News & Research

arXiv:2606.31497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cloud-hosted foundation models enable robots to use semantic reasoning beyond onboard computational limits. In this setting, the robot executes a currently available primitive generated by the cloud, and continued task progress requires the next cloud result before this primitive is exhausted. This execution becomes fragile under spatially heterogeneous connectivity, because the current primitive determines when the next result is needed, whereas the wireless environment determines where the next request can be submitted and where the response can be retrieved. Strategies that reduce latency or improve individual transmissions can shorten this dependency, but they do not determine a submission location that supports reliable upload and leaves a feasible opportunity for response retrieval. To address this problem, we introduce the request--response window, which characterizes the time required for the next cloud cycle, including uplink tra

arXiv:2606.31494v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans and animals exhibit remarkable robustness in physical manipulation, yet robots remain far behind. Progress toward human-level manipulation robustness is hindered by the absence of a unified and systematic understanding: different subfields frame robustness in distinct ways, often leaving the concept ambiguous and limiting deeper analysis as well as communication across research areas. This paper presents a systematic study of manipulation robustness. We begin with a formal definition, characterizing robustness as the degree to which a manipulation system can achieve its goal in the presence of uncertainty and variation. Building on this definition, we introduce general formulations of manipulation robustness from probabilistic and control-theoretic perspectives. We then synthesize the guiding principles and concrete mechanisms of manipulation robustness across perception, planning, control, policy learning, and hardware, illustrati

arXiv:2606.31493v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visual signals play a crucial role in policy learning by enabling models to capture object motion and interaction dynamics. Just as humans reason about actions using both past experience and anticipated outcomes, effective policies should integrate past interactions with future predictions. However, existing visuomotor policies typically model either historical context or future dynamics in isolation, lacking a unified temporal representation of interaction dynamics. In this work, we introduce ChronoFlow, a temporally unified representation that captures past, current, and future interaction dynamics through sparse 3D keypoints of both objects and the gripper. Based on this representation, we propose ChronoFlow-Policy, a diffusion-based visuomotor policy that jointly learns ChronoFlow and action sequences through a co-training objective. Experiments on 14 simulated tasks and 5 real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that ChronoFlow-

arXiv:2606.31487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Due to the limited endurance of embedded energy sources such as lithium-polymer (LiPo) batteries, the flight duration and operational range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are severely constrained. Although energy-efficient trajectory planning and control have been widely studied, most existing approaches rely on accurate system models and computationally expensive optimization procedures. This paper proposes a model-free online iterative learning (IL) framework to minimize energy consumption. Without requiring explicit models of UAV dynamics or energy consumption, the proposed method improves energy efficiency while maintaining a low computational cost. The per-iteration computational complexity is O(n), where n denotes the number of path points. In the tested cases, the proposed method is approximately 50--60 times faster than the model-based IPOPT benchmark. Simulation results and real-world flight experiments across multiple UAV pl

arXiv:2606.31377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning for long-horizon robotic manipulation is often limited by sparse and delayed rewards, while manually designing dense shaping signals is costly and brittle to changes in environments and object configurations. This work proposes Stage-Transition Dense Reward (STDR), a visual reward-learning framework that converts unstructured expert videos into logically grounded dense rewards for training RL agents from scratch. STDR leverages semantic understanding to infer a task's stage structure from demonstrations, and delivers two complementary learning signals during online training: (i) stage-transition feedback that provides goal-directed reward, and (ii) within-stage progress feedback that supplies fine-grained guidance toward completing each stage. Furthermore, an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection mechanism and a grasping regulation module are integrated to enhance robustness and prevent reward hacking. Experiments on

arXiv:2606.31339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic artificial intelligence is increasingly used to decompose industrial tasks, propose robot actions, and adapt execution plans in dynamic cyber-physical environments. However, autonomous proposal generation alone does not guarantee that multi-robot industrial systems preserve task dependencies, resource ownership, safety holds, or repair boundaries during long-horizon execution. This paper introduces a verification-gated agentic mission-state governance framework for intelligent industrial multi-robot systems. The framework maintains two synchronized state objects: an evolving task forest for persistent hierarchy, delayed grounding, and repairable substructures; and a governed blackboard for online execution state, robot traces, resource locks, world beliefs, proposals, verification records, and scene-temporary constraints. From each forest--blackboard snapshot, a derived execution coupling topology exposes cross-branch dependencies

arXiv:2606.31329v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models decouple high-level planning from low-level control to improve generalization in robot manipulation. Recent work in this paradigm uses 2D end-effector trajectories predicted by a Vision-Language Model (VLM) as explicit guidance for a downstream policy. However, state-of-the-art low-level policies operate in 3D metric space on point clouds, and feeding them 2D guidance that lacks depth forces each waypoint to be assigned the depth of whatever scene surface lies beneath it, producing geometrically distorted trajectories. We propose 3D HAMSTER, a hierarchical framework that closes this gap by having the planner directly output metrically reliable 3D trajectories. We augment a VLM with a dedicated depth encoder and a dense depth reconstruction objective to predict 3D waypoint sequences, which are directly integrated into a pointcloudbased low-level policy. Across 3D trajectory prediction, s

arXiv:2606.31260v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied task planning asks an agent to turn a natural-language instruction into an executable sequence of actions in a physical scene, and is a building block for household, assistive, and service robots. Recent prompting-based and reinforcement-learning planners generate fluent action text but lack a cheap deterministic check that the produced plan is valid in the target world, while high-fidelity simulation is too slow to serve as an inner-loop training signal. The general problem is therefore how to obtain verifiable supervision and rewards for embodied planners without relying on string-level matching or full simulation. Here we show that a single BDDL specification, automatically constructed from open-world video evidence or curated tasks, can serve as a shared interface for data construction, plan verification, and reward design. A video-to-BDDL parser, an LLM verifier, and a lightweight symbolic engine together supply dense feedba

arXiv:2606.31236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tactile sensors provide critical information for contact-rich manipulation, yet tactile representations and policies remain tightly coupled to each specific sensor, limiting transferability across robots and hardware platforms. We propose TactX, a framework for learning a transferable tactile representation across sensors spanning three fundamentally different transduction modalities: resistive, magnetic, and vision-based. TactX maps heterogeneous tactile observations into a shared latent space through modality-specific encoders trained on paired contact data. Such paired interactions provide a natural alignment signal across modalities, and the encoders are jointly trained across all sensor pairs, inducing a consistent latent space for all sensor types. Our experiments show that TactX aligns tactile representations across sensors while preserving object-level contact information, as evidenced by sensor-identity prediction and object clas

arXiv:2606.31197v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate 4D trajectory prediction and closed-loop tracking are essential for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms to achieve safe and efficient operations in complex low-altitude environments such as urban airspaces, industrial sites, and indoor facilities. However, this task remains challenging due to intrinsic nonlinearity of UAV swarm dynamics and strict real-time constraints of swarm formation control. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework that couples coarse-to-fine trajectory forecasting with uncertainty-aware Distributed Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (DNMPC). Our approach features two key innovations: 1) a dimension-decoupled trajectory prediction module that reduces computational complexity by forecasting axis-wise motion, and 2) a diffusion-based residual dynamics refinement module that captures temporally correlated dynamic uncertainties. These refined predictions are then integrated into a DNMPC loop

arXiv:2606.31167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: VLA models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for transferring semantic knowledge from web-scale data to physical robotic control. However, current single-frame architectures suffer from intrinsic limitations: temporal myopia that discards historical dynamics, reasoning gaps between high-level instructions and low-level motor commands, and inference inefficiency due to autoregressive scalar decoding. In this work, we propose MIRTH, a unified framework designed to address these challenges. MIRTH augments a pretrained VLA backbone with three key innovations: (1) dual-scale temporal memory hubs that compress long-term scene evolution and short-term motion trends into compact embeddings; (2) latent reasoning tokens optimized via a mutual-information objective carving out a semantic plan space to align multimodal context with action trajectories; and (3) a parallel action decoding scheme that replaces autoregressive generation with vector-wis

arXiv:2606.31158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The quest for intuitive and natural human-robot interaction (HRI) remains a significant challenge in robotics. Traditional methods often rely on rigid, pre-programmed commands that limit the robot's expressiveness and adaptability. This paper introduces a novel framework that leverages the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to synthesize complex robotic actions from a rich tapestry of multimodal human inputs: natural speech, hand gestures, and music/sound beats. Our system architecture integrates a speech transcription model, a gesture recognition module, and a signal processing pipeline for beat detection. These processed inputs are contextualized using prompt templates and fed into a LLM. The LLM, informed by a predefined robot action space, reasons over the combined inputs to generate a coherent sequence of actions. This sequence is dispatched to an action queue for execution on a quadruped robot over ROS. The frame

arXiv:2606.31144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents an integrated system for the CMU Vision-Language-Action (VLA) Challenge, designed to enable an autonomous agent to perform complex tasks based on natural language instructions. Our framework employs a modular architecture that orchestrates environment mapping, question processing, and navigation. The system operates in two parallel streams: a perception pipeline that constructs a semantic voxel map from real-time camera feeds using OwlViT embeddings, and a language pipeline that classifies user commands with a Vision-Language Model. The mapping is time-constrained; the system proceeds with a partial map if a 500-second exploration limit is reached. The classified query is then grounded in the geometric and semantic context of the map to generate a detailed prompt for the VLM. This yields an actionable output, demonstrating a capable solution for bridging the gap between human language and robotic action.

arXiv:2606.31132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative control policies (GCPs), such as diffusion policies and flow-based vision-language-action models, enable test-time scaling in robot control. Test-time compute can be allocated along two axes: sequential scaling, which increases denoising steps to refine actions, and parallel scaling, which samples multiple candidate actions to search across modes of the policy distribution. However, the optimal allocation of sequential and parallel compute is hard to know a priori as it is state-, task-, and policy-dependent. For example, early stages of a grasp may benefit from broader parallel exploration, while near-contact phases may require more sequential refinement for precision. We present ELASTIC, an algorithm that learns state-dependent test-time compute schedules for GCPs. We formulate compute allocation as a meta-Markov Decision Process in which a meta-policy interacts with a frozen pretrained robot policy and selects sequential ste

arXiv:2606.31101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bridging the sim-to-real gap is a core challenge in deploying learned manipulation policies. Sim-to-real learning is attractive because it can replace expensive real robot demonstrations with scalable synthetic data, yet world-action models have not previously been shown to transfer from simulation to real robotic manipulation. We study whether a world-action model can be trained from synthetic priors and deployed zero-shot in the real world. To this end, we build upon Cosmos Policy, a video diffusion model adapted for visuomotor control. We construct simulation environments with extensive domain randomization and generate demonstrations using the AnyTask motion planning pipeline. We evaluate our approach across object lifting, drawer opening, and pick-and-place tasks using ${\sim}800$ synthetic demonstrations per task and no real demonstrations. When deployed zero-shot on a Franka Robot, our policy attains a 35\% average success rate. To