News & Research

arXiv:2608.15502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising foundation for Embodied AI, but their high inference cost poses significant challenges for deployment in robotic systems. In practice, on-device inference is constrained by limited compute capacity and energy budgets, struggling to simultaneously satisfy real-time control and energy efficiency requirements. Alternatively, offloading the inference workload to an edge server is susceptible to fluctuations in system conditions, introducing unpredictable latency risks. Device-edge co-inference offers a promising solution, but systematic research tailored to VLA models remains scarce, particularly a unified co-inference framework that jointly addresses real-time constraints and system-level energy efficiency. Thus, we propose EcoVLA, an adaptive device-edge co-inference framework for VLA models that maximizes system energy efficiency under real-time constraints. EcoVLA first int

arXiv:2608.15375v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops Admissibility-Preserving Control (APC), a realization-centered safety-critical control framework for strict-feedback systems subject to asymmetric actuator limits, time-varying output constraints, and actuator-rate limitations. APC denotes the overall control architecture, whereas an Admissibility-Preserving Input Realization (APIR) denotes its constraint-realization module. Therein, the APIR dynamically generates the physical plant input while rendering its prescribed asymmetric actuator set forward invariant. In contrast to algebraic clipping and post-design saturation compensation, the actuator limits are embedded directly in a continuously differentiable dynamic realization with user-selectable regularity and interpretable tuning parameters. The APIR is integrated with recursive backstepping by treating the realized plant input as an additional state. The resulting design does not require an input-to-state stabil

arXiv:2608.15259v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play a crucial role in various scenarios ranging from disaster response to traffic surveillance. However, aerial video footage often suffers from severe motion blur due to rapid flight maneuvers, vibrations, and camera panning, which can significantly degrade downstream tasks such as target detection. Our goal is to explore a computationally-efficient and effective video deblurring approach to enhance UAV target detection performance. To reduce computational cost, we first propose an Adaptive Latent Scale Selector that dynamically adjusts the latent space resolution according to the intensity of UAV motion, thus balancing detail preservation with inference efficiency. To ensure temporal consistency, we introduce a Multi-Frame Alignment and Learnable Gating module to warp and gate the preceding frames, allowing the model to fuse only relevant temporal information and suppress misaligned or uninformative fe

arXiv:2608.15060v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Touch is fundamental to dexterous manipulation, yet most egocentric human data increasingly used for robot learning lacks tactile information. Directly collecting large-scale tactile data is challenging due to sensor limitations, while human video data is abundant, contact-rich, and easily scalable. This motivates a natural question: can tactile signals be inferred purely from vision? To address this, we introduce EgoTac, a generalizable model that predicts rich tactile information directly from egocentric human videos. EgoTac is trained on a unified corpus of over 5.7M image-tactile pairs, covering both continuous force measurements and binary contacts. By learning from this diverse dataset, EgoTac captures nuanced touch dynamics across varied interactions. Experiments demonstrate strong performance: in-domain prediction achieves an average force error below 0.06N. On out-of-domain contact prediction benchmarks, EgoTac consistently out

arXiv:2507.15502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Postoperative follow-up plays a crucial role in monitoring recovery and identifying complications. However, traditional approaches, typically involving bedside interviews and manual documentation, are time-consuming and labor-intensive. Although existing digital solutions, such as web questionnaires and intelligent automated calls, can alleviate the workload of nurses to a certain extent, they either deliver an inflexible scripted interaction or face private information leakage issues. To address these limitations, this paper introduces FollowUpBot, an LLM-powered edge-deployed robot for postoperative care and monitoring. It allows dynamic planning of optimal routes and uses edge-deployed LLMs to conduct adaptive and face-to-face conversations with patients through multiple interaction modes, ensuring data privacy. Moreover, FollowUpBot is capable of automatically generating structured postoperative follow-up reports for healthcare inst

arXiv:2608.16889v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon robot manipulation chains many contact-rich skills into one multi-stage task. Vision-language-action (VLA) models increasingly master the individual skills, yet the chain still fails: errors compound beyond the policy's ability to correct, and one subtask silently constrains the next. A promising recipe freezes the VLA and puts an LLM agent in charge: it plans in language, moves in free space with analytic primitives, invokes the VLA only for contact-rich segments, and writes adaptation into language memory. Applied to long horizons, it breaks twice. (1) Competence comes from whole-task exploration at test time, whose cost is multiplicative in stages: if one stage needs T episodes, a K-stage task needs about T^K, and a failure does not reveal which stage caused it. (2) It has no representation of transitions: the VLA primitive carries an exit but no entry condition, so a subtask can succeed in a form its successor cannot use.

arXiv:2608.16885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon robot manipulation requires a robot to both execute individual skills reliably and sequence them coherently over extended tasks. Most hierarchical vision-language-action (VLA) models make each such decision with a single forward pass, leaving no mechanism to allocate additional computation to difficult or consequential choices. We introduce $\tau_0$-VLA, a hierarchical robot foundation model that formulates high-level subtask generation as a compute-scalable inference problem through world-model-guided test-time computation. At each inference step, the high-level policy uses execution memory to generate a subtask and, when needed, searches over alternatives before committing to its output. A low-level policy then executes the generated subtask across multiple robot embodiments. The policy is trained on 40,115 hours of heterogeneous real-world data with multimodal co-training. Across in-domain and distribution-shifted settings

arXiv:2608.16853v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-segment suction-based soft robots are promising for inspection and maintenance in confined or fragile environments, but existing approaches still depend heavily on manually designed gaits and environment-specific motion scripts. This work presents a planning framework for serial multi-segment soft robots with deformable body segments and boundary suction pads. The formulation targets full 3D navigation on complex surfaces and explicitly handles discrete adhesion switching and continuous body deformation under geometric, collision, and quasi-static feasibility constraints, while remaining agnostic to the specific actuation realization used to produce segment deformation. Its core, block-wise IK hybrid search (IKHS), performs best-first search over feasible adhesion transitions while solving inverse kinematics only on induced free blocks. On top of IKHS, primitive-augmented hybrid search (PaHS) uses a learned observation--primitiv

arXiv:2608.16837v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid robots hold great promise as general-purpose agents in human-centered environments, yet generalist vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models are not readily applicable to humanoid whole-body loco-manipulation. The high dimensionality and interdependence of humanoid motions make it challenging for conventional single-stage VLA architectures to coordinate locomotion, waist posture, and dual-arm manipulation effectively. Moreover, policies trained through offline behavior cloning can remain suboptimal during real-world deployment. Although online reinforcement learning can refine policies through real-world interaction, directly tuning large VLA backbones demands excessive computation and may introduce safety risks during real-robot exploration. To address these bottlenecks, we introduce HAF (Humanoid Adaptation Framework), a two-part framework consisting of HAF-VLA and HAF-Steer that transfers off-the-shelf generalist VLA foun

arXiv:2608.16822v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Central Place Foraging Algorithm (CPFA) combines site fidelity, pheromone-guided navigation, and uninformed random search to enable decentralized resource collection in robot swarms. However, CPFA often revisits previously explored regions while leaving other areas insufficiently searched, reducing efficiency as resources become scarce. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Repulsive Pheromone Clustering (ARPC), a bio-inspired method in which robots deposit repulsive pheromone waypoints to mark previously explored locations. These waypoints are clustered around the nest to estimate low-value search regions, allowing robots to be redirected toward likely unvisited areas. By integrating the exploitation of known resources with systematic avoidance of redundant exploration, ARPC improves search diversity and resource discovery efficiency. Extensive simulations in ARGoS across varying arena sizes, resource densities, and clustered, random, a

arXiv:2608.16806v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated capabilities in in-context learning, task decomposition, step-by-step reasoning, and code generation, driving their gradual evolution from text generation models into the core of agents capable of perceiving environments, invoking tools, and executing tasks. Traditional LLM Agents typically obtain information through webpages, documents, databases, or external tools and generate corresponding invocation sequences according to user goals; when this technology is further integrated with robotic systems, large language models begin to undertake functions such as task understanding, high-level planning, and behavioral decision-making. SayCan combines the task reasoning capability of language models with the affordances of robotic skills, while Code as Policies and ProgPrompt generate robot task plans through policy code and programmatic prompting, respectively, and VoxPoser uses language models a

arXiv:2608.16741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term manipulation planning requires robots to reason not only about immediate task success but also about how current decisions affect future interactions with the environment. In this context, household service robots may need to organize groceries in partially occupied shelves while using limited storage space efficiently and preserving access for subsequent placements. In this paper, we consider an online multi-object shelf-placement setting in which future objects arrivals are unknown. Existing approaches do not jointly address semantic organization, dense space utilization, and manipulator accessibility during sequential shelf filling. To address this gap, we propose Semantic-Dense Placement Planning (SDPP), an accessibility-preserving approach that ranks candidate poses using a semantic-density score combining inter-object semantic similarity with spatial proximity. An Accessibility Map (AM) further filters candidates unlikely

arXiv:2608.16728v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Designing large soft robots capable of generating high forces for physical human-robot interaction remains a significant challenge in soft robotics. Prior work in large soft robots has focused on proof-of-concept prototypes, and no systematic framework exists for determining the suitability of a design paradigm for a desired task. This manuscript introduces a method for optimizing the geometry of a soft robot limb, maximizing its blocking force subject to an anti-bucking constraint under its own gravitational loading. We demonstrate that an explicit solution exists to the proposed optimization problem under certain assumptions. Experiments with three geometries of a large, soft, pneumatically-actuated manipulator demonstrate that the method correctly predicts which designs meet constraints and which produces the largest end-effector forces. This method, with its closed-form solution, can allow designers to determine a-priori if an intende

arXiv:2608.16715v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In-context imitation learning enables few-shot policy generalization but struggles to maintain performance on unseen objects and novel scenarios. To address this, we introduce MatchingPolicy, a correspondence-driven framework that explicitly decouples demonstration-to-scene matching from policy learning. Central to our method is a correspondence-aware diffusion policy that conditions robotic actions directly on dense semantic correspondences. This architectural separation resolves the inherent conflict between correspondence identification and action adaptation, enabling robust out-of-distribution transfer. Our framework integrates vision foundation models with a novel two-stage matching algorithm to dynamically establish reliable correspondences. Extensive evaluations on RLBench and real-world manipulation tasks confirm that MatchingPolicy achieves superior few-shot performance, generalizing reliably across unseen object instances and se

arXiv:2608.16712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Underactuated tendon-driven hands offer compact actuation and passive compliance, but tendon elongation under restoring-spring loading introduces configuration-dependent joint deviations. This paper presents H-PAC, a modular 6-actuator, 15-DoF robotic hand with a control-oriented modeling and implementation framework. A sparse analytical actuator-joint model is derived from the tendon-routing geometry, and a mechanics-based compensation model is developed to account for tendon-elasticity-induced joint errors. The proposed method is implemented in a hierarchical architecture: a host computer performs workspace-constrained posture mapping and compensation, while an ESP32 generates synchronized commands for six position-controlled servos. The same control parameters and execution strategy are used across all tasks without task-specific retuning. Monotonic servo-sweep experiments show that the compensation substantially improves joint-angle p