News & Research

arXiv:2607.12130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spacecraft attitude control is traditionally achieved using momentum exchange devices or propellant-consuming thrusters. Meanwhile, a growing number of missions require robotic manipulators, which are typically treated as disturbance sources to be rejected rather than as actuators for spacecraft reorientation. This work investigates the use of manipulator motions for propellant-free attitude control by formulating a trajectory optimization problem with critical joint and collision avoidance constraints. Using an interior point solver for the resulting nonlinear program, complex slew and detumble trajectories are demonstrated for a range of spacecraft-manipulator systems with varying kinematic complexity and mass properties. The achievable control authority is compared directly with that of reaction wheel arrays via momentum and torque envelopes, demonstrating the potential for manipulators to serve as redundant or even primary attitude co

arXiv:2607.12115v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents a corpus-level analysis of generated behavior diagrams derived from Sony's R-CODE sample distribution for the ERS-111 AIBO. Rather than reading each script in isolation, the study compares named states across the corpus to identify the recurring control vocabulary that structures the sample set. The resulting aggregate shows that many superficially different routines are built from a compact embodied grammar centered on initialization, sensing, iterative action, synchronization, and recovery. It further shows that this vocabulary supports a graded scale of rising behavioral complexity, from capability activation and startup regularization to monitored locomotion, environmental decision loops, and fuller mode-based control. In addition to historical analysis, the paper argues that this form of state-based abstraction is useful as an intermediate representation for constructing new encapsulated behavior routines, esp

arXiv:2607.12114v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A humanoid that can walk should not relearn locomotion from scratch to jog or run. Yet current approaches often obtain gait diversity by prescribing gait schedules, imitating motion clips, training experts to switch between or distilling skills into one policy. These strategies can produce impressive behaviors, but offer limited flexibility across continuous speed commands, terrains, and morphologies. We study skill growth with GaitSpan, a framework that expands a pretrained, basic walking policy into faster locomotion. It treats walking as a seed skill: reusable motor structure for balance, support, body coordination, and contact transition that can be regenerated at new rhythms, extended into longer/higher strides, and corrected by residual adaptation. This expansion has three aspects: 1) rhythm generation, which modulates the frozen walking policy with multiple internal clocks and learns command-conditioned combinations of the resultin

arXiv:2607.12105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In-hand manipulation without external sensing is challenging due to uncertainties from finger-object contacts and disturbances by gravity. While reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning complex finger gaiting, existing approaches do not prioritize maintaining well-conditioned grasps for sustained manipulation. We introduce two complementary physics priors for robust in-hand rolling: a global grasp-quality prior derived from classical grasp analysis and a local contact-geometry prior based on fingertip curvature. The grasp-quality prior is used as a dense reward-shaping term that encourages well-distributed contacts with improved worst-case wrench resistance. The contact-geometry prior is expressed in the fingertip geometry that mechanically shapes the contact interface toward task-aligned rolling while reducing off-axis drift. We evaluate the effect of these priors on learning in-hand rolling manipulation for a multifingered r

arXiv:2607.12065v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While visual navigation has been extensively studied in agricultural robotics, most existing systems assume daytime conditions. In fact, deploying autonomous robots at night offers significant advantages, including 24-hour crop and soil monitoring, fruit harvesting, and nocturnal pest detection. Modern vision-based systems, however, rely heavily on large-scale well-annotated image datasets, which remains challenging to obtain for nighttime operation scenarios. To address this, we propose an unsupervised image translation framework that converts daytime plant-row RGB images into near-infrared (NIR) nighttime counterparts without requiring pixel-to-pixel supervision. This enables the direct reuse of daytime semantic labels for training nighttime perception models. In particular, by incorporating a pre-trained Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model, the proposed framework is designed to preserve semantic consistency during day-

arXiv:2607.12050v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-robot teams operating in confined or cluttered environments must adapt both their formation geometry and group topology to navigate through complex obstacles. This adaptation requires two complementary behaviors: deformation, where the team continuously reshapes its geometry while remaining connected, and reconfiguration, where robots split into subgroups or merge back into a single formation. Existing methods often model these behaviors independently, connect them through handcrafted rules, or lack explicit geometric criteria for determining when each behavior should be invoked. However, challenging environments may require online changes in formation shape, connectivity, and effective team composition, making decoupled or rule-based approaches prone to suboptimal trajectories and deadlock. We propose EFLUX, a geometry-grounded LLM agentic framework for automatic and elastic multi-robot formation navigation. EFLUX extracts a struct

arXiv:2604.11645v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Frequency-selective wireless power transfer provides a feasible route to enable independent actuation and control of multiple untethered robots in a common workspace; however, the scalability remains unquantified, particularly the maximum number of resonators that can be reliably addressed within a given frequency bandwidth. To address this, we formulate the relationship between resonator quality factor (Q-factor) and the number of individually addressable inductor-capacitor (LC) resonant energy harvesters within a fixed radio-frequency (RF) spectrum, and we convert selectively activated harvested energy into mechanical motion. We theoretically proved and experimentally demonstrated that scalability depends primarily on the Q-factor. For this proof-of-concept study, we define effective series resistance as a function of frequency allocating bandwidths to discrete actuators. We provide design equations for scaling untethered magn

arXiv:2603.06279v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: 3D semantic occupancy prediction is a cornerstone of robotic perception, yet real-world voxel annotations are inherently corrupted by structural artifacts and dynamic trailing effects. This raises a critical but underexplored question: can autonomous systems safely rely on such unreliable occupancy supervision? To systematically investigate this issue, we establish OccNL, the first benchmark dedicated to 3D occupancy under occupancy-asymmetric and dynamic trailing noise. Our analysis reveals a fundamental domain gap: state-of-the-art 2D label noise learning strategies collapse catastrophically in sparse 3D voxel spaces, exposing a critical vulnerability in existing paradigms. To address this challenge, we propose DPR-Occ, a principled label-noise-robust framework that constructs reliable supervision through dual-source partial label reasoning. By synergizing temporal model memory with representation-level structural affinity, DP

arXiv:2606.12936v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Wet-lab robots can improve the reproducibility, throughput, and safety of biomedical experiments, but scaling their learning requires customizable simulators for safe and reproducible task generation, open editable laboratory assets, and efficient pipelines that turn limited demonstrations into usable training data. We present Pipette, an embodied simulation platform, benchmark, and data-efficient augmentation framework for wet-lab robot learning. Pipette provides over 100 open-source and re-editable wet-lab assets through an extensible asset-building pipeline with built-in Tencent Hunyuan support for text- and image-conditioned 3D asset generation, and supports three robotic-arm embodiments through a unified simulation interface for task construction, data collection, augmentation, and evaluation. A key component of Pipette is its simulation-based data augmentation pipeline, which replays human demonstrations in simulation, applies l

arXiv:2605.19029v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reliable robotic manipulation requires control policies that can accurately represent and adapt to uncertainty arising from contact-rich interactions. Modern data-driven methods mitigate uncertainty through large-scale training and computation, and degrade significantly in performance with limited number of training samples. By contrast, classical model-based controllers are computationally efficient and reliable, but their limited ability to represent task-relevant uncertainty can hinder performance in contact-rich interactions. In this work, we propose to expand the capabilities of model-based manipulation control through more flexible uncertainty modeling that retains performance while exactly adapting to uncertainty. Our approach casts the manipulation problem as a distributionally robust control optimization and proposes a novel deterministic formulation based on Stein variational inference that preserves performance while explic

arXiv:2605.15753v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Functional 3D scene graphs offer a versatile and flexible representation for 3D scene understanding and robotic manipulation, defined by object nodes, interactive elements, and functional relationship edges. However, their potential remains underexplored due to the limited coverage of existing benchmarks and the overly straightforward design of previous pipelines, which primarily focus on large-scale furniture but lack of hierarchical structures. Therefore, in this work, we extend the benchmark coverage by introducing dense tabletop objects and explicit multi-level functional relationships. This expansion introduces critical challenges involving small-scale, dense, and similar instances, with lack of visual anchoring in relational reasoning, instance confusion during cross-frame fusion, and attribution uncertainty under dynamic viewpoints. To address these issues, we propose an open-vocabulary pipeline based on 2D visual grounding and

arXiv:2605.14712v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robot imitation data are often multimodal: similar visual-language observations may be followed by different action chunks because human demonstrators act with different short-horizon intents, task phases, or recent context. Existing frame-conditioned VLA policies infer each chunk from the current observation and instruction alone, so under partial observability they may resample different intents across adjacent replanning steps, leading to inter-chunk conflict and unstable execution. We introduce IntentVLA, a history-conditioned VLA framework that encodes recent visual observations into a compact short-horizon intent representation and uses it to condition chunk generation. We further introduce AliasBench, a 12-task ambiguity-aware benchmark on RoboTwin2 with matched training data and evaluation environments that isolate short-horizon observation aliasing. Across AliasBench, SimplerEnv, LIBERO, and RoboCasa, IntentVLA improves rollo

arXiv:2605.09633v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study multi-robot persistent monitoring on weighted graphs, where node weights encode monitoring priorities and edge weights encode travel distances. The goal is to design joint robot trajectories that minimize the worst-case weighted latency across all nodes over an infinite time horizon. The widely adopted worst-case latency objective evaluates team performance over the entire time horizon and therefore may fail to distinguish strategies with poor transient behavior but strong asymptotic performance. To address this limitation, we propose a family of tail-performance objectives that generalize the standard objective and study the resulting functional optimization problems. We establish several key theoretical properties, including the existence of optimal strategies, relationships among the proposed objectives and their corresponding optimization problems, approximation by periodic solutions to arbitrary accuracy, and reductions

arXiv:2605.08947v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper introduces a low-cost experimental mockup to simulate the laser cutting process of containers in nuclear decommissioning. It is composed of a three-axis table supporting a cuboid container with ultraviolet-sensitive faces, a six-degree-of-freedom serial manipulator holding an ultraviolet torch that simulates the laser, and a visual system based on cameras and fiducial markers. The system employs a constrained task-space adaptive motion controller that compensates for inaccurate parameters and eliminates the need to calibrate the system. Furthermore, as the motion controller explicitly accounts for geometric constraints, the robot reactively avoids collisions with obstacles while handling the ultraviolet torch. To improve the tracking of the laser-cutting path, we control the ultraviolet beam, which requires only four degrees of freedom, instead of the full end-effector pose. Experiments show that, despite an initially uncal

arXiv:2604.27792v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize semantically well but often lack fine-grained modeling of world dynamics. We present Motubrain, a unified World Action Model that jointly models video and action under a UniDiffuser formulation with a three-stream Mixture-of-Transformers architecture. A single model supports policy learning, world modeling, video generation, inverse dynamics, and joint video-action prediction, while scaling to heterogeneous multimodal data such as video-only, task-agnostic, and cross-embodiment robot data. Building on Motus, Motubrain further introduces unified multiview modeling, an independent text stream for stronger language-action coupling, a shared cross-embodiment action representation, and an efficient post-training and deployment recipe for long-horizon real-world control. Our inference stack combines step reduction, compilation, FP8 quantization, DiT caching, V2A-style action-only inference, and