News & Research

arXiv:2606.23760v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Engineering reliable autonomous systems is an important and growing topic in computer science. As autonomous systems become more prevalent, easy-to-use techniques for building them reliably are increasingly important. This workshop report captures and expands on the discussions at the Lorentz Center Workshop "Engineering Reliable Autonomous Systems" (ERAS), held from 10 to 14 June 2024. The workshop was co-organised by the organisers of the Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems (FMAS) and the Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy (AREA). It brought together members of the FMAS and AREA communities, industry practitioners, and representatives from sectors where autonomous systems pose distinctive engineering challenges. The workshop focused on three main research topics: techniques for verification and validation of autonomous systems; engineering real-world autonomous systems; and software architec

arXiv:2606.23754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deploying foundation models for robot control raises a central challenge: the expressive power that enables rich, multimodal perception also makes these models opaque and difficult to analyze formally, rendering them intractable for existing verification tools. In this paper, we present FEARL (Foundation-Enabled Assured Robot Learning), a framework that addresses this tension through a modular architectural decomposition. FEARL separates the policy into a large Controller (C) responsible for high-dimensional perception and task reasoning, and a small Safety module (S) that receives low-dimensional observations from dedicated safety sensors together with a bounded context embedding from C and produces the final action. Since many robot safety requirements, such as collision avoidance and workspace boundary constraints, can be expressed over these safety sensor observations, formal verification can be applied to S rather than to the full fo

arXiv:2605.02867v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite significant advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL), model performance remains highly sensitive to algorithm and hyperparameter configurations, while generalization gaps across environments complicate real-world deployment. Although prior work has studied RL generalization, the relative contribution of specific configurations to the generalization gap has not been quantitatively decomposed and systematically leveraged for configuration selection. To address this limitation, we propose an explainable framework that evaluates RL performance across robotic environments using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) to quantify configuration impacts. We establish a theoretical foundation connecting Shapley values to generalizability, empirically analyze configuration impact patterns, and introduce SHAP-guided configuration selection to enhance generalization. Our results reveal distinct patterns across algorithms and hyperparame

arXiv:2512.14349v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present a novel geometric port-Hamiltonian formulation of redundant manipulators performing a differential kinematic task $\eta=J(q)\dot{q}$, where $q$ is a point on the configuration manifold, $\eta$ is a velocity-like task space variable, and $J(q)$ is a linear map representing the task, for example the classical analytic or geometric manipulator Jacobian matrix. The proposed model emerges from a change of coordinates from canonical Hamiltonian dynamics, and splits the standard Hamiltonian momentum variable into a task-space momentum variable and a null-space momentum variable. Properties of this model and relation to Lagrangian formulations present in the literature are highlighted. Finally, we apply the proposed model in an \textit{Interconnection and Damping Assignment Passivity-Based Control} (IDA-PBC) design to stabilize and shape the impedance of a 7-DOF Emika Panda robot in simulation.

arXiv:2606.13102v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite the success of vision-based generalist robotic policies, existing tactile-based policies remain tied to fixed embodiments and sensor setups. This is because tactile signals are highly heterogeneous across hardware, making cross-sensor generalization difficult. We present FTP-1,the first generalist foundation tactile policy pretrained to acquire transferable tactile manipulation abilities across diverse sensors and embodiments. FTP-1 supports varied tactile inputs, including image-, array-, and state-based signals, by using heterogeneous encoders to project them into unified morphology-aware latent tokens that are jointly modeled by a shared tactile Transformer expert. Pretrained on around 3,000 hours of tactile manipulation data aggregated from 26 data sources, spanning human and robot demonstrations across 21 sensors, FTP-1 learns tactile skills that transfer beyond the sensors seen during pretraining. Across downstream finet

arXiv:2606.04825v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite the importance of tactile sensing for reliable manipulation, most existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) datasets remain vision-only, and those that do incorporate tactile information typically lack the joint combination of task diversity, language conditioning, and action trajectories. Furthermore, existing teleoperation pipelines rarely provide haptic feedback to the operator, despite its established role in demonstration quality and manipulation stability. In this work, we present HapTile, a contact-grounded visuotactile manipulation dataset that advances beyond vision-only trajectory datasets by embedding physical interaction sensing at two levels: fingertip tactile feedback at the robot end-effector, and haptic-informed demonstrations at the teleoperator side. The data collection platform integrates haptic feedback directly into the teleoperation controller, enabling the operator to perceive contact interactions in real ti

arXiv:2605.31110v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generalization in robotics requires prior knowledge about how the world is structured, yet this structure changes from one situation to the next. This paper investigates the proposition that generalization arises from adaptively composing regularities -- predictable relationships within the robot-environment system -- into situation-appropriate structures for behavior generation. We examine this proposition by analyzing the mechanism in AICON (Active InterCONnect), a framework representing regularities as interacting processes in a differentiable network, where sensory feedback realizes composition and gradient descent generates behavior. To isolate adaptive composition as the key mechanism, we study a simple simulated problem in which all relevant regularities can be identified. We expose the resulting model to a wide range of novel conditions not considered during design, and we find that it generates context-appropriate behavior in

arXiv:2605.09127v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Contact-implicit trajectory optimization (CITO) has attracted growing attention as a unified framework for planning and control in contact-rich robotic tasks. Recent approaches have demonstrated promising results in manipulation and locomotion without requiring a prescribed contact-mode schedule. It is well known that the underlying mathematical programs with complementarity constraints (MPCCs) remain numerically ill-conditioned, and systematic, scalable solution strategies for CITO remain an active area of research. More efficient and principled solvers that can handle contact constraints are therefore essential to broaden the applicability of CITO. In this work, we develop an augmented-Lagrangian approach to CITO for solving MPCC-based CITO with stationarity guarantees. The method can be interpreted as identifying the implicit contact-mode branches on the fly during the trajectory optimization (TO) iterations; we call this approach

arXiv:2604.22378v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robot-to-human handovers often rely on static, open-loop strategies (or, at best, approaches that adapt only the position), which generally do not consider how the object will be grasped by the human, thus requiring the user to adapt. This work presents a novel adaptive framework that dynamically adjusts the object's delivery pose in real time based on the user's hand pose and the intended downstream task. By integrating AI-based hand pose estimation with smooth, kinematically constrained trajectories, the system ensures a safe approach and an optimal handover orientation. A comprehensive user study compares the proposed adaptive approach against a static baseline across multiple tasks, evaluating both subjective metrics (NASA-TLX, Human-Robot Trust Scale) and objective physiological data (blink rate measured via wearable eye-trackers). The results demonstrate that dynamic alignment significantly reduces users' cognitive workload and

arXiv:2604.14944v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present HRDexDB, a paired cross-embodiment dexterous grasping dataset of high-fidelity dexterous grasping sequences featuring both human and diverse robotic hands. Unlike existing datasets, HRDexDB provides a comprehensive collection of grasping trajectories across human hands and multiple robot hand embodiments, spanning 100 diverse objects. Leveraging state-of-the-art vision methods and a dedicated multi-camera system, HRDexDB offers high-precision spatiotemporal 3D ground-truth motion for both the agent and the manipulated object. The dataset comprises 2.1K grasping trials, each enriched with synchronized visual and kinematic modalities, with contact-force signals available for tactile-enabled robotic hands. By providing closely aligned captures of human dexterity and robotic execution on the same target objects under comparable grasping motions, HRDexDB serves as a foundational benchmark for cross-embodiment dexterous manipulat

arXiv:2604.14484v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Behavior cloning (BC) on position-controlled robots is shaped by the PD loop that executes policy actions. We give a finite-horizon, nonasymptotic analysis of how controller gains affect BC failure. Independent sub-Gaussian action errors propagate through gain-dependent closed-loop dynamics into sub-Gaussian position errors. The resulting failure tail is controlled by controller amplification multiplied by validation loss and generalization slack, so validation loss alone can mis-rank gains. Under shape-preserving upper-bound assumptions, the analysis separates label difficulty, injection strength, and contraction, ranking compliant-overdamped gains as tightest and stiff-underdamped gains as loosest, with the mixed regimes system-dependent. In the canonical scalar second-order PD system, stationary position-error variance increases with stiffness and decreases with damping over the stable range, and exact zero-order-hold discretizatio

arXiv:2604.11975v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-robot systems hold significant promise for social environments such as homes and hospitals, yet existing multi-robot systems often treat robots as functionally interchangeable, overlooking how distinct agent identities shape user perception and how such individuality changes the coordination requirements of multi-robot interaction. To address this, we introduce M2HRI, a multimodal multi-agent framework that models each robot as an identity-bearing agent through personality and long-term memory, together with a contextualized coordination mechanism that regulates agent participation. In a controlled user study (n = 105) in a multi-agent human-robot interaction (HRI) scenario, we found that most personality contrasts were distinguishable and consistently expressed. Long-term memory improved preference awareness and interaction naturalness, while contextualized coordination improved conversational flow, response appropriateness, an