News & Research

arXiv:2610.15934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motion planning for automated vehicles in interactive traffic has to simultaneously ensure safety, respect traffic rules, and maintain comfortable progress under multi-modal behavior uncertainty. Imposing all these requirements as hard constraints reduces feasibility, whereas treating them all as costs allows safety-critical requirements to be traded against progress. We propose a hybrid hard--soft Signal Temporal Logic (STL) MPC framework that optimizes a single shared ego trajectory against every retained behavior hypothesis: minimum-distance and speed predicates are imposed as explicit hard constraints, while soft STL robustness terms shape clearance, comfort, and interaction quality within the resulting feasible driving corridor. This retains robustness to discrete interaction modes without branch-specific contingent ego policies. We further identify substantial symbolic graph-construction overhead and introduce reachability-certified

arXiv:2610.15833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavioral foundation models (BFMs) provide humanoids with reusable repertoires of whole-body behaviors; in real-world humanoid control, the same behavioral intent may require fundamentally different motions under different terrain constraints. Covering such variation with terrain-matched demonstrations requires enumerating a combinatorial space of behaviors and terrain geometries. We introduce P-BFM, a perceptive behavioral foundation model that factorizes humanoid control into terrain-invariant intent and terrain-conditioned realization. A forward-backward representation maps motion references, target states, and reward functions into a shared intent space without terrain information, while a perceptive policy learns how to realize each intent under the surrounding terrain geometry. We further identify a complementary limitation of purely latent control: behavioral latents can preserve local motion patterns while losing precise global p

arXiv:2610.15814v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General-purpose multimodal foundation models are increasingly capable of directly controlling robots, yet improving their manipulation capabilities through autonomous interaction remains challenging. A key challenge to such self-improvement is learning from failures in complex manipulation tasks involving cross-stage dependencies, where an action may succeed locally but cause a later stage to fail. To address this challenge, we introduce ReTrace, a self-improvement framework for robotic manipulation through autonomous physical interaction and retrospective reasoning, without provided demonstrations or model-parameter updates. ReTrace retrospectively traces downstream failures to earlier decisions, proposes targeted corrections, and evaluates them through subsequent interactions. Across attempts, ReTrace progressively consolidates validated corrections into a reusable manipulation skill that guide subsequent execution. We evaluate ReTrace

arXiv:2610.15794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow matching is a common generative recipe for robot foundation models. Vision-language-action models (VLAs) generate action chunks, while world-action models (WAMs) additionally generate future visual states. Both start generation from a fixed Gaussian prior, despite temporal continuity between past and future states and actions. This requires costly training and iterative sampling, especially for WAMs with an additional visual branch. We introduce $\Delta$-flow, which constructs the source from recent history with mild noise rather than from a fixed Gaussian prior. This moves the source closer to the target, reducing transport to a small residual $\Delta$ that can be learned efficiently and enables single-step inference. We integrate $\Delta$-flow into the VLA policy $\pi_{0.5}$ and the WAM policies ImageWAM and Fast-WAM. On LIBERO, ImageWAM reaches 90% success in one epoch rather than six, and Fast-WAM reaches 95% in two epochs rather

arXiv:2610.15769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human demonstrations can capture task-relevant manipulation without using the target robot, but the recorded hand motions cannot directly serve as robot action supervision. Hand reconstruction and motion retargeting provide a direct route to such supervision, yet recovering hand motion alone does not ensure physically consistent hand-object interactions. To address this issue, we introduce Hand2Robot, an object-centric 4D hand reconstruction framework for robot policy post-training. Given videos of humans performing the target task, Hand2Robot extracts interaction clips, reconstructs object geometry, and generates robot action supervision through hand-object interaction optimization and motion retargeting. For object tracking, we combine observation confidence with temporal motion constraints to select a globally consistent object pose trajectory from per-frame pose candidates. For hand refinement, we use object geometry and motion as a r

arXiv:2610.15766v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and vision--language--action models have provided robots with new capabilities for long-horizon task understanding and planning. In surgical robotics, however, end-to-end prediction of low-level actions remains limited by insufficient precision, opaque decisions, and scarce data. This paper presents SurgiCLAW, a hierarchical skill-based framework for precision surgical manipulation. SurgiCLAW confines an MLLM to intraoperative visual understanding, structured explanation, and atomic surgical-skill selection, while delegating physical execution to verifiable deterministic control programs. For brain--machine-interface implantation, a representative high-precision surgical task, we construct a state-to-skill invocation dataset and expand it through visual and state perturbations. The model first learns structured skill invocation through supervised fine-tuning and is then optimized using three

arXiv:2610.15763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern industrial automation demands autonomous collaborative systems capable of coordinated manipulation in workspaces with heterogeneous object arrangements. Existing systems rely on predetermined trajectories and rigid allocation strategies, causing suboptimal workspace utilization and collision risks. This paper presents a distance-based competitive task allocation framework for dual-arm systems, integrating real-time vision perception with collision-free motion planning. A temporal window mechanism enables each arm to evaluate object detections over five consecutive vision frames before committing to optimal distance-based selection, featuring dynamic reallocation and spatial conflict resolution at 0.01m threshold accuracy. An improved Artificial Potential Field (iAPF) framework provides coordinated dual-arm movements through exponential goal attraction, inter-arm repulsion, home-seeking, and velocity damping forces. Simulation resul

arXiv:2610.15756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Yoshikawa's Manipulability Index is generally used as a classical measure to define an optimal morphology of a manipulator. However, any such optimization is almost always studied as a purely kinematic quantity in simulation and is rarely validated on hardware. We present a reinforcement-learning framework with RSL-RL PPO that optimizes the morphology of a 2R SCARA-type manipulator arm with Yoshikawa's kinematic manipulability index as a core reward, and the analytically derived closed-form optimum for the circular task is used to verify that our method recovers it. Then the same method is applied to custom elliptical and rectangular paths having no analytical optimum. The RL-optimized morphologies are then transferred to a 2R hardware manipulator to validate its effect in reduction of joint load in the hardware. Compared to the worst morphology, the optimum morphology delivered by our method reduces second joint load by 38.4 +/- 0.6% for

arXiv:2610.15747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trailer sway is a persistent contributor to severe crashes among light passenger vehicles towing trailers, yet it remains largely unaddressed by the autonomous vehicle systems now entering this new era of automation. Improper cargo placement rearward of the trailer axle reduces, and can invert, the tongue load transmitted through the hitch. The resulting loss of vertical load at the tow vehicle's rear axle diminishes the lateral tire force available there and degrades yaw stability of the coupled system, admitting a divergent lateral oscillation of the trailer known as trailer sway. Under adverse combinations of speed and loading, this oscillation can progress to jackknifing, in which the articulation angle diverges rapidly and directional control is lost. This work develops a linear state-space model of the yaw-plane dynamics of a light vehicle-trailer combination, parameterized to expose tongue load as an explicit stability-determining

arXiv:2610.15740v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Launching a micro unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) from a hovering carrier and recovering it in flight requires reliable confirmation that the child is securely seated before the carrier is allowed to descend. This is challenging because vision provides relative guidance but does not directly indicate load transfer, and a downward-facing camera can lose its fiducial near touchdown. This letter presents a mothership-child quadrotor system in which mission transitions are gated by complementary nonvisual sensing. An upward-facing single-beam LiDAR on the recovery deck provides a binary occupancy state using hysteresis and a debounce interval derived from the child's occluding footprint and crossing speed; real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning conditions the carrier hover; and carrier thrust provides a proprioceptive indication of load transfer. In ten outdoor missions using an F450-class mothership and a Q250-class child with camera-guided rec

arXiv:2610.15739v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A deterministic method for the problem of distributed area coverage path planning subject to the inclusion of a headland path is presented. Given a, in general, non-convex area to be covered that may, in general, include obstacle areas, multiple robots, at least one robot depot, and constraints on each machinery such as a working width, work capacity limits, travel capacity limits, nonholonomic dynamical constraints and, possibly, a robot start and end depot assignment, distributed paths for each machinery are calculated that collectively enable full area coverage. Variations are discussed, in particular, a scenario where unconstrained depots assignment can attain a global optimal solution to the problem. The importance of inclusion of a headland path for area coverage, as well as the benefits in comparison to an alternative Boustrophedon-pattern based approach are highlighted.

arXiv:2610.15735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a geometry-aware predictive control framework for bipedal obstacle crossing across walking and running regimes. The proposed approach integrates a phase-structured trajectory generator with a constrained model predictive control (MPC) tracking layer to generate coordinated pelvis and swing-foot motions during obstacle traversal. The crossing process is represented through five interpretable phases: pre-crossing, leading-leg clearance, straddle, trailing-leg clearance, and recovery. Within this structure, swing-foot elevation is adapted as a function of obstacle height, while lateral stance widening and pelvis repositioning are introduced as functions of obstacle depth to improve transverse clearance and body alignment. A continuous gait-parameter evolution enables smooth walk-to-run transition without discrete controller switching. The generated references are tracked using MPC to regulate motion smoothness, clearance

arXiv:2610.15639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon robotic manipulation is inherently composed of semantically meaningful sub-tasks. While Movement Primitives (MPs) can model these components, their composition typically relies on manual engineering or sample-inefficient reinforcement learning. Existing supervised methods are limited by the lack of MP labels in standard datasets and often fail to generalize across discrete and rhythmic movements. We propose Neural Dynamic Composition (NDC), a supervised framework to compose Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMPs) using only raw trajectories for supervision, given a single example of each primitive. Our approach exploits parallel combinations of DMPs as a differentiable relaxation of categorical primitive selection, and utilizes a warp-invariant loss formulation to identify primitives despite spatial or temporal variations. A staged training curriculum is employed to learn the selection policy and DMP parameters, unifying discrete

arXiv:2610.15585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs), often built upon pretrained video-generation world models, have emerged as a promising framework for general-purpose and open-ended robot control. However, their real-world deployment often suffers from discontinuous and jerky execution. Existing methods typically address this issue by either improving inference efficiency or enhancing action continuity across prediction chunks, without jointly addressing both challenges. To bridge this gap, we propose StreamingWAM, a streaming-diffusion framework for WAM-based robot control. StreamingWAM combines a noise ladder for chunk-wise action prediction, a prefix rollout module for cross-chunk continuity, and dense video-history memory for temporally consistent conditioning. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, RoboTwin 2.0, and real-world robotic tasks demonstrate that StreamingWAM improves action continuity across static and dynamic settings, achieving competitive perf

arXiv:2610.15572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-world mobile manipulation requires a robot to find an object, approach it, and move it to a target receptacle from a language instruction. Training vision-language model (VLM) agents for these tasks requires demonstrations of both action selection and active vision. Existing pipelines often convert planned trajectories into high-level action labels, but shortest-path progress provides limited supervision for deciding where to look. We introduce Agent-Interface Data Alignment (AIDA), a data collection pipeline in which a teacher directly selects and executes actions through the deployed agent's skill interface. For mobile manipulation, we design teachers that maintain target visibility, recover lost targets, and approach for picking or placing. We add template-based spatial reasoning supervision and use a shared harness to organize observations, history, and outputs during training and inference. The resulting agent, AIDA-OWMM, achiev