News & Research

arXiv:2608.25798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation requires adapting to contact states that can evolve substantially within an action horizon. However, chunk-based vision-language-action models predict complete action chunks from observations collected before execution, leaving tactile conditioning stale during execution. Existing tactile-reactive approaches typically rely on separate high-frequency controllers, which increase both architectural and training complexity. In this paper, we introduce TacForcing, a streaming action-generation framework that effectively incorporates execution-time tactile feedback. Instead of employing a separate reactive controller, TacForcing replaces the standard action expert with a streaming action expert to generate actions conditioned on the evolving tactile observations acquired during execution. TacForcing also introduces Execution-Aware Tactile Attention (EATA), which restricts tactile conditioning to actions nearing executi

arXiv:2608.25757v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large-scale vision--language--action (VLA) policies have advanced generalist robot control, yet most remain stimulus-to-action black boxes: actions are exposed, but their explanatory state is not. They provide no native account of three explanatory signals: task progress, the next semantic transition, or local command reliability. Prior work shows that progress and event structure aid long-horizon control and that uncertainty supports monitoring; however, such capabilities are typically added or extracted only after action pretraining. The field therefore lacks a VLA foundation model whose explanatory state is jointly pretrained with control. Drawing on biological sensorimotor organization, in which outcome-sensitive, event-segmented, and probabilistic predictions structure behavior, we introduce LM-X. LM-X learns three directly supervised online signals: return-to-go (RTG) estimates visible progress and state quality; event-to-go (ET

arXiv:2608.25666v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bimanual manipulation in cluttered, contact-rich environments remains challenging because it requires coordinated motion generation, interaction-aware planning, and reliable execution under tight kinematic constraints. We present PRISM, a projection-integrated sampling-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework that uses a GPU-accelerated physics simulator as an online world model for complex dual-arm manipulation. The main algorithmic contribution is a QP-guided control sampling strategy that decouples trajectory exploration from kinematic feasibility. At each MPC step, sampled joint-velocity trajectories are projected onto the set of motions satisfying joint position, velocity, acceleration, and jerk bounds, together with an initial-velocity boundary condition, before rollout evaluation. This enables broad yet feasible exploration of coordinated bimanual behaviors. To support efficient online execution, we derive a custom ADMM/Bregm

arXiv:2608.25659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies have advanced language-conditioned robotic manipulation, yet action-imitation objectives provide only weak supervision for metric 3D structure and short-horizon physical evolution. Geometry-enhanced policies mainly improve current-scene grounding, whereas predictive policies often model future dynamics in RGB or latent spaces and may incur substantial deployment cost. GaussianDream demonstrates that training-time current Gaussian reconstruction and future Gaussian prediction provide effective 3D supervision, but its dense VGGT/TGE-based prefix jointly carries state, dynamics, and action-conditioning information. We present \textbf{\methodname}, a compact, policy-native extension that inserts \textbf{World State Tokens} and \textbf{World Prediction Tokens} directly into the VLA backbone. A training-only \textbf{World Representation Head} decodes these tokens into a Current World and coupled Future Pred

arXiv:2608.25642v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Image-goal navigation using lightweight topological maps is a practical paradigm for indoor robot deployment: the map requires only geotagged images, and localization relies on visual matching rather than precise pose estimation. However, learned waypoint predictors can produce targets that violate geometric constraints or deviate from the global path. Executing these waypoints safely further requires a local planner capable of collision avoidance, yet existing systems either lack one or rely on fixed parameters that cannot adapt to confined spaces. To address these limitations while retaining the navigational intuition of the learned predictor, we present EgoNav, a hierarchical system that implements this idea by generating candidates from semantically segmented traversable regions and scoring them alongside the learned waypoint for geometric safety, directional coherence, and fidelity to the learned prior. An adaptive local path planner

arXiv:2608.25641v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional task-and-motion planning (TAMP) approaches primarily focus on defining sequences of actions along with the necessary geometric and kinematic constraints to execute long-horizon tasks. However, their applicability in real-world settings is limited, as they typically assume simplified object models that overlook key physical properties critical for the successful execution of contact-rich tasks. Moreover, they often use sub-symbolic reasoning during motion planning, which drastically increases planning time and decreases overall success rates. We propose a method that leverages a TAMP approach, defining object-centric abstractions of execution constraints, called Unified TAMP (U-TAMP), to execute robotic tasks involving interactions among objects with heterogeneous shapes, sizes, and materials. Using a Vision-Language Model (VLM), we generate abstractions of inter-object affordances for characterizing physical interaction constr

arXiv:2608.25610v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot policies are predominantly learned with classical parametric variants of imitation learning or RL, where training stores the agent's behavior exclusively in the policy's network parameters, putting a heavy burden on the representation learning algorithm. We propose a new navigation agent equipped with non-parametric memory which explicitly indexes prior steps leading to critical events. The advantages are twofold: first, it allows the policy to outsource some of its behavior into an explicit memory; second, it encourages a form of continual learning by allowing an agent to collect data from its testing episodes during deployment and therefore to better generalize to OOD situations. In the context of social navigation, we show that this improves the agent's capability to retain sparse, high-cost failures, such as human collisions. If the policy is trained in simulation, this also naturally addresses the sim-to-real gap, partially, by

arXiv:2608.25585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a versatile foundation for general robotic manipulation, yet they exhibit significant brittleness when confronted with novel task distributions. While In-Context Imitation Learning (ICIL) offers a training-free alternative, existing frameworks suffer from an adaptation bottleneck that hinders the effective translation of expert context to executable actions. This failure originates from superficial retrieval mechanisms and an inherent behavioral inertia that anchors the policy to its pre-trained priors. To address these limitations, we present RA-VLA, a retrieval-augmented VLA framework that integrates behavior-aligned context retrieval with a grounded execution pipeline. By enforcing faithful adherence to functional cues within a scalable architecture, RA-VLA facilitates seamless task adaptation while preserving inference efficiency. Our empirical evaluations across the LIBERO benchmark and a r

arXiv:2608.25572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Action-conditioned world models have become an important foundation for embodied prediction, planning, and synthetic data generation, but their errors under new task and scene distributions are often concentrated in localized spatiotemporal regions such as robot arms, manipulated objects, contact areas, and occluded objects. This paper presents ConfAL-WM, a confidence-guided active learning framework for post-training embodied world models. Built upon EVAC, we attach a lightweight confidence probe to UNet decoder features and predict dense confidence maps in the latent space. These maps are aggregated into task-, frame-, and patch-level scores, enabling both efficient data selection and localized training enhancement. Our pipeline first retrains the confidence probe and warms up EVAC with a small subset of target-domain data, then performs task-level prescreening to allocate sampling budgets, and finally applies selected-data retraining w

arXiv:2608.25547v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To apply the techniques of embodied artificial intelligence to human-oid robots for complex manipulations, dexterous robotic hands are indispensable, which are restricted by the dexterity and tactile perception capability. In this work, we proposed a novel design of tendon-driven five-fingered hand with dis-tributed tactile perception. With a soft-rigid-hybrid structure employed, both compliance and operational force are endowed to the hand. Dual-modality tactile sensing elements are distributed on the distal and middle phalanges of all five fingers, enabling the simultaneous detection of static contact and dynamic force variations. Manipulation experiments, including counting gestures, finger-to-thumb pinching, object grasping, and bottle-grasp tactile recording, demonstrate the feasibility of the integrated actuation-perception system.

arXiv:2608.25509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic welding is widely used in industrial manufacturing, where the welding torch is often connected to the generator through an external umbilical. With the increasing deployment of lightweight and collaborative robots, the dynamic influence of this umbilical can significantly affect the robot motion and the actuation forces. This paper proposes a constrained multibody dynamic model of a welding umbilical, represented as a serial chain of rigid bodies interconnected by passive joints with elastic and dissipative effects. Prescribed motions at the distal anchor point are introduced through holonomic kinematic constraints. The equations of motion are reduced by projecting the dynamics onto the subspace of admissible velocities, yielding an efficient formulation free of Lagrange multipliers. The reaction wrench exerted by the umbilical on the robot is explicitly recovered. A planar case study illustrates the approach.

arXiv:2608.25459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Industrial aerial robotics demands safety guarantees for navigation in unstructured environments while optimizing performance and computational efficiency. This paper presents a method for generating safe pose trajectories for fully actuated multirotors within a Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework, leveraging both viability theory and data-driven methods. Obstacle avoidance is enforced through dynamically computed axis-aligned bounding boxes, providing formal safety guarantees without exhaustive offline reachability analysis. Numerical simulations on a fully actuated tilted hexarotor validate the approach, demonstrating successful navigation in cluttered environments with real-time computational performance.

arXiv:2608.25427v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Resilient and robust odometry is crucial for autonomous systems operating in complex and dynamic environments. Existing odometry systems often struggle with severe sensory degradations and extreme conditions such as smoke, sandstorms, snow, or low-light conditions, threatening both the safety and functionality of robots. To address these challenges, we present Super Odometry, a sensor fusion framework that dynamically adapts to varying levels of environmental degradation. Super Odometry employs a hierarchical structure to integrate four core modules from lower-level to higher-level adaptability including adaptive feature selection, adaptive state direction selection, adaptive engine selection, and a novel learning- based inertial odometry. The inertial odometry, trained on over 100 hours of heterogeneous robotic platforms, captures comprehensive motion dynamics. Super Odometry elevates the inertial measurement unit (IMU) to equal importan

arXiv:2608.25405v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world humanoid tasks involve physical interaction with objects and humans, yet current controllers either reject external forces as disturbances or restrict compliance to limited body links while ignoring angular effects. We present LAC, a general whole-body controller that simultaneously realizes commanded Linear and Angular Compliance for wrenches applied to the upper body. First, we synthesize whole-body compliant responses into a large-scale augmented dataset. Sampled force and couple events are imposed on contact frames extracted from human interaction data. At each contact link, the external force and a virtual torque from the passively yielding kinematic chain drive a virtual admittance under the commanded stiffness. Subsequently, teacher-student reinforcement learning trains a single policy to track the compliant motions under external wrenches. Finally, extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate whole-body c

arXiv:2608.25395v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent vision-language-action models offer a path toward robots with broader repertoires than conventional task-specific systems. Construction deployment, however, requires a precise inventory of worker activities and the capabilities needed to execute them. We present TARCAT, an occupation-grounded taxonomy derived from 91 O*NET tasks across seven high-employment construction occupations and 30 instructional videos of physical work. TARCAT defines 41 action primitives in 12 groups and three classes and provides a mechanism for composing parameterized primitive sequences into reusable skills. This human-interpretable structure can organize demonstrations, specify robot requirements, and support coding agents that retrieve and extend skill libraries. We also demonstrate selected primitives on a DOBOT CR3 arm with a CRAFT hand. TARCAT thereby provides a common vocabulary for analyzing human work and developing general-purpose construction r