News & Research

arXiv:2608.15784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soft piezoresistive strain sensors are one of the most common sensing solutions for wearable and soft robotic applications due to their flexibility and compliance. However, their resistance response is nonlinear and hysteretic, and a sensor can be pushed past its calibrated workspace or misbehave inside it, carrying that error into a decision or control loop. Probabilistic regressors track confidence but ignore those limits. A predictive mean can look unremarkable even when the reading comes from a sensor outside its admissible range or already failing internally, so a confident-looking estimate is not the same as a trustworthy one. This paper proposes a reliability framework pairing a physics-informed probabilistic inverse model, built on physics-guided input features, with a risk factor fusing uncertainty with strain and strain-rate limits into a three-state monitor. Tests on a Nitinol wire and a silver-coated polyamide thread with a Ga

arXiv:2608.15766v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid robots are expected to traverse complex terrains, where the plantar support may vary dramatically due to foot placement errors, ground properties, and transient dynamics. To achieve robust locomotion, the robots are required to adapt to uneven terrain and uncertain foot--ground interactions. Existing locomotion policies rely primarily on proprioception or exteroceptive terrain perception, where the former provides only indirect evidence of plantar support, while the latter predicts contact conditions before touchdown but cannot observe the actual support in real-time. Although some studies incorporate plantar contacts as an auxiliary perception, they rely mainly on summary statistics, overlooking the spatial topology of plantar pressure, which provides a more direct characterization of the realized contact state. To bridge this gap, we present Tac4Loco, a tactile-perceptive framework that incorporates multi-array plantar pressure

arXiv:2608.15748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A dual-representation flow-matching policy decodes each predicted motion into joint and end-effector spaces, and the residual between the two kinematically equivalent decodings provides a physically interpretable runtime signal. On multimodal tasks, however, independently sampled branches may choose different valid modes, causing false alarms. We study how to coordinate the two branches and at what cost. Across two robot environments and a non-robotic testbed, the tested mechanisms fall into four classes. An auxiliary latent shared by both branches but absent from the flow-matching construction is erased at the population optimum, a provable dead end confirmed within a prespecified 2% equivalence band. Sharing source noise can coordinate or anti-coordinate: its effect changes sign with the representation map and tracks the alignment of decoder mode basins. Consistency regularization gives intermediate coordination but reduces the valid-pa

arXiv:2608.15741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The one-stage planner YOPO maps a single depth image and the robot state directly to a set of candidate trajectories, trained by backpropagating through differentiable trajectory costs. This yields dense, geometrically informative supervision, but inherits the pathologies of soft-constrained optimization: the safety cost competes with the smoothness and goal-reaching terms, is non-convex across homotopy classes, and the single-piece polynomial is limited in expressiveness. In this report, we summarize several effective modifications. We adopt a two-piece MINCO parameterization, trading time for smoothness without altering the trajectory's spatial profile. We further lift YOPO's multi-modal prediction to span distinct homotopy classes, treating each motion primitive as a homotopy anchor that confines the trajectory to a feasible basin - without explicit safe-flight-corridor construction or front-end search. For dynamic feasibility, we impo

arXiv:2608.15707v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Correcting robot manipulation policies through human intervention holds great promise for real-world deployment, yet human operators are inherently imperfect in both the actions they provide and the timing of their intervention signals. While the former has been extensively discussed in reinforcement learning (RL), the latter remains underexplored. At high control frequencies, human intervention signals are often delayed and inconsistent across time and state space. In this work, we present GAINS, a framework for leveraging inconsistent human intervention signals in RL. At the core of GAINS, we employ distributional RL with quantile Q-networks to model the return variability induced by sparse task rewards and inconsistent human interventions. Building on this distributional representation, we introduce a pessimistic exploration strategy that promotes safe and sample-efficient learning under human corrections. We evaluate GAINS on four div

arXiv:2608.15680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models improve robotic manipulation but remain vulnerable to compounding errors, scene changes, and off-trajectory states. Reinforcement learning can refine pretrained VLA policies, yet sparse success signals hinder exploration, while engineered dense rewards are costly and task-specific. Existing learned visual reward models often rely on static before-after observations, causing temporal ambiguity and weak discrimination between robustness-preserving variations and task-invalid failures under out-of-distribution (OOD) execution. We introduce Robo-Dopamine 2.0, a history- and OOD-aware process reward model with a pairwise prediction interface. It combines (1) history-conditioned pairwise rewards that use source-aligned reference panels for synthetic OOD queries and observed rollout history for online queries, while preserving the queried endpoints, and (2) an OOD-aware signed progress space that represents va

arXiv:2608.15636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in the field of embodied AI, but their high computational cost and limited predicted action length hinder real-time deployment. Although Dadu-Corki, a dedicated accelerator for efficient embodied AI, has been introduced, it does not exploit the inherent interaction patterns between the robot and its environment, which results in a relatively short predicted action length. We observe that robotic environments naturally alternate between active states-where precise actions are crucial-and inactive states-where actions have limited impact on task success. This insight enables a new scheduling opportunity: long-action-length speculative prediction in inactive states, paired with selective verification in active states. We propose SpecVLA, an algorithm-system co-design framework that adaptively balances action length, inference latency, and task reliability. On the a

arXiv:2608.15560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human demonstrations offer a scalable data source for dexterous manipulation, but transferring them to robot actions remains challenging due to the embodiment gap. Today's retargeting is mostly kinematic, yet manipulation is decided by force, which governs how the hand interacts with the object and how the object moves. In this paper, we present ReForce, a Force-aware Retargeting method that turns human motion and forces into robot actions that reproduce the intended contact. ReForce predicts a residual on the kinematically retargeted action to reach the desired force, using a general force tracker trained on large-scale simulation interactions. It supports both online force-aware teleoperation and offline data translation. In simulation and on real hardware, ReForce achieves lower force-tracking error and stronger multi-finger contact engagement on contact-rich tasks such as paper-cup grasping and tongs manipulation.

arXiv:2608.15549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Programming small social robots from natural-language instructions requires more than invoking isolated APIs. Interactive tasks combine reactive physical behaviors with stateful social behaviors, while existing interfaces often require developers to manually compose APIs into skills, configure their parameters, bind sensor events to skills, and manage task states at runtime. We present MistyPilot, a multi-agent LLM framework that interprets high-level natural-language instructions and orchestrates the corresponding skills on the Misty social robot. A Task Router dispatches each instruction to one of two specialized agents: a Physically Interactive Agent for sensor-triggered robot control and direct skill invocation, and a Social Interaction Agent for dialogue-oriented task-state management and context-dependent multimodal response generation. To improve efficiency, the Social Interaction Agent reuses previously generated results when appl

arXiv:2608.15541v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation poses a discrete question and a continuous one at once, namely which contacts are active and how to move while they hold. The two are coupled by a change of dimension, since each contact that a robot maintains confines its motion to a lower-dimensional manifold. We make that coupling the explicit object of planning by observing that a contact mode is not merely analogous to a stratum of the configuration space; it is one. A plan is then a walk over strata whose within-stratum segments are geodesics. On two contact-rich manipulation tasks in simulation, pushing a T-shaped block around obstacles and reorienting a cube in a dexterous hand, our planner returns solutions within seconds with no mode, contact sequence, or stratum given in advance.

arXiv:2608.15490v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile sensing is essential for robots in contact-rich tasks, yet many tactile sensors still provide sparse, low-dimensional signals that do not capture sufficient information for complex robotic perception and interaction. Vision-based tactile sensors (VBTSs) offer a powerful alternative by con-verting contact-induced deformation of a soft interface into im-ages. The image-based formulation gives VBTSs high-resolution, information-rich tactile observations that enable complex robotic tasks. This review surveys the full VBTS pipeline and treats sensing hardware, learning methods, simulation, and datasets as an integrated sensing-and-learning system. We 1) organize representative VBTSs into a hardware taxonomy structured by deformable elastomer design, sensor size and shape, and optical system design to guide future sensor development; 2) present a hierarchical view of learning-based tactile intelligence from low-level signal understandin

arXiv:2608.15461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reconfigurable robots offer significant potential for adapting to diverse tasks; however, conventional centralized architectures often require dedicated actuators for each module, leading to substantial increases in overall system weight, volume, and cost. To address these challenges, this paper presents the "Detachable Wire Drive," a reconfigurable robotic system that enables the sharing of heavy and expensive actuators across various morphologies. The core of this system is the "Wire Detach Unit," a mechanism designed to physically split and reconnect wire drive paths, allowing motors to be consolidated into a common base unit. We demonstrate the versatility of this approach by developing a 2-DOF rigid arm, a continuum arm, and two distinct grippers, all of which are interchangeably attached to, and driven by, a single shared actuator set. Experimental results validate the mechanical reliability of the detachment process and the control

arXiv:2608.15446v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents an evaluation of a goal-free probabilistic framework for human intent inference during robotic manipulation. We deploy the Global User Intent Dual-phase Estimation for Robots (GUIDER) on data collected from a robotic arm to test the manipulation phase across various assistance scenarios, including making tea and fetching medicine. To support operation, we add online probability updates, workspace limits, support-plane filtering, and a grasping mode that prioritizes feasible grasp regions, all of which are tested on the recorded data while preserving its original temporal conditions. Across 20 manipulation steps in three scenarios, GUIDER estimated human intent within the correct grasp-candidate set in all cases and achieved a time to confident prediction of 3.7 s, a remaining time before first grasp of 49.6 s, a prediction stability of 96.4%, and a runtime of 4.857/4.474 s (mean/median) per perceptual phase of intent.

arXiv:2608.15440v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motion planning problems such as collision-free navigation and contact-rich manipulation can be naturally formulated as optimization problems that couple discrete decisions with continuous trajectories. The Graphs of Convex Sets (GCS) framework offers a practical solution to these problems. It represents discrete decisions as nodes of a graph and encodes continuous trajectories in the edges connecting them. However, the resulting optimization subproblems can become computationally prohibitive for online replanning. In this work, we propose a learning-based strategy to mitigate this limitation. Specifically, we replace the costly convex relaxation step required by nominal GCS with a single forward pass through a Graph Attention Network that predicts a set of highly probable candidate paths through the graph. A lightweight ranking network then orders these candidates by their estimated trajectory cost. Evaluating them in this order, we

arXiv:2608.15289v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous UAVs enter enclosed environments such as caves and collapsed structures that confine the vehicle and degrade perception. Conformal prediction provides a distribution-free guarantee by calibrating how far an obstacle keep-out must expand to absorb perception error at a target coverage level. However, existing keep-out regions use convex primitives whose bulges consume narrow passages and grow as perception degrades. Our main contribution defines the nonconformity score on a signed distance field (SDF). This produces a non-convex keep-out that tightly follows obstacle geometry and avoids the unnecessary bulging of equal-margin convex regions. Two supporting components keep this geometry usable as perception degrades. First, a voxelwise union of complementary sensor observations certifies voxels that any single sensor misses. Second, the margin around the obstacle adapts to measured visibility without weather labels or the online