News & Research

arXiv:2603.10198v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper proposes SoftGM, an octopus-inspired distributed control architecture for segmented soft robotic arms that learn to reach targets in contact-rich environments using online obstacle discovery without assuming full obstacle geometry at the start of each episode. SoftGM formulates each arm section as a cooperative agent and represents the arm-environment interaction as a graph. SoftGM uses a two-stage graph attention message passing scheme following a Centralised Training Decentralised Execution (CTDE) paradigm with a centralised critic and decentralised actor. We evaluate SoftGM in a Cosserat-rod simulator (PyElastica) across three tasks that increase the complexity of the environment: obstacle-free, structured obstacles, and a wall-with-hole scenario. Compared with six widely used MARL baselines (IDDPG, IPPO, ISAC, MADDPG, MAPPO, MASAC) under identical information content and training conditions, SoftGM matches strong CTDE m

arXiv:2603.05754v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models rely primarily on RGB perception, preventing them from capturing modalities such as thermal signals that are imperceptible to conventional visual sensors. Moreover, end-to-end generative policies lack explicit safety constraints, making them fragile when encountering obstacles and novel scenarios outside the training distribution. To address these limitations, we propose Safe-Night VLA, a multimodal manipulation framework that enables robots to see the unseen while enforcing rigorous safety constraints for thermal-aware manipulation in unstructured environments. Specifically, Safe-Night VLA integrates long-wave infrared thermal perception into a pre-trained vision-language backbone, enabling semantic reasoning grounded in thermodynamic properties. To ensure safe execution under out-of-distribution conditions, we incorporate a safety filter via control barrier functions, which provide determi

arXiv:2602.23053v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Field robotics research in maritime and space domains is constrained by a persistent gap between low-cost, low-fidelity simulation and costly offshore experimentation. Instrumented water tanks partially bridge this gap but often provide limited sensing, restricted experimental capabilities, and weak integration with simulation tools. To address these limitations, we present Marinarium, a modular, standalone experimental facility that provides a cost-effective intermediate testbed between simulation and field deployment. Marinarium combines a fully instrumented underwater and aerial operational volume with motion capture (MoCap), a retractable roof enabling both sheltered and open-air operation, a digital twin implemented in SMaRCSim, and direct integration with a planar space robotics laboratory, enabling both maritime and underwater space-analog experimentation. We present the design rationale of the facility and validate its capabil

arXiv:2411.03747v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cooperative Localization is a promising approach to achieving safe quadrotor formation flight through precise positioning via low-cost inter-drone sensors. This paper develops an observability-aware control principle tailored to quadrotor formation flight with range-only inter-drone measurements. The control principle is based on a novel approximation of the local observability Gramian (LOG), which we name the Short-Term Local Observability Gramian (STLOG). The validity of STLOG is established by proving its link to directional estimation precision in nonlinear systems. We propose the Observability Predictive Controller (OPC), a receding-horizon controller that generates optimal inputs to enhance information gain in weakly observable state directions by maximizing the minimum eigenvalue of the STLOG. This reduces the risk of estimator divergence due to the unbounded growth of uncertainty in weakly observed state components. Monte Carl

arXiv:2607.15207v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World-action models (WAMs) are emerging as a promising foundation for embodied control: rather than predicting actions alone, they learn representations that couple action generation with future world prediction. This coupling is often viewed as a source of robustness, interpretability, and safety, as a robot's action can in principle be checked against its imagined future. In this paper, we show that this assumption is fragile. We introduce BadWAM, a unified framework for modeling and evaluating World-Action Drift Attacks: a new class of WAM-specific adversarial attacks that use small visual perturbations to break the alignment between what a WAM imagines and what it executes. BadWAM characterizes this attack surface along two natural criteria: attack strength and stealthiness. When the adversary prioritizes disruption, BadWAM instantiates an action-only adversarial attack, which directly drives the model toward task-failing actions. W

arXiv:2607.15182v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated fulfillment warehouses must continuously assign and execute pickup-and-delivery work while avoiding congestion. In many-to-many Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery (MAPD), a request specifies a stock-keeping unit rather than fixed endpoints, requiring the controller to select an agent, source, and destination before path planning. Existing graph-guidance methods primarily influence routing after goals are fixed, leaving endpoint instantiation uninformed by recent traffic. We introduce Stigmergic Graph Memory (SGM), a bounded, decaying memory layer that records recent execution signals on warehouse nodes and directed edges to rank feasible endpoints and route preferences without altering collision constraints or planner validity. Across paired request streams on five layouts, three load levels, and 25 seeds per condition, SGM outperforms two reconstructed many-to-many allocation baselines in all 15 map-load conditions, with paired

arXiv:2607.15058v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: CAD-to-image alignment aims to estimate an object's 9D pose (rotation, translation, and anisotropic scale) from a single RGB image, enabling applications in robotics and augmented reality. Recent zero-shot methods use visual foundation models to match image regions to CAD models, yet typically their correspondences are appearance-driven and degrade under occlusion or sim-to-real domain shift. To address these limitations, we introduce SUFLECA (Scaling Up Feature LEarning for CAD Alignment), a weakly-supervised framework for zero-shot CAD alignment with two key contributions. First, SUFLECA scales up geometry-grounded feature learning from pretrained visual representations through Normalized Object Coordinates (NOCs) supervision on 674K images spanning 12 real and synthetic datasets, learning compact geometry-aware features that generalize across domains. Second, we propose a geometrically consistent matching algorithm that establishes r

arXiv:2607.14728v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tactile image generation significantly reduces the dependency on expensive and wear-prone sensors by synthesizing high-fidelity tactile data, offering an efficient solution for tactile information acquisition in robotic perception and human-machine interaction systems. However, existing methods depend on large-scale, diverse datasets from specific sensors and lack efficient data utilization and robust generalization capabilities, struggling in vision-limited environments. To address this, we introduce VQ-Touch, a tactile generation framework that supports both cross-sensor and multi-scenario applications. Specifically, to efficiently extract complex deformation and texture features from the data, we propose DM-VQGAN, an effective tactile representation learner. Furthermore, we introduce a discrete diffusion decoder with a unified conditioning interface, supporting multimodal generation tasks such as images and labels, and enhances the m

arXiv:2607.14635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Action supervision in vision-language-action (VLA) models is often treated as a downstream objective for learning action prediction. In this paper, we study it instead as a force that shapes inherited multimodal representations. We show that this shaping has a dual effect: it is necessary for forming action-compatible representations, but when action supervision is applied too directly to the inherited multimodal pathway, it can also destabilize representations that support language-side processing and object grounding. To address this tension, we introduce Action QFormer, a query-based action-facing interface that uses instruction-conditioned queries to reorganize inherited multimodal information into action-facing representations before downstream action generation. In zero-shot sim-to-real navigation, Action QFormer improves average closed-loop task success from 18.8% to 56.3%, raises fixed-instruction action-generation correctness f

arXiv:2607.14470v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Few-view surface reconstruction recovers the visible surfaces of a scene from a few posed RGB images, providing the 3D models that robots need to explore and interact online. On mobile platforms, the reconstruction must be fast and geometrically accurate while keeping a small memory footprint to ensure safe and efficient operation. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offers a high-fidelity scene representation, but building it from a few views is ill-posed, as many distinct surfaces reproduce the same images, making traditional photometric methods prone to "floater" artifacts. End-to-end methods resolve the ambiguity by regressing splats with large, usually Transformer-based, networks that require heavy compute and memory while generalizing poorly to new scenes. We propose G2SR, which exploits a well-posed core of the task: given cross-view 2D splat correspondences, 3D splats follow analytically from multi-view geometry. G2SR employs a lightwe

arXiv:2607.14439v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalist robot manipulation policies trained on large, diverse datasets have shown remarkable promise across a wide range of tasks. However, rigorously evaluating these policies remains a fundamental challenge. Real-world performance depends on a large combinatorial space of task factors including object poses and camera viewpoints, making full, exhaustive evaluation intractable. Additionally, real hardware evaluation is slow and resource-intensive, so current practice is to use narrow test suites that can miss critical failure modes and misrepresent true deployment readiness. We propose an active evaluation framework that addresses this challenge by treating policy evaluation as a sequential experimental design problem. Our approach fits a probabilistic surrogate model over a structured space of task factors and adaptively selects evaluation configurations to maximize information gain over the policy's performance distribution, allow

arXiv:2607.15275v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent robot foundation models operate with single-step or short-history visuomotor context. We introduce Test-Time-Training Robot Policies (RoboTTT), a robot model and training recipe that scale visuomotor context to 8K timesteps, three orders of magnitude beyond state-of-the-art policies, without growing inference latency. At this context length, we unlock new robot capabilities: one-shot in-context imitation from human video demonstrations, on-the-fly policy improvement, robustness to perturbations, and stronger performance on multi-stage, long-horizon tasks. We also observe, for the first time, steady gains in closed-loop performance as pretraining context length scales. At its core, RoboTTT integrates Test-Time Training into robot foundation models such as Vision-Language-Action policies, yielding a sequence model whose recurrent state consists of fast weights, parameters updated by gradient descent during both training and inference

arXiv:2607.15172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct hand-driven teleoperation maps an operator's hand motion to robot end-effector commands at every frame, enabling precise control, but it requires constant monitoring and correction during approach, grasp, and placement, which can be slow and fatiguing. For repetitive pick-and-place tasks, supervisory (goal-based) teleoperation simplifies this process: the operator specifies goals/waypoints, and the robot executes the motion using planning algorithms. Yet, this introduces latency, as the robot must wait for the next command before it can plan and act. "How can we reduce robot reaction time while lowering operator workload?" To tackle this question, we present AHEAD, a real-time VR teleoperation system that anticipates operator intent to enable proactive, hand-driven control. In a digital twin, the operator performs pick-and-place naturally, using hand motion to convey high-level commands rather than a continuous robot trajectory. AH

arXiv:2607.15163v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid control requires natural whole-body coordination, precise real-time responses to control signals, and robust generalization across diverse environmental contexts, making it a cornerstone for generalist embodied agents. Behavior Foundation Models (BFMs) have recently emerged as a promising solution to address these challenges by leveraging large-scale behavioral data to achieve superior expressiveness, versatility and generalization. However, despite growing interest in scaling BFMs to further improve their capabilities, it remains unclear how key factors, including the learning paradigm, behavioral data and model architecture should be coordinated to enable effective scaling. In this work, we revisit the scaling recipe for BFMs and demonstrate that substantial performance gains can be achieved through the coordination of three core components: 1) the learning paradigm of motion tracking that reformulates diverse humanoid control

arXiv:2607.15156v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frailty assessments are crucial to evaluate the risk of adverse events and the health and social care needs of older adults, yet their administration remains resource-intensive and typically relies on coarse clinical outcomes, such as task completion times, which may overlook biomechanical indicators of functional decline. To address this, we present a robotic framework that guides older adults through standardised frailty and fall-risk tests while capturing clinical scores and additional frailty-related metrics, offering a deeper insight into a user's condition. The system uses a Behaviour Tree architecture that coordinates perception, decision-making, interaction, and measurement modules. Using vision-based skeleton tracking, the robot evaluates established clinical tests, including the Short Physical Performance Battery (SPPB) and the Timed Up and Go (TUG). The framework was co-designed with healthcare professionals and evaluated in si