News & Research

arXiv:2507.14061v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: What if a robot could rethink its own morphological representation to better meet the demands of diverse tasks? Most robotic systems today treat their physical form as a fixed constraint rather than an adaptive resource, forcing the same rigid geometric representation to serve applications with vastly different computational and precision requirements. We introduce MorphIt, a novel spherical approximation framework that treats morphological representation as a tunable resource. MorphIt enables automatic task-driven morphological adaptation through gradient-based optimization with tunable parameters that provide explicit control over the accuracy-efficiency tradeoff. Unlike existing approaches that rely on either labor-intensive manual specification or inflexible computational methods optimized for visualization rather than robotics, MorphIt generates spherical approximations up to 100x faster than optimization-based methods while main

arXiv:2505.04491v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State estimation is one of the fundamental problems in robotics. For soft continuum robots, this task is particularly challenging because their states (poses, strains, internal wrenches, and velocities) are inherently \textit{infinite-dimensional} due to continuous deformability, while sensing provides only discrete measurements. Recently, a dynamic state estimation method known as a \textit{boundary observer} was introduced, which uses Cosserat rod theory to recover all states from tip velocity measurements. In this work, we present a dual design that instead relies on measuring the internal wrench at the robot's base. Despite the duality, this approach offers a key practical advantage: it requires only a force/torque (FT) sensor at the base and eliminates the need for external motion capture systems. Both observer types are inspired by energy dissipation principles and can be combined to enhance performance. We conduct a Lyapunov-ba

arXiv:2503.01236v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper addresses fixed-graph terrain-aware path refinement, in which a global planner is restricted to a predefined route space and may remain optimal within that space while missing lower-cost terrain corridors available in the native-resolution map. We propose LLM-Advisor, an external verification-guided multimodal refinement framework that uses semantic terrain context to propose route alternatives with lower cost than the baseline route. The framework combines a multimodal prompt, map-disjoint Reference Example Augmentation (REA), and deterministic validation with fallback: a proposed route is deployed only when it is feasible and strictly lower in cost than the baseline. To evaluate the method, we introduce MultiTerraPath, a controlled 2,000-map benchmark with Easy and Hard subsets for fixed-graph terrain-cost refinement, and further conduct a semantic-cost transfer evaluation on RUGD. Using coarse-lattice A* with stride r=50

arXiv:2608.13719v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous systems can fail in rare and heterogeneous ways, making real-world failure discovery difficult under limited testing budgets. Although cheaper proxies such as simulators, lower-fidelity systems, or related policies can be sampled extensively to find failures, proxy failures often do not transfer to the real world due to sim-to-real and system-to-system gaps. The key challenge is therefore to effectively leverage proxy system information for accurate prediction of severe target system failures. We propose an adaptive failure discovery method that combines proxy evaluations with limited target system results to guide scenario selection for target system testing. Our method learns a local predictor of target risk by correcting proxy failure signals using control-variate-inspired residual modeling. To find failures that are both likely and diverse, we combine this predictor with a support-aware mutual-information objective that f

arXiv:2608.13605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Natural language provides robots with a flexible task interface, but target ambiguity in embodied environments arises not only from user intent; it can also result from missing taskrelevant physical evidence in the current observation. Existing interactive disambiguation methods primarily obtain additional information by asking the user, whereas occlusion, restricted viewpoints, unreadable text, and unobserved targets require the robot to actively change its observation. We propose an active-perception framework for embodied target disambiguation that uses active observation as the backbone for information acquisition and uses a vision-language model to decide, on the basis of accumulated visual evidence and interaction information, whether to continue observing, request clarification, or complete target selection. Active observation can both directly recover missing discriminative evidence and reveal object names, labels, and semantic

arXiv:2608.14481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As heterogeneous robotic systems deploy across diverse urban zones, maintaining safety amid complex human-robot interactions remains a critical challenge. We present a unified framework that bridges systematic hazard analysis and runtime enforcement using hazard-informed safety envelopes. Rather than treating safety as a static constraint isolated within individual software modules, we introduce a cross-layer safety transformation process spanning symbolic, spatial, and dynamic world models. We show how this representation naturally interfaces with physical AI runtime harnesses to guarantee safe urban mobility.

arXiv:2608.14466v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An autonomous robot efficiently exploring an unknown environment, such as looking for water sources on Mars, faces two simultaneous demands: building an accurate information map while quickly finding the regions of greatest value, and paying for every meter of travel and the cost of every measurement it takes. Classical information-seeking and reward-seeking criteria address only one of these objectives at a time. Here, we propose Expected Free Energy (EFE), the principled action-selection objective from active inference, as a unifying criterion for budgeted robotic informative path planning. Maintaining a Gaussian-process belief over the information field, our agent plans continuous trajectories that minimize expected free energy under hard path-length constraints. The results from multiple realizations show that EFE-based planning yields accurate posterior maps and locates the highest-value regions simultaneously, outperforming informat

arXiv:2608.14462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents THRIVE (Therapeutic Humanoid Robot In Virtual Environment), an at-home rehabilitation platform that integrates a suite of virtual-reality upper-body rehabilitation games, a real-time camera-based motion-tracking system, and a socially interactive robot therapist. The system is designed for therapy and intervention in children with upper-limb motor impairments, which can be improved through consistent, task-specific practice. THRIVE features a set of newly designed, engaging games that target functional reaching, grasping, and object-manipulation movements through customizable popping, hitting, catching, and grabbing tasks, while the camera-based tracking system captures the child's kinematic performance during play. A robot therapist - deployable either as a physical robotic coach or as a remote-presence virtual agent - delivers adaptive, dynamic feedback to motivate the child and guide their movements toward therapeut

arXiv:2608.14406v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Textile-integrated capacitive sensors offer flexible and conformable tactile sensing for wearable electronics and human-robot interaction; however, the influence of yarn-level architecture on capacitive transduction characteristics remains insufficiently quantified. This work presents a textile capacitive sensing platform based on silver-coated yarns coated with polydimethylsiloxane and assembled into one-, two-, and four-layer twisted configurations. The influence of effective electrode overlap area and inter-fiber separation on the capacitive response is systematically investigated, enabling architecture-dependent tuning of pressure and proximity sensing characteristics. Pressure was calculated using the localized single-fiber contact area, corresponding to stresses of 0.4-3.9 MPa. Increasing the layer number improved mechanical strength and sensing performance: elongation at break increased from 37.5% to 62.5% and 85.0%, while the maxi

arXiv:2608.14379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently achieved promising performance in robotic manipulation. However, existing benchmarks mainly evaluate generalization on static manipulation tasks and largely overlook dynamic interaction scenarios. To address this gap, we present ReflexBench, a benchmark for reaction-critical manipulation. ReflexBench contains six dynamic tasks and introduces an evaluation framework that decouples simulator stepping from robot control while supporting configurable latency under synchronous and asynchronous inference. Building upon ReflexBench, we propose ReflexVLA, an efficient VLA model designed for reaction-critical manipulation without large-scale robot-data pretraining. ReflexVLA enhances temporal reasoning through latent future prediction and multi-frame temporal fusion within the vision backbone, while reducing deployment latency through batched visual encoding and CUDA Graph replay. Experiments show

arXiv:2608.14284v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-grained robotic evaluation matters for understanding embodied models, going beyond binary success rates and rule-based process scores. We present PRM-as-a-Judge 1.5, a toolkit for robot process assessment that turns rollout videos into dense progress curves and derives multiple fine metrics. PRM-as-a-Judge 1.5 introduces three metrics, building on version 1.0, that characterize failure-side progress, post-drawdown recovery, and success-side execution quality, helping users understand embodied model capability. Based on the rollout videos from benchmarks, we perform a comprehensive assessment of the embodied models, providing some fine-grained metric results and key findings. We further introduce RoboPulse++ to evaluate the reliability of process reward models (PRM), providing evaluators with a more accurate testing platform. Moreover, we release a user-friendly assessment suite, including the benchmark, metric implementation, and vis

arXiv:2608.14244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In large and heavy structures, vibrations arise during motion, posing significant challenges for precise manipulation. To accomplish the desired motion, control algorithms must effectively suppress these structural vibrations. In cutting edge projects, such as remote maintenance of future fusion energy reactors (tokamaks), the manipulation of this type of structure is defined as a crucial task. This paper presents a control strategy to suppress transverse vibrations in flexible payloads during motion using a collaborative payload manipulation approach. Two different industrial robot arms are arranged in a leader follower configuration for the manipulation strategy. The leader robot guides the motion with shaped velocity commands, while the follower robot ensures compliance with the estimated external forces applied by the leader on the payload through an admittance controller. Unlike existing methods, the proposed approach enables collabo

arXiv:2608.14160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pixel-goal navigation specifies targets directly in the agent's camera view, but a target pixel provides neither metric depth nor traversability, making 3D goal grounding and collision-free continuous planning challenging. We present OccPlanner, a goal-aware occupancy-conditioned diffusion planner that grounds pixel goals in egocentric metric space and sequentially conditions the goal representation on temporal visual context and learned local 3D occupancy features. To provide occupancy supervision at scale, we introduce L3ROcc, which converts monocular RGB navigation videos into robot-centric local 3D occupancy annotations through geometric reconstruction and ray-based visibility reasoning. We train OccPlanner on InternData-N1 and evaluate it in closed-loop simulation across four unseen scene categories from InternScenes and two goal-distance ranges. In the 5-8 m setting, OccPlanner increases the average success rate (SR) over NavDP from

arXiv:2608.14135v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous pursuit-evasion is a fundamental challenge for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), requiring rapid decision-making under tightly coupled dynamics and continuously changing opponent behaviors. Traditional rule-based or differential-game approaches often struggle with high-dimensional aerial interactions and agile maneuvering. We present AgilePE, a complete system for autonomous UAV pursuit-evasion via self-play reinforcement learning. AgilePE integrates agile low-level control, competitive policy optimization, and sim-to-real deployment in a unified framework. The policy directly maps onboard state observations to Collective Thrust and Body Rates (CTBR) commands, enabling end-to-end agile maneuvering without intermediate trajectory planners or waypoint controllers. For training, we use competitive self-play with Prioritized Fictitious Self-Play (PFSP) and a diversified opponent pool, enabling agents to improve against historical po

arXiv:2608.14082v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous navigation in cluttered environments is hampered by partial observability and dynamic constraints. This paper presents PILOT, a constraint-aware privileged imitation learning framework for vision-based end-to-end UAV motion planning under partial observability. The framework distills planning strategies from a computationally intensive optimal control expert into a student policy regularized toward safety and dynamic requirements via a dual-objective loss function. To mitigate partial observability, a spatiotemporal perception fusion module using a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) is developed to integrate historical depth images and odometry. This module infers task-relevant latent context from historical observations, enhancing spatial awareness beyond the instantaneous FOV without maintaining persistent map memory. A trajectory parameterization layer mapping network outputs to a structured trajectory, while enabling expl