News & Research

arXiv:2610.30876v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid robots must coordinate locomotion and manipulation in everyday environments, yet progress is difficult to assess across differing policies, controllers, and task settings. LocoManiLab provides an integrated testbed spanning data collection and generation, policy training, evaluation, and physical deployment. Its task suite covers 234 atomic and compositional tasks across five household scene categories, supported by 51.5 hours of simulated teleoperation. The evaluation covers twelve policies with a shared controller across task and scene splits and perturbation levels, two policies across five controllers, and studies of demonstration scale and data-source mixtures. Success rates fall on unseen tasks and scenes and generally decline as visual perturbations increase, with differences in generalization and robustness across policies. For data generation, a humanoid motion generation model is fine-tuned for loco-manipulation to stud

arXiv:2610.30819v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable robotic manipulation in field-deployed settings requires more than executing a capable controller. As the execution conditions change, the system must decide, online and on the robot side, which control source should hold authority. Human teleoperation adapts readily to contact-rich and semantically ambiguous situations but depends on a stable communication link. Local autonomy is executed without continuous human intervention, but may fail under semantic ambiguity, long-horizon drift, and unforeseen contingencies. These two control sources exhibit complementary reliability profiles. We formulate this complementarity as a control authority routing problem and present Task-Evidence Authority Routing for Robotic Manipulation (TEAR), an edge-deployable framework that allocates authority between human teleoperation and local autonomy. TEAR arbitrates on the robot side using network-state evidence, which governs the usability of teleo

arXiv:2610.30817v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid motion-tracking policies can reproduce diverse behaviors, yet connecting independently acquired motions into a continuous sequence remains challenging. Interpolation connects boundary poses without considering whether their relative position, heading, and timing provide suitable conditions for a transition. A generative motion prior can produce richer motion, but poorly arranged boundaries may cause it to generate excessive locomotion, turning, or another unintended action. We present Spatio-Temporal Alignment with a Motion Prior (STAMP), a framework for connecting independently acquired humanoid motions through a Robot-to-Human-to-Robot process. STAMP uses human motion space to draw on rich motion priors and reuse transition knowledge across robot embodiments. Its key component is a learned alignment model that determines the boundary conditions for motion inbetweening. Given the two motions retargeted to a human rig, the alignm

arXiv:2610.30810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Loco-manipulation extends the workspace of conventional manipulation by combining mobility with physical interaction, while aerial loco-manipulation further expands this capability into three-dimensional space, enabling robots to reach environments inaccessible to ground-based systems. Moving to an aerial platform, however, gives rise to a demanding control problem, since the vehicle must track trajectories accurately in three dimensions while the motion of the arm and its interaction with the environment continuously shift the center of mass, alter the inertia, and impose force and moment disturbances on the body. Conventional controllers address these effects through explicit models and estimation, whereas learning-based controllers infer dynamics from experience, yet control rewards provide no direct target for the response information retained from history, and fixed task sampling can leave persistent tracking difficulties insufficien

arXiv:2610.30737v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), such as self-driving cars, operate in increasingly complex environments while expected to maintain high reliability. The black-box nature of many of these systems makes it impossible to fully verify their behavior prior to deployment. When a failure occurs, it is important to analyze it to guide improvements to system robustness. A recent work introduced the novel concept of leveraging the framework of actual causality for CPS failure explanation. However, that work considered only a discrete, binary causal model that cannot capture continuous changes in system inputs. In this paper, we address these limitations by extending the actual causality framework with the notion of distance to account for the continuous characteristics of the system. Specifically, we introduce the novel concepts of distance-weighted actual cause and distance-weighted degree of responsibility, enabling causal influe

arXiv:2610.30735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow matching is now the dominant approach for vision-language action (VLA) robot policies, thanks to its expressiveness and simple training objective. However, inference for standard flow matching requires iteratively solving an ODE, limiting the control frequency at deployment. While several works have proposed novel methods to allow for single-shot action generation, we ask whether such additional objectives are actually necessary. We find that across six flow matching VLAs, one-step action generation largely matches multi-step sampling at scale: multi-step integration confers little to no consistent advantage at inference. We empirically find that this holds as long as models are sufficiently trained and have enough capacity. Practically, the implication is that for large VLAs, the single-step policy comes essentially for free from the multi-step model, enabling low-latency deployment without retraining, distillation, or auxiliary obj

arXiv:2610.30694v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous robotic surgery has drawn increased attention in recent years due to its potential to relieve surgeons of time-consuming, mentally straining, and tedious tasks, particularly during prolonged operations. One suitable task for automation is suturing, which involves tracking the thread as it deforms during needle retrieval, de-tangling, knot tightening, and other tasks. Unlike rigid-object manipulation, deformable thread manipulation has no fixed pose to track and effectively infinite degrees of freedom, making its configuration difficult to predict and requiring the thread's state to be re-estimated rather than assumed. At the same time, thread manipulations involve sequential motions that depend on past and current thread contact points, which must be accurately and continuously tracked. This paper presents an image-to-manipulation pipeline that concurrently generates live thread reconstruction while conducting safe and optimize

arXiv:2610.30671v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual Language Action (VLA) models are designed to be generalist robot models that can be implemented across embodiments, tasks and environments. However, their ability to collaborate with other robots and humans remains underexplored. In this work, we propose a framework to automate the generation of multi-robot collaborative data for decentralized VLA training without requiring human teleoperation. Our framework first utilizes a decentralized collaborative planning approach to generate multi-robot collaborative robot plans in the form of an executable function. We then utilize the collaborative plan to produce collaborative demonstration data to finetune VLA models in a decentralized manner. We show that our approach produces demonstration data that when used to finetune VLA models on decentralized collaboration tasks matches the task performance of VLA models finetuned on human-teleoperated collaborative data.

arXiv:2610.30607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motion planning is central to robotics, and it is increasingly used to correct the motions proposed by learned planners and policies. In both uses, constraints must hold at every instant of the motion, not only at sampled times. To our knowledge, no algorithm provably converges to a globally optimal motion once a smoothness cost is combined with such constraints. We cast planning and steering as a single continuous-time program: robots avoid one another and static or moving obstacles, and a learned proposal is steered by keeping the motion close to it. The program is elementary to state, yet nonconvex. We propose GlobMP (Global Motion Planning), a gradient projection method over piecewise-polynomial curves, on which each constraint is one polynomial per piece that must stay nonnegative over the whole motion; it alternates cost reduction with feasibility restoration. Under mild assumptions, we show that, from a fine grid start, its cost ap

arXiv:2610.30605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traversability estimation is critical for ground vehicle teleoperation, yet existing methods often neglect the human operator's preferences for speed and risk tolerance. To address this gap, we propose PATH-Net, a Preference-Aware Traversability estimation Hierarchical Network that adaptively generates preference-conditioned traversability cost maps and speed profiles for off-road teleoperation. Our framework integrates visual and geometric bird's-eye-view features with short-term historical vehicle states through a multi-head shared-backbone architecture. Our PATH-Net infers traversability cost maps while optimizing speed recommendations by using maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning and sparse speed supervision. Our method incorporates operator preference via an asymmetric feature aggregation mechanism, splitting inference into a cost branch that prioritizes high-risk traversability regions and a speed branch that outputs prefe

arXiv:2610.30589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable robotic mapping in dynamic real-world environments is essential for embodied intelligence and long-term autonomy. However, existing methods often involve a trade-off: lightweight online mapping is efficient but captures limited semantic context, while dense mapping provides richer semantics at higher computational cost and is more vulnerable to distractors. They also struggle to relocalize objects after scene changes. To address these challenges, we propose the Online Anchor-centric Scene Inference System (OASIS), a unified system for online mapping, complex open-vocabulary retrieval, and navigation in dynamic environments. Motivated by the observation that indoor scenes are organized around stable semantic anchors, OASIS represents the environment using a sparse set of anchor nodes, each maintaining a unified multimodal representation that integrates semantic descriptions, visual features, and geometric states for reasoning, ver

arXiv:2610.30540v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human motion retargeting bridges the embodiment gap between humans and humanoid robots by converting human demonstrations into reference trajectories for whole-body control and loco-manipulation. For object-interaction tasks, successful execution depends on accurately preserving body--object relations at critical stages. However, uniform per-frame iteration budgets do not account for these localized accuracy requirements, limiting the computational efficiency of retargeting. To address this limitation, we present Spatiotemporal Retargeting (STR), which uses keyframes and key body parts to allocate optimization effort. Specifically, a vision-language model selects relevant motion signals and body parts, and keyframes are identified from changes in the selected signals. Based on these selections, STR assigns additional solver iterations to keyframes and higher interaction weights to the selected parts. To further improve contact fidelity, w

arXiv:2610.30528v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting surrounding vehicles' lane-change intentions enables autonomous vehicles to anticipate potential hazards and respond proactively rather than relying solely on reactive maneuvers. This study investigates the benefits of integrating lane-change prediction, based on knowledge graph embeddings and Bayesian inference, into autonomous vehicle decision-making. Three driving strategies are evaluated in risky merging scenarios simulated in CARLA: reactive driving, prediction-based longitudinal action, and prediction-based lateral action. The proposed prediction model anticipates the surrounding vehicle's lane change approximately 3-4 seconds before its occurrence, allowing the ego vehicle to adjust its behavior accordingly. In the representative simulation records, reactive driving results in a collision accompanied by aggressive deceleration. In contrast, prediction-based longitudinal action initiates early braking to establish a safe

arXiv:2610.30452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Currently, CT-guided lung biopsy is a highly manual procedure requiring patient breath-holding, iterative manual needle insertions, and repeated CT confirmation scans to accurately target a tumor. Automating this process within the CT bore--without relying on manual needle placement or patient breath-holding--has the potential to reduce procedure time, patient discomfort, and radiation exposure. In this work, we present an integrated sensing and control system capable of performing a gated needle insertion within the CT bore. The experiments demonstrate the system's ability to track and predict patient breath cycles, perform autonomous respiratory-gated needle insertion, and detect breath cycle anomalies.

arXiv:2610.30438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile sensing provides robots with direct access to physical interactions at the contact interface, making it a critical modality for robust and dexterous manipulation. Over the past several decades, tactile-based manipulation research has evolved from mechanics-driven approaches, which explicitly interpret tactile signals through contact mechanics and task-specific reasoning, to data-driven approaches that learn tactile representations and manipulation policies directly from data. This paper reviews the development of tactile-based manipulation from these two complementary perspectives. We first introduce the fundamentals of tactile sensing, and then review, from a mechanics-driven perspective, how those signals form manipulation-relevant state representations and subsequently influence the robot action. We then examine the recent advances in data-driven tactile manipulation, covering imitation learning, reinforcement learning, vision-