News & Research

arXiv:2603.18559v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Industrial laparoscopic graspers rely on multi-link rigid mechanisms manufactured to tight tolerances, resulting in high manufacturing and assembly costs. This work presents the design and proof-of-concept validation of a monolithic, fully compliant, bistable, laparoscopic grasper that eliminates the need for multiple rigid links, thereby reducing part count. The device integrates a compliant trigger and a compliant gripper end-effector, coupled via a control push-rod, to achieve stable grasping without continuous user input. A hybrid approach combining an analytical model, iterative prototyping, and finite element analyses is employed to design the laparoscopic grasper. The trigger mechanism is synthesized using a Two-Element Beam Constraint Model as a design framework to control the deformation and stiffness of I-beam-like elements. This technique enables elastic energy storage while preventing snap-through instability. The end-effe

arXiv:2603.13869v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Dexterous manipulation enables complex tasks but suffers from self-occlusion, severe depth noise, and depth information loss when manipulating transparent objects. To solve this problem, this paper proposes TransDex, a 3D visuo-tactile fusion motor policy based on point cloud reconstruction pre-training. Specifically, we first propose a self-supervised point cloud reconstruction pre-training approach based on Transformer. This method accurately recovers the 3D structure of objects from interactive point clouds of dexterous hands, even when random noise and large-scale masking are added. Building on this, TransDex is constructed in which perceptual encoding adopts a fine-grained hierarchical scheme and multi-round attention mechanisms adaptively fuse features of the robotic arm and dexterous hand to enable differentiated motion prediction. Results from transparent object manipulation experiments conducted on a real robotic system demon

arXiv:2603.11130v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Co-design optimisation of autonomous systems has emerged as a powerful alternative to sequential approaches by jointly optimising physical design and control strategies. However, existing frameworks often neglect the robustness required for autonomous systems navigating unstructured, real-world environments. For agile Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating at the edge of the flight envelope, this lack of robustness yields designs that are sensitive to perturbations and model mismatch. To address this, we propose a robust co-design framework for agile fixed-wing UAVs that integrates parametric uncertainty and wind disturbances directly into the concurrent optimisation process. Our bi-level approach optimises physical design in a high-level loop while discovering nominal solutions via a constrained trajectory planner and evaluating performance across a stochastic Monte Carlo ensemble using feedback LQR control. Validated across three

arXiv:2603.08926v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Persistent air ground robot teams require nano UAVs that can leave a mobile UGV, perform short scouting or inspection tasks, and reliably return to a compact landing interface. This final docking phase remains difficult: it demands centimeter-scale relative localization on a moving platform, while nano UAVs provide only a few grams of payload and severe onboard sensing, power, and computation constraints. We address this problem with an infrastructure-less magneto inductive anchor-tag localization system for heterogeneous UAV-UGV teaming. Unlike passive magnetic docking aids or approaches exploiting environmental magnetic features, the proposed system actively generates a frequency multiplexed AC magnetic field on the UGV and uses it as an onboard localization reference for closed loop flight. The nano UAV carries only a lightweight passive receive coil and estimates its 3D position directly in the UGV frame, providing a local close r

arXiv:2603.08560v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robotic disassembly involves contact-rich interactions in which successful manipulation depends not only on geometric alignment but also on force-dependent state transitions. While vision-based policies perform well in structured settings, their reliability often degrades in tight-tolerance, contact-dominated, or deformable scenarios. In this work, we systematically investigate the role of tactile sensing in robotic disassembly through both simulation and real-world experiments. We construct five rigid-body disassembly tasks in simulation with increasing geometric constraints and extraction difficulty. We further design five real-world tasks, including three rigid and two deformable scenarios, to evaluate contact-dependent manipulation. Within a unified learning framework, we compare three sensing configurations: Vision Only, Vision + tactile RGB (TacRGB), and Vision + tactile force field (TacFF). Across both simulation and real-world

arXiv:2603.08541v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robotic imitation learning has achieved impressive success in learning complex manipulation behaviors from demonstrations. However, many existing robot learning methods do not explicitly account for the physical symmetries of robotic systems, often resulting in asymmetric or inconsistent behaviors under symmetric observations. This limitation is particularly pronounced in dual-arm manipulation, where bilateral symmetry is inherent to both the robot morphology and the structure of many tasks. In this paper, we introduce EquiBim, a symmetry-equivariant policy learning framework for bimanual manipulation that enforces bilateral equivariance between observations and actions during training. Our approach formulates physical symmetry as a group action on both observation and action spaces, and imposes an equivariance constraint on policy predictions under symmetric transformations. The framework is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integ

arXiv:2602.03087v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quadruped robots are used for primary searches during the early stages of indoor fires. A typical primary search involves quickly and thoroughly looking for victims under hazardous conditions and monitoring flammable materials. However, situational awareness in complex indoor environments and rapid stair climbing and descending across different staircases remain the main challenges for robot-assisted primary searches. In this project, we designed a two-stage end-to-end deep reinforcement learning (RL) approach to optimize both navigation and locomotion. In the first stage, the quadrupeds, Unitree Go2, were trained to climb and descend stairs in Isaac Lab's pyramid-stair terrain. In the second stage, the quadrupeds were trained to climb and descend various realistic indoor staircases in the Isaac Lab engine, with the learned policy transferred from the previous stage. These indoor staircases are straight, L-shaped, and spiral, to suppo

arXiv:2602.01515v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deploying learned control policies is risky because policies that appear robust in simulation can confidently enter out-of-distribution (OOD) states after Sim-to-Real transfer, causing silent failures and potential hardware damage. Existing anomaly detectors often fail to meet the requirements of high-rate control, extremely low false-positive rates, and interpretable failure feedback. We present \textbf{RAPT} (Recurrent Anomaly Probabilistic Trajectory Model), a lightweight, self-supervised $50$\,Hz deployment monitor that learns nominal execution from large-scale simulation and produces calibrated, per-dimension predictive-deviation signals online. RAPT enables OOD detection under strict false-positive constraints while localizing \emph{when and where} real execution departs from nominal behavior. For post-hoc diagnosis, RAPT combines temporal saliency, joint-kinematic summaries, and LLM-based semantic reasoning to classify likely f

arXiv:2512.10946v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Human-level contact-rich manipulation relies on the distinct roles of two key modalities: vision provides spatially rich but temporally slow global context, while force sensing captures rapid local contact dynamics. Integrating these signals is challenging due to their fundamental frequency and informational disparities. In this work, we propose ImplicitRDP, a unified end-to-end visual-force diffusion policy that integrates visual planning and reactive force control within a single network. We introduce Structural Slow-Fast Learning, a mechanism utilizing causal attention to simultaneously process asynchronous visual and force tokens, allowing the policy to perform rapid force control at the action rate while maintaining the temporal coherence of action chunks. Furthermore, to mitigate modality collapse where end-to-end models fail to adjust the weights across different modalities, we propose Virtual-target-based Representation Regula

arXiv:2511.01177v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cross-embodiment learning seeks to build generalist robots that learn from and operate across diverse morphologies, but differences in kinematics and action spaces hinder data sharing and control transfer. We ask: What structure can be shared across embodiments despite these differences? We argue that the physical interactions they induce can be modeled in a shared geometric space, allowing world models to provide a common interface for learning and control. To realize this idea, we represent human and robot hands as sets of 3D particles and define actions as end-effector particle displacement fields. This representation abstracts away embodiment-specific joint spaces while preserving the geometry and motion relevant to physical interaction. We train a graph-based world model on random interaction data from diverse simulated robot hands and real human hands, and integrate it with model-predictive control for deployment on new hardware

arXiv:2509.22469v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Allocating tasks to heterogeneous robot teams in environments with uncertain task requirements is a fundamentally challenging problem. Redundantly assigning multiple robots to such tasks is overly conservative, while purely reactive strategies risk costly delays in task completion when the uncertain capabilities become necessary. This paper introduces an auction-based task allocation algorithm that explicitly models task requirement uncertainty, leveraging a novel strongly coupled formulation to allocate tasks such that robots with potentially required capabilities are naturally positioned near uncertain tasks. This approach enables robots to remain productive on nearby tasks while simultaneously mitigating large delays in completion time when their capabilities are required. Through a set of simulated disaster relief missions with task deadline constraints, we demonstrate that the proposed approach yields up to a 15% increase in expe

arXiv:2508.21378v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in reasoning and code generation, enabling robotic manipulation to be initiated with just a single instruction. The LLM carries out various tasks by generating policy code required to control the robot. Despite advances in LLMs, achieving reliable policy code generation remains a significant challenge due to the diverse requirements of real-world tasks and the inherent complexity of user instructions. In practice, different users may provide distinct instructions to drive the robot for the same task, which may cause the unreliability of policy code generation. To bridge this gap, we design \textbf{RoboInspector}, a pipeline to unveil and characterize the unreliability of the policy code for LLM-enabled robotic manipulation from two perspectives: the complexity of the manipulation task and the granularity of the instruction. We perform comprehensive experiments with 216 d

arXiv:2607.19343v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video models absorb rich priors over how the visual world moves, interacts, and responds to contact, making them promising substrates for robotic world modeling. The central challenge is how to communicate action to such models in a form aligned with the visual space in which they learned these interaction priors, yet still grounded in physical manipulation. We introduce Masked Visual Actions, a pixel-space control interface that expresses action as a partially revealed trajectory of an arbitrary entity in a video. Revealing robot motion makes the model act as a forward dynamics model that predicts the scene's response to low-level robot actions, while revealing desired object motion makes the same model recover robot behavior consistent with that outcome. Finetuned with only 15 hours of masked examples from real videos and simulation, a single checkpoint achieves strong visual fidelity and controllability across diverse scenes and mult

arXiv:2607.19288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Test-time scaling offers a promising method to improve the inference performance of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) without additional training. Existing approaches to vision-language navigation (VLN) for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) typically relies on a single inference pass, which can falter in complex environments by producing suboptimal or unsafe trajectories. In this paper, we explore a simple and effective approach to apply test-time scaling to VLN for UAV. We enhance navigation reasoning through an iterative refinement process that requires no extra model training, guiding the model to re-evaluate its initial navigation plan for better accuracy and safety. Our method first prompts the model to generate multiple parallel candidates and then performs a self-correction step, achieving deeper and more robust planning without changing the underlying model. To further strengthen decision-making, we design a multi-criteria scoring funct

arXiv:2607.18540v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic perception pipelines increasingly rely on large vision backbones deployed on SWaP-constrained edge platforms, making post-training quantization (PTQ) attractive for real-time inference. However, while PTQ often preserves clean in-distribution accuracy, we show that it can substantially degrade reliability under deployment-relevant distribution shifts (e.g., sensor noise, severe weather, and novel operating environments), creating a Quantization-Induced Robustness Gap. Across foundational vision benchmarks (ImageNet-C and PACS), 4-bit PTQ models exhibit pronounced robustness degradation despite negligible ID accuracy loss. To address this, we propose Recti-Q, a lightweight feature-space rectification framework that freezes the quantized backbone and trains a small classifier-head LoRA adapter using only source data. Recti-Q is architecture-agnostic across CNNs and Transformers, supports efficient teacher-free training, and recove