News & Research

arXiv:2610.21211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proactive robots should anticipate user needs and provide assistance before being explicitly asked. A straightforward approach is to infer human intentions from commonsense knowledge, but the same observed behavior can imply different needs across users, potentially leading to unwanted assistance. We observe that everyday routines in the real world exhibit recurring patterns, so learning these patterns can reduce ambiguity in proactive decisions. Based on this, we propose a memory-based agentic framework in which a VLM task predictor reads a Procedural Assistance Memory (PAM) alongside the current observation to decide when to assist and what task to perform, and a VLA executor performs the predicted task. PAM is structured as a finite-state machine over activity phases, per-state assistance rules, and event-driven transitions; a reflection VLM revises PAM from each day's interaction trace without weight updates or retraining. In our 5-da

arXiv:2610.21199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geometric light detection and ranging (LiDAR)--inertial simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) provides efficient state estimation but lacks the continuous map representation and global refinement capabilities of neural implicit SLAM, while neural implicit methods remain computationally expensive. We propose Lightweight LiDAR--Inertial Neural SLAM (LIN-SLAM), a hybrid method that couples high-rate geometric LiDAR--inertial estimation with neural implicit tracking, continual mapping, and global refinement for accurate real-time onboard SLAM. Experiments on twelve representative sequences from three datasets spanning 32-, 64-, and 128-channel LiDAR configurations show that LIN-SLAM achieves the lowest overall mean absolute trajectory error (ATE) among the evaluated state-of-the-art geometric and neural implicit methods, while substantially reducing runtime compared with existing neural implicit SLAM methods. On a Unitree Go2 equipped

arXiv:2610.21180v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General-purpose dexterous manipulation requires policies to transfer knowledge from related tasks to new tasks with only a few target demonstrations. Existing benchmarks often provide too many target demonstrations. They also leave the differences between source and target tasks uncontrolled. As a result, they cannot clearly distinguish knowledge transfer from task memorization. Our key insight is the Core-Gen principle. Core tasks are related tasks that share a functional interaction and provide source knowledge, while a Gen task is a novel target within the same functional family that has only a few demonstrations. This setup tests whether a policy can reuse functional interaction knowledge. Based on this principle, we propose Evo-DexBench, which controls both source-task relatedness and target-task exposure. It comprises 30 tasks in six functional families and a VR teleoperation pipeline. The resulting dataset covers three everyday sce

arXiv:2610.21152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training humanoid whole-body vision-language-action (VLA) policies requires costly robot demonstrations with aligned robot-view observations and controller-compatible whole-body state-action labels. Egocentric human demonstrations offer scalable supervision but have misaligned views and sparse motion cues. Existing approaches either pretrain policies that still require robot data for adaptation or generate controller-specific commands that limit reuse. Conversion also requires robot-view observations aligned with the generated whole-body motion. We present KODA (Kinematics-Observation Data Alignment), which converts egocentric RGB demonstrations into whole-body VLA training data using a reusable canonical trajectory to guide robot-view synthesis and generate controller-specific whole-body state-action supervision. KODA first generates a simulator-checked whole-body trajectory using a sparse tracker with sampling-based command optimization

arXiv:2610.21140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich robotic tasks require coordinated motion and impedance under uncertain interaction dynamics and physical constraints. While recent methods on learned policies provide useful interaction strategies, they may fail when contact conditions differ from those encountered during training. Model-based generative methods show promising receding-horizon trajectories optimization results, but often lack structured behavioral guidance and refinement that jointly accounts for constraint geometry and actual contact responses. To this end, we propose Manifold Generative Annealing (MGA), a joint model-free and model-based generative framework for motion--impedance optimization. MGA first organizes pretrained reinforcement learning policies into structured sequence proposals, retaining task-specific interaction strategies without committing to their execution. It then evaluates these proposals alongside exploratory samples through model-based

arXiv:2610.20998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Passive human videos of everyday activity offer robots access to a massive amount of human experience without requiring a demonstration for each task. However, using this experience requires recovering knowledge from unstructured video recordings and adapting it to a different body (i.e., the robot). To overcome these challenges, we present mobile code-as-policy (MoCaP), an agentic framework that turns passive human video recordings into guidance for an end-to-end mobile manipulation policy. MoCaP extracts spatial memory and cues of how people prepare to interact with objects, which inform navigation and the search for a manipulation-ready configuration. Guided by passive human experience and current observations, MoCaP uses a closed-loop code-as-policy to coordinate planning and tool use primitives to solve motions under the robot's geometry and kinematic constraints. On a real mobile manipulator, MoCaP achieves 80% success on each of tw

arXiv:2610.20970v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robots searching for odour usually surge upwind on contact, steering by the wind sensed now. In simulated reversing wind this rule collapses, favouring controllers that hold an earlier heading. We show that on our benchmark the collapse came from the simulated anemometer. Reading the nominal wind, wind-following controllers reached the source in at most 3.5% of episodes. Reading the odour-carrying flow, the best reached 90%, ahead of a held heading. The winner then depends on the flow. A held heading won in smooth fields that reverse quickly and lost in a stochastic field. A controller-free measure of the sensed wind ranked a moth-inspired follower's success. On a quadruped in a reversing fan arena, wind-following controllers were pushed away from the source, while a heading held from a source-facing start was not. Benchmarks should state which wind their sensor reads and test more than one flow structure.

arXiv:2610.20968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Executing heavy-duty physical manipulation in unpredictable environments remains a major challenge for quadrupedal robots lacking dedicated manipulators. This paper presents SOMA, a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for whole-body non-prehensile manipulation of multi-object stacks using a quadruped robot. Unlike traditional methods restricted to two-dimensional planar pushing, SOMA integrates explicit robot base-height control, unlocking full three-dimensional pushing strategies. This capability enables the quadruped to manipulate complex payload stacks as a unified system while preventing relative sliding or tipping of upper layers. The architecture factorizes control into a high-level manipulation policy using a Simplified Structured State Space Sequence (S5) encoder to reason over long-horizon temporal history and predict bounded target tracking commands via Beta distributions, and a low-level locomotion policy that dynamic

arXiv:2610.20958v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous mobile robots in warehouses and production facilities operate in precisely the environments that defeat point-feature visual odometry: featureless aisles, uniform walls, repetitive racking and specular floors. Such environments are, however, rich in straight-edge structure: rack uprights, door frames, wall junctions and cabinet outlines present high-contrast linear edges stable across wide viewpoint changes. A line-feature extension to cuVSLAM, a CUDA-accelerated visual-SLAM system, is presented that recovers this signal. Lines are parameterised as Pl\"ucker coordinates for geometric transport and as the minimal 4-DOF orthonormal representation of Bartoli and Sturm for optimisation; a Cauchy-robust point-to-line residual with analytic Jacobians is folded directly into cuVSLAM's per-frame Gauss-Newton pose solve, and the same line state is jointly refined in the Schur-complement sliding-window bundle adjustment. An adaptive info

arXiv:2610.20936v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generating dynamically feasible motions for legged and manipulating robots requires solving a large, nonlinear, non-convex optimal control problem (OCP) in which contact wrenches must satisfy friction-cone constraints throughout the motion, not only at isolated instants. Existing solvers are sensitive to the initial guess and scale poorly with the number of joints. This paper introduces LEAP, which transcribes the OCP with pseudospectral collocation and, instead of a Newton or SQP solve, integrates a primal--dual gradient flow of a Powell--Hestenes--Rockafellar augmented Lagrangian to compute a solution. Because the flow is stiff, this paper designs a linearly implicit integrator with a Gauss--Newton metric, momentum, and a merit-based step controller that keeps the augmented Lagrangian monotone. Across locomotion benchmarks on five robot platforms, from planar hoppers to 32-joint humanoids, LEAP is the only method to solve every tested p

arXiv:2610.20925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust adaptive control is vital for keeping robots safe while actively reducing uncertainty in unfamiliar settings. However, traditional methods are often conservative since they fail to account for guaranteed future parameter learning during planning and struggle to scale to high-dimensional systems. In this work, we present A-SLS, a learning-aware robust adaptive model predictive control (RAMPC) framework based on system-level synthesis. A-SLS forecasts future parameter uncertainty and preserves correlations between process disturbances, parameter error, and estimate updates to construct tight, guaranteed reachable sets that account for future information gain. We also develop a GPU-accelerated A-SLS solver to enable real-time performance. Across nonlinear robotic systems, A-SLS reduces reachable-tube conservativeness, maintains real-time performance, and scales to whole-body control for a quadruped with 61 states, 8 uncertain paramete

arXiv:2610.20904v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Egocentric human videos offer a scalable alternative to costly robot demonstra- tions, yet transferring their manipulation priors to robot control remains chal- lenging. The commonly adopted retargeting-based approaches convert human wrist and finger poses into embodiment-specific action commands through hand- crafted geometric mappings. However, such mappings require meticulous recal- ibration across different embodiments and risk propagating hand-tracking errors into downstream robot control pipelines. To this end, we propose EgoJEPA, a three-stage framework that learns embodiment-agnostic representations from ego- centric human videos without rule-based human-to-robot retargeting: 1) Human- action pre-training learns effect-aware latent actions through JEPA-style visual prediction conditioned on hand-motion differences; 2) Latent-action-based world modeling jointly predicts future visual dynamics and latent actions, which decou- ples h

arXiv:2610.20901v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Task-Oriented Grasping (TOG) has emerged as an important skill for purposeful robotic manipulation. Given the task of using a knife to "slice bread," a robot must choose to grasp from the handle, whereas for "hand[ing] the knife over," it is preferable for the handle to remain unobstructed for safe handoff. Current approaches for TOG either focus on 2D planar grasping, remain limited by their reliance on task-agnostic grasp generators, or are constrained by reliance on finite, manually-annotated, task-specific grasp datasets that cannot cover all possible grasp-task pairs. To that end, we present TGrasp6D, a vision-language based approach for generating task-oriented 6DoF grasps in a zero-shot manner. Given a task and a single RGB-D image of an associated object, TGrasp6D reasons about the appropriate semantic affordance for the given task and object geometry to produce an initial task- informed prior. This generated prior is further refi

arXiv:2610.20895v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Satisfying safety constraints for systems with second-order dynamics is challenging because a position constraint may require infeasible deceleration. Higher-order control barrier functions (CBFs) provide an approach for expressing safety conditions for such systems but feasibility depends on the system dynamics and available control authority. We develop a constructive approach for designing feasible safety constraints for second-order control-affine systems. Starting from a signed distance function (SDF), we construct collision-free spheres, i.e., bubbles, in position space, and use their quadratic geometry and overlap to construct a velocity-dependent safety constraint. The associated safe set is represented as a union of intersections and enforced through a quadratic-program safety filter. Under mild assumptions on the dynamics, bubble overlap, and design parameters, we prove that the quadratic-program-based controller is well defined

arXiv:2610.20875v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sustainably powered mobile robots enable long-duration observational missions by harvesting energy from the environment. However, effective autonomy requires the robots to make decisions as to how to allocate this energy to maximize information quality over time. In this paper, we study a persistent (infinite-horizon) speed trajectory optimization problem that is posed as a periodic optimal control problem in which a robot repeatedly traverses a fixed closed path, coupling a super-linear propulsion cost with dynamic information gain and decay. Using the information-theoretic quantity of clarity as an information metric, we first derive the necessary conditions for optimal control. We then derive a number of specialized follow-on properties, which characterize (i) the nature of the optimal control when points on the path are of varying importance and when they are of equal importance, along with (ii) a high-speed information limit that is