News & Research

arXiv:2609.08678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In multi-party human-robot interaction, a robot must continuously decide whom to address and what to say to participate effectively in the conversation. In real-world interactions, this is challenging because several behaviours may be plausible at the same time: a robot might continue a topic with one participant, involve another through a question, or address the whole group, with the appropriate choice depending on both whom it addresses and the interaction context. Current approaches remain limited in representing uncertainty when several behaviours are plausible and in structuring decisions into semantically meaningful intermediate steps that make robot decisions easier to interpret. Addressing these, we present HiBRIDGE, a hierarchical Bayesian neural network framework for group-robot dialogue management. Its Bayesian formulation enables uncertainty-aware prediction and robust learning from limited interaction data, while the hierarc

arXiv:2609.08673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in tactile sensing have made contact-rich perception possible, accelerating progress in robotic manipulation, material understanding, and embodied interaction. However, because optical design, elastomer mechanics, and imaging geometry differ substantially across tactile sensors, models trained on known sensor types can suffer an abrupt performance collapse on unknown sensors. To address this problem, we propose the Brain-Inspired Few-Shot Tactile Adaptation (BIFTA) framework; it draws on the brain's rapid sensory adaptation mechanism to adapt a frozen encoder to an unknown tactile sensor from a small labeled support set. BIFTA preserves pretrained representations through dual-view statistical memory, constructs support-conditioned spectral graphs to repair sensor-dependent feature neighborhoods, and applies uncertainty-gated recurrent propagation to strengthen reliable cross-query evidence. Extensive benchmarks across three tacti

arXiv:2609.08669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic construction offers the potential to use materials more efficiently and create complex geometries, but current methods rely on rigid, high-precision plans that cannot accommodate the tolerances, inaccuracies, and unexpected changes inherent in physical fabrication. In this work, we introduce a reinforcement learning approach that forgoes predefined plans entirely, instead generating construction sequences adaptively as the structure is built. Our method operates on graph-structured state representations and a mixed (parameterized) action space, requiring both discrete block selection and continuous placement parameters. Because the stability simulation of a structure is computationally heavy, we develop an efficient exploration strategy by incorporating unilateral edges into graph neural networks, extending soft actor-critic (SAC) to this hybrid setting. We evaluate our algorithm, HSAC, against the prior method hybrid-PPO (HPPO),

arXiv:2609.08638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An action chunk can span several stages of a manipulation task, yet a label for its first step describes only the current stage. We introduce Chunk-Aligned Semantic Distillation (CASD), which derives semantic targets for entire action chunks. An offline vision--language model segments demonstrations into described stages. Their occupancy within each action chunk determines a weighted semantic target, including transitions between stages. A CASD generator learns to predict this target from the current observation, robot state, and task instruction. We then freeze the generator and train a policy conditioned on its predictions. The semantic branch runs once per policy query, without online VLM calls or reasoning-trace decoding. Teacher matching on annotated LIBERO training episodes is above chance for both single-stage and boundary-crossing chunks. We evaluate three Fast-WAM variants and a DreamZero integration across four benchmarks, inclu

arXiv:2609.08626v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) method using a monocular camera and a low-cost inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor is an effective way to fulfill a low-cost sensor configuration. Using this sensor configuration, visual-inertial system (VINS) focuses on fusing data from a camera and an IMU sensor to estimate the six degrees-of-freedom (DOF) of the sensor pose. Typically, VINS uses only a single camera as visual input, which lead to problems such as error accumulation due to occlusion, various illumination, and textureless environments. In this paper, we propose a new multiple fisheye camera-based visual-inertial system called MFVINS. We present an IMU-aided FAST feature tracker for multiple cameras that enables efficient extraction and robust matching of local features. Then, the proposed method filters out outliers caused by fisheye distortion on the normalized image plane. Subsequently, a new reprojection error with phy

arXiv:2609.08512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous exploration on uneven terrain requires ground robots to balance exploration efficiency, coverage completeness, and terrain safety. Detailed tsrrain reasoning improves local reliability but can slow large-scale exploration, whereas coarse region guidance expands quickly in open areas but can miss narrow passages and irregular traversable boundaries. To address this challenge, this paper presents TASG-Explore, a traversability-aware sector-guided exploration framework for ground robots. The framework first performs hierarchical traversability analysis using variable-voxel ground fitting and adaptive 8-bit obstacle encoding. It then splitting cost map into sectors, incrementally updates sector clusters, extracts terrain-coupled frontier viewpoints, and maintains a dynamic topological roadmap with unknown topological hypotheses. Finally, a sector-guided planner selects region targets and inserts local viewpoints to generate efficie

arXiv:2609.08511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid motion trackers can reproduce diverse whole-body motions, but their performance degrades on complex terrain where terrain-agnostic references become physically infeasible. We present PGMT, a Perceptive General Motion Tracking pipeline for humanoid robots that learns terrain adaptation from independently selected motion references and terrains. PGMT first learns a general tracking and recovery prior, then incorporates terrain perception through motion-conditioned terrain glimpses that selectively encode regions relevant to the current motion. Terrain-aware tracking relaxation allows necessary deviations from the reference while preserving its motion intent. Zero-shot deployment on a Unitree G1 demonstrates robust terrain-adaptive locomotion and whole-body motion execution over real-world terrain with obstacles up to 37 cm high, while supporting teleoperation, dynamic motion tracking, and fall recovery. PGMT extends general humanoi

arXiv:2609.08493v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Observing objects grasped by a robot hand is challenging due to severe visual occlusions. Although in-hand manipulation can expose hidden surfaces, existing approaches often rely on predefined or open-loop reorientation strategies that do not explicitly target under-observed regions. We propose AURORA, an active 3D reconstruction framework that closes the loop between online object-centric reconstruction and in-hand reorientation. At its core, Ray-GPIS estimates direction-wise reconstruction uncertainty along candidate viewing rays and selects next-best-view targets using an uncertainty--novelty objective, which are realized through an axis-conditioned in-hand rotation policy. The resulting RGB-D observations are fused incrementally using CAD-free 6D pose tracking and lightweight geometric reconstruction. Experiments demonstrate that AURORA improves reconstruction quality and information-acquisition efficiency over non-active rotation str

arXiv:2609.08490v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a soft robotic drummer for accurate and efficient drum rolls. High-frequency drum rolls require the "multi-bounce technique," where a drumstick bounces multiple times with a single stroke. In robotic reproduction of this technique, the body's elasticity is key, while the fine motion during the stroke is also crucial for maximizing the potential of that elasticity. Therefore, we design two tricks: i) Tap-Pull (TP) trick to increase the number of rebounds by adding a pulling motion after impact; and ii) Micro-Pulse (MP) trick to keep the drumming volume by injecting small oscillations during the stroke. Due to the nonlinear complexity of soft embodiment, both tricks are efficiently tuned using Bayesian optimization in a data-driven manner for accomplishing the respective objectives quantified. We evaluated the optimized behaviors with soft and rigid end-effectors. As a result, the soft TP achieved the highest bounce coun

arXiv:2609.08409v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Surface coverage with task-redundant manipulators is challenging because each surface point may admit multiple inverse kinematics (IK) solutions, and configuration choices strongly affect motion quality. This paper extends the classical Spanning Tree Coverage (STC) method to redundant manipulators through offline and online Joint Spanning Tree Coverage (JSTC) algorithms. Offline JSTC samples multiple Inverse Kinematics (IK) solutions per grid cell and formulates the problem as a Generalized Minimum Spanning Tree (GMST), selecting one configuration per cell and tracing the resulting tree to obtain a non-revisiting coverage path. Online JSTC incrementally expands and backtracks a spanning tree with feasibility and cost evaluation while handling dynamic grid updates. Simulation results show that offline JSTC reduces computation time, reconfigurations, and joint motion compared to other methods, while online JSTC achieves fast per-step planni

arXiv:2609.08408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Focusing on spatially localized, control-relevant visual cues has been shown to improve data efficiency in visuomotor policies by reducing the need to model task-irrelevant visual variation. Existing methods often impose this focus through input preprocessing, such as cropping control- or object-centric regions in RGB images or point-clouds. However, it remains underexplored whether such localized features can be exposed directly from commonly used convolutional neural network (CNN) encoded features. In this paper, we show that intermediate CNN features preserve localized visual context for control, but existing pooling methods fail to aggregate it effectively. We introduce FocusPool, an attention pooling module that selectively aggregates intermediate visual features according to their relevance to the robot's current proprioceptive context. The resulting pooled representation captures task-progressive, control-relevant local information

arXiv:2609.08339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bimanual manipulation policies require large and diverse training datasets, yet collecting demonstrations on physical robots is expensive and difficult to scale. Simulation can generate data efficiently, but existing pipelines typically operate within closed asset libraries and predefined scenes: adding a newly observed object or environment still requires substantial effort to reconstruct geometry, specify physical and semantic properties, annotate interactions, and integrate the result into executable tasks. We present RoboCousin, an extensible simulation-based data-generation platform that turns user-provided observations into reusable assets, scenes, and expert trajectories for bimanual manipulation. Built on RoboTwin~2.0, RoboCousin converts object images into simulation-ready assets with visual and collision geometry, semantic and physical metadata, and automatically generated grasp-contact candidates. It further constructs digital

arXiv:2609.08280v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In multi-robot collaboration, task handovers rely on downstream verifiers performing remote attestation, which inspects sensor telemetry to ensure a robot's physical behavior strictly matches its assigned task. But can this telemetry be trusted? We show that it often cannot. In this paper, we uncover a severe vulnerability in Robot Operating System (ROS) 2: by modifying a single environment variable, an adversary can execute a pre-built hook to covertly intercept and inject both telemetry and control signals before they are published. Consequently, adversaries can hijack a robot to perform dangerous tasks while spoofing downstream verifiers with synthesized fake telemetry. Worse still, by exploiting the widespread reliance on third-party Docker containers and auxiliary tools, attackers can distribute compromised packages embedded with these malicious hooks to launch such attacks easily. On a physical Franka Emika robotic arm running Secur

arXiv:2609.08250v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How far a pushed object slides depends on its mass and friction, which no single image reveals. Pretrained visual encoders are increasingly used as the perception front end of world models for manipulation, and their physical competence is assessed with perturbation benchmarks and linear probes, almost always in a clean, fixed-camera scene. We show that these assessments cannot distinguish an encoder that infers physics from one that does not. CALIPER (calibrate, then predict) is a direct test: an object of unknown mass and friction is struck twice at known speeds, a third strike is shown only up to the moment of contact, and a linear readout on frozen features must predict how far the object slides. Swapping in another object's calibration clips checks that the evidence is actually used. Across 2,000 simulated episodes and eight representations, from V-JEPA 2 to a randomly initialised ViT and raw pixels, calibration adds +0.50 R^2 and th

arXiv:2609.08224v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Intermediate representations are key to bridging the modality gap between generalizable manipulation policies and large-scale pretrained vision-language models (VLMs). Among these, trajectory-based representations compactly represent motion-relevant cues, yet most existing approaches predict trajectories in 2D image space, resulting in intrinsic 3D ambiguity. Moreover, using 2D trajectories with depth still leaves the free-space waypoints ambiguous, limiting reliable 3D reasoning. To address this, we propose predicting 3D consistent waypoints (3DWay) from multi-view images. By reformulating 3D waypoints prediction as generating multi-view consistent 2D waypoints followed by geometric triangulation, we enable explicit 3D motion specification while preserving the strong priors of pretrained VLMs. The predicted waypoints can guide existing VLA models for better generalization or be directly executed on simple tasks. Extensive experiments sho