News & Research

arXiv:2501.06348v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding the motivations underlying the human inclination to automate tasks is vital for developing robots that fit seamlessly into daily life. Accordingly, we ask: are individuals more inclined to automate activities based on the time they consume or the feelings experienced while performing them? This study explores these preferences and whether they vary across social groups, specifically gender category and income level. Leveraging data from the BEHAVIOR-1K dataset, the American Time-Use Survey, and the American Time-Use Survey Well-Being Module, we investigate the relationship between the desire for robot automation, time spent, and associated feelings: Happiness, Meaningfulness, Sadness, Painfulness, Stressfulness, or Tiredness. Our key findings show that, despite common assumptions, time spent on activities does not strongly predict automation preferences; instead, happiness and pain are the strongest indicators. We

arXiv:2606.13672v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The potential impacts of world models (WMs, i.e., learned simulators) on robotics are far-reaching -- policy evaluation, policy improvement, and test-time planning -- all with limited real-world interaction. To unlock these downstream capabilities, a WM needs to jointly satisfy three desiderata: $\textit{(i)}$ fidelity (i.e., producing simulated trajectories that correlate with reality), $\textit{(ii)}$ consistency (i.e., producing simulated trajectories that are coherent over long horizons), and $\textit{(iii)}$ efficiency (i.e., producing simulated trajectories quickly). We propose WEAVER (World Estimation Across Views for Embodied Reasoning): a WM architecture that simultaneously achieves all three desiderata, providing state-of-the-art results on robotic manipulation tasks. WEAVER is a multi-view WM trained to predict future latents and reward values via a flow-matching loss. We distill the key design decisions across model archit

arXiv:2605.05925v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning dexterous manipulation from human-object interaction (HOI) data offers a scalable alternative to robot teleoperation, but HOI demonstrations are typically sparse and purely kinematic, making direct retargeting unreliable under embodiment mismatch and contact-rich dynamics. We present DexSynRefine, a coupled framework that treats HOI data as structured motion priors rather than executable robot actions. DexSynRefine first synthesizes hand-object trajectories conditioned on the task and initial object state using HOI Motion Manifold Flow Primitives (HOI-MMFP), a motion prior for coupled hand-object motion. It then physically grounds them with task-space residual reinforcement learning and adapts execution by inferring missing contact-dynamics context from proprioceptive history. Across five dexterous manipulation tasks, each stage addresses a complementary bottleneck: HOI-MMFP improves trajectory consistency and smoothness, tas

arXiv:2602.01700v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we present Tilt-Ropter, a fully actuated hybrid aerial-terrestrial vehicle (HATV) that integrates tilt rotors with passive wheels to enable efficient multi-modal locomotion. Unlike conventional underactuated HATVs, the fully actuated design of Tilt-Ropter allows decoupled force and torque control, improving maneuverability and ground locomotion efficiency. A unified nonlinear model predictive controller (NMPC) is developed to track reference trajectories, enforce non-holonomic constraints, and accommodate contact effects across locomotion modes, while ensuring actuator feasibility through dedicated control allocation. To address complex wheel-ground dynamics, an external wrench estimator is incorporated to provide real-time interaction wrench estimates. The system is validated through simulation and real-world experiments, including seamless air-ground transitions and trajectory tracking tasks. Experimental results demon

arXiv:2601.20381v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visual foundation models provide strong perceptual features for robotics, but their dense representations lack explicit object-level structure, limiting robustness and controllability in manipulation tasks. We propose STORM (Slot-based Task-aware Object-centric Representation for robotic Manipulation), a lightweight object-centric adaptation module that augments frozen visual foundation models with a small set of task-aware slots for robotic manipulation. Rather than fully tuning large backbones on the task, STORM employs an efficient two-stage training strategy: few layers of object-centric representation are first trained on top of the frozen backbone through visual--semantic pretraining using language embeddings, then jointly adapted with a downstream manipulation policy for task alignement. This staged learning prevents degenerate slot formation and preserves semantic consistency while aligning perception with task objectives. Exp

arXiv:2601.07052v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Simulation is crucial in real-world robotics, offering safe, scalable, and efficient environments for developing a variety of robotic applications. While the Robot Operating System (ROS) has been widely adopted as the backbone of these robotic applications in both academia and industry, its asynchronous, multi-process design complicates reproducibility, especially across varying hardware platforms. Deterministic callback execution cannot be guaranteed when computation times and communication delays vary. This lack of reproducibility complicates scientific benchmarking and continuous integration, where consistent results are essential. To address this, we present a methodology to create deterministic simulations using ROS 2 nodes. Our ROS Simulation Library for C++ (RSLCPP) implements this approach, enabling existing nodes to be combined into a simulation routine that yields reproducible results, usually without requiring any source co

arXiv:2512.21109v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: MuJoCo is a powerful and efficient physics simulator widely used in robotics. One common way it is applied in practice is through Model Predictive Control (MPC), which uses repeated rollouts of the simulator to optimize future actions and generate responsive control policies in real time. To make this process more accessible, the open source library MuJoCo MPC (MJPC) provides ready-to-use MPC algorithms and implementations built directly on top of the MuJoCo simulator. However, MJPC relies on finite differencing (FD) to compute derivatives through the underlying MuJoCo simulator, which is often a key bottleneck that can make it prohibitively costly for time-sensitive tasks, especially in high-DOF systems or complex scenes. In this paper, we introduce the use of Web of Affine Spaces (WASP) derivatives within MJPC as a drop-in replacement for FD. WASP is a recently developed approach for efficiently computing sequences of accurate deriv

arXiv:2512.14428v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The development and evaluation of Lidar-Inertial Odometry (LIO) and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems requires a precise ground truth. The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is often used as a foundation for this, but its signals can be unreliable in obstructed environments due to multi-path effects or loss-of-signal. While existing datasets compensate for sporadic GNSS loss by incorporating Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) measurements, the commonly used systems do not permit prolonged study of GNSS-denied environments due to accumulated drift. Therefore, the diversity of such datasets is limited. To close this gap, we present Odyssey, an automotive LIO dataset featuring: (1) a ground truth derived from a navigation-grade Ring Laser Gyroscope (RLG)-based RTK/INS, offering bias stability one to four orders of magnitude better than existing automotive datasets; (2) a comprehensive collection of 36 sequences acr

arXiv:2512.11736v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mobile robots are increasingly deployed in cluttered environments with movable objects, posing challenges for traditional methods that prohibit interaction. In such settings, the mobile robot must go beyond traditional obstacle avoidance, leveraging pushing or nudging strategies to accomplish its goals. While research in pushing-based robotics is growing, evaluations rely on ad hoc setups, limiting reproducibility and cross-comparison. To address this, we present Bench-Push, the first unified benchmark for pushing-based mobile robot navigation and manipulation tasks. Bench-Push includes multiple components: 1) a comprehensive range of simulated environments that capture the fundamental challenges in pushing-based tasks, including navigating a maze with movable obstacles, autonomous ship navigation in ice-covered waters, box delivery, and area clearing, each with varying levels of complexity; 2) novel evaluation metrics to capture effi

arXiv:2511.02036v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In real-time Visual SLAM systems, local mapping must operate under strict latency constraints, as delays degrade map quality and increase the risk of tracking failure. GPU parallelization offers a promising way to reduce latency. However, parallelizing local mapping is challenging due to synchronized shared-state updates and the overhead of transferring large map data structures to the GPU. This paper presents TurboMap, a GPU-parallelized and CPU-optimized local mapping backend that holistically addresses these challenges. We restructure Map Point Creation to enable parallel Keypoint Correspondence Search on the GPU, redesign and parallelize Map Point Fusion, optimize Redundant Keyframe Culling on the CPU, and integrate a fast GPU-based Local Bundle Adjustment solver. To minimize data transfer and synchronization costs, we introduce persistent GPU-resident keyframe storage. Experiments on the EuRoC and TUM-VI datasets show average loc

arXiv:2510.18085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Imitation Learning (IL) is a natural way for humans to teach robots, particularly when high-quality demonstrations are easy to obtain. While IL has been widely applied to single-robot settings, relatively few studies have addressed the extension of these methods to multi-agent systems, especially in settings where a single human must provide demonstrations to a team of collaborating robots. In this paper, we introduce and study Round-Robin Behavior Cloning (R2BC), a method that enables a single human operator to effectively train multi-robot systems through sequential, single-agent demonstrations. Our approach allows the human to teleoperate one agent at a time and incrementally teach multi-agent behavior to the entire system, without requiring demonstrations in the joint multi-agent action space. We show that R2BC methods match, and in some cases surpass, the performance of an oracle behavior cloning approach trained on privileged sy

arXiv:2503.08895v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mutual adaptation can enhance overall task performance in human-robot co-transportation by integrating both the robot's and the human's understanding of the environment. While human modeling helps capture humans' subjective preferences, two challenges persist: (i) the uncertainty of human preference parameters and (ii) the need to balance adaptation strategies that benefit both humans and robots. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to address these challenges and improve task performance through mutual adaptation. First, instead of relying on fixed parameters, we model a probability distribution of human choices by incorporating a range of uncertain human preference parameters. Building on this, we introduce a time-varying stubbornness measure and a coordinated planning model, which allows either the robot to lead the team's trajectory or, if a human's preferred path conflicts with the robot's plan and their stubbornness exc

arXiv:2501.02874v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The manipulation of flexible objects such as cables, wires and fresh food items by robot hands forms a special challenge in robot grasp mechanics. This paper considers the steering of flexible linear objects in planar environments by two robot hands. The flexible linear object, modeled as an elastic non-stretchable rod, is manipulated by varying the gripping endpoint positions while keeping equal endpoint tangents. The flexible linear object shape has a closed form solution in terms of the grasp endpoint positions and tangents, called Euler's elastica. This paper obtains the elastica solutions under the optimal control framework, then uses the elastica solutions to obtain closed-form criteria for non self-intersection, stability and obstacle avoidance of the flexible linear object. The new tools are incorporated into a planning scheme for steering flexible linear objects in planar environments populated by sparsely spaced obstacles. T