News & Research

arXiv:2608.28175v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bin-picking is a cornerstone of modern manufacturing, yet achieving complete bin clearance without manual intervention remains a critical challenge. While model-based methods provide high precision, they frequently suffer from deadlocks when predefined grasps are occluded or perception fails. Labor-intensive fine-tuning of grasp points is commonly required to reach a satisfactory performance for new parts. Model-free algorithms offer a more flexible alternative with "out-of-the-box" versatility but lack the reliability and repeatability required for production. Unlike existing work, which treats the two techniques in isolation, we propose a fourtiered hierarchical hybrid approach to combine the best of both worlds. A model-based pipeline serves as a robust backbone, while a model-free "exploration agent" resolves deadlock situations and discovers new grasp points. This is supported by an online self-learning mechanism that uses gripper-st

arXiv:2608.28154v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People naturally chat while collaborating and share personal information (i.e., self-disclose) to build rapport and maintain social connections. As robots are increasingly developed to work with people, the effective use of these social behaviors to enhance engagement and support teamwork becomes ever more important. While prior work has shown that robot-initiated small talk can benefit human-robot collaboration, less is known about how best to design such small talk. In this work, we explore how self-disclosure may be designed to support small talk within a human-robot team---especially when the robot is an industrial manipulator that lacks anthropomorphic cues and performs physical work. We first developed an LLM-driven manipulator capable of partaking in small talk, adopting either a low-disclosure or high-disclosure strategy. We then conducted a user study (N = 50) to investigate how self-disclosure in small talk influences human-robo

arXiv:2608.28140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-prehensile manipulation offers versatile skills for moving and rearranging heavy or bulky objects, particularly when combined with a mobile manipulation platform. However, both model-based and model-free approaches struggle with the complex hybrid dynamics and the sparsity of the contact in these tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a contact-guided exploration strategy implemented within a Multi-Critic Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework. A dedicated exploration critic is trained with a dense contact-seeking reward that guides the end-effector toward meaningful contact points; its influence is progressively decayed to recover a task-optimal policy. We obtain candidate interaction points from a general-purpose grasping algorithm, enabling the exploration mechanism to generalise across various object geometries. We evaluate the approach on multiple tasks, including box pushing, chair transportation, and a dishwasher opening

arXiv:2608.28108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) allow users to specify manipulation tasks in natural language, but distinguishing a target or placement goal among objects of the same category or similar appearance requires detailed expressions that VLAs may not use reliably. We propose DeicticVLA, which canonicalizes Language Instruction (LI), Vision-Language Instruction (VLI), and Visual Instruction (VI) into a text prompt and deictic masks through text-prompt completion and deictic gesture grounding, enabling a single pretrained VLA to handle all three instruction modes. With a shared backbone, demonstrations, and matched training steps, we compare two RGB visual prompting methods, two separate-channel mask prompting methods, and three training strategies in simulation. Under two-stage training, the four prompting methods achieve high in-distribution success but differ in their ability to use deictic masks in unseen layouts. Across methods, traini

arXiv:2608.28090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid robots with quasi-direct-drive actuators continuously generate joint torque while standing, whereas seated humans delegate weight support to chairs during desk work. As a first step toward seated loco-manipulation, we study omnidirectional seated locomotion on a passive mobile chair, requiring unfixed pelvis-seat contact and intermittent foot-floor propulsion of the robot-chair system. We extend a standard standing velocity-tracking environment with a passive-chair model, seated-state rewards, critic-only chair observations, and task-tailored contact settings. The policy is learned without motion-imitation rewards; its actor uses only proprioception and velocity commands, without contact sensing or chair states. In random-command evaluation, the policies tracked omnidirectional commands through nearly all 20-s rollouts, and the best seated policies could outperform the Standing policy in velocity tracking. Across four training se

arXiv:2608.28075v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Manipulation in partially observable environments requires planning under incomplete scene information. In such settings, an initially valid plan may execute successfully yet remain insufficient for task completion. Existing foundation-model-guided task and motion planning (TAMP) systems can generate useful long-horizon task decompositions, subgoals, or constraints, but they often assume having access to a fully specified scene state or invoke model-level replanning after a subgoal, refinement, or execution attempt fails. We present ROBUST TAMP, a modular LLM/VLM-guided planning framework for reactive TAMP where unseen task-relevant and non-target objects may become visible during execution. The framework restricts the foundation-model planner to the currently visible relational scene state, validates generated task-level actions against a strict executable interface, and routes the accepted actions to scene-specific execution adapters. O

arXiv:2608.27726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent motion planning for high-degree-of-freedom robotics manipulators in shared workspaces remains a fundamental yet challenging problem. Centralized planners often suffer from poor scalability, while decentralized approaches face robustness and safety concerns. Game-theoretic formulations offer a promising approach for modeling agent interactions, potentially overcoming these limitations. However, their application to articulated multi-arm systems remains limited. This paper presents an iterative Linear Quadratic (LQ) game framework for multi-manipulator motion planning, where each manipulator is modeled as an independent agent optimizing its own objective while interacting with other agents based on shared global states and collision constraints. The method solves a series of local LQ games by linearizing the dynamics and approximating the cost around a nominal trajectory, with Riccati backward recursions yielding feedback Nash s

arXiv:2608.27685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simultaneously optimizing the trajectories of multiple agents is a challenging problem plagued by nonlinearity, nonconvexity, and the curse of dimensionality. A collection of interacting aerial vehicles or self-driving cars in an intersection are examples of complex multi-agent systems that remain difficult to solve without many simplifying assumptions. The presence of communication latency between agents further increases the difficulty. In this paper, we analyze Distributed Model-Based Diffusion: a sampling-based Model-Predictive Control method suitable for highly nonlinear, nonconvex, nonsmooth, multi-agent systems. We prove contraction and robustness to latency for multi-agent, nonconvex problems, showing applicability to real-world constraints. We test the algorithm on a circleswap task, a cooperative medium-fidelity driving task, and in an aerial combat scenario. Despite the addition of latency, our algorithm improves circleswap mak

arXiv:2608.27628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Subarctic regions have the potential to see increased deployment of autonomous robots in applications including forestry, mining, and environmental monitoring. In these conditions, an autonomous system's reliance on GNSS or cloud computing is precarious due to dense tree canopies and atmospheric attenuation, necessitating onboard sensing and data processing. However, established exteroceptive modalities, including cameras, lidars, and radars, are typically evaluated in structured urban settings or in environments that lack significant seasonal variations. To address this, we present a field report on a year-long deployment of a mobile robot in a subarctic boreal forest. We evaluate 64 km of data using nine odometry, localization, and mapping methods and assess their performance across seasonal changes. The performed experiments suggest that the environment changes significantly hinder the performance of state-of-the-art techniques, which

arXiv:2608.27609v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action models (VLAs) have shown strong promise for general-purpose robotic manipulation by mapping language instructions and vision observations directly to actions. However, most VLAs primarily condition action prediction on current observations and lack an explicit mechanism for reasoning over future task dynamics, which is particularly important for fine-grained, contact-rich manipulation. We present PHR-VLA, a framework that enables planning-horizon reasoning in VLAs through privileged latent representations of future dynamics. PHR-VLA introduces a lightweight auxiliary future head that, during training, aligns the VLA's internal representations with latent dynamics extracted from future observations. Evaluation results demonstrate that local, contact-centric, patch-level latent dynamics supervision from the wrist camera improves success rate on LIBERO from 84.1% to 88.4% and on real-world disassembly tasks from 63.3%

arXiv:2608.27550v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling robot data is crucial for building generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, yet robot trajectories are harder to scale than web-scale image-text data because embodied collection is costly and sparsely covers the physical world. This makes representation quality a central bottleneck: under a fixed robot-data budget, continued pre-training must turn limited trajectories into transferable visual-action knowledge rather than merely fit actions. We propose VLAct, a VLA-oriented VLM backbone trained on broad, heterogeneous, multi-embodiment robot data before task-specific fine-tuning. VLAct preserves the broad VLM prior and encourages shared action semantics across embodiments through VLM-prior preservation, multi-head continuous action co-supervision, and a partially unified cross-embodiment action layout, while allowing task-specific action heads during fine-tuning. Across simulation, real-world, and unseen-embodiment transfer,

arXiv:2608.27545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study evaluates the effectiveness of remote human-robot interaction using virtual reality for leaf inspection and soil moisture assessment in a greenhouse environment. The robotic system comprised an unmanned ground vehicle and a robotic manipulator equipped with cameras, governed by kinematic models for navigation and manipulator control. Fourteen distinct plants were inspected across two experiments utilizing VR teleoperation, guided by a set of pre-specified research questions and hypotheses. In the leaf inspection experiments, cycle completion times varied from 3.3 to 8.0 s, and plant-based disease detection was achieved up to 88% accuracy; diseased-spot detection improved numerically in the second experiment, though this change was not statistically significant (p=0.378). For soil moisture assessment, the experiments achieved successful determination of watering needs in up to 64.3% of plants (9 of 14), with consistent success o

arXiv:2608.27497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent embodied models increasingly leverage geometric representations to improve spatial reasoning and robotic manipulation. However, existing reconstruction methods only reconstruct relative geometry with arbitrary scales, causing predicted object dimensions and spatial distances to vary across scenes, viewpoints, and input configurations. This inconsistency prevents geometric perception from being directly aligned with robotic actions defined on the real-world scale. To address this limitation, we propose Metric-Aware Geometry Perception (MAGP), an end-to-end, plug-and-play framework for metric geometry reconstruction that can be seamlessly integrated into robotic policies. At its core, Metric Scale Equivariant Augmentation encourages the model to reconstruct metric geometry from camera parameters and depth observations, ensuring that the reconstructed geometry follows the metric scale specified by observations. Flexible Metric Conditi