News & Research

arXiv:2602.18164v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate state estimation and multi-modal perception are prerequisites for autonomous legged robots in complex, large-scale environments. To date, no large-scale public legged-robot dataset captures the real-world conditions needed to develop and benchmark algorithms for legged-robot state estimation, perception, and navigation. To address this, we introduce the GrandTour dataset, a multi-modal legged-robotics dataset collected across challenging outdoor and indoor environments, featuring an ANYbotics ANYmal-D quadruped equipped with the Boxi multi-modal sensor payload. GrandTour spans a broad range of environments and operational scenarios across distinct test sites, ranging from alpine scenery and forests to demolished buildings and urban areas, and covers a wide variation in scale, complexity, illumination, and weather conditions. The dataset provides time-synchronized sensor data from spinning LiDARs, multiple RGB cameras with com

arXiv:2512.05693v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generalist vision--language--action (VLA) policies are typically trained on heterogeneous mixtures of robot demonstrations spanning diverse embodiments, action spaces, and observation configurations. Modeling such heterogeneity with a shared dense action module can induce negative transfer, particularly when action spaces or visual observations differ across data sources. We address this issue with HiMoE-VLA, a VLA framework built around a Hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts (HiMoE) action module. HiMoE uses Action-Space MoE layers at the input/output boundaries to specialize computation for distinct action spaces, Heterogeneity-Balancing MoE layers in neighboring layers to provide balanced capacity for residual variation in observations, scenes, and embodiments, and dense Transformer blocks in the middle to integrate shared representations. Two auxiliary objectives further guide this hierarchy: a contrastive Action-Space Regularization o

arXiv:2511.06667v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the explosive growth of rigid-body simulators, policy learning in simulation has become the de facto standard for most rigid morphologies. In contrast, soft robotic simulation frameworks remain scarce and are seldom adopted by the soft robotics community. This gap stems partly from the lack of easy-to-use, general-purpose frameworks and partly from the high computational cost of accurately simulating continuum mechanics, which often renders policy learning infeasible. In this work, we demonstrate that rapid soft robot policy learning is indeed achievable via implicit time-stepping. Our simulator of choice, DisMech, is a general-purpose, fully implicit soft-body simulator capable of handling both soft dynamics and frictional contact. We further introduce delta natural curvature control, a method analogous to delta joint position control in rigid manipulators, providing an intuitive and effective means of enacting control for soft

arXiv:2508.16943v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physics-based human motion control can make a simulated character walk, sit, and manipulate objects with high physical realism. Almost always, though, this happens in short, isolated clips that are re-initialized between interactions. We instead aim for continuous, reset-free long-horizon motion: a physically simulated humanoid that repeatedly walks to a displaced object, lifts it with a balanced whole-body posture, carries it past obstacles, and places it at a goal, over and over within a single uninterrupted take. The hard part is not any individual motion but the transitions between them. Without a reset, each cycle must end in a state that both leaves the object just placed undisturbed and lets the next cycle begin, yet every placement leaves the character off-balance in a non-canonical pose where naive end-to-end reinforcement learning fails. Our key idea is to treat this handoff as a two-sided problem of recoverability: the char

arXiv:2607.07403v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Vision Language Action (VLA) models have shown promise in robotic control. Yet, they face significant challenges regarding explainability, generalization, and compute requirements. This paper presents a Multi-Agent System (MAS) architecture that addresses these limitations by deploying specialized agents on onboard hardware - eliminating dependence on external compute. The system controls a multi-purpose autonomous mobile manipulator in a simulated industrial warehouse, fulfilling five task categories: safety inspection, warehouse maintenance, warehouse search, package quality verification, and responding to human requests. Compact VLMs (3-20B parameters) are used throughout, with fine-tuning applied to improve package inspection accuracy. A novel "Megamind" orchestration agent mitigates context retention issues inherent to long-horizon planning with smaller models. The system was validated in a hardwar

arXiv:2607.07252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables the synthesis of control policies directly from data, making it highly appealing for complex cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and robotics. A persistent challenge, however, is ensuring strict, hard safety constraints during the active learning phase. In real-world physical systems, violating mechanical limits can cause irreversible damage, necessitating that exploration remains strictly within safe operational regions. We propose a generalized framework that combines the adaptive, high-performance nature of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with the formal safety guarantees of model predictive control (MPC). Using a mathematical model of the system dynamics, offline MPC computations define a feasible state-action space, representing all safe combinations of system states and control inputs that guarantee constraint satisfaction. During training and deployment, the RL agent's instantaneous actions are pro

arXiv:2607.06600v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Line segment detection is a key building block in visual SLAM, 3D reconstruction, and industrial inspection. Recent deep learning methods have greatly improved accuracy, yet even the smallest models require several megabytes of memory, exceeding low-cost MCU capacity. This work investigates the maximum achievable accuracy under a sub-megabyte budget. We propose MiLSD, a detector tailored for MCU-level constraints, and systematically compare three output representations within a compact fully-convolutional backbone. Our study shows that the proposed F-Clip center-with-length-and-angle formulation learns most effectively at small model sizes. We find that 8-bit quantization preserves full-precision performance, while 4-bit quantization causes significant degradation, particularly in angle regression, with quantization-aware training recovering only part of the loss. With a one-megabyte activation budget and inference enhancements includin

arXiv:2607.07622v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The elephant trunk is a dexterous and versatile manipulator whose performance is still unmatched in robotics. In previous works, modularity was prioritized and relatively small-scale continuum robots were built. We take the natural proboscis of the Loxodonta africana species as a model and propose a different design approach which favors structural continuity and natural frequency that plausibly emulate those of the natural trunk, while conferring high adaptability to the environment and humans. Instead of targeting prescribed behaviors, we show that a biomimetic design based on the macroscopic properties of the natural system enables elephant-like movements and grasping. We build by 3D printing an 85 cm long, compliant, tapered, volumetrically tessellated continuum arm, which is combined with tendon-driven actuation mimicking the longitudinal and oblique muscles of the natural model. We demonstrate whole-body grasping of objects havi

arXiv:2607.07608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mainstream Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predict actions primarily from the current observation under a Markovian assumption, thus struggling with long-horizon, temporally dependent tasks. Existing memory-augmented VLAs either expand the observation window or retrieve history from the memory bank as auxiliary policy-side context. However, they leave memory outside the native latent embedding space of VLA reasoning, preventing historical experience from being fluidly interleaved with multimodal reasoning and action formation. To this end, we introduce LaMem-VLA, a latent-memory-native framework that reconstructs historical experience into latent memory tokens and directly interweaves them with VLA reasoning. At its core, LaMem-VLA introduces four coordinated components: (i) a curator that organizes historical experience into two complementary short-term and long-term memory vaults; (ii) a seeker that queries both vaults using the mul

arXiv:2607.07574v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic surface swabbing requires sustained interaction between a compliant tool and heterogeneous environments, where accurate estimation of tip-level contact force is critical for consistent sampling performance. However, deformable tool dynamics introduce nonlinear viscoelastic hysteresis that decouples wrist-mounted force measurements from true contact forces, while tool-integrated sensors are impractical for deployment due to sterility and disposability constraints. This paper presents a data-driven framework for contact force estimation in Deformable Tool Manipulation (DTM) that leverages proprioceptive sensing without requiring explicit physical models or permanent embedded sensing hardware at the tool tip. A recurrent architecture is first identified through a comparative evaluation of temporal models, where a compact LSTM achieves the lowest estimation error and sub-millisecond inference latency. To address generalization across

arXiv:2607.07533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalizing exoskeleton assistance requires user-specific gait data across many locomotor tasks, yet collecting this data demands repeated motion capture sessions that are costly, time-intensive, and especially burdensome for clinical populations. This challenge is most acute across walking speeds, where gait changes substantially and deviates further in clinical gait. This work introduces a subject-conditioned residual diffusion framework that generates personalized lower-limb kinematics at unseen walking speeds from a subject's gait sequence at a single seen speed. Given sagittal-plane hip, knee, and ankle trajectories at a seen speed and a desired unseen speed, the model generates a residual that transforms the seen trajectory into the unseen one, using a transformer denoiser conditioned on the subject's gait and the two speeds through feature-wise linear modulation. Trained only on able-bodied data, the model achieved a mean absolut

arXiv:2607.07491v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Advances in learning-based robotic manipulation, such as Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and Video Action Models (VAMs), heavily rely on high-quality teleoperation data. Their capabilities are strictly upper-bounded by the quality of the underlying human demonstrations. Current gradient-based retargeting algorithms often converge to different local minima, resulting in jitter that affects data quality and teleoperation experience. To address this, we introduce the Sampling-Based Retargeter (SBR), a novel gradient-free retargeting method drawn from the rich literature of sampling-based control and explicitly designed for low-jitter, real-time kinematic retargeting. We evaluate SBR both in simulation and through a rigorous real-world user study involving 18 participants performing 3 complex manipulation tasks. Compared to gradient-based baselines, SBR achieved the highest overall task success rate (54.1%) while significantly reducin

arXiv:2607.07475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In robotics, the capability of an artificial agent to represent the range of its action possibilities, i.e. affordances, is crucial to understand how it can act on its environment. While functional affordances, which refer to the use of tools and objects, have been broadly studied in knowledge representation, the implications of a social context and the presence of other agents have remained unexplored in this field. Consequently, in the field of social robotics, a multi-agent context enables the agents to engage in new actions that are potentially complementary to their individual capabilities, leading to the perspective of agentexploitation. This work focuses on the concept of cooperative affordance within the realm of social affordances. Cooperative affordances refer to situations where agents interact with each other to extend their action possibilities range. From this definition, this paper proposes a tractable ontological represent

arXiv:2607.07459v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present EmbodiedGen V2, a generative 3D world engine for building executable policy-ready environments for embodied intelligence. Sim-ready 3D asset generation has advanced rapidly, yet assembling such assets into policy-ready task environments remains largely manual, limiting scalable closed-loop learning. EmbodiedGen V2 addresses this gap through a unified sim-ready representation that connects cross-simulator assets, interaction affordances, task-driven worlds, large-scale multi-room scenes, and stateful Vibe Coding into a generative, editable, and reusable simulation pipeline. The generated environments support manipulation, navigation, mobile manipulation, cross-simulator deployment, and embodied policy training. In evaluation, the asset pipeline achieves 96.5% human acceptance and 98.6% collision success, and 83.3% of task-driven worlds are directly usable for downstream simulation without manual modification. Online reinforc

arXiv:2607.07452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dense visual SLAM is a fundamental problem in robotics. Recent advances in 3DGS have demonstrated its potential for dense SLAM. Existing 3DGS frameworks focus on both appearance and geometry modeling. However, scene geometry is typically more critical for SLAM than novel view synthesis because downstream robotic tasks, such as navigation and obstacle avoidance, rely primarily on accurate spatial geometry rather than photorealistic rendering. This observation raises a natural question: Is it feasible for 3DGS to perform 3D reconstruction without scene appearance modeling? Motivated by this, we propose Geometry-only Gaussian Splatting (GeoGS), which directly reconstructs scene geometry, and further present GeoGS-SLAM, a dense visual SLAM system built upon this representation. Specifically, GeoGS retains only spatial parameters to reduce the number of per-primitive parameters by over 80%. In contrast to existing 3DGS methods, GeoGS focuses s