News & Research

arXiv:2607.07101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proprioception is fundamental to robotic manipulation, yet standard fusion methods often treat it as an isolated vector lacking explicit alignment with visual tokens. Without a direct correspondence between 3D kinematics and 2D feature maps, manipulation policies struggle to ground the robot's state within the scene, frequently underperforming even vision-only baselines. To address this, we introduce GeoProp, a lightweight, plug-and-play adapter that aligns proprioception with vision through explicit geometric grounding and spatial feature sampling. GeoProp projects the robot state onto the image plane to sample localized visual features, constructing a grounded state token. It then injects state-derived spatial priors into the corresponding visual features via FiLM modulation. To capture motion intent, GeoProp further samples features at a short-horizon predicted coordinate derived from recent kinematics, providing look-ahead visual cont

arXiv:2607.07076v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Imitation learning has enabled remarkable progress in robotic manipulation, especially with diffusion and flow-based policies that generate complex visuomotor behaviors directly from demonstrations. Yet, despite their strong performance, these policies often fail to generalize across tasks and environments. A key reason is that existing policies tend to imitate superficial action correlations rather than the underlying intent. Inspired by the compositional structure of human behaviors, we propose PriGo, a primitive-guided test-time adaptive framework for robust robotic manipulation. PriGo introduces PANet, a lightweight primitive prediction module that infers primitive distributions directly from observations. We further propose a differentiable primitive guidance mechanism that refines generated actions during inference, steering trajectories toward semantically consistent behaviors. Unlike prior primitive-conditioned approaches, PriGo o

arXiv:2607.06990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-robot systems provide the parallelism and redundancy necessary for long-horizon tasks, while Large Language Models (LLMs) offer the reasoning capabilities to decompose these objectives into actionable plans. However, effectively grounding this high-level reasoning in physical multi-robot execution remains an open challenge. Existing LLM-based approaches fall mainly into two categories: Single-robot methods achieve robust contact-rich manipulation but lack the coordination mechanisms required for tasks spanning multiple workspaces. Current multi-robot frameworks focus on high-level planning, often treating manipulation as an idealized primitive that fails to account for real-world execution uncertainties. To address this, we propose a hierarchical closed-loop agentic LLM-based framework to ensure robust multi-robot manipulation. Our system consists of three specialized agents: the Planning Agent decomposes instructions into allocated

arXiv:2607.06989v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Table tennis, a dynamic, compact, and popular sport, has received significant attention as a robotics benchmark over the last decades. Most of the research has focused on the rally aspect - returning an incoming ball - requiring high-speed vision, agile motion planning, and tight closed-loop control. However, the other component of table tennis gameplay - the serve - is comparatively a quite unexplored research problem, that in fact requires pushing physics modeling and control to the extremes. Achieving competitive serves with a robot presents domain-specific challenges, such as high-spin generation from a spinless ball, precise aiming, or multi-objective optimization. In this work, we present a novel approach for generating official rule-compliant serves by combining motion primitives, Model Predictive Control, and Bayesian Optimization. Serves generated in this way offer a wide and controllable variation of spins of up to 550 rad/s

arXiv:2607.06988v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Steering robot foundation models (RFMs) toward new task variants or user-preferred behaviors remains challenging, often requiring additional robot demonstrations, task-specific fine-tuning, or long-context conditioning. We present WAM-TTT, a test-time training framework for steering world action models from raw human videos. Rather than treating human videos as trajectories to imitate, WAM-TTT absorbs them into a lightweight adaptive memory inside a frozen WAM through self-supervised video prediction. To make this memory useful for control, we introduce a meta-training stage that aligns human demonstrations with robot behaviors using paired human-robot data and a key--value memory reconstruction objective. At test time, only unlabeled human videos are required to adapt the memory, while the pretrained WAM remains frozen. This enables efficient and reusable steering without robot actions, human-side annotations, or task-specific fine-t

arXiv:2607.06978v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robot imitation learning for manipulation should preserve demonstrated task geometry while producing dynamically admissible robot motions. Existing pipelines often learn task-dependent trajectories and impose execution limits afterward through filtering, smoothing, clipping, or time scaling, which may distort task-critical end-effector paths. We propose the Spectral Movement Primitive (SMP), a frequency-domain imitation learning framework that couples task-space skill generation with joint-space execution regulation. Demonstrations are represented by truncated finite-horizon Fourier coefficients. An empirically selected low-frequency task band captures the dominant motion geometry, while higher harmonics contribute disproportionately to derivative growth. A frame-aware context-conditioned GMM/GMR prior predicts the task-band coefficients in a canonical task frame, and the resulting Cartesian trajectory is mapped to joint space through

arXiv:2607.06896v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust dynamic object detection and tracking are essential for enabling robots to operate safely and effectively alongside humans in complex environments such as construction sites. While LiDAR-based SLAM and occupancy grid methods offer viable solutions for detecting and tracking motion, many state-of-the-art 3D vision approaches rely heavily on pre-trained neural networks and require additional post-processing to identify moving objects. Sensor fusion techniques, combining the precision of LiDAR with the semantic richness of RGB imagery, offer a promising alternative. In this work, we present a novel framework that enhances a quadruped robot equipped with a LiDAR sensor and an upward-facing fisheye camera for real-time dynamic object detection and tracking. After identifying moving objects within a registered point cloud, our method assigns semantic labels by projecting 3D coordinates onto a 2D cylindrical panorama, aligning with real-t

arXiv:2607.06882v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visual navigation policies built on large pretrained models have so far followed a common recipe: a dedicated visual encoder, a bespoke action head, and training on thousands of hours of cross-embodiment datasets. We ask whether this recipe is necessary. In this paper, we introduce GemNav, a visual robot navigation policy that adapts a frozen Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) for short-to-medium horizon waypoint navigation using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on the language tower alone, with no auxiliary visual encoder and no continuous regression head. Waypoints and categorical navigation signals share a single discrete token vocabulary generated by the language-model head, and a soft-decoded auxiliary loss recovers the metric structure that pure cross-entropy training discards. On a single 8.7-hour open corpus, roughly three orders of magnitude smaller than competing training sets, the policy transfers zero-shot to four physically

arXiv:2607.06824v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physics-informed learning promises data-efficient and stable dynamics prediction, yet its strongest geometric guarantees have largely remained confined to closed conservative systems. This excludes robotic systems of interest, where actuation, dissipation, and constraints exchange energy and momentum with the environment. We introduce CaLiSym, a lightweight framework that extends symplectic learning to such systems by changing where the geometric prior is imposed. Rather than enforcing symplecticity on the measured state, CaLiSym embeds the state and its ports into a lifted phase space, where the dynamics evolve through a symplectic map. The lift is explicit and algebraic, requiring neither recurrent latent states, transformer decoders, implicit optimization, nor inference-time numerical integration. We instantiate the framework with SympNet predictors and introduce GRB-SympNet, a B-spline variant combining approximation with exact sy

arXiv:2607.06740v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soft robots have attracted significant attention in applications such as medical intervention, rehabilitation, and robotic manipulation due to their inherent compliance, flexibility, and high degrees of freedom. Modular soft robots (MSRs), composed of multiple interconnected segments, represent an emerging class of robotic systems with highly deformable and reconfigurable structures capable of performing complex tasks. However, designing controllers for MSRs remains challenging due to their nonlinear dynamics, modeling complexity, and hyper-redundant nature. Existing approaches typically require controllers to be retrained from scratch whenever the robot morphology changes. In this work, we address these challenges through a continual learning inspired control framework capable of incrementally adapting to changes in robot morphology while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Specifically, the proposed framework enables the controlle

arXiv:2607.06724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based robot planners are fluent but cannot guarantee that their plans are executable or safe. Classical PDDL planners can guarantee these properties, but only after the problem is fully specified, and they make poor use of an LLM's ability to read context and repair plans. This paper presents a neuro-symbolic framework with three parts. All LLM calls use a locally-hosted open-weight model, so the pipeline can be deployed on-robot with no cloud dependency. First, an offline procedure that mines a single global Signal Temporal Logic (STL) constraint on mobility from demonstration data. The procedure recovers codified rules (e.g., stopping at red lights, mined from nuPlan driving logs) or population preferences (e.g., social-navigation comfort, mined from SCAND teleoperation), depending on what the demonstrations encode. Because the demonstrations are a one-class signal, we generate the missing negatives with counterfactual perturbations

arXiv:2607.06706v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision Language Action (VLA) models unify visual perception, natural-language understanding, and action generation within a single foundation model, allowing a robot to follow instructions such as fold the towel or fly to the red building directly from camera images. Because VLAs inherit world knowledge from internet-scale pre-training, they have become the dominant framework for learning-based manipulation, with bimanual coordination serving as the most demanding testbed: two arms with 7 degrees of freedom each must move in concert to fold, assemble, and reorient objects. Unmanned aerial robotics faces a structurally similar challenge: a drone must coordinate thrust, attitude, and increasingly gripper commands from visual observations under strict latency and payload constraints. This review covers 183 contributions spanning 2017-2026 and organized along seven dimensions: VLA architectures, training recipes, action representations, biman

arXiv:2607.06700v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and collaborative SLAM (CSLAM) require robots to continuously exchange global descriptors (GDs) to detect inter-agent loop closures (ILCs). While encrypted radios protect this traffic from external eavesdroppers, they offer no protection against a compromised swarm member. We show this threat is concrete by demonstrating how a corrupted agent can reconstruct approximations of an honest agent's imagery and trajectory from its public GD broadcasts. To address this, we propose CILC (Cryptographically-secure Inter-agent Loop Closure candidate detection), a first-of-its-kind system leveraging Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) to detect ILC candidates without exchanging GDs in the clear. Rather than securing the entire CSLAM pipeline, we apply SMPC only to ILC candidate detection (i.e., GD similarity comparison), a privacy-sensitive yet computationally lightweight step, yielding an ad

arXiv:2607.06699v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recovering real-world scenes as interactive simulation environments can enable generalizable robot learning and reproducible policy evaluation. However, constructing scenes that are both physically stable and visually faithful remains slow and expensive. In this work, we present RoboSnap, a real-to-sim framework that turns a single RGB image into a simulation-ready scene. The key idea is a layered design that separates the physics-critical interaction area from the surrounding visual context: collision-aware foreground assets are refined for stable robot interaction, while a 3D Gaussian splatting visual layer preserves faithful background appearance under novel views. Experiments on DROID scenes and real-robot tasks show that RoboSnap achieves reliable trajectory replay in the recovered scenes, supports task-specific synthetic data generation for policy training, and yields meaningful sim-real correlation for policy evaluation. To further

arXiv:2607.06678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How can pretrained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models retain long-horizon visual histories with high-frequency updates without sacrificing efficiency? Existing approaches rely on external memory management, which restrains either the memory horizon or the reactiveness of pretrained policies. To this end, we present NativeMEM, a VLA policy that features long-term and real-time updated memory. At its core is an efficient memory encoding scheme, Native Memory Compression, which repurposes the VLA's own vision encoder to compress each historical frame from each camera view into a single token. Appended to the input sequence, these memory tokens enable the pretrained VLA to attend over long-term history with negligible latency overhead, requiring neither an external planner nor a freshly initialized memory module. To align the memory tokens with the pretrained policy, we first develop a generic memory tokenizer under the supervision of a froz