News & Research

arXiv:2603.20804v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) systems are fundamentally constrained by partial observability, as an agent can only accumulate knowledge from locations it has personally visited. As multiple robots increasingly coexist in shared environments, a natural question arises: can agents navigating the same space benefit from each other's observations? In this work, we introduce Co-VLN, a minimalist, model-agnostic framework for systematically investigating whether and how peer observations from concurrently navigating agents can benefit VLN. When independently navigating agents identify common traversed locations, they exchange structured perceptual memory, effectively expanding each agent's receptive field at no additional exploration cost. We validate our framework on the R2R benchmark under two representative paradigms (the learning-based DUET and the zero-shot MapGPT), and conduct extensive analytical experiments to systematicall

arXiv:2509.10711v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider the benchmarking problem of gathering in an $(N,f)$-fault system consisting of $N$ robots, of which at most $f$ may fail at any execution. The {\em traditional} version asks $N-f$ non-faulty robots to gather at a point not known a priori. The recently studied {\em indulgent} version asks $N-f$ non-faulty robots to gather at the location of a faulty one. Indulgent gathering is impossible in a $(2,1)$-crash system in the $LUMI$ model under semi-synchrony, even when infinitely many colors and coordinate axis agreement are available. In this paper, we establish four results for indulgent gathering under asynchrony in $LUMI$, considering a {\em mobility fault} model in which a robot crash only impacts its mobility but not the operation of the light. We first show that indulgent gathering is impossible in a $(2,1)$-mobility system using 2-colored lights, and then give an optimal solution w.r.t. the number of colors using 3

arXiv:2606.03784v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Embodied chain-of-thought (CoT) aims to bridge linguistic reasoning with robotic control, yet its effective form and integration remain underexplored. In this paper, we revisit embodied CoT for robotic control at an unprecedented scale. We curate the largest embodied CoT corpus to date, comprising 978,743 trajectories, 226.3M samples, and 2592.5 hours of data. Through extensive experiments, we show that effective CoT must ground high-level semantic understaning in concrete linguistic action guidance -- such as end-effector movement and image-space trajectories -- whereas high-level reasoning alone yields marginal gains. More importantly, we identify that explicit CoT does not scale reliably as an autoregressive action prefix, suffering from compounding errors during inference. To address these challenges, we propose ERVLA, a vision-language-action (VLA) model that effectively leverages linguistic reasoning in generalizable robot manip

arXiv:2605.30696v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Safe navigation often relies on well-defined conditions based on the shape of robots and obstacles, and can be challenging when they have irregular geometries. While Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) offer an efficient mechanism to enforce safe set forward invariance, common shape surrogates (e.g., spheres or super-ellipsoids) are either overly conservative in unstructured scenes or require many local primitives, which inflates constraint counts and degrades real-time performance. In this paper, we introduce a novel geometry-aware Control Barrier Function (CBF) based on Bernstein-Polynomial Signed Distance Fields (BP-SDFs). It provides a unified way to represent the obstacles and robots, so as to represent the barrier function with a unified minimum distance. Benefiting from the differentiability of the Bernstein polynomials, one can easily enforce the control constraints in a closed loop. We validate the method's efficiency and perfor

arXiv:2604.27095v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper discusses null-space wrench components in parallel manipulators. We examine the adaptation of the two most common characterizations of these components in grasp-like systems, namely, interaction forces and internal loads, to parallel manipulators with actuation redundancy. We identify critical oversights in the existing literature on the subject, resolve ambiguities related to the definitions of interaction forces and internal loads, and provide explicit methods for synthesizing equilibrating and manipulating joint torque vectors. A case study is also provided to justify the validity of our novel methods and correct erroneous results reported in the literature.

arXiv:2604.26910v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents a planning pipeline framework for locomotion in rope-assisted robots climbing vertical surfaces. The proposed framework is formulated as a bi-level optimization scheme that addresses a mixed-integer problem: selecting feasible terrain regions for landing while simultaneously optimizing the control inputs, namely rope tensions and leg forces, and landing location. The outer level of the optimization is solved using the Cross-Entropy Method, while the inner level relies on gradient-based nonlinear optimization to compute dynamically feasible motions. The approach is validated on a novel climbing robot platform, ALPINE, across a variety of challenging terrain configurations.

arXiv:2603.15410v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Dexterous grasping in multi-object scene constitutes a fundamental challenge in robotic manipulation. Current mainstream grasping datasets predominantly focus on single-object scenarios and predefined grasp configurations, often neglecting environmental interference and the modeling of dexterous pre-grasp gesture, thereby limiting their generalizability in real-world applications. To address this, we propose DGS-Net, an end-to-end grasp prediction network capable of learning dense grasp configurations from single-view point clouds in multi-object scene. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage grasp data generation strategy that progresses from dense single-object grasp synthesis to dense scene-level grasp generation. Our dataset comprises 307 objects, 240 multi-object scenes, and over 350k validated grasps. By explicitly modeling grasp offsets and pre-grasp configurations, the dataset provides more robust and accurate supervision for dext

arXiv:2602.16511v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reliable fall recovery is critical for humanoids operating in cluttered environments. Unlike quadrupeds or wheeled robots, humanoids undergo high-energy impacts, complex whole-body contact, and large viewpoint changes during falls, making recovery essential. Prior work treats fall safety as separate problems (avoidance, impact mitigation, stand-up) or learns end-to-end policies without vision, typically on flat terrain. More fundamentally, it couples pose, dynamics, and terrain into a single data space, requiring exhaustive coverage and limiting generalization. We present a unified visually grounded fall-safety approach spanning all phases of recovery. It builds on two insights: (1) human fall-recovery poses are structured and transferable across terrains via alignment, and (2) effective recovery depends on interpreting the recovery goal in relation to the surrounding terrain. We train a privileged teacher using sparse human demonstra

arXiv:2602.12405v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reasoning about failures is crucial for building reliable and trustworthy robotic systems. Prior approaches either treat failure reasoning as a closed-set classification problem or assume access to ample human annotations. Failures in the real world are typically subtle, combinatorial, and difficult to enumerate, whereas rich reasoning labels are expensive to acquire. We address this problem by introducing ARMOR: Adaptive Round-based Multi-task mOdel for Robotic failure detection and reasoning. We formulate detection and reasoning as a multi-task self-refinement process, where the model iteratively predicts detection outcomes and natural language reasoning conditioned on past outputs. During training, ARMOR learns from heterogeneous supervision - large-scale sparse binary labels and small-scale rich reasoning annotations - optimized via a combination of offline and online imitation learning. At inference time, ARMOR generates multiple