News & Research

arXiv:2611.05372v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inverse kinematics (IK) converts end-effector pose commands into joint motion, and many vision-language-action (VLA) policies rely on it to act on a given arm and to transfer across embodiments. Precise IK remains laborious: redundancy and singularities complicate the inverse mapping, execution depends on hand-tuned controllers, and training data on physical robots are costly to collect. We present PolicyIK, a goal-conditioned reinforcement learning policy for high-precision IK. It updates joint-position references from pose feedback and observes its accumulated reference relative to the measured joints, so it can retain the offset that the position controller needs at rest. Two-scale pose errors with an error-dependent action gain resolve millimeter residuals while preserving large motions. Progress and dwell rewards teach it to both reach the tolerance and stay within it. In simulation, a single attempt by the trained PPO policy keeps t

arXiv:2611.05368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Imitation learning policies in robotics are trained on datasets collected through costly real-world teleoperation. Often, the data-collection process is unguided, relying on the teleoperator's intuition, resulting in data that contributes little to overall policy performance. Recent work has shown that curating such unguided datasets can substantially improve policy performance, but these approaches operate by filtering existing datasets after collection and therefore do not prevent the acquisition of uninformative data. In this work, we propose GUILD, a novel Guided Data Collection (GDC) method that actively reasons about which data should be collected to maximize downstream policy performance. We introduce an iterative framework that alternates between 1) task proposal and data collection and 2) data evaluation to close the loop. For task proposal, we leverage semantic priors from vision-language models to identify relevant environments

arXiv:2611.05320v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Teleoperation remains the default way to collect robot demonstrations, but every episode costs robot and operator time, and every new task starts from scratch. We ask whether a coding agent can take over the teleoperator's job. In our DataFarm, the agent receives a data request and one calibration episode of the robot in the target scene and rebuilds the task in simulation: it writes the scene, an expert controller, and a success judge. The simulator supplies exact actions, and a video model conditioned on real images renders each rollout as photographic video, generating all camera views together consistently. The output is real-ready data: synchronized camera views labelled with the robot's actions, on which a policy can be trained directly and deployed on the real robot. Independent judges certify the expert and every rendered episode before admission. On five real-robot tasks, policies trained only on farm data match policies trained

arXiv:2611.05302v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid robotic hands must provide sufficient force, speed, and backdrivability within a human-scale envelope. Tendon-driven transmissions address this challenge by relocating actuators to the palm and forearm, but routing paths, moment arms, and capstan dimensions jointly determine both force capability and joint speed, so selecting them sequentially satisfies one requirement at the expense of the other. This paper presents a pose-robust actuation co-design for tendon-driven robot hands (PACT) framework that optimizes tendon routing, moment arms, and capstan dimensions under pose-dependent force requirements and drivetrain-bandwidth constraints. A feasible-force formulation enforces actuator bounds and equilibrium at all joints, while a max-min objective maximizes task-force coverage at the weakest pose. Applied to a four-degree-of-freedom finger, the framework produces an asymmetric N + 1 tendon topology using quasi-direct-drive actuat

arXiv:2611.05244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Moving robot swarms from simulation into the physical world can be difficult because small discrepancies in hardware, timing and communication can cascade across interacting robots and alter group behaviour. This challenge is known as the reality gap. When swarms operate in human environments, a second challenge emerges: a perceptual gap between what the swarm physically does and what human onlookers actually perceive. This study examines the same decentralised coordination code deployed across three robotic swarms-tabletop, aerial and human-scale mobile manipulators-during live artistic performances. We find that while the underlying algorithms executed reliably on all three platforms, physical embodiment drastically altered visible motion-distorting execution timescales by more than a factor of three and reshaping trajectory geometry. More importantly, audience surveys revealed that human interpretation does not mirror technical success

arXiv:2611.05163v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot foundation models have shown remarkable performance in robot control, yet adapting them to a new task still relies heavily on teleoperated demonstrations. Egocentric human videos offer a scalable substitute, but overlaying rendered robots on human videos or retargeting human poses into robot actions leaves significant visual or action gaps for high-DoF robot embodiments. To address this limitation, we propose RoboTryOn, which treats human-to-robot translation as virtual try-on: try-on keeps the person and swaps the garment, RoboTryOn keeps the demonstrated motion and swaps the human for the robot. Specifically, RoboTryOn converts a human video into a video of the target robot specified by a reference image, while preserving the original task, objects, and background. To maintain visual consistency, we translate selected keyframes autoregressively and use them to guide video synthesis with motion conditioned on the human hand skeleto

arXiv:2611.05155v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling vision-language foundation models has significantly advanced generalist robot manipulation, but the increased model scale introduces computational latency that degrades real-time physical reactivity. Existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architectures execute high-level semantic reasoning and action ex- ecution sequentially within the primary control loop, creating a fundamental tension between semantic-reasoning capability and robot agility. To address this, we propose Asynchronous Robot Policy (ARP), an architectural framework that decouples semantic reasoning from low-level action generation using asynchronous processes operating at independent frequencies. In ARP, a high-capacity Vision-Language Model (VLM) asynchronously updates a semantic memory at low fre- quency, while a lightweight Vision-Action Expert, conditioned on this semantic memory, generates robot actions at a much higher control frequency. Such a formulation, ena

arXiv:2611.05129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Web services provide walking directions for nearly every city, but following them reliably over long routes remains challenging for autonomous robots. Point-goal navigation policies rely heavily on accurate GNSS, while most vision-language navigation models struggle to execute even short instructions outdoors. We present WayTrace, a hierarchical system that connects web-map directions to robot motion through language. An off-the-shelf orchestrator vision-language model reads the turn-by-turn directions, a satellite map and recent camera images, and issues one atomic language command at a time, such as "cross the road to the left". An onboard trace predictor, trained on over one million automatically labelled samples from street-level images, draws the path for this command in the image, and a reinforcement learning policy tracks it. In long-range simulated missions, WayTrace remains robust to GNSS noise and rarely leaves crosswalks or sid

arXiv:2611.05119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dexterous manipulation involves not only moving objects, but also arranging the hand around them to maintain useful contacts and enable subsequent actions. Yet many learning-based systems specify goals primarily through object poses or trajectories, leaving hand-object configurations to emerge implicitly. We introduce DexHOT, which formulates dexterous manipulation as hand-object configuration transfer: moving between feasible configurations that jointly specify hand articulation and object pose relative to the wrist. DexHOT learns a reusable relation-conditioned transfer primitive from synthetic feasible configuration pairs, without human reference motions, and composes long-horizon behaviors through closed-loop tracking of configuration subgoals. On DexHOTBench with 120 objects, a single policy achieves 80.5% transfer success on seen objects and 69.4% on unseen objects; on a real dexterous hand, it achieves 61.5% success over 200 real-r

arXiv:2611.05113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hierarchical pipelines for humanoid loco-manipulation typically pair a task-agnostic whole-body controller (WBC) with a downstream task policy. Such WBCs are often trained through manual reward shaping, which yields visibly machine-like motions; more consequentially, they are trained without the manipulated object in the scene. Object dynamics are instead approximated through randomized end-effector force disturbances, a proxy that fails to reproduce the distributed multi-contact wrench a real payload applies across the arms and torso, with the gap becoming critical near the platform's payload limit. In this work, we train the low-level (LL) controller itself as an object-aware motion prior: a single policy trained via motion imitation on retargeted motion-capture (MoCap) references that span the core motion primitives of the downstream task, with the manipulated object physically present in the scene. This single stage inherits natural h

arXiv:2611.05080v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is promising for adapting robot policies to unstructured real-world environments. However, standard RL pipelines rely on episodic training with frequent scene resets, which is impractical for real-world deployment due to the need for substantial human intervention. While prior work has studied non-episodic RL in relatively small policies trained from scratch, its behavior when fine-tuning modern large-scale pre-trained vision-language-action (VLA) models remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce CRONOS, a simulation benchmark for RL fine-tuning of VLAs under non-episodic scene resets. CRONOS leverages high-fidelity physics simulators and adopts shared-scene multi-task settings. Using CRONOS, we show that naively fine-tuning pre-trained policies fails in non-episodic settings due to shifts in object configurations and end-effector poses; however, these challenges can be mitigated through targeted reset a

arXiv:2611.05074v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Teleoperation of mobile robots in communication-denied environments requires maintaining a communication link while allowing the operator to maneuver freely. We propose a shared-autonomy framework in which a teleoperated leader is followed by a chain of autonomous robots that relays a line of sight to a fixed base station, a geometric proxy for the link. Connectivity is enforced geometrically through visibility-based Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), with each agent computing its control input locally through a quadratic program. A strict visibility constraint guarantees connectivity, but a follower with no independent motion objective remains stationary, stalling the leader at the boundary of the safe set. Relaxing it preserves mobility at the cost of the guarantee. Our framework resolves this conflict through nested hard-soft visibility constraints: a full field-of-view (FoV) constraint enforced strictly to guarantee connectivity and a

arXiv:2611.05058v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent multimodal language models can reason directly about robot scenes, but it is unclear whether they need to repeatedly reinterpret raw visual observations at every step of an interaction. We propose shifting routine spatial reasoning from images to text and symbols through a 3D geometric abstraction that is refreshed locally from observations and read directly by the language models. Specifically, our interface represents scene geometry via typed, evidence-aware symbolic references to object parts, grounds them from calibrated RGB-D, and returns compact textual checkpoints with metric residuals after each action. Symbolic task structure can thus be reused across decisions while metric values are rebound to the current scene, with direct visual reasoning invoked only on demand. Across offline policy synthesis and continuous online execution, reasoning over grounded text and symbols improves multi-step manipulation completion while sub

arXiv:2611.05027v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent systems offer significant advantages in terms of flexibility and redundancy, enabling the efficient distribution of complex tasks among multiple robots. However, their deployment requires advanced control strategies to ensure optimal cooperation between autonomous agents and human operators. We propose a modification of the global connectivity maintenance algorithm to incorporate measurements taken in agent's local frame, using sensors with limited fields of view. This algorithm, responsible for the autonomous behavior of the multi-robot system, is combined with different adaptive supervision strategies, allowing the user to exert control at varying scales over the entire group. (i) Single Agent Control (S): The operator directly controls a single robot, (ii) Pinning Control (P): The operator imposes constraints on multiple robots to influence the group, (iii) Centroid Control (C): The operator acts on the system's center of m

arXiv:2611.05023v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) improve robotic manipulation by jointly modeling visual dynamics and robot actions. However, most existing WAMs model dense short-horizon visual dynamics, capturing local interactions but providing limited long-range task context. Extending prediction horizons increases uncertainty and computation while entangling task-level evolution with fine-grained local dynamics, obscuring their dependencies and distinct roles in action generation. We propose HiLo-WAM, which decouples long-horizon task evolution from local visual dynamics while jointly modeling their interaction with robot actions. A sparse long-horizon visual stream captures historical task context and future evolution, while a dense local dynamics visual stream models short-horizon robot-object interactions. The two streams operate at different temporal scales within a unified dual-DiT architecture and guide actions through structured cross-stream attenti