News & Research

arXiv:2610.39798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual grounding is crucial for robots to understand language instructions with visual observations. This paper addresses the problem of visual grounding uncertainties, where a robot uses a black-box vision-language model (VLM) to ground free-form natural-language instructions to target objects. Prevailing methods derive uncertainty from the VLM itself. Yet, outputs of the VLM, e.g., generated uncertainties, are from the same parameters and structures producing the predictions, and inherit the bias. We give a formal Bayesian definition of the problem that treats the VLM prediction as an observation. An external surrogate Bayesian model then quantifies per-query uncertainty over a local neighborhood of a held-out calibration set, decomposed into aleatoric and epistemic components. A hierarchical retrieval across input modalities realizes a compact joint-space neighborhood, mitigating the curse of dimensionality. The estimator further integ

arXiv:2610.39775v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous mobile robots commonly pair a global planner with a local model predictive controller (MPC), but nonconvex obstacle avoidance and a limited horizon can make the robot freeze in complex layouts. Deciding whether to replan, wait, or call for help is a supervisory decision. Recent work queries a large language model (LLM) supervisor on every anomaly, which is slow and costly. We instead distill the LLM online into a decision tree. After each training episode, counterfactual replay labels recoveries as needed, unnecessary, or harmful. These labels retire unhelpful rules. In simulation, on 20 unseen layouts where the MPC alone freezes, the tree handles at least 18 correctly across all seeds, either by reaching the goal or by calling for help when no feasible path exists. The tree matches both an always-query LLM supervisor and expert-designed rules, while issuing no LLM queries at test time. Handwritten rules cannot anticipate the l

arXiv:2610.39708v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Localization is an essential capability of intelligent robots. However, in real-world constrained environments, robots often cannot rely on external localization systems. Therefore, this paper proposes an online particle-filter localization method based on Monte Carlo sampling. The method is applied to the localization of a mobile robot in a maze environment and requires only four range sensors mounted on the front, rear, left, and right sides of the vehicle, without the need for any heading information. Simulation experiments demonstrate that even in a maze where local regions are highly similar, the vehicle can still achieve relatively accurate localization, thereby providing a fast and effective approach for robot localization in complex environments.

arXiv:2610.39689v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence for science (AI4S) is extending from interpretation of existing data to the design and execution of experiments. Space offers distinctive scientific opportunities while restricting physical support. Microgravity and extraterrestrial environments expose phenomena that terrestrial experiments cannot fully reproduce; finite samples, constrained resources, and limited opportunities for intervention complicate sustained investigation. This critical review examines orbital laboratories and planetary in situ science across biology, materials, fluid and thermal physics, and adaptive exploration. We distinguish learning from space-derived data, selecting scientific actions, executing them, and preserving experimental validity. Terrestrial self-driving laboratories provide complementary evidence on optimization, dedicated automation, robotic manipulation, and the support needed for unattended operation. The synthesis connect

arXiv:2610.39582v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human demonstrations provide a natural and scalable source of data for learning dexterous manipulation policies. However, existing retargeting methods primarily transfer human kinematics, while the tactile information underlying physical interaction is rarely preserved across embodiments. To address this limitation, we present a hierarchical three-stage framework for kinematic-tactile aligned dexterous retargeting. We use object-centric contact wrench space as a physical representation for tactile alignment between human and robot hands. The framework first aligns hand kinematics and contact geometry, and then constructs a human wrench support profile from tactile forces and contact geometry. Robot fingertip force targets are subsequently optimized to cover the human wrench support and converted into joint position corrections, yielding directly replayable robot hand trajectories. We evaluate the framework in simulation and real robot exp

arXiv:2610.39560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic grippers operating in unstructured environments must robustly grasp objects of different shapes and sizes despite perception and positioning errors. Soft grippers that can achieve this robustness through intelligent mechanical design rather than sophisticated control software offer a promising solution. However, no existing computational design framework explicitly optimises soft gripper morphology for robustness across object geometries and grasp poses. We introduce SimTO-Robust, a generalisation of simulation-driven topology optimisation (SimTO) that simulates grasps across multiple objects and poses and aggregates their contact forces to guide gripper morphology optimisation. We generate 6,646 designs and physically evaluate 24 of them alongside 10 specialised SimTO designs, two rigid baseline grippers, and a baseline generalist soft gripper produced using conventional topology optimisation. All 37 grippers are tested in a pick

arXiv:2610.39547v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning-enabled cyber-physical systems (CPS), including autonomous vehicles and UAVs, increasingly incorporate foundation models, yet fragmented assurance practices provide insufficient support for system-level guarantees. We argue that restoring engineering control across stochastic neural, symbolic, and physical boundaries requires a shift from model-centric evaluation to system-level assurance. We introduce the Foundation Model Assurance Stack, connecting three directions: (i) neuro-symbolic architectures that constrain foundation models through explicit symbolic world models, reasoning layers, and interfaces; (ii) semantically grounded, conformance-based testing that combines formal specifications and symbolic world models with foundation-model-assisted specification mining, scenario generation, and test synthesis; and (iii) compositional verification and runtime assurance that target formally tractable components and interfaces thro

arXiv:2610.39528v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel at instruction following, yet most remain feed-forward: they condition actions only on the current observation and discard both long-horizon temporal context and the hierarchical structure of VLM representations. We present PRIME W0, a hierarchical conditional flow-matching framework that closes this gap through three synergistic designs: (1)per-layer KV injection from a pretrained VLM into an Adaptive MoE action expert; (2)dynamics-aware conditioning via asynchronous world-model subgoal-image prediction and a DINOv2 historical-frame semantic bridge; and (3)Action Dynamic Manifold (ADM) flow matching with covariance-structured noise that respects robot kinematic coupling. PRIME W0 is trained in four stages---VLM pre-training, DAT/NTP visuomotor pre-training, DiT flow-matching decoder assembly with WM injection, and end-to-end SFT---and achieves state-of-the-art results on LIBERO and real-robot ben

arXiv:2610.39429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-arm robot platforms, including bimanual and humanoid robots, have the capability to complete tasks with lower cycle times than single-arm systems, but they are more difficult to safely control due to the presence of multi-arm constraints. The paradigm of training generalist robot policies from massive datasets is a promising approach to address general-purpose multi-arm manipulation, but the acquisition of large multi-arm manipulation datasets remains a bottleneck. Automated demonstration generation can alleviate this burden by synthesizing new demonstrations from a handful of source demonstrations, but existing algorithms ignore multi-arm constraints and as a result often induce unsafe and unsuccessful behaviors. We address this limitation by introducing ScheduleGen, an integrated planning & scheduling algorithm for multi-arm demonstration generation. We evaluate ScheduleGen on 28 simulation task variants, including seven externall

arXiv:2610.39416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting where to grasp and how to move is fundamentally a geometry problem. Vision-language models treat it as language generation instead. They tokenize spatial coordinates into text and decode them autoregressively. This mechanism ignores spatial structure and truncates continuous precision. Errors compound across coordinate tokens during decoding. In this paper, we show that compact off-the-shelf VLMs with 0.5-2B parameters already encode rich spatial information in their intermediate hidden states. Autoregressive decoding is the dominant bottleneck for trajectory prediction, while affordance prediction depends additionally on feature depth and decoder architecture. We expose the latent spatial information with a lightweight, geometry-compatible prediction head that attaches to a frozen backbone. It reads features from an intermediate hidden layer, conditions a learned query on the task instruction and refines it via cross-attention

arXiv:2610.39385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) devices allow human experts to demonstrate tasks for robot learning without teleoperating physical robots. Using these demonstrations as training data still requires a consistent hardware setup, calibration, and data processing. We present UMI-Live, a full-stack open-source bimanual UMI system for in-the-wild data collection. We design our custom UMI-Live hardware to integrate camera and LiDAR--inertial sensing, onboard compute, and power, without external tracking equipment or calibration within the collection environment. We implement a simple user interface for recording data while an asynchronous pipeline performs parallel SLAM reconstruction and publishes training-ready datasets. We also release software that supports dual-YAM teleoperation and VLA policy training and inference. We validate UMI-Live data quality by fine-tuning $\pi_{0.5}$ and MolmoAct2, achieving success rates of 10/10 and 8/10,

arXiv:2610.39379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper considers coordinating a heterogeneous team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) traversing a domain containing an unknown number of potentially hazardous targets. The UAVs provide aerial sensing using onboard optical cameras, adapting their trajectories to ground routes and target information. We formulate the aerial search problem using ergodic control, which distributes sensing effort according to a spatial information density to balance exploration and target localization. The formulation incorporates dynamic camera field-of-view footprints and pose-dependent probabilistic detection models. Angles-only measurements are processed through Bayesian inference and marginalization over data-association hypotheses to obtain a Poisson multi-Bernoulli (PMB) approximation of the target posterior, representing both detected and undetected targets. This belief directs aerial sensing toward unexplored r

arXiv:2610.39367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) can condition robot actions on generated visual futures, but this additional context is neither cost-free nor uniformly beneficial. We examine what a predicted future actually changes: the action delta $\Delta a$ between the future-conditioned and future-free execution paths of the same model. Under a shared WAM checkpoint, this delta barely shifts average benchmark success ($+0.8$ points on LIBERO, $-0.8$ on RoboTwin~2.0), while generating visual futures increases inference latency by 1.7--1.9$\times$. These aggregate metrics conceal a concentrated failure mode that we term \emph{future-induced negative transfer}: while predictive deltas benefit long-horizon tasks ($+2.4$ points on LIBERO-Long) and remain negligible on most routine manipulations, they induce severe degradation on precision tasks---with \emph{Press Stapler} and \emph{Place Can Basket} losing 54.0 and 34.0 points, recurring as top failure modes a

arXiv:2610.39327v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present SONIC-K1, to our knowledge the first open-weights whole-body motion tracker for the Booster K1 humanoid, obtained by adapting the SONIC framework to this smaller robot. The policy is trained from scratch on a single shared GPU with a small fraction of the compute reported for SONIC. In MuJoCo simulation, it tracks nearly all held-out motion clips and performs well on external benchmarks under SONIC's success criterion. On the real K1, it tracks upper-body and slow motions, while stepping and turning remain less reliable, and simulation experiments show a sensitivity to action latency. These results show broad motion-tracking capability on a modest training budget and point to quantitative hardware evaluation as the main next step. Code, policy weights and evaluation tools are publicly available.

arXiv:2610.39319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon robotic tasks are commonly decomposed into semantic subgoals to simplify planning. However, subgoal progress in LLM-based planning is typically inferred implicitly from interaction histories. Inaccurate estimates can misguide execution and allow local errors to propagate. To address this, we propose ProLoop, a Progress-Aware Closed-Loop framework that derives explicit subgoal progress from structured relations between desired and execution states. A learned State-Relation Monitor assesses these relations, which are then aggregated into subgoal progress as ongoing, deviated, or completed. The resulting progress guides execution adaptation, enabling reliable progress-aware control throughout execution. Experiments on AgentBoard ALFWorld and a real-world robotic platform show that ProLoop improves success rate by 12.94% overall and by 15.46% on Hard tasks, while reducing environment interactions by 32.3%.