News & Research

arXiv:2610.23899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reconstructing sub-millimeter detail of small objects underpins tasks such as circuit-board defect detection, specimen digitization, and archiving. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) makes photorealistic reconstruction possible from posed images alone, but macro optics violate two conditions it depends on. The field of view (FOV) and the depth of field (DoF) shrink to millimeters, so viewpoint error can take a sample out of frame, and only a thin focal plane is sharp in frame. Existing automated macro-capture rigs handle the shallow DoF with per-view focus stacking, but typically rely on classical photogrammetry and offline, human-in-the-loop processing. We present MicroSplat, which generates a 3DGS using a low-cost consumer microscope on a manipulator arm. After a single up-front object-localization step, the system runs unattended. It performs calibration, plans collision-free viewpoints, captures and fuses a focal stack at each viewpoint, se

arXiv:2610.23894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) jointly predict robot actions and future observations. However, their visual prediction objectives do not explicitly distinguish task-relevant transitions from incidental scene changes. For whole-body policies, this distinction matters because task progress depends on coordinated changes in body pose, contact, and object state. We introduce LANGUAGE-FORCING, a training strategy that uses language to emphasize task-relevant changes in the future visual representations of a whole-body WAM. Given paired current and ground- truth short-horizon future frames, a frozen vision-language model assesses task progress and predicts plausible subsequent state changes. We encode these descriptions with a frozen text encoder and align their embeddings with intermediate, action-conditioned future-visual features, complementing the original visual and action prediction objectives. All auxiliary components are used only during tr

arXiv:2610.23891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A robotic agent operating in an unknown environment must gather sufficient task-relevant information before acting. However, determining when the available information is sufficient remains a challenge. We propose a conceptual hybrid neuro-symbolic framework for task-sufficient active perception in unknown environments. After interpreting a requested task, the agent generates an initial plan and iteratively reevaluates it as new information becomes available. At each iteration, it can acquire a more informative viewpoint, inspect or manipulate candidate objects, ask the user for clarification, or perform the task. Neural perception modules update an object-centric belief state, while a symbolic decision layer determines whether the remaining uncertainty justifies further information gathering. The framework will be implemented on a mobile manipulator comprising a humanoid torso and a mobile base, with complementary evaluation in simulatio

arXiv:2610.23888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-object grasping is a fundamental yet challenging problem, constrained by data collection costs, varying spatial layouts, and the need for broad generalization. To address these challenges, we propose MoDex, a data-efficient framework that provides the first unified solution for universal multi-object dexterous grasping across diverse spatial layouts. MoDex accomplishes this by formulating the task as a single-step decision problem of learning residual corrections to a reference trajectory, and introducing a spatially adaptive dual-strategy that performs single-shot grasping for proximal objects and sequential interaction for separated objects. Extensive evaluations show that MoDex significantly outperforms baselines in proximal configurations, achieving 61.24% success on unseen objects, and achieves high success rates in separated layouts. Further experiments demonstrate its generalization across robot embodiments, scalability and z

arXiv:2610.23887v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich insertion requires precise geometric alignment despite uncertainty in perception, geometry, and con- trol. When this uncertainty causes unintended contact, the re- sulting contact provides local information that can guide correc- tive motion. Sampling-based Model Predictive Control (SMPC) is well suited to this setting because it optimizes through forward simulation without requiring gradients through contact dynamics. However, standard SMPC methods typically use generic proposal distributions that do not exploit observed contact to determine where to search next. We introduce ContactKernels, a contact-adaptive proposal kernel that uses geometry-conditioned wrench measurements to estimate contact location and local contact geometry. The estimated contact state directly adapts the proposal distribution: contact location biases the search toward corrective motions, while the contact normal shapes the sampling covariance. We eva

arXiv:2610.23884v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: GPU acceleration has made motion planning one to two orders of magnitude faster, but it has not made the three paradigms---sampling, search, and optimization---comparable to one another: every GPU-accelerated planner is built around a single paradigm, so comparing across libraries also compares their collision checkers. All three, however, bottleneck on the same GPU primitive: batched collision detection and the batched forward kinematics beneath it. PrismPlan builds that primitive once, as a shared substrate of per-sphere collision--kinematics device code that every planner consumes. Because they all execute the same device code, the backend is held fixed by construction and the paradigms can be compared head-to-head. We run six planners over 1800 MotionBenchMaker problems on three robots (7--14 DoF, one a dual-arm whole-body composite) at an equal 2s budget. On the 7-DoF Panda, sampling (pRRTC) is the most reliable paradigm at 98%, whil

arXiv:2610.23883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-range throwing on unstructured terrain is a key capability for mobile robots in delivery and retrieval tasks, but it requires high release velocity, coordinated whole-body motion, and robustness to terrain-induced disturbances. We present a whole-body kinetic-coordination framework for a wheeled-quadruped manipulator that combines kinetic-chain arm modeling with SQP-based trajectory optimization and a reference-guided reinforcement learning policy for coordinated base motion. The manipulator is first reduced to a kinetic-chain model and optimized under kinematic and dynamic constraints to produce a high-speed throwing reference. On a stationary base, the optimized arm trajectory reaches a release speed of 12.75 m/s and a throwing distance of 16.68 m. When whole-body coordination is enabled, the system further increases the release speed to 16.64 m/s and the throwing distance to 28.25 m. We then integrate the mobility of the wheeled-q

arXiv:2610.23879v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legged robot control is not yet practical in non-inertial environments, where the ground and surroundings accelerate in the inertial Earth frame, mainly because of the unknown, time-varying, persistent perturbations caused by environmental motion, compounded by the associated hybrid robotic dynamics. We formulate the problem of robot walking control as unknown-disturbance rejection for hybrid linear systems subject to hybrid sinusoidal disturbances (i.e., a linear combination of sinusoidal components with instantaneous phase jumps at discrete events). First, necessary and sufficient conditions for solvability of the disturbance rejection problem are derived and used to characterize the control input that rejects the disturbances. Second, with the Youla-Kucera parametrization, an output feedback controller capable of rejecting the disturbance is introduced. Third, an adaptive law is proposed to estimate the controller parameters that rejec

arXiv:2610.23878v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aerial tracking of autonomous ground vehicles can provide useful situational awareness in environments where fixed external perception infrastructure is unavailable. However, visual-only tracking from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is limited by camera field of view, viewpoint changes, occlusions, and temporary loss of target visibility. This paper presents a heterogeneous UAV--UGV methodology for aerial tracking of small-scale autonomous ground vehicles in simulation. The system is implemented in ROS~2 and Gazebo Sim using a Tello-like UAV equipped with a front-facing RGB camera and multiple LIMO-like unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). Three approaches are evaluated: a training-free color-marker baseline, a YOLO-based visual baseline, and a proposed UAV--UGV fusion method. The proposed method uses the same visual detector as the YOLO baseline, but combines visual detections with UGV state information to maintain the target estimate durin

arXiv:2610.23877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Integrating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) into autonomous UAV navigation enables high-level semantic reasoning but introduces critical temporal bottlenecks that can destabilize flight control. This paper presents a systematic benchmark that evaluates the operational trade-offs among model scale, hardware constraints, and flight reliability. By subjecting the system to extensive stress tests on both a high-performance workstation and a constrained integrated-graphics laptop, we isolate the kinetic impact of inference latency against reasoning accuracy. Our findings reveal a performance dichotomy: lightweight models struggle with structural hallucinations that break deterministic state machines, while heavyweight models induce trajectory overcorrections due to inference lag. We demonstrate that a mid-weight architecture strikes the optimal balance, successfully rehabilitating navigation in degraded environments without compromising real-tim

arXiv:2610.23874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this study, we propose an adaptive question generation mechanism that addresses uncertainty arising from ambiguous instructions. Natural-language instructions for service robots often contain ambiguities. In scenes with multiple similar objects, the robot must identify the target object by asking questions. However, existing question generation methods focus on probabilistic discrimination efficiency and do not sufficiently account for user ease of response. Asking questions without considering the user's ease of response may cause incorrect or uncertain answers. Such incorrect or uncertain answers lead to additional clarification turns and degraded dialogue efficiency. The proposed mechanism integrates probabilistic discrimination efficiency and human cognitive characteristics to generate questions that users can intuitively and easily answer. First, the proposed mechanism extracts visual attributes of candidate objects using a vision

arXiv:2610.23872v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Changing a humanoid robot's manipulation policy should not require retraining the controller that maintains the robot's balance. This study introduces DUET, a decoupled execution framework that enables locomotion and manipulation controllers to operate simultaneously by combining their commands only at the robot interface. A reinforcement-learning locomotion policy controls the 12 leg joints and a waist yaw joint, tracking planar velocity, turning rate, and pelvis height from deep crouching to upright standing on a 23-degree-of-freedom Unitree G1. The 10 arm joints are excluded from the action space, while their positions and velocities are included only as observations, so that any compatible manipulation policy that generates arm-joint targets can control the upper body, and the locomotion policy keeps the lower body stable without requiring shared training or direct coordination. This study demonstrates the modular approach on hardware

arXiv:2605.16395v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present OrbiSim, a novel robotic simulation paradigm that redefines world models as a fully differentiable physics engine for embodied intelligence. Unlike prior world models that focus on unconstrained imagination in latent or visual domains, OrbiSim establishes a unified, physically-grounded pathway that bridges structured scene assets, neural dynamics, and downstream reinforcement learning. By enabling end-to-end differentiability throughout the entire simulation loop -- spanning from explicit state transitions to visual observation generation -- OrbiSim supports tasks traditionally intractable for classical simulators, such as differentiable contact modeling, gradient-based policy optimization under sparse rewards, and intuitive physical inference. Empirical results demonstrate that OrbiSim significantly outperforms state-of-the-art world models in both predictive fidelity and control performance. Furthermore, its consistent re