, they inevitably discard the intermediate trajectory evolution that provides crucial action correction. Directly recovering this mechanism by explicitly estimating a training-time drifting field is mathematically ill-posed due to extreme conditional demonstration sparsity. We introduce Implicit Drifting Policy (IDP), a one-step imitation learning framework that brings the training-time correction of Drifting into policy learning without explicit vector field estimation. IDP extracts a conditional expert geometry from the local variation of observation-similar expert actions, and compares it against a global reference geometry to isolate condition-specific constraints. This local geometric structure adaptively weights

arXiv:2606.01112v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Heterogeneous marine robotic systems composed of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) and a hybrid remotely operated vehicle (HROV) have shown great potential for subsea cable inspection. In such missions, the USV tracks the HROV at the surface while supplying power and communication through an umbilical tether. However, dynamic collision avoidance for the USV during HROV tracking is challenging because the submerged tether may scrape against passing vessels, while evasive maneuvers can enlarge the USV--HROV separation, thereby increasing the likelihood of tether tautness and compromising HROV operations. To address these challenges, this work proposes a tether-aware dynamic collision avoidance method for a USV tracking an HROV. First, a tether safety-aware planar domain is introduced to represent the three-dimensional collision risk between the tether and obstacle vessels without an explicit tether shape model. Second, a tether tautness-awa

arXiv:2606.01277v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current end-to-end autonomous driving systems predominantly rely on frame-based sensors, which suffer from inherent perception latency and motion blur during highly dynamic encounters, specifically sudden pedestrian crossings. To address this critical safety vulnerability, we propose DeepIPCv3, a novel multi-modal autonomous navigation framework that synergizes the dense 3D spatial geometry of LiDAR point clouds with the microsecond-level asynchronous event streams of a Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS). We introduce a Transformer-inspired cross-modal attention mechanism to dynamically correlate these distinct modalities, allowing the network to instantaneously prioritize high-speed dynamic updates without sacrificing structural scene awareness. The fused latent representations are then mapped to safe local waypoints and executable control commands via a hybrid policy network that blends heuristic trajectory tracking with direct neural predicti

arXiv:2606.01313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-vocabulary navigation requires embodied agents to manage significant perception uncertainty stemming from semantic ambiguity and model errors. However, most existing works settle for local optimal deterministic approaches, depriving complex navigation decision-making over multiple composite possibilities that are critical for globally better solutions. In this paper, we propose Probabilistic Scene Graph Navigation (PSG-Nav), which constructs a 3D Probabilistic Scene Graph that uses full semantic categorical distributions to account for perception uncertainty. To efficiently use the local distributions to compose and reason about the optimal navigation landmarks, we propose Multiverse Decision to sample multiple most likely world settings from the joint distribution, and evaluate navigation landmarks based on the compatibility between landmarks and multiverses. To mitigate false positives due to epistemic uncertainty in open-vocabular

arXiv:2606.01332v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of scaling dynamic loco-manipulation from a single free-rolling sphere to multiple spheres transported simultaneously on the back of a wheel-legged quadruped, without fences, grippers, or mechanical stops. Multiple identical free-rolling spheres form an unordered set with no persistent identity: their ordering may change independently at each history frame, creating a \emph{per-frame permutation symmetry} that standard history-concatenation set encoders do not explicitly enforce -- these encoders impose only a shared, diagonal permutation symmetry over the full history. We show that this symmetry mismatch leads to a concrete failure mode in curriculum-based reinforcement learning. Within the same PPO training budget, flat MLPs and branch-wise encoders plateau at or below the two-sphere stage, while a history-concatenation Deep Sets baseline (\HCDS) fails to progress past the two-sphere stage in our runs unless ball-to

arXiv:2606.01367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Active scene reconstruction enables robots/UAVs to autonomously plan trajectories and reconstruct environments without costly manual data acquisition. Unlike passive methods, active reconstruction requires real-time construction of high-confidence occupancy maps for collision-free navigation. Existing approaches rely on depth sensors for occupancy map updates, increasing platform cost and weight. To advance spatial intelligence, we aim for a vision-only monocular solution. However, current monocular scene reconstruction methods operate offline and fail to deliver globally consistent dense depth at the frame rates required for robots/UAVs navigation. To bridge this gap, we introduce ActMVS, the first framework for monocular active reconstruction. Our framework integrates a view factor graph construction for informed Multi-View Stereo depth prediction, along with a global depth optimization, to enable the online generation of high-quality,

arXiv:2606.01398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Underwater robots typically use both cameras and sonar for perception to leverage the rich semantic details of vision and the robust range measurements of acoustics. However, learning to map between these modalities via cross-modal prediction remains underexplored due to limited sonar-visual paired datasets. We present SOVIS, a sonar-visual dataset for cross-modal underwater perception. SOVIS comprises over 76,000 paired frames collected across 17 dives at six sites in the Trondheimfjord, supported by an end-to-end pipeline that cleans and synchronizes the cross-modal sensor data. We also introduce an interactive annotation tool designed to accelerate the labeling process for this paired data. Finally, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept cross-modal fish detection task using a small subset of labeled data, achieving a 7x improvement in mAP@0.10 over a monocular camera baseline. SOVIS serves as the first step toward advancing cross-modal und

arXiv:2606.01458v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training vision-language-action (VLA) policies for humanoid loco-manipulation is constrained by the high cost and complexity of collecting human teleoperation demonstrations. VLA policies fine-tuned in simulators have, until now, failed to transfer effectively in humanoid loco-manipulation tasks. We present LEGS (Loco-manipulation via Embodied Gaussian Splatting), a hybrid simulator that composites a mesh foreground (robot, objects, props) over a photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) background reconstructed from a handheld scene capture. LEGS uses a procedural motion-primitive generator to synthesize labeled demonstrations at scale without human teleoperation, and a deterministic two-stage color calibration to align the rendered 3DGS image to the robot's deployment camera. On a Unitree G1 humanoid robot, across three pick-and-place tasks of increasing whole-body difficulty and three VLA backbones (psi_0, pi_0.5, GR00T N1.6), a poli

arXiv:2606.01526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In multi-robot systems, maintaining persistent communication graph connectivity is often overly restrictive, especially when robots have limited communication ranges but operate in large environments. Instead, allowing robots to temporarily disconnect and later reconnect is often more desirable for efficient task execution while still ensuring timely information sharing across the team. In this paper, we propose an adaptive prescribed-time control barrier function (adaptive PT-CBF) framework that enables robots to temporarily disconnect and re-enter the communication range within an adjustable and feasible prescribed time. Moreover, we introduce a reconnection triggering mechanism that jointly considers task execution and reconnection urgency, thereby providing a principled way to decide when reconnection should occur. Theoretical analysis justifies convergence to the satisfying reconnection within a prescribed finite time. Experimental r