News & Research

arXiv:2609.22285v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adapting language models to new domains via continual pre-training raises a basic evaluation problem: if the training corpus overlaps with what the model already knows, performance gains cannot be cleanly attributed to new learning rather than pre-existing knowledge. This matters most for knowledge-intensive, task-light (KHTL) robot deployments - pharmaceutical dispensing, hazardous-material handling, facility-specific protocols, where the physical task is simple but the governing rules are proprietary and safety-critical, and where extensive live testing is costly or unsafe. We introduce ORDER (Ontology-driven Decision-making for Embodied Reasoning), a benchmark built on a fictitious world: a 342,069-token synthetic corpus defining a self-consistent physics that cannot appear in any model's pre-training data. ORDER pairs a 500-question knowledge test (ORDER-BENCH) with a harder compositional task, ORDER-SPATIAL: ordering objects for safe

arXiv:2609.22278v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quadruped manipulators enable mobile grasping in complex environments, yet their whole-body control policies remain vulnerable to unreliable onboard visual perception. Existing methods are typically developed under relatively reliable observations and have not systematically examined how occlusion, segmentation-mask dropout, depth noise, and target-localization jitter affect grasp reasoning and target tracking. To address this gap, we introduce DeViGrasp-Bench, a benchmark for mobile grasping under degraded vision that incorporates controlled visual degradations, seen and unseen objects, multiple difficulty levels, and complex terrains, and evaluates task success, execution efficiency, and action smoothness. We further propose DeViGrasp-Net, a teacher--student framework that combines state-conditioned grasp reasoning with reliability-aware temporal target estimation. The privileged teacher attends to offline grasp candidates conditioned o

arXiv:2609.22276v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Dynamic Window Approach (DWA) is widely used for local navigation, but its performance depends strongly on parameters that are typically fixed before navigation. In particular, the appropriate prediction horizon can vary with local free space: longer horizons support efficient motion in open areas, whereas shorter horizons help preserve feasible motions in narrow or cluttered regions. This paper proposes D3DWA, an adaptive DWA framework based on a Dueling Double Deep Q-Network (D3QN), which jointly selects the DWA evaluation weights and prediction horizon from a continuous navigation state at every control step while retaining DWA's trajectory generation and collision checking. In eight simulated environments, including unseen layouts, D3DWA reached every goal. Real-robot experiments further showed that D3DWA completed all three tested configurations, including a constrained case in which the weights-only variant timed out. These resu

arXiv:2609.22274v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in humanoid robotics have produced diverse skills through reinforcement learning, motion imitation, and generative modeling. Yet these capabilities remain siloed because they are built around incompatible representations, interfaces, and controllers. We present CHOREO, a framework for training-free composition of heterogeneous humanoid skills. Our key observation is that, regardless of how a skill is learned, it can ultimately be expressed as an executable motion trajectory. Based on this observation, CHOREO converts each capability into SkillMotion, a unified representation that combines motion states, contacts, semantics, and boundary conditions. Skills are composed through direct continuation, cubic Hermite blending, or validated bridge motions, without retraining source models or updating models at test time. On Unitree G1 in MuJoCo, CHOREO organizes 2,950 admitted SkillMotion assets derived from heterogeneous sources

arXiv:2505.04193v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simplicity is a critical inductive bias for designing data-driven controllers, especially when robustness is important. Despite the impressive results of deep reinforcement learning in complex control tasks, it is prone to capturing intricate and spurious correlations between observations and actions, leading to failure under slight perturbations to the environment. To tackle this problem, in this work we introduce a novel inductive bias towards simple policies in reinforcement learning. The simplicity inductive bias is introduced by minimizing the entropy of entire action trajectories, corresponding to the number of bits required to describe information in action trajectories after the agent observes state trajectories. Our reinforcement learning agent, Trajectory Entropy Reinforcement Learning, is optimized to minimize the trajectory entropy while maximizing rewards. We show that the trajectory entropy can be effectively estim

arXiv:2604.07799v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robots deployed for long periods keep improving their skills, and each update changes a released system. We treat this as a software-lifecycle problem: a fixed decision layer dispatches versioned skill modules and a runtime layer was built to screen each action. On six robosuite tasks we report three negative results and two measurements. First, peak task success is unstable across random seeds (within one method it spans 23.3 to 73.3%), so single-run peaks cannot rank these methods. Second, the system's four modules are whole-task policies with different labels, rotated on a clock, not the phase decomposition its documentation describes. At a matched budget one such policy holds the geometry at the final step in 0.734 of episodes reaching it, averaged over seeds, against 0.023 for the rotation, with no seed overlap at four seeds per arm (exact p=0.029). An intervention isolates why: restoring the termination condition the clock repla

arXiv:2603.22560v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Legged robots operate across a wide range of physical scales, but how their designs should be adapted as size changes remains unclear. Here, we tackle this question in two ways. First, we survey existing legged robots to provide a broad context for the key scaling variables, robot mass m and leg length L. We find the surprising result that bipedal robot mass generally scales with the length squared, L^2, rather than the isometric prediction L^3. Then, to reduce the variance in design choices, we focus on a pair of previously developed bipeds that share the same quasi-passive morphology but differ by a factor of six in leg length, use different feet and controllers, and achieve different relative speeds. We reconstruct both robots in a common 3-D simulation environment and scale each design over leg lengths from 0.02 to 1.2 meters under both mass models (mass is proportional to L^2 and is proportional to L^). The controlled comparison

arXiv:2603.17201v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visual SLAM systems combine visual tracking with global loop closure to maintain a consistent map and accurate localization. Loop closure is a computationally expensive process as we need to search across the whole map for matches. This paper presents FastLoop, a GPU-accelerated loop closing module to alleviate this computational complexity. We identify key performance bottlenecks in the loop closing pipeline of visual SLAM and address them through parallel optimizations on the GPU. Specifically, we use task-level and data-level parallelism and integrate a GPU-accelerated pose graph optimization. Our implementation is built on top of ORB-SLAM3 and leverages CUDA for GPU programming. Experimental results show that FastLoop achieves an average speedup of 1.4x and 1.3x on the EuRoC dataset and 3.0x and 2.4x on the TUM-VI dataset for the loop closing module on desktop and embedded platforms, respectively, while maintaining the accuracy of

arXiv:2603.16086v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have begun to incorporate audio, they typically treat sound as static pre-execution prompts or focus exclusively on human speech. This leaves a significant gap in real-time, sound-centric manipulation where fleeting environmental acoustics provide critical state verification during task execution. Consequently, key sounds are easily missed due to low-frequency updates or system latency. This problem is exacerbated by action chunking with open-loop execution, which creates a Blind Execution Interval where acoustic events are lost between discrete audio observation windows. Recognizing the necessity of continuous auditory awareness, we formalize Vision-Sound-Language-Action (VSLA) as a continuous control paradigm conditioned on vision, streaming audio, language, and proprioception under delayed decision loops. As an instantiation, we introduce HEAR, a VSLA framework integrating four compo

arXiv:2603.12488v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In many robotic manipulation tasks, the robot repeatedly solves motion-planning problems that differ mainly in the location of the goal object and its associated obstacle, while the surrounding workspace remains fixed. Prior works have shown that leveraging experience and offline computation can accelerate repeated planning queries, but they lack guarantees of covering the continuous task space and require storing large libraries of solutions. In this work, we present COAD, a framework that provides constant-time planning over a continuous goal-parameterized task space. COAD discretizes the continuous task space into finitely many Task Coverage Regions. Instead of planning and storing solutions for every region offline, it constructs a compressed library by only solving representative root problems. Other problems are handled through fast adaptation from these root solutions. At query time, the system retrieves a root motion in consta

arXiv:2603.03279v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Achieving autonomous and versatile whole-body loco-manipulation remains a central barrier to making humanoids practically useful. Yet existing approaches are fundamentally constrained: retargeted data are often scarce or low-quality; methods struggle to scale to large skill repertoires; and, most importantly, they rely on tracking predefined motion references rather than generating behavior from perception and high-level task specifications. To address these limitations, we propose ULTRA, a unified framework with two key components. First, we introduce a physics-driven neural retargeting algorithm that translates large-scale motion capture to humanoid embodiments while preserving physical plausibility for contact-rich interactions. Second, we learn a unified multimodal controller that supports both dense references and sparse task specifications, under sensing ranging from accurate motion-capture state to noisy egocentric visual input

arXiv:2602.21583v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to conventional quadrotors for agile and robust flight, whether actuator-level RL can be reliably deployed on tilt-rotor aerial robots remains an open question, as the hybrid actuation coupling brushless rotors with rotational joints introduces a substantially harder sim-to-real gap. In this work, we propose an end-to-end RL framework for omnidirectional motion control on overactuated tilt-rotor quadrotors, directly mapping target poses to joint and rotor commands. The learning framework combines actuator-level simulation with an asymmetric actor-critic architecture for 6D pose-reaching. For reliable sim-to-real transfer on the hybrid actuation, we integrate system identification with minimal yet physically grounded domain randomization. The trained policy is deployed zero-shot on real hardware and evaluated across waypoint hovering, external disturbances, payload variati

arXiv:2602.18071v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Humans rearrange objects in cluttered environments using egocentric perception, actively moving to keep task-relevant spatial cues in view. Mobile robots have not matched this: rearrangement is usually built on a global pose estimate or a map, which is exactly what a robot carrying one camera lacks, while pushing keeps changing the scene it would have to be built from. We present EgoPush, which pushes objects into anchor-relative formations from onboard RGB-D alone, with no global localization, external tracking, or map at deployment, and transfers zero-shot to a TurtleBot in controlled and visually cluttered scenes. What makes this learnable turns out to be a property of the teacher rather than of the student: three privileged teachers trained with identical rewards, architecture, and hyperparameters all exceed $98\%$ success, yet their distilled egocentric students reach $0\%$, $54.8\%$, and $87.3\%$, the only variable being the tea