News & Research

arXiv:2610.38993v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Anticipating the motion of nearby objects is critical for safe and efficient robot navigation. Without a proper understanding of what may move, a robot may plan overly conservative, inefficient trajectories to guarantee safety, or it may be overly risky, resulting in unacceptable collisions. While tracking and predicting the motion of known objects has seen significant progress, little research addresses how a robot should adapt online to novel objects, including anticipating how one object may move another (e.g., a person operating a forklift to move a pallet). To enable this capability, we propose a meta-learned graph neural network that leverages a semantic, geometric, and relational history of objects to accurately predict, from a few online observations, when objects will begin to move in new environments. We demonstrate that our method, which is trained only in simulation, accurately anticipates the motion of objects unseen at train

arXiv:2610.38930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quadrotor control under disturbances such as wind gusts and payload variations remains challenging. First-order sliding mode control (SMC) and matched/unmatched uncertainty distinction are classical approaches; however, neither tells a practitioner which loops in a cascaded controller should be made robust to sustain disturbances, how to tune those loops, nor what the additional costs are on an embedded processor. Applying robust control uniformly across all axes addresses disturbances indiscriminately, adding tuning effort on axes where no disturbance acts. On inherently underactuated vehicles, disturbances along some axes cannot be opposed directly at all. We propose a principled methodology for deciding where robust control belongs in a cascaded architecture, with all control running onboard the vehicle. We recover the acting disturbance from PID hover flights under disturbance by inverting the equations of motion, use the recovered si

arXiv:2610.38657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Future planetary rovers will traverse steep, deformable terrain where slip, sinkage, and terrain deformation can threaten mobility. Although simulation can capture some wheel-soil effects, unmodeled deformable-terrain phenomena create sim-to-real gaps requiring deployment-time adaptation. Yet, rover operations leave little room for extensive trial-and-error. We introduce TERRA (Targeted Exploration for Reward-Relevant Adaptation), an online adaptation framework that efficiently seeks deployment data exposing task-relevant model errors and corrects them. TERRA adapts a simulation-trained world model with a reward-weighted prediction loss and trains a loss predictor to estimate where future performance-relevant errors are likely to occur, using this signal to guide exploration during MPC. In simulation, TERRA reaches approximately 90% slope-climbing success within five trials under severe out-of-distribution pretraining conditions, outperfo

arXiv:2610.38569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Smart wheelchairs are robotic devices that gather information from the surroundings and allow people to safely drive through various environments. They usually rely on the interpretation of high-level user's intentions, typically decoded through human-robot interface (HRI) or brain-machine interface (BMI). However, navigating in an unknown environment and accurately understanding user commands remain significant challenges. Misinterpretation of commands or the environment can lead to user frustration, distrust of the system, or even unsafe situations. In this paper, we present a novel Multi-Layer Navigation System (MLNS) for a smart wheelchair that enables navigation in unknown environments while interpreting and safely contextualizing user's intentions even in the case of limited and faulty commands. The stack relies on a Virtual Sensors-Driven Potential Fields (ViSPF) method for obstacle detection that accounts for the wheelchair's actu

arXiv:2610.38513v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The growing volume of end-of-life products has intensified the need for automated disassembly, yet hook-type connections remain challengin: their orientations vary, they deform under load, and their geometry is hidden, so vision alone cannot identify a feasible non-destructive disassembly direction. This work proposes a constraint-aware reinforcement learning framework that infers feasible extraction directions online from contact forces. The policy is trained in a robot-agnostic, object-centric simulation on a simplified peg-in-hole pair and deployed zero-shot on a physical robot, where it transfers to real connections with unseen, multi-stage constraint structures. Because instantaneous contact forces are noisy and locally ambiguous, the policy is coupled with a particle filter belief that provides the policy with temporally integrated directional information and reduces redundant exploratory motion. The approach is validated on four re

arXiv:2610.38502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Combining wheeled and legged locomotion within a single robotic platform offers the potential to harness the advantages of both systems. The development of such hybrid systems remains an active area of research. While legged robots exhibit remarkable adaptability for traversing uneven and rugged terrains, their relatively low speed limits their practicality in indoor environments. Conversely, wheeled robots demonstrate higher efficiency on flat surfaces but often encounter difficulties when navigating obstacles such as steps. This paper introduces OmniQuad, a novel hybrid robot that integrates mecanum wheels with legged locomotion to exploit the benefits of both modalities. Mecanum wheels provide omnidirectional mobility, enhancing the robot's manoeuvrability by enabling agile movement in confined spaces and the ability to maintain a consistent orientation during task execution. In this work, we first present the design of a custom wheele

arXiv:2610.38443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic grasping relies on large manually annotated datasets, which are costly to create. We introduce a straight-skeleton-based algorithm for generating two-finger grasp keypoints and identifying regions suitable for stable, feasible grasps. Our automated pipeline produces consistent grasp annotations without human intervention. We also propose the Skeleton-based Generative Grasp Convolutional Neural Network (SkelGG-CNN), a 4-DoF architecture that learns geometric grasp features from skeleton-based guidance. To extend auto-labeling to 6-DoF grasping, we develop a generalized quasi-3D skeletonization algorithm that operates directly on point clouds. Using automatically generated 4-DoF labels, SkelGG-CNN achieves accuracies of 95.42%, 96.55%, and 97.1% on Jacquard V1, Jacquard V2, and Cornell, respectively. On the GraspNet novel split, 6-DoF auto-labeling achieves an average precision of 18.33, comparable to state-of-the-art model-based ap

arXiv:2610.38400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a person declined our robot's invitation to play, Alice turned her shoulder away and said "No worries, it's all good." Only after a brief pause did she drive off. The words and gestures were plausible but their order changed the message. In another episode, Alice informed a host that his visitor had arrived---while the visitor stood right beside him. Both came from a three-year ROS 2 HRI consortium that integrated large language and vision models as they emerged. Today's foundation models give robots broader capabilities to perceive their surroundings, reason about situations and generate behavior. Yet capability alone does not ensure that a changed situation shapes the action that reaches a person. Evidence may never be acquired, or a purpose or constraint may fail to survive planning and execution. A system may even report Success when an action no longer serves its intended purpose. Drawing on the consortium's engineering experien

arXiv:2610.38388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quadrupedal manipulators can extend their workspace through whole-body interaction, but task-planning agents' capabilities remain limited by their available controllers. We present ELEVATE, a framework that uses persistent failures during task-program refinement to identify and acquire missing whole-body control capabilities. When these failures suggest a missing physical capability, a coding agent formulates and iteratively refines a reinforcement-learning problem, specifying behavior-specific rewards, curricula, and termination conditions. Validated controllers are added to the capability library and composed with existing controllers to retry the task. Starting from a single pretrained loco-manipulation controller, ELEVATE autonomously acquires controllers for wall-supported elevation, supported manipulation, and wall descent across a sequence of seven simulation tasks. These controllers are reused in subsequent reaching and object-man

arXiv:2610.38357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discretizing continuous actions into discrete skills using methods like VQ-VAE has emerged as a powerful paradigm for robotic manipulation. However, quantization errors yield a suboptimal distribution for the skill prior, degrading its performance. While reinforcement learning offers a path for refinement, its direct application faces unstable encoder updates and a granularity dilemma in importance sampling. To address these challenges, we introduce Cascaded Skills Optimization (CSO), a two-stage post-training framework. First, Rejection-Sampling Supervised Fine-tuning aligns the model's observation-to-skill mapping with the distribution of successful online trajectories via supervised fine-tuning. Second, with the observation encoder frozen, Skills Policy Optimization computes an independent, clipped importance ratio for each complete skill, enabling stable and efficient updates. With a lightweight QueST-style policy, CSO raises overall

arXiv:2610.38351v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable box manipulation requires successful placement without damage, which depends on maintaining sufficient contact force without excessive loading. We hypothesize that per-finger force feedback improves manipulation reliability relative to open-loop finger commands. To this end, we present Finger External-Force Estimation from Proprioceptive SignaLs (FEEL), an uncertainty-aware residual method that estimates per-finger external force magnitude from proprioceptive histories. Our method combines a calibrated virtual-spring estimate with a residual distribution predicted by a Mixture Density Network (MDN) and requires no dedicated contact sensors during deployment. The estimated force is used for continuous per-finger adaptation, while predictive uncertainty is evaluated as an empirical signal of ambiguity in proprioceptive force estimation. Across ten fingers and contact forces spanning 0-20 N, our method achieves a mean RMSE of 0.251

arXiv:2610.38234v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate the first zero-shot sim-to-real transfer for a surgeon-robot collaboration task in open surgery: retractor take-over. A robot arm takes a retractor from the surgeon's hand and preserves retraction at handoff, using a policy trained only on simulated demonstrations, without human demonstrations or real-world fine-tuning. Imitation learning from real demonstrations is limited by collection and labeling costs, and by performance degradation when the environment changes. Our framework, SimRetract, generates simulated demonstrations designed for transfer: the policy observes masked instrument images and grasp geometry, learns to recover from off-nominal states, and acts with margin for execution drift. Deployed zero-shot, it grasps the retractor in 90% of 50 surgeon-defined phantom presentations and preserves retraction at handoff in 78%. Results on unseen retractors suggest potential for generalization to instruments with simil

arXiv:2610.38233v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mobile manipulator robots rarely reposition their base during manipulation, because doing so requires real-time knowledge of how well the arm can reach its surroundings among obstacles. Reachability maps (RMs) encode this knowledge, but existing methods are slow, coarse (typically 5 cm), or ignore real obstacles. This article asks whether a neural network can predict an obstacle-aware RM at 2 cm resolution from a live depth camera, on embedded hardware, fast enough for online use. We present HERON, a 3D U-Net trained on RMs computed with the GPU-accelerated inverse kinematics of cuRobo, first on synthetic scenes and then on real depth data, and deployed on a Jetson AGX Orin with TensorRT and INT8 quantization. HERON predicts the RM of a 2.56 m cube around the arm in 115 ms on average, for a measured system rate of 8.57 Hz, close to the 10 Hz update rate of the obstacle map, whereas computing the same map with cuRobo takes about 90 min. Ag

arXiv:2610.38221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot imitation learning uses demonstrations from operators of varying skill, but selecting training data remains challenging. Existing methods score demonstrations using smoothness, diversity, or estimated influence on policy performance, but differences in selection and evaluation protocols make it difficult to determine whether they outperform simple baselines. We introduce \textbf{CuraEval}, a framework combining mathematical analysis of demonstration scores with controlled comparisons against fixed size-matched random subsets and full-data training on mixed-skill robomimic data using Diffusion Policy and BC-RNN. We show that the evaluated PSD score depends only on episode length and squared position magnitudes, and produces nearly the same ranking as episode length on \textit{square} ($\rho=0.999$). With Diffusion Policy, selecting the shortest 50\% of demonstrations improves \textit{square} success from 70.7\% under random selection

arXiv:2610.38199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavior Cloning has demonstrated promising generalization capabilities for robotic manipulation in terrestrial environments. However, marine visual distortions and dynamic currents create a severe domain shift that remains a key bottleneck in adapting generalist architectures to underwater field manipulation. To address this, 1616 episodes of underwater manipulation data were collected in calm and turbulent waters and were used to train 14 generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models (DynamicVLA) with varying proprioception observation configurations. Across three tasks on 1260 gradable on-hardware rollouts in a pool, 10 models outperformed the baseline, with the highest-performing model achieving a 93.3% overall success rate, including partial successes. Results are also introduced from a case study evaluating the performance of a single-task Action Chunking Transformer (ACT) and a generalist VLA (SmolVLA) policy for two tasks in mari