News & Research

arXiv:2606.15568v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advancements in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive generalist capabilities in robot manipulation, yet these policies can be brittle under out-of-distribution spatial and semantic perturbations. While human teleoperation offers reliable recovery, it can demand high cognitive load and precise manual control, and existing policy steering methods often require auxiliary models or sampler modifications. In this work, we introduce Shared Autonomy for Policy Steering (SAPS), a framework that blends real-time human teleoperation commands with pretrained policy actions at the action level. SAPS requires no policy retraining, auxiliary dynamics models, or architectural modifications. We propose and evaluate three arbitration strategies to balance human and VLA policy control, including a dynamic Cosine-similarity arbitration strategy that computes the geometric agreement between human and policy actions. Across

arXiv:2606.15550v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The success of generative models in language and visual generation has inspired extensive applications to generative robot planning. However, most existing works either focus on single-robot planning, or generate multi-robot trajectories in a sequential manner with iterative post-processing to resolve inter-robot conflicts. In this work, we investigate whether coordinated multi-robot trajectories, as a special spatiotemporal distribution, can be learned and generated with a generative model in a feed-forward manner. We propose Robots as Tokens (Roken), a unified diffusion transformer that directly generates multi-robot trajectories that satisfy both (individual) safety and (global) connectivity constraints. The core design of Roken is to represent each robot as a discrete token, allowing them to naturally interact with each other through self-attention, and cross-attend to map tokens for environment layouts. We further introduce several a

arXiv:2606.15516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Dexterous grasping depends on contact regulation, not motion alone. Stable manipulation requires fingers to maintain appropriate object loading as contacts slip, deform, or become visually occluded. Existing cross-embodiment dexterous policies unify motion through retargeted hand poses or latent actions, but force feedback remains tied to each hand's sensing and actuation, limiting transfer. This work introduces a cross-embodiment force-position interface for contact-aware manipulation across heterogeneous dexterous hands. Motion intent is represented in a shared hand-pose latent, while each hand's effort signal is calibrated through system identification into physical joint torque in N.m. These torques are mapped to fingertip forces and compact per-finger load descriptors, giving the policy comparable observations of where the hand should move and how the object is loaded. Using this interface, a flow-matching visuomotor policy is tr

arXiv:2606.15514v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic systems perceive the world through multiple input modalities -- including visual camera streams and natural language instructions -- and must select appropriate actions based on these signals. However, assuming the permanent availability of all input devices is unrealistic, as sensors may fail, become occluded, or drop out entirely during deployment. Robust handling of such missing-modality scenarios is therefore essential for real-world robot operation. This paper introduces RL4IL, a reinforcement learning guided method for imitation learning that selects the most suitable action for a given observation by identifying the most relevant expert demonstrations from a training library. A reinforcement learning policy, trained via Proximal Policy Optimisation over Breadth-First Search candidate sets, ranks candidate demonstrations and a soft cross-attention fusion head aggregates their action signals to produce the final prediction. W

arXiv:2606.15494v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human-robot collaboration (HRC) in prefabricated construction requires planning approaches that consider not only productivity but also time-dependent worker states during repeated work and rest. Existing planning models often rely on simplified assumptions about fatigue, workload, or recovery, with limited domain-specific empirical evidence on how perceived strain evolves. This study develops an empirically grounded, planning-oriented approach to characterize perceived strain accumulation and recovery in prefabricated construction HRC. A controlled repeated work-rest experiment assessed perceived cognitive and physical strain using the Rating Scale for Mental Effort and Borg's Rating of Perceived Exertion. Linear and exponential functional forms were evaluated, followed by mixed-effects modeling to examine collaborative conditions, session effects, and inter-individual variability. Results indicate that cognitive strain accumulation is b

arXiv:2606.15491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Radar SLAM is attractive for autonomous ground vehicles operating in visually degraded environments, however, scanning radars are noisy, have low scanning rates, and their measurements are challenging to match reliably over long trajectories. This paper presents FD-SLAM, a fast dense radar-inertial SLAM system that extends dense radar-inertial odometry with frequency-domain loop closure and pose graph optimization. The proposed method preserves an image-like structure of scanning radar measurements by using a compact frequency-domain polar descriptor for loop-candidate retrieval and a multi-stage verification pipeline based on temporal filtering, phase-correlation screening, scan-alignment similarity, and geometric consistency checks. Verified loop closures are added as non-sequential constraints in an SE(2) pose graph together with radar-inertial odometry factors. FD-SLAM is evaluated on a publicly available dataset using standard KITTI

arXiv:2606.15476v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robots operating in homes, warehouses, and other object-rich environments need memory systems that can find specific object instances on demand. Object-level memory alone is often insufficient: scenes contain many plausibly matching objects, and users refer to the target through relations to landmarks and surrounding objects (e.g. ``the tall lamp below the dartboard and to the left of the poster''), demanding a relational spatial memory that supports retrieval through semantic, appearance, and spatial predicates over objects. To achieve this, we present FARM (Find Anything using Relational Spatial Memory), which builds, in real time at 5-10 Hz, a compact, open-vocabulary, object-level memory with geometry, visual-language descriptors, and viewpoint evidence. At query time, FARM uses VLMs to parse the query and score visual evidence, while grounding spatial constraints explicitly through object symbols and relational predicates. This s

arXiv:2606.15469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic systems deployed in uncertain and dynamically changing environments often face variations in contact conditions, aerodynamic effects, and external disturbances that challenge reliable control. To remain effective under model-based control, these systems require dynamics models that can adapt to such changes, especially when direct access to complete environmental information is limited. To enable adaptability and facilitate integration with model predictive control, we propose a context-aware dynamics model based on neural ordinary differential equations, which infers environmental factors from state-action histories using a two-phase training procedure. We validate the approach across diverse robotic platforms, including a quadrotor in simulation, as well as a Sphero BOLT robot and a Fanuc manipulator in real-world experiments. The results demonstrate that our method effectively adapts to temporally and spatially varying environm

arXiv:2606.15434v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dexterous teleoperation requires precise arm-hand coordination, low-latency feedback, and robust interaction in real-world contact-rich environments. This paper presents a modular bilateral teleoperation framework that integrates operator-side input interfaces with a robot-side dexterous hand and compliant robotic arm in a unified control architecture. The system supports position-based hand retargeting, differential arm control, multi-scale haptic feedback, and shared control for stable manipulation. We validate the framework through a real-world dexterous manipulation task, highlighting coordinated arm-hand control and contact-aware interaction. Beyond feasibility, we identify key design insights related to cross-embodiment mismatch, haptic feedback granularity, and shared control. The proposed platform provides a practical teleoperation system and a foundation for collecting high-quality demonstrations for future learning-from-demonstr

arXiv:2606.15338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RGB sim-to-real for deformable manipulation has remained largely unsolved without real-world fine-tuning. We present SimWeaver, which trains zero-shot RGB VLA policies on 200 simulated demonstrations per task, reaching above 80% per-task and 91% average real-world success across 5 diverse deformable tasks including plastic-bag manipulation, without teleoperation or per-task calibration. SimWeaver combines a reliable measurement-backed simulator (SimWeaver-Sim) with an extensible asset framework supporting single-image generation(SimWeaver-Asset), a deterministic topology-aware trajectory synthesizer (SimWeaver-Syn), and a sim-to-real protocol with ISP-aware photometric augmentation (SimWeaver-Real). On silk grasping, the sim-trained policy reaches 100% under visual distribution shifts where real-data baselines drop to 9-70%, at two orders of magnitude lower per-trajectory cost. We will release SimWeaver and a representative asset subset.

arXiv:2606.15317v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline models for autonomous robots often fail under time-varying dynamics outside their training distribution. Koopman operator theory offers a linear representation of nonlinear dynamics via lifting, but its transition to real-time recursive estimation may suffer numerical vulnerabilities: covariance windup under low excitation when using exponential forgetting, and vanishing gain without forgetting. This paper introduces a Covariance-Regulated Recursive Koopman Learning (CR-RKL) framework with two complementary strategies--error dead-zone gating and constant-trace normalization--each independently capable of preventing covariance explosion and parameter freezing, with the latter additionally preserving the geometric structure of uncertainty. Validated on a non-holonomic differential-drive robot with wheel slip and Stribeck friction and on a 26-gram butterfly-inspired flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle, CR-RKL achieves numerically stab

arXiv:2606.15285v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have demonstrated strong task understanding and generalization in robotic manipulation, yet the high computational cost of full-model inference limits their deployment in low-latency, high-frequency closed-loop control. We propose an asynchronous semantic-action decoupling framework that separates semantic understanding from action generation along the internal semantic-action interface of existing VLAs, without redesigning the vision-language backbone or introducing an external planner. A low-frequency understanding module asynchronously updates reusable semantic conditions, while a high-frequency action module continuously outputs control actions without repeatedly invoking the full model. To mitigate the temporal mismatch between stale semantics and the current execution state, we further introduce historical action conditioning and time-misalignment training, which provide short-horizon execution c

arXiv:2606.15255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coordinating heterogeneous multi-robot systems (MRS) for complex, long-horizon tasks requires both flexible high-level reasoning and efficient low-level scheduling. Existing LLM-based approaches address the reasoning side but introduce two critical bottlenecks: (1) repeated LLM inference during execution, which inflates latency with agent count, and (2) offline, pre-committed scheduling, which forces robots to idle while waiting for sequentially ordered predecessors even when independent work is available. This paper presents OSDAG, a novel framework that integrates LLM-based task reasoning with Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) representation and constraint-aware online scheduling. The LLM is invoked once to decompose a natural-language instruction into a dependency-annotated task graph, and a lightweight online scheduler then allocates ready tasks to idle agents in real time. The DAG representation encodes both precedence and resource constr

arXiv:2606.15239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-source social robots offer accessibility, repairability, and student empowerment, yet the build itself often presents a barrier. Existing platforms either ship pre-assembled, foreclosing hands-on learning, or expose students to unfamiliar fasteners, opaque wiring, and inaccessible service points that erode engagement. Whether targeted mechanical redesign can lower this barrier whilst maintaining structural integrity remains untested. Here we show that Design for Assembly (DfA) and Design for Disassembly (DfD) interventions reshape how a build feels before they shorten how long it takes. Working with university students in Guyana and Estonia, we applied the Double Diamond framework to co-create the Robot Study Companion (RSC) v4.1: mapping pain points, then redesigning its chassis around twist-lock fasteners, snap-fit joints, and tool-free service latches. Across two studies with developers and first-time builders, system usability cl

arXiv:2606.15232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative model-based imitation learning has become a widely adopted paradigm for robotic manipulation, where policy performance depends critically on the conditioned visual representations. Although spatial softmax-based representations have been adopted in prior visuomotor policies, their effectiveness and underlying mechanisms remain insufficiently understood. This work rethinks the use of spatial softmax pooling: do such implicit spatial representations provide effective and stable visual features for robotic manipulation? Through systematic studies of different pooling methods in visual encoders, we find that this pooling operation produces compact and stable spatial representations, which outperform feature-value representations, despite using substantially fewer dimensions. Complementary saliency analysis further suggests that these spatial representations guide the encoder to focus more consistently on task-relevant regions. Howe