News & Research

arXiv:2610.15563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soft wearable robots must commit to assistance around movement onset, when the available signals are ambiguous. Surface electromyography (sEMG) detects neuromuscular drive early but degrades under sweat and electrode shift, and kinematic sensors respond only once the limb moves. This letter presents a knitted textile interface that co-samples a three-channel mechanomyography (MMG) array and an anterior strain sensor on a single synchronous 500 Hz clock. Across five participants, MMG activation preceded strain-detected knee motion during sit-to-stand by per-channel medians of 322-344 ms. Sampled on the same clock, the sign of the strain slope resolved movement direction on 649 of 650 completed transitions with no training or per-participant calibration, raising four-class balanced accuracy from 90.3% to 95.6%. The fused signals drove a two-stage confirm-then-assist policy for a soft pneumatic knee. Across 240 trials in four participants, t

arXiv:2610.15560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing navigation systems commonly rely on dedicated depth sensors or explicit depth reconstruction, while learning to generate trajectories directly from RGB images remains challenging due to the sim-to-real domain gap. In this work, we propose Stereo-Planner, an end-to-end vision-to-trajectory framework that enables zero-shot sim-to-real planning from stereo RGB observations. The key idea is to formulate trajectory generation as state- and scale-conditioned querying of latent stereo geometry. A Scene Representor incorporates a pretrained vision grounding foundation model to extract geometric cues shared across simulated and real-world environments, supporting generalization across visual domains. A lightweight Trajectory Decoder then translates these representations into trajectories through interleaved attention, separating trajectory-state interaction from scene-feature retrieval and incorporating the stereo baseline as a metric-sca

arXiv:2610.15558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual self-modelling lets robots learn body models from observations, but such models usually encode kinematics implicitly rather than exposing metric joint parameters for computation and control. Moreover, a good fit to images does not by itself establish accurate kinematics. Here we present an explicit analytic robot self-model that requires neither deformation networks nor URDF/CAD templates. Multi-view images and joint readings establish Gaussian appearance and provide motion evidence for rigid link assignments, whereas sparse end-effector poses independently identify metric screw axes. The resulting closed-form forward kinematics and analytic Jacobian can be evaluated beyond the fitting ranges. We validate the model on a simulated seven-axis arm, a simulated twelve-joint quadruped and a real six-axis arm. In simulation, it achieves millimetre-level reaching and pick-and-place, as well as closed-loop quadruped walking. On the real ar

arXiv:2610.15548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quadruped robots deployed for inspection and field missions must cross heterogeneous terrain, from stairs, slopes, and gaps to high platforms, stepping stones, and balance beams, where safe support is sparse or see-through. Existing methods interpose a terrain map or a depth image between sensing and control. Maps are costly to maintain, corrupted by odometry drift and outliers, and misled by see-through gratings, while depth cameras degrade with lighting and surface material. In this paper, we present PointWalker, a mapless framework whose single reinforcement learning policy directly consumes raw point clouds from four light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors. Voxelized points are encoded by linear self-attention and fused with proprioception through cross-attention, so terrain geometry reaches the policy without maps or foothold estimation. One proximal policy optimization (PPO) run, with terrain-aware rewards and dual-channel simul

arXiv:2610.15522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Camera-based occupancy prediction provides geometric and semantic scene understanding for robot perception and has been adopted in autonomous vehicle and UAV perception systems. Gaussian primitives offer a promising alternative by potentially representing only occupied regions, thereby concentrating computation and representational capacity where needed and reducing wasted computation and memory in empty space. However, existing Gaussian-based methods suffer from poor primitive utilization, as ineffective training objectives leave some Gaussians in empty space, while the limited expressiveness of Gaussian functions restricts their ability to model complex shapes. To address these limitations, we propose a novel 3D representation, Gaussian Neural Field (GNF), which can accurately map voxel positions to semantic occupancies. In GNF, Gaussians and a neural network jointly parameterize the field, where the Gaussians define its spatial support

arXiv:2610.15486v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic systems for lunar surface operations must act autonomously and preserve their own integrity in an environment where failures are unrecoverable and continuous supervision is impossible. This paper presents a Constrained Reinforcement Learning framework for quadrupedal mobile manipulators that learns a single whole-body policy for tracking a 6D end-effector pose specified in task space, with operational limits enforced during learning through a constrained learning mechanism. We introduce a reward formulation in which the transition between locomotion and manipulation emerges from the reward geometry rather than from an explicit gating mechanism, a stability term derived from the Gravito-Inertial Inclination Margin and motivated by the reduced-gravity dynamics of the lunar surface, and a design rule for reward regularization that follows from the multiplicative structure of the termination-based objective. The framework is evaluated

arXiv:2610.15425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In embodied manipulation, Vision Language Action (VLA) models can execute atomic skills, but long-horizon manipulation requires recombining these skills without demonstrations for every skill combination. The full instruction route treats skill chaining as long-horizon imitation. In a controlled study, full instruction training on limited skill combination sequences reaches 40.0% ordered success on covered combinations but only 7.7% on recombination, suggesting memorization of sequence templates rather than robust skill recombination. We introduce Hierarchical Subtask Execution (HSE), a diagnostic framework that exposes skill recombination through a shared modular interface over the planner, trigger, and policy, decomposing long-horizon failures into separable modes. We introduce RoboCombine, a benchmark for skill recombination without combined skill training trajectories, with metrics for ordered success and transition conversion across

arXiv:2610.15422v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Haptic shared control in surgical robotics combines human-side and robot-side forces at a shared end effector while preserving operator involvement. However, the effects of geometric safety choices on task execution and force coordination remain unclear. We model the interaction as a two-agent cooperative Markov game under centralized training and decentralized execution, comparing learned human control with a task-tuned fixed-impedance baseline. This model-free multi-agent reinforcement learning framework supports joint policy adaptation without requiring a complete analytical interaction model. It compares MADDPG and rMAPPO with an epigraph-constrained approach under common geometric task definitions. In simulation, rMAPPO generally achieved the highest return and tracking performance, whereas the epigraph approach produced more conservative motions and lower geometric exposure, including no observed collision or dangerous-region exposu

arXiv:2610.15362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Object Navigation in unseen environments remains a fundamental challenge in embodied AI, as it requires agents to generalize visual and spatial reasoning to novel layouts. While recent advances in large language model (LLM) and vision-language model (VLM) have enhanced semantic mapping, spatial memory, and waypoint selecting for navigation, successful navigation requires more than selecting the next promising waypoint. A robot must also recognize stalled progress, escape unproductive behaviors, and revisit overlooked target cues. Addressing these challenges requires both specialized navigation strategies and a high-level policy that coordinates their execution. Motivated by the analysis of failed navigation episodes, we propose LERR-Nav, an object navigation framework that coordinates exploration, recovery, and reminiscing through a learned high-level policy. The framework comprises four complementary navigation strategies: value-function

arXiv:2610.15308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Combining aerial robots with soft continuum manipulators promises safe, compliant interaction with the environment, but the coupled dynamics of a free-flying base and a highly deformable, underactuated arm are difficult to study without a suitable simulator. This paper describes an open-source simulation framework, built on the MuJoCo physics engine, for a quadrotor that carries a tendon-driven soft continuum arm underneath its body. The arm is modelled as a pseudo-rigid-body chain of twelve segments joined by pairs of orthogonal compliant hinges. Three tendons, spaced \SI{120}{\degree} apart and routed through every segment, bend it in any direction. A geometric tracking controller on $SE(3)$ flies the vehicle; its rotor allocation matrix is generated directly from the model description. A closed-form tendon-tension allocation keeps every tension within its limits and gives the same bending moment in every direction. We report the full s

arXiv:2610.15305v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) improve robotic manipulation by jointly predicting future visual states and actions, yet most existing methods make decisions primarily from the current observation. This limits their reliability in long-horizon tasks, where visually similar states may correspond to different interaction histories and task stages. Moreover, directly incorporating historical observations can introduce stale, stage-mismatched, or error-contaminated information, leading to inaccurate world prediction and accumulated closed-loop errors. We propose RM-WAM, a reliable memory-augmented World Action Model that treats memory as a context-dependent predictive resource rather than universally useful historical context. RM-WAM represents history using complementary short-term visual state memory and latent event memory, which respectively capture recent interaction dynamics and longer-term state transitions. A counterfactual memory learning

arXiv:2610.15294v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating robot manipulation policies through repeated physical trials is costly. We study whether an action-conditioned world model can serve as a closed-loop test environment whose policy success rates track those on real robots. Beyond realistic video, the model must return the camera views and proprioceptive state needed for the policy's next action and preserve failed-action outcomes to avoid overestimating policy capability. We introduce ProWorld, a world model that jointly predicts multi-view video and robot state, then feeds both back to a frozen policy for repeated interaction. ProWorld comprises a shared transformer for joint video-state flow prediction and Shared-Time View Encoding to distinguish cameras while preserving temporal synchronization. To reduce interaction hallucinations that turn missed grasps into successful lifts, we augment training with failed interactions collected in high-fidelity simulation, reducing inflat

arXiv:2610.15274v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training humanoid robots to learn human behaviors requires expensive data collection, and human-robot interaction data can be even more difficult and costly to collect. Training a specialized reaction model for each humanoid embodiment can also be time-consuming and resource-intensive. Human-to-humanoid motion retargeting provides a more scalable alternative, allowing human-human reaction data to serve as a common motion representation for different humanoid embodiments. However, due to morphological and kinematic differences between humans and humanoid robots, a reaction preferred in human motion space may not be the most suitable one for execution on a particular robot embodiment. In this work, we propose an inference-time reaction search framework that leverages stochastic sampling from a generative reaction model and jointly considers reaction quality and humanoid embodiment feasibility. Given the observed interaction, our framework g

arXiv:2610.15237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) have been increasingly deployed to perform different kinds of maritime tasks in recent years, which motivates the need for a reliable task allocation policy that can adapt to heterogeneous tasks and maritime disturbances. In this work, we formulate a multi-robot task allocation problem in which a team of ASVs with heterogeneous capabilities needs to complete tasks of different types and appearance times under unknown stochastic spatio-temporal uncertainties from maritime disturbances. We propose a decentralized Reinforcement Learning (RL) based policy network that is trained to be robust towards uncertainty-induced observation deviations, and is able to perform individual decision making that leads to efficient execution behaviors toward heterogeneous task requirements. We evaluate the proposed policy and four baseline methods in simulated experiments with varied proportions of different tasks types, num

arXiv:2610.15215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Nearest-neighbor (NN) search underlies countless robotics algorithms, but many state spaces are not Euclidean: orientations live on $SO(2)$ or $SO(3)$ and poses on $SE(2)$ or $SE(3)$, and a Euclidean KD-tree on their raw coordinates returns wrong neighbors. We present a header-only, dependency-free C++ KD-tree library for exact NN search on user-defined product manifolds declared at compile time: the space is composed from base manifolds ($\mathbb{R}^n$, $SO(2)$, $SO(3)$, $S^n$; products $SE(2)$, $SE(3)$, tori) with a single type alias, and the library synthesizes a metric whose pruning is provably admissible, wrap-aware for circular coordinates and double-cover-aware for unit quaternions. Experiments confirm exactness (recall $1.0$ vs an exhaustive scan under the same product metric), where the Euclidean-on-raw shortcut collapses to recall $\approx 0.5^{m}$ for $m$ rotation blocks, with up to three orders of magnitude speedup over brute