News & Research

arXiv:2501.12654v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Off-road navigation is critical for a wide range of field robotics applications from planetary exploration to disaster response. However, it remains a longstanding challenge due to unstructured environments and the inherently complex terrain-vehicle interactions. Traditional physics-based methods struggle to accurately capture the nonlinear dynamics underlying these interactions, while purely data-driven approaches often overfit to specific motion patterns, vehicle geometries, or platforms, limiting their generalization in diverse, real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce AnyNav, a vision-based friction estimation and navigation framework grounded in neuro-symbolic principles. Our approach integrates neural networks for visual perception with symbolic physical models for reasoning about terrain-vehicle dynamics. To enable self-supervised learning in real-world settings, we adopt the imperative learning paradigm

arXiv:2412.18347v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Predicting agents impacted by legal policies, physical limitations, and operational preferences is inherently difficult. In recent years, neuro-symbolic methods have emerged, integrating machine learning and symbolic reasoning models into end-to-end learnable systems. Hereby, a promising avenue for expressing high-level constraints over multi-modal input data in robotics has opened up. This work introduces an approach for Bayesian estimation of agents expected to comply with a human-interpretable neuro-symbolic model we call its Constitution. Hence, we present the Constitutional Filter (CoFi), leading to improved tracking of agents by leveraging expert knowledge, incorporating deep learning architectures, and accounting for environmental uncertainties. CoFi extends the general, recursive Bayesian estimation setting, ensuring compatibility with a vast landscape of established techniques such as Particle Filters. To underpin the advanta

arXiv:2610.26855v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models enable embodied agents to anticipate action consequences, yet jointly modeling locomotion and manipulation across diverse embodiments remains challenging due to heterogeneous action spaces and limited multimodal supervision. We present Ropedia W0, the first egocentric loco-manipulation world foundation model spanning humans and robots with diverse embodiments. We curate Xp-Data, comprising 10k hours of egocentric human data and 3k hours of robot data with unified multimodal annotations and systematic quality control. A unified kinematic representation encodes locomotion through camera poses and manipulation through projected skeletons, with robot skeletons combining embodiment-specific forward kinematics with extensive manual keypoint annotation and correction. We also introduce Xp-Teleop, a long-horizon loco-manipulation benchmark based on high-quality dexterous humanoid teleoperation data. Evaluations demonstrate state-of

arXiv:2610.26813v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) jointly predict future video and generate actions, yet remain sensitive to task-irrelevant visual perturbations, i.e., changes in visual appearance that should not affect robot behavior. We identify a gap in conventional WAM training: video prediction encourages representations to preserve appearance information, while action generation does not explicitly enforce invariance to task-irrelevant appearance. Data augmentation exposes WAMs to such perturbations but does not require perturbed and nominal observations to produce consistent action representations, and alignment with external pretrained features does not guarantee the desired invariance. To address this gap, we propose PICA-WAM, a self-supervised training framework that casts perturbation invariance as an auxiliary cross-appearance self-alignment task for WAMs. An exponential-moving-average (EMA) teacher processes the nominal observation to provide a

arXiv:2610.26629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-horizon tasks are important for modern AI and robotics, yet pose a challenge for reinforcement learning. Historically, a popular approach has been to decompose a task into subgoals, and learn a subgoal-conditioned policy to execute each subtask in sequence. We introduce an alternative called Value Disaggregation (VaDar), which trains a single subgoal-independent policy to maximize a linear combination of per-subgoal critic values. Because subgoal information is needed only at training-time, VaDar removes the need for possibly costly or cumbersome subgoal-selection during policy deployment. Moreover, through careful experiments, we show that VaDar (1) is always competitive with, and frequently outperforms, natural baselines like goal-conditioning and (2) succeeds on tasks with non-sequential goal structure and multiple optimization objectives. In particular, VaDar is the first algorithm to solve challenging, long-horizon tasks in th

arXiv:2610.26174v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tactile perception is crucial for precise robotic manipulation, providing an important foundation for dexterous, closed-loop force control. Among various tactile sensing techniques, magnetic tactile sensors stand out thanks to their fine-grained, three-dimensional force perception capability and strong robustness against visual occlusion. In this study, we discover a physical loophole called PhantomTac in magnetic tactile sensors. The attacker can alter the magnetic field, thus spoofing the force interpreted by magnetic tactile sensors. The attacker can stealthily deploy such an attack by simply attaching a thin (the thickness is around 0.5 mm), battery-free magnetic tag to the surface of an object. Hence, the attack tag can be easily concealed by a barcode sticker. Such an attack scheme is "deploy-and-forget" -- the attacker can deploy the tag and leave. When a robotic hand is picking up an object, it may severely damage the object. Sp

arXiv:2610.25927v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robot manipulation often depends on short-term cues - such as brief contacts, temporary occlusions, and intermediate object states - that are ambiguous in a single frame and can only be resolved by integrating observations over time. However, injecting historical information solely by enlarging the history window is computationally costly and frequently yields limited gains due to substantial redundancy and task-agnostic, inflexible sampling of observations. We propose CondenseVLA, a multi-frame VLA policy with a learnable decoder-side history condensation module for using short-term visual context in action decoding. Given a sequence of cached per-frame features from the VLM backbone, CondenseVLA distills observation history into a fixed set of slot tokens using learnable queries and multi-head cross-attention. Simple auxiliary regularization penalizes overlap among slot attention maps and decorrelates slot embeddings, encouraging comp

arXiv:2610.24549v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intelligent warehouse systems have transformed logistics by integrating robots with minimal infrastructure changes, boosting efficiency and optimizing workflows compared to traditional human-only operations. However, human-robot collaboration introduces new challenges, particularly due to human uncertainty, which leads to dynamic interactions and unpredictable behavior. To address these complexities, this paper presents the Multi-Agent Pickup-and-Delivery with Human Collaboration (MAPDwHC) problem, an extension of the Multi-Agent Pickup-and-Delivery (MAPD) problem that incorporates human unpredictability. This problem adds key constraints, such as dynamic obstacles caused by robots temporarily blocking paths when interacting with humans, and the need for real-time responsiveness. We formalize the MAPDwHC problem with additional constraints and properties. Based on this problem setting, we propose the CARVS algorithm, which improves task

arXiv:2610.24522v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human responses to sound depend not only on its semantic content, but also on the evolving spatial relationship between source and listener, conveyed through spatial audio and its temporal dynamics. Modeling human reactions to such dynamic spatial audio is important for character animation, human behavior analysis, and robotics. As of yet, existing audio-driven motion generation methods primarily focus on non-spatial or static acoustic conditions, leaving this important problem largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we formulate the novel task of dynamic spatial-audio-driven human motion generation and introduce two motion-captured datasets. We introduce the Dynamic Spatial Audio and Motion dataset (DySAM) as the first dataset and benchmark for this task, providing synchronized binaural audio, 3D human motions, and moving sound source trajectories. Given the importance of dynamic spatial cues of sound sources, we further provide the

arXiv:2610.24209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Slender structures made of stimuli-responsive materials represent an emerging class of programmable material systems, with applications in soft robotics, minimally invasive surgery, wearable electronics, and deployable structures. In biomedical applications, the on-demand design of slender structures, encompassing both their material layout and actuation, is essential to harnessing their large deformation and multiphysics actuation to meet patient-specific design requirements. However, owing to geometric and material nonlinearities, their structure-actuation-response relationship is highly nonintuitive and computationally demanding. This often makes trial-and-error and conventional design approaches challenging for addressing patient-specific needs. To this end, we present a Cosserat-rod-based design optimization framework for the autonomous design of programmable slender structures. Leveraging the Cosserat rod representation, the end-t

arXiv:2610.23940v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collision detection for complex non-convex objects is a bottleneck in physics simulation, virtual reality, and robotics. Inner sphere trees (ISTs) answer proximity and penetration queries efficiently, but their greedy leaf-sphere construction is sequential and computationally expensive, which limits both large-scale preprocessing and runtime use. In this work, we present ML-IST, a machine-learning-based method that reformulates leaf-sphere generation as a single-shot set-prediction problem: a network predicts a fixed set of inscribed sphere candidates from multichannel voxel geometry, differentiable coverage feedback corrects the coarse prediction and fills residual gaps at finer scales, and a lightweight geometric projection enforces validity. Averaged over the test set, a single-GPU implementation of ML-IST reduces mean leaf-generation time by a factor of $2.0$--$2.6$ over single-core CPU construction across target capacities of 64--5

arXiv:2610.23907v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world egocentric videos capture multi-step household procedures, but their recorded trajectories leave alternative actions and recovery from the learner's own mistakes largely unexplored. We introduce EgoVine, a post-training framework that turns a fixed demonstration set into interactive experience for long-horizon planning. EgoVine operates in executable symbolic environments compiled from real-world video annotations, where an agent must coordinate object manipulations under partial observation and account for delayed consequences. Restoring a decision state allows the learner to explore alternative actions and compare their eventual outcomes. Union jointly trains action generation and consequence prediction in one model, using the same executions to supervise candidate comparison and recovery. Verified repairs add recovery targets from failed attempts, while comparisons among sampled continuations guide policy updates. The upda

arXiv:2610.23882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Due to their low accuracy, industrial robots commonly require online teaching after the offline development of a robot program in simulation. The accuracy is limited by compliance and transmission errors in the robot joints. Transmission errors are defined as errors between the load-side angles of the gearboxes and the motor encoder angles. An approach to identify the transmission errors based on laser tracker measurements is presented. The developed velocity-dependent Fourier series model is integrated in a virtual commissioning software as a co-simulated functional mock-up unit. Additionally, it is used to compensate the transmission errors by correcting the setpoint from the computerized numerical control (CNC). The model identification and the compensation are experimentally evaluated with a St\"aubli TX2-40 industrial robot. The model has a mean absolute error of 0.114 mrad, and the compensation improves the accuracy by 83.26 % for

arXiv:2610.23881v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The position and path accuracy of industrial robots is strongly affected by temperature. In particular, temperature-dependent friction and altered hysteresis and transmission errors in the gearboxes are the main causes of these deviations. Since standard industrial robots lack temperature sensors, it is proposed to estimate the gearbox lubricant temperature using observer structures. It is planned to apply the proposed lubricant temperature observer to provide the input for temperature-dependent error compensation for gearboxes in industrial robots. First, a two-state heat transfer model describing the heat transfer from the lubricant through the gearbox housing to the environment is described and identified. It is integrated into a Luenberger observer and a Kalman filter with a correction of the lubricant temperature estimation based on measurements from a housing temperature sensor. Temperature measurements were performed in an experi

arXiv:2610.26854v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal reasoning provides robotic foundation models with predictive context needed for reliable action generation. However, language-based reasoning captures task semantics but struggles to express fine-grained physical dynamics, while latent reasoning models future state evolution but offers limited structure for organizing these dynamics into reusable reasoning primitives. To bridge this gap, we introduce PhysWord, a reasoning-before-acting foundation model built on Physical Words, which use atomic action verbs as shared semantic anchors for continuous representations of physical dynamics. Specifically, PhysWord predicts upcoming atomic action words and directly aligns their contextual hidden states with latent targets derived from the corresponding future observations. Building on these primitives, we construct a temporally structured PhysWord space with visual and optional tactile variants of each action word. Autoregressively pre