News & Research

arXiv:2602.04600v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Achieving generalizable manipulation in unconstrained environments requires the robot to proactively resolve information uncertainty, i.e., the capability of active perception. However, existing methods are often confined in limited types of sensing behaviors, restricting their applicability to complex environments. In this work, we formalize active perception as a history-dependent perception-action loop driven by information-seeking action and decision branching, providing a structured categorization of visual active perception paradigms. Building on this perspective, we introduce CoMe-VLA, a cognitive and memory-aware vision-language-action (VLA) framework that leverages large-scale human egocentric data to learn versatile exploration and manipulation priors. Our framework integrates a cognitive auxiliary head for autonomous sub-task transitions and a dual-track memory system to maintain consistent self and environmental awareness

arXiv:2512.16861v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-horizon manipulation has been a long-standing challenge in the robotics community. We propose ReinforceGen, a system that combines task decomposition, data generation, imitation learning, and motion planning to form an initial solution, and improves each component through reinforcement-learning-based fine-tuning. ReinforceGen first segments the task into multiple localized skills, which are connected through motion planning. The skills and motion planning targets are trained with imitation learning on a dataset generated from 10 human demonstrations, and then fine-tuned through online adaptation and reinforcement learning. When benchmarked on the Robosuite dataset, ReinforceGen reaches 80% success rate on all tasks with visuomotor controls in the highest reset range setting. Additional ablation studies show that our fine-tuning approaches contribute to an 89% average performance increase. Finally, ReinforceGen demonstrates signif

arXiv:2510.27048v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we introduce SpikeATac, a multimodal tactile finger combining a taxelized and highly sensitive dynamic response (PVDF) with a static transduction method (capacitive) for multimodal touch sensing. Named for its `spiky' response, SpikeATac's 16-taxel PVDF film sampled at 4 kHz provides fast, sensitive dynamic signals to the very onset and breaking of contact. We characterize the sensitivity of the different modalities, and show that SpikeATac provides the ability to stop quickly and delicately when grasping fragile, deformable objects. Beyond parallel grasping, we show that SpikeATac can be used in a learning-based framework to achieve new capabilities on a dexterous multifingered robot hand. We use reinforcement learning from human feedback to fine-tune the behavior of a policy to modulate force. Our hardware platform and learning pipeline together enable a difficult dexterous and contact-rich task that has not previously

arXiv:2509.15254v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this study, we address the problem of in-flight object catching using a quadruped robot with a basket. Our objective is to accurately predict the impact point, defined as the object's landing position. This task poses two key challenges: the absence of public datasets capturing diverse objects under unsteady aerodynamics, which are essential for training reliable predictors; and the difficulty of accurate early-stage impact point prediction when trajectories appear similar across objects. To overcome these issues, we construct a real-world dataset of 8,000 trajectories from 20 objects, providing a foundation for advancing in-flight object catching under complex aerodynamics. We then propose the Object-Adaptive Impact Point Predictor (OIPP), consisting of two modules: (i) an Object-Adaptive Encoder (OAE) that extracts object-dependent representations from motion histories, and (ii) an Impact Point Predictor (IPP) that estimates the

arXiv:2502.08645v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real-world data collection for robotics is costly and resource-intensive, requiring skilled operators and expensive hardware. Simulations offer a scalable alternative but often fail to achieve sim-to-real generalization due to geometric and visual gaps. To address these challenges, we propose a 3D-photorealistic real-to-sim system, namely, RE$^3$SIM, addressing geometric and visual sim-to-real gaps. RE$^3$SIM employs advanced 3D reconstruction and neural rendering techniques to faithfully recreate real-world scenarios, enabling real-time rendering of simulated cross-view cameras within a physics-based simulator. By utilizing privileged information to collect expert demonstrations efficiently in simulation, and train robot policies with imitation learning, we validate the effectiveness of the real-to-sim-to-real pipeline across various manipulation task scenarios. Notably, with only simulated data, we can achieve zero-shot sim-to-real

arXiv:2501.11434v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a simple and easy-to-implement algorithm to detect plan infeasibility in kinematic motion planning. Our method involves approximating the robot's configuration space to a discrete space, where each degree of freedom has a finite set of values. The obstacle region separates the free configuration space into different connected regions. For a path to exist between the start and goal configurations, they must lie in the same connected region of the free space. Thus, to ascertain plan infeasibility, we merely need to sample adequate points from the obstacle region that isolate start and goal. Accordingly, we progressively construct the configuration space (initially assumed to be entirely free) by sampling from the discretized space and updating the bitmap cells representing obstacle regions. Subsequently, we partition this partially built configuration space to identify different connected components within it and assess the c

arXiv:2405.03411v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Informed sampling techniques accelerate the convergence of sampling-based motion planners by biasing sampling toward regions of the state space that are most likely to yield better solutions. However, when the current solution path contains redundant or tortuous segments, the resulting informed subset may remain unnecessarily large, slowing convergence. Our prior work addressed this issue by introducing the greedy informed set, which reduces the sampling region based on the maximum heuristic cost along the current solution path. In this article, we formally characterize the behavior of the greedy informed set within Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT*)-like planners and analyze how greedy sampling affects exploration and asymptotic optimality. We then present Greedy RRT* (G-RRT*), a bi-directional anytime variant of RRT* that leverages the greedy informed set to focus sampling in the most promising regions of the search space. Experim

arXiv:2607.09336v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion-based trajectory planners have shown strong performance in offline reinforcement learning, but their iterative denoising process often incurs high inference cost. Consistency-based planners reduce the number of sampling steps, yet they typically rely on a two-stage teacher--student distillation pipeline that increases training cost and may introduce instability. We propose Shortcut Trajectory Planning (STP), an offline model-based reinforcement learning framework that incorporates shortcut models as efficient trajectory generators. STP trains a conditional shortcut trajectory model in a single stage, supports adjustable one-step and few-step inference through step-size conditioning, and selects candidate plans using a critic augmented with feasibility-aware correction. Across standard D4RL benchmarks, including locomotion, navigation, manipulation, and dexterous control tasks, STP achieves strong performance while simplifying

arXiv:2607.09185v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Action-conditioned world models (ACWMs) aim to simulate future observations conditioned on embodied actions, offering a promising foundation for robot planning, policy evaluation, and data augmentation. However, learning controllable ACWMs requires large-scale action-labeled data, which remains costly to collect in the real world. Latent action models (LAMs) mitigate this bottleneck by inferring latent actions from unlabeled videos, but existing LAMs are typically trained with reconstruction-only objectives and therefore entangle action-relevant dynamics with action-irrelevant visual factors such as backgrounds and untouched objects. In this work, we identify this action-irrelevant bias as a key obstacle to controllable ACWMs and introduce evaluation metrics to measure latent-action bias, action following, and robustness. We propose CD-LAM, a causally debiased framework for LAM-based ACWMs. CD-LAM introduces three efficient fine-tuning

arXiv:2607.09078v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Object detection is a fundamental component in numerous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) applications, yet it has long been plagued by hindrances like occlusion or target pixel scarcity. Active Object Detection (AOD) provides a novel paradigm to address these challenges via active vision, while UAV-based AOD research remains scarce due to the lack of high-quality datasets and benchmarks for algorithm development and evaluation. To fill this gap, this paper presents ATRNet-LUDO, the first large-scale real-world dataset for UAV-Ground Active Object Detection (UGAOD). It contains 121,000 multi-view panoramic multi-target aerial images and 1.21 million local single-target slices, covering 10 vehicle targets across 40 scenarios. It enables the construction of diverse training and testing environments for UAV agent interaction and active observation policy learning. Based on this dataset, we establish a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for AOD

arXiv:2607.08966v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Soft metamaterials provide a promising platform for robotics, biomedical devices, and flexible electronics. The localized mechanical responses by nonuniform excitation are ubiquitous in soft materials, yet their controlled transmission across assemblies remains largely overlooked in metamaterial design, which critically constrains nontrivial functionalities with end-to-end and long-range deformation transmission. Here, we introduce an impedance-guided design framework that enables programmable transmission of localized deformation in modular soft metamaterials, achieving behaviors unattainable by intuitive design. By establishing a nonlinear model considering position-dependent interactions and integrating the concept of mechanical impedance within metamaterials, we regulate assembly-level transmission solely through unit-cell topology optimization. The resulting framework enables effective synthesis of module families, allowing both ho

arXiv:2607.09648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we present B-spline Policy (BSP), an action representation designed for accelerating robot manipulation policies. Rather than predicting discrete-time action chunks, BSP parameterizes actions as continuous B-spline curves defined by a set of knots and control points. This representation yields smooth, time-continuous trajectories that can be temporally scaled and executed by low-level controllers at higher frequencies and speeds. We show that B-spline-parameterized actions can be seamlessly integrated into standard policy learning pipelines by directly predicting B-spline parameters. Experiments on simulated and real-world tasks demonstrate that BSP significantly reduces task completion time, achieving substantial improvements over baseline methods while maintaining strong success rates. More results: https://b-spline-policy.github.io

arXiv:2607.09590v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Precision industrial contact manipulation requires reliable robot policies under pose perturbations and contact-force constraints. Vision-language-action models offer broad generalization but often introduce high inference latency and GPU-memory cost, while vision-action chunking policies are more suitable for real-time industrial control. However, these policies are usually trained by behavior cloning and suffer from distribution shift in contact-rich tasks. This paper proposes PAC-ACT, a reinforcement-learning post-training framework for pretrained Action Chunking Transformer policies. PAC-ACT reformulates policy optimization at the chunk level, constructs an ACT-transferred actor-critic architecture, and introduces a hybrid behavior-prior constraint to preserve the pretrained action distribution during online fine-tuning. Experiments on industrial precision-contact benchmarks show that PAC-ACT improves task success, contact stability,

arXiv:2607.09587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decentralized multi-robot coordination under partial observability remains challenging, especially in communication-free settings where agents must act solely from local sensor observations. Privileged policy distillation provides a promising approach by transferring knowledge from a globally informed oracle to sensor-constrained students. However, in multi-agent systems, the same local observation may correspond to multiple global configurations requiring qualitatively different cooperative actions, making the conditional action distribution inherently multi-modal. Standard deterministic distillation collapses these modes to their mean, often yielding invalid or hesitant actions. To address this issue, we propose CoDiMAD, a three-stage framework that trains a privileged oracle with MAPPO, constructs an offline dataset of local-observation-oracle-action pairs, and distills the oracle into decentralized students parameterized as conditiona

arXiv:2607.09557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine grain control and positioning of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) is critical for sampling, maintenance, and survey applications. Traditional control methods for AUVs are labor intensive and are not robust to changes in the vehicle configuration or environmental conditions. Reinforcement learning (RL) promises rapid controller development while handling a range of deployment parameters via domain randomization (DR). However, DR is still limited by the capacity of the underlying simulation to model real physics. In particular, drag physics are difficult to model and are a large contributor to sim-to-real gaps. Meanwhile, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) provides high fidelity drag models but is challenging to leverage within reinforcement learning frameworks due to its computational overhead. Thus, in this paper we exploit the idea of training surrogate approximations of CFD models of a given vehicle, enabling fast inference wi