News & Research

arXiv:2607.11427v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning effective action representations is critical for robotic manipulation, where raw control trajectories are often noisy, redundant, and difficult to model directly. Existing methods mainly encode the structure of the action stream itself, treating the role of actions in the environment as implicit. Yet manipulation is about changing the world: the same action segment can induce different outcomes under different scene contexts, making action semantics inherently environment-dependent. We propose EDAR, an Environment-Dependent Action Representation that grounds action tokens in both executable control structure and expected visual consequences. By coupling motor commands with their environment-conditioned effects, EDAR encourages the learned action space to capture interaction semantics rather than merely command-level patterns. Experiments on simulated and real-robot manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that EDAR improves downstream

arXiv:2607.11397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalizable robot policies typically rely on action-labeled robot demonstrations, which are expensive to collect and difficult to scale. In contrast, large-scale human and robot videos contain rich physical interactions but often lack executable robot action labels. We present WALA, a framework for learning executable latent actions from both action-labeled demonstrations and action-free videos. WALA first pretrains a semantic-geometric latent action model from videos by modeling the evolution between current observations and sparsely sampled future observations. Instead of reconstructing raw pixels, WALA predicts future deltas in the DINOv3 feature space and dense depth space, preserving task-relevant semantic and geometric structure while reducing sensitivity to appearance details. During policy training, the pretrained encoder provides stable latent action targets, and the decoder serves as a trainable latent world model. The latent

arXiv:2607.11386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: UAV swarm for applications, such as indoor inspection, security patrol, and logistics delivery, are often mission-oriented rather than exploration-oriented. In these tasks, UAVs are required to visit task-relevant regions in a prescribed sequence, and such region-level mission information can often be obtained from pre-deployment sketch-map priors, such as floor plans, CAD layouts, or evacuation diagrams. Although these tasks are executed in three-dimensional space, UAVs usually fly within a specific altitude layer or a nearly fixed altitude range on each floor, making mission-level region transitions mainly governed by planar connectivity. Based on these observations, this paper proposes a mission-oriented coordinated navigation framework that exploits sketch-map priors for multi-UAV indoor operations. Onboard observations are used to perform topological alignment, and the aligned prior is fused with online observations to construct a mi

arXiv:2607.11377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term physical coexistence with intelligent robots requires more than capable robot policies. A persistent robotic assistant must support diverse user-facing interfaces, maintain long-horizon memory of people and preferences, coordinate across robot embodiments, and translate human intent into safe physical execution. We introduce PHILIA, a multi-robot agent built around a robot gateway abstraction. PHILIA retains the rich interaction and tool ecosystem of OpenClaw while exposing robot-local runtimes, onboard perception, navigation, speaker, and robot policies through a unified capability interface. This design decouples low-frequency, high-semantic agent reasoning from high-frequency, low-level robot execution, enabling plug-and-play integration of user interfaces, robot embodiments, and policy backends. As a result, the user experience becomes compositional: advances in user interfaces, robot embodiments, robot policies, navigation,

arXiv:2607.11340v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continuum robots provide intrinsic compliance, high dexterity, and safe physical interaction, enabling navigation and manipulation in confined and unstructured environments. Despite recent advances in sensing and control, heightening the need for precise motion generation, most widely used planning libraries are grounded in rigid-body assumptions, creating a critical gap for fast and practical tools for continuum robots. To address this, we present CR-Solver, a two-stage, optimization-based solver for the motion generation of tendon-driven continuum robots. Our method unifies inverse kinematics, path following, and trajectory planning within a single constrained nonlinear optimization framework. Leveraging GPU-accelerated parallel optimization, CR-Solver delivers fast, accurate, and constraint-aware solutions. We validate our approach on three tasks, demonstrating significant speedups over traditional CPU-based solvers while achieving

arXiv:2607.11270v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning, at its core, extends beyond memorization to the ability to reason and solve novel problems by navigating a space of possibilities. We introduce Lumo-2, a latent world-action model that generates actions by reasoning over world dynamics in latent space. The learned latent world dynamics capture physically grounded visual transitions, naturally encoding future possibilities and providing a unified substrate for cross-modal alignment. This formulation enables predictive reasoning akin to world modelling while remaining lightweight and focused on physical dynamics relevant to control. Central to our approach is the hypothesis that action generation quality is governed by the geometry of the latent space. We observe that standard reconstruction-based action tokenization objectives induce representations biased toward low-level signal fidelity, leading to misalignment between reconstruction quality and downstream control performance.

arXiv:2607.11204v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compute-constrained quadrupeds often run their navigation loop far below the controller's design rate: sharing the onboard Jetson Orin with the vision pipeline slows our stair loop to about 15 Hz. This latency breaks a standard proprioceptive pattern: declaring stair-summit arrival from the body-pitch signal while still climbing. On a stepped platform whose 50 cm top is shorter than the robot (Unitree Go2, about 75 cm), in-motion detection overshoots the top edge with probability rising with the per-period advance v/f (the slowest about 15 Hz cell partly diluted by a separate non-arrival mode), whereas a climb-settle cadence holds overshoot near zero at every loop rate (pooled 22/45 vs 1/45 over about 30/20/15 Hz; Fisher p about 2.4e-7; 7/15 vs 0/15 at the deployed about 15 Hz). A logistic dose-response model in v/f captures the failure; a pre-specified 40 Hz out-of-sample test favours the protocol-clean fit (33% observed vs 43%/22% predi

arXiv:2607.11184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: SLAM methods based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have demonstrated impressive tracking and mapping performance, but typically require additional geometric information from external depth sensors. Meanwhile, recent SLAM systems that leverage geometric priors from pre-trained feed-forward models enable real-time dense reconstruction, yet often discard original RGB information during optimization, thus degrading overall reconstruction quality. We present GeoGS-SLAM, an online monocular dense reconstruction system that combines the 3DGS-based map representation with learned geometric priors. Given uncalibrated RGB input, we first employ a feed-forward visual geometry model to predict camera and scene priors. The Gaussian scene map is then expanded by directly sampling Gaussian primitives from both RGB input and geometric priors. Camera poses and the scene map are jointly optimized through a coarse-to-fine strategy that minimizes both photom

arXiv:2607.11167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Representing manipulation actions as 2D trajectories in the camera plane provides a compact and interpretable basis for learning complex 3D manipulation policies. However, it also creates challenges from out-of-frame trajectories and limited precision. We propose Pix2Act, an imitation learning method that addresses these challenges by generating continuous image-space keypoint trajectories in each camera plane and losslessly recovering end-effector poses via triangulation. This reformulates high-dimensional 3D control as a simpler, more learnable 2D prediction problem. Crucially, it aligns observations and actions in the same coordinate space, enabling equivariant transformations to jointly rotate individual camera images together with their image-space actions. We analyze the symmetry properties of this augmentation and design a network architecture that can fuse multiple camera views while respecting their per-view rotations. As a resul

arXiv:2607.11119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot manipulation is a complex task that requires visual understanding, physical reasoning, planning, and closed-loop control. General-purpose foundation models (FMs) have grown remarkably capable of some of these, especially vision and reasoning. To leverage this for generalist robot policies, current methods typically involve converting existing FMs into vision-language-action (VLA) models by fine-tuning on robot data to output low-level actions. However, VLAs are often orders of magnitude smaller than frontier FMs given the limited data and compute available for fine-tuning, which in turn limits their general capability. Inspired by the growing ability of FMs to operate software through visual interfaces, we ask whether that same competence suffices to control a robot. We present VIA (Visual Interface Agent for robot control), a framework that recasts robot control as an agentic task: an off-the-shelf FM-powered agent drives a manipul

arXiv:2607.11099v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable visual data association is fundamental to visual SLAM (V-SLAM), as it directly determines the quality of the camera pose estimation and map consistency. However, the handcrafted descriptors used by most mature real-time systems degrade under illumination and viewpoint changes, while learning-based front-ends that address this weakness typically require replacing the extraction-and-matching pipeline and introduce substantial computational overhead. Descriptor enhancement offers a compromise by refining existing descriptors within their original format, yet current methods rely on simplified attention mechanisms whose limited contextual modeling constrains the achievable matching quality. To resolve this trade-off between contextual expressiveness and efficiency, we propose Desc++, a lightweight enhancement module that jointly encodes descriptor representations and keypoint geometry and aggregates spatial context through a hybrid a

arXiv:2607.11041v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Loco-manipulation has recently shown promising capabilities; however, achieving high-precision control, managing the high-dimensional action space induced by many degrees of freedom (DoFs), and fully exploiting the inherent redundancy of whole-body systems remain challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel whole-body control framework that effectively addresses these challenges by decomposing the complex loco-manipulation problem into partial reference motion generation and low-level imitation control. We introduce a new Kinematic Normalizing Flow (KNF) model, trained on a large-scale kinematic dataset, that generates diverse yet feasible partial reference motions. A high-level controller is then trained to navigate the KNF's latent space to exploit redundant solutions, while a low-level controller ensures physically feasible and accurate motion execution. We validate our approach on the quadrupedal robot equipped with a six-DoF roboti

arXiv:2607.11031v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dexterous grasp generation across robot hands is challenging because hands differ in kinematic topology, actuation dimensions, and native command spaces. We introduce GraspGraphNet, a topology-aware grasp generation framework that represents each hand as a URDF-derived kinematic graph and directly generates executable palm poses and joint configurations. GraspGraphNet combines hierarchical object surface encoding, differentiable forward kinematics, and dynamic world-edge message passing to model evolving robot-object interactions. It applies conditional flow matching directly in executable palm-pose and joint-state space, avoiding post-processing optimization, inverse kinematics, and retargeting. Using a shared model trained on Barrett Hand, Allegro Hand, and Shadow Hand, GraspGraphNet achieves an average success rate of 83.48% with 40ms inference time per grasp on a 40-object benchmark. Without retraining, the same model achieves 72.70%

arXiv:2607.11027v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Imitation learning enables robots to acquire manipulation skills from demonstrations by mapping observations to actions. Existing approaches predict either short-horizon continuous action sequences or discrete keyposes. However, continuous prediction methods suffer from compounding errors due to short prediction horizons and struggle with multi-modal action distributions, whereas keypose-based methods necessitate an external planner, constraining real-time applicability. To address these challenges, we introduce SegDiff, a closed-loop visuomotor policy that integrates the strengths of both paradigms. SegDiff decomposes demonstrations into motion segments between keyposes and learns to predict the continuous trajectory from the current state to the next keypose, enabling long-horizon prediction with real-time refinement. Furthermore, we leverage the capability of diffusion models and DDIM inversion to propose a Dynamic Temporal Ensembling

arXiv:2607.11018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For close-contact human-robot interaction (HRI), trunk-like continuum manipulators provide a physical channel for diverse whole-body expression, but grounding open-vocabulary responses into such robots is difficult: end-effector motion underspecifies body shape, whereas direct whole-body commands are high-dimensional and hard to keep feasible. We propose a whole-body semantic-to-actuation grounding framework for elephant-inspired soft-trunk HRI based on lightweight flow matching. The framework converts responses from a multimodal large language model into bounded, morphology-aligned intent-intensity tuples, parameterizes tendon-actuation trajectories with compact Catmull-Rom spline controls, and uses a rectified-flow generator to sample feasible whole-body trunk motions. Experiments show that the proposed framework improves held-out grounding correctness from 25.0% to 77.2% over a raw-response dense-regression baseline. Compared with a de