News & Research

arXiv:2609.24660v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human demonstrations offer a scalable way to collect manipulation data, but their contacts may be unstable or infeasible when transferred to a robot hand. Collecting demonstrations directly on the target robot avoids this mismatch, but substantially increases the cost of data collection. To address this trade-off, we present \textbf{Touch2Robot}, a framework that lets humans collect demonstrations while seeing how the target robot hand would contact the object. We capture human hand motion, tactile-glove measurements, and object motion during human manipulation. These recordings guide object-specific RL policies to reproduce the demonstrated object motion while favoring contacts consistent with the recorded human touch. We distill the learned behaviors into a unified real-time retargeter that maps incoming human observations and object geometry to robot hand configurations. During collection, the predicted robot configuration is synchroni

arXiv:2609.24632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot manipulators are monitored by constraint-specific indicators whose units and gradient scales are not comparable, so they do not provide a common measure of the configuration-space motion remaining before violation. We define the feasibility distance field (FDF) as the distance, under a fixed positive-definite joint-space metric, to the union of infeasible configuration sets. Classical distance-to-set theory gives 1-Lipschitz continuity, almost-everywhere differentiability, and unit dual-gradient norm wherever the nearest projection is unique. The robotics contribution is an admissibility analysis showing when practical constraints define non-empty closed sets. We derive admissible formulations for external and self-collision, joint limits, dexterity, Cartesian and task-projected compliance, joint torque under payload, and dynamic manipulability. Since every field uses the same metric, heterogeneous constraints compose by a pointwise

arXiv:2609.24621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile sensing is increasingly being incorporated into learning-based robotic manipulation, yet many existing approaches rely on spatially distributed sensors. Here we introduce SpectRobot, a framework that transforms single-point tactile signals into compact time-frequency spectrograms. These spectrograms encode high-bandwidth tactile histories as fixed-size image-like representations. They can be processed by standard vision encoders and integrated into learning pipelines originally developed for vision, while preserving temporal and frequency information unavailable to conventional cameras. Rather than increasing spatial density through arrays of tactile elements, SpectRobot exploits the rich dynamics contained in sparse, high-bandwidth single-point measurements. In our implementation, the sensors are mounted away from the contact surface while remaining mechanically coupled to it, reducing direct exposure to wear and potentially impr

arXiv:2609.24563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adapting visuomotor policies to new manipulation tasks often requires substantial manual engineering or teleoperated data collection. Simulation can provide task-specific data at scale, but constructing the scene, designing expert behavior, and configuring data generation still require significant per-task effort. We present ARSTAG, an agentic Real2Sim2Real system that turns a single RGB image and a natural-language instruction directly into robot policy-learning data. A hierarchy of language agents constructs a task-scoped simulation scene, generates robot-feasible demonstrations, and expands the training distribution through task-consistent randomization, while a coordinator agent manages cross-stage feedback and recovery. Across seven manipulation tasks spanning grasping, placement, and stacking, the ARSTAG-generated demonstrations enable sim-to-real transfer of three visuomotor policy architectures to a dual-arm robot, with pi0.5 achi

arXiv:2609.24552v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied AI systems, particularly humanoid robots deployed in real world scenarios require whole-body control policies that are both task-responsive and physically smooth. However, smoothness is not uniform across the body: lower body must remain sufficiently reactive, while the upper body must be tightly regulated to preserve stability. Existing reinforcement learning approaches typically impose smoothness through auxiliary terms in the reward function, which compete with task objectives, treating the body as uniform and provide no direct control over the physical quantities responsible for smooth behavior. We introduce DeCap (Decoupled Constraint-aware policy), a constrained reinforcement learning algorithm that decouples whole-body smoothness into separate upper- and lower-body constraint groups, each formulates smoothness as explicit constraints on physical motion limits. To improve constraint satisfaction near feasibility boundaries,

arXiv:2609.24547v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time embodied companion interaction requires a robot to infer user intent from streaming speech, generate timely responses, and execute expressive, interruptible motions. Existing systems typically decouple dialogue orchestration from gesture synthesis, relying on offline motion generation from complete audio. This separation leaves open how a deployed robot can dynamically synchronize response content, prosodic timing, and physical safety under incremental inputs and uncertain turn boundaries. We present MIRA, a unified framework for full-duplex embodied companion interaction. Given streaming user speech, dialogue history, and vocal affect, MIRA predicts both the response text and an explicit embodiment cue. Discrete social behaviors (\eg listening, greeting) are mapped to validated robot trajectories, while open-ended speaking is paired with streaming, co-speech motion. This generative motion is governed by a predict-more-than-comm

arXiv:2609.24535v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unlike conventional rigid-link robots defined by discrete joints, continuum robots pose a fundamental challenge for expressing their complex continuous bending configurations for closed-loop control. Several modelling approaches have been proposed for conventional continuum robots, but tensegrity-based continuum robots remain largely open. Moreover, many of these approaches assume a continuous elastic backbone and are therefore not directly applicable to tensegrity manipulators, whose bodies are networks of rigid struts and tensioned cables. This work presents a reduced-order model for shape and posture control of a tensegrity-based continuum manipulator. The manipulator is modelled as a serially connected parallel-link mechanism. The proposed method is formulated as an optimization problem that uses geometric constraints of the tensegrity structure together with information from the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors embedded in the

arXiv:2609.24525v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable generalization in robotic manipulation via large-scale multimodal pretraining. However, VLA models are mainly trained on 2D-centric observations, which inherently constrains their capacity for precise spatial manipulation. Previous methods enhance 3D awareness by introducing implicit spatial priors, but still lack explicit geometry guidance. In this paper, we propose Bridge3D that integrates both implicit and explicit 3D geometry guidance into pre-trained 2D VLA models, enabling them to ''see'' and ''act'' in 3D. Bridge3D introduces two strategies: 1) Implicit Fusion, which enriches visual tokens with features from 3D foundation models to improve ''seeing'' in 3D; 2) Explicit Conditioning, which integrates action denoising with an explicit 3D semantic field to achieve ''acting'' in 3D. Furthermore, we utilize the proposed layer-wise linear probing to improve learning efficie

arXiv:2609.24511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich precision insertion is a key manipulation skill in robotic assembly. Tight clearances make insertion more sensitive to alignment errors and prone to collisions and jamming, while variations in geometry and clearance across parts further complicate policy reuse. We present a reinforcement learning framework that trains insertion policies entirely in simulation for direct deployment without real-world demonstrations or policy fine-tuning. By combining target poses with compact three-dimensional fingertip force feedback, the policy learns to search for alignment and correct its motion despite errors in the estimated hole position. A decoupled gated reward coordinates alignment and insertion. Force-signal smoothing and state-independent standard deviations stabilize the learning process. The resulting policies perform real-world insertion across multiple hole geometries with a minimum nominal clearance of 0.02 mm and improve succ

arXiv:2609.24507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visuomotor policies trained from a few demonstrations may reproduce demonstrated trajectories without reliably following changes in object position. Existing approaches with explicit attention typically obtain spatial priors from human annotation or visual models. We introduce TACIT (tactile contact informs attention), which uses measured tactile contacts from teleoperated demonstrations to supervise spatial attention without additional point annotation. Gaussian targets over preceding camera point clouds supervise an attention head whose pooled output conditions a visuotactile diffusion policy. Targets are used only during training; tactile observations remain inputs at inference. In the primary real-robot benchmark, with ten demonstrations per task and five demonstrated placement regions, TACIT achieves 66.7% success on ball placement and 73.3% on peg insertion, compared with 10.0% and 20.0% for input-matched 3D visuotactile fusion and

arXiv:2609.24499v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pneumatic proprioceptive actuators integrate actuation and sensing for soft robots that attract interest due to functional potential. Existing approaches often suffer from assembly errors or stress concentrations caused by heterogeneous materials. In this work, we propose the Monolithic Force-Proprioception Soft (MFPS) design and fabrication method that integrates an Asymmetric Origami Bending (AOB) chamber and a Force-Proprioception Soft (FPS) sensor with single material through one-step Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) fabrication. Based on the resistance response to strain of conductive thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), we design and analyze the structure of the FPS sensor, and conduct parametric analysis on the sensing characteristics. The FDM fabrication parameters of the MFPS actuator are analyzed, followed by actuator fabrication and characterization of the actuation and proprioception performance. Experimental results show that the

arXiv:2609.24497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time motion planning remains challenging in large and high-dimensional environments. Prior acceleration of RRT* follows tree-centric state organization, which reduces per-query cost but preserves superlinear end-to-end complexity and limits parallelism through structural dependencies. This paper presents ScaleMPA, a motion-planning accelerator that rethinks RRT* with a grid-native representation. By replacing hierarchical traversal with direct grid-based access, ScaleMPA reduces the planner critical path and exposes fine-grained parallelism. To make this reformulation practical under sparse high-dimensional planning, ScaleMPA further proposes a multi-resolution grid search engine and a hash-grid memory system. Implemented in 28 nm CMOS, ScaleMPA achieves millisecond-level planning latency and delivers 4.7$\times$--44.4$\times$ speedup over state-of-the-art motion-planning accelerators.

arXiv:2609.24433v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-bit vision-language-action inference must reduce observation-to-action latency while preserving robot behavior. We present FoldQuantVLA, a post-training quantization framework that carries a consistent activation representation through calibration, weight rounding, and native integer execution. It combines channel scaling and block Hadamard transforms with dynamic per-token quantization, without policy retraining. Custom TensorRT plugins execute projections in both the language backbone and iterative action expert with four-bit weights and activations (W4A4) on Ada GPUs and Jetson AGX Orin. Evaluation spans LIBERO, SimplerEnv, and two robot platforms. Across three GR00T checkpoints and $\pi_{0.5}$, W4A4 achieves $1.20$ to $1.33\times$ speedups over floating-point TensorRT on Orin and $1.25$ to $1.52\times$ on desktop. Retaining language attention-output and feed-forward down projections at eight bits (W8A8) improves held-out action fi

arXiv:2609.24413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we propose a haptic update control law that uses reaction torques to correct axial misalignment during robotic valve manipulation. Unlike vision-based estimates, which can be affected by calibration errors, occlusion, and uncertainty in the contact geometry, reaction torques arise directly from the physical interaction between the gripper and valve. A geometric relationship exists between the error (misalignment) vector and these torques. The primary aim of this work is to propose a stable controller exploiting this geometric property. Our control law is proven to be uniformly asymptotically stable. Simulations are performed for verification. Furthermore, we experimentally test the robustness of our method using a Kinova Gen3 robotic arm for initial misalignments ranging from $-15^\circ$ to $15^\circ$ at 3 different valve positions and report the resulting data distribution. The absolute value of the median misalignment acro

arXiv:2609.24411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Egocentric video offers a scalable source of physical interaction experience, yet translating it into robot-executable knowledge and enabling continual adaptation remain challenging. We introduce Zeva-Ego, a unified framework that learns physical priors from human experience and evolves through robot interaction. An Action-Centric Encoder (ACE) converts egocentric visual transitions into action-centered supervision for VLA mid-training, while In-Context Causal Learning (ICCL) enables parameter-free adaptation from action-effect feedback at deployment. Scaling Ego data to 10K hours improves RoboTwin success from 63.8% to 75.3%, matching 2K hours of robot demonstrations (74.7%), corresponding to an empirical data ratio of roughly 4-5:1. With accumulated interaction experience, ICCL further improves success from 58% to 89% within four attempts without parameter updates. These results demonstrate a scalable path toward embodied intelligence t