News & Research

arXiv:2609.14868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a primitive-informed sampling-based model predictive control (MPC) framework for multi-fingered dexterous manipulation. Sampling-based MPC avoids the need for gradients through complex contact dynamics, but direct exploration of the high-dimensional joint space is inefficient and makes performance strongly dependent on the sampling distribution. Our framework biases sampling using low-dimensional manipulation primitives that encode coordinated finger motions, while simultaneously optimizing joint-level residuals to adapt these motions to the current hand-object configuration. Task-related rollout constraints reject infeasible trajectories during forward simulation, improving the effective use of the sampling budget. We evaluate the approach on a physical Allegro hand using a synchronized MuJoCo digital twin. Ablations show that both the primitive and residual are necessary for reliable continuous in-hand rotation, that increasi

arXiv:2609.14806v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable online autonomy is critical for quadrotor operation in urban airspaces, where global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) measurements suffer from multipath, blockage, and latency issues, introducing non-stationary, temporally correlated errors that degrade conventional GNSS-IMU fusion. This paper presents a belief-adaptive online autonomy framework that augments an extended Kalman filter (EKF) with explicit GNSS trust modelling, second-order online belief adaptation, and latency-aware out-of-sequence measurement handling. GNSS trust is represented as a latent belief state that modulates measurement weighting and multipath bias uncertainty, and is updated online using EKF consistency signals. Unlike reactive covariance tuning, the proposed approach enables proactive and stable sensor trust adaptation without prior environmental knowledge or offline training. Evaluation in simulated urban air mobility scenarios with correlated mult

arXiv:2609.14783v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots need touch to manipulate objects safely and reliably, as many properties, such as softness, texture, and contact stability, are hard to infer from vision alone. However, vision-based tactile sensors yield different observations of the same material due to variations in optics, elastomer properties, and illumination, leading to poor generalization when trained on a single or multiple sensors. We propose a language-guided distillation framework for learning sensor-robust tactile representations. Language encodes high-level semantic properties of touch (e.g., rough, soft, slippery) that remain invariant across sensing hardware, providing a natural sensor-agnostic supervisory signal. We construct a 39K-sample touch-language dataset with human-annotated material labels and train a tactile encoder to align sensor-specific tactile images with language embeddings in a shared semantic space. We evaluate our approach for few-shot learning an

arXiv:2609.14765v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hip exoskeletons may improve recovery from unexpected gait perturbations, yet personalizing assistance remains difficult because balance is multidimensional and human-in-the-loop experiments are small-sample and noisy. We present a participant-specific composite balance cost that integrates seven biomechanical sub-metrics spanning margin of stability, center-of-mass dynamics, and whole-body angular momentum. The sub-metrics are converted to direction-aligned, dimensionless cost features, and nonnegative fusion weights are learned on the simplex. Coupled with an empirical-Bayes hierarchical model, the learned-composite selector estimates each tested condition's posterior probability of being best, P(best), and a high-probability candidate set with size $K_{0.8}$. The framework was evaluated with three participants walking at 1.1 m/s during unilateral belt-slip perturbations across 46 hip-assistance conditions. In the full-budget analysis (

arXiv:2609.14710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interaction paradigms used in robot-assisted autism intervention have historically employed robots as teachers, clinical assistants, or more-abled peers to promote a variety of social skills. These modalities often leverage the expertise of trained practitioners to ensure that child-robot interactions are productive or clinically grounded to yield positive therapeutic benefits for children across the autism spectrum. Yet, despite the fact that the majority of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) attend mainstream schools and spend 80% or more of their time in the general classroom [27], there is a paucity of research incorporating validated classroom teaching pedagogies into robot-assisted autism interventions. In this work, we introduce a novel teaching methodology for advancing social skills in school-aged children with ASD. We evaluate the effectiveness of a novel robot-assisted autism intervention which incorporates the learni

arXiv:2609.14647v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots, and humanoid robots in particular, are increasingly competent at individual behaviors, each obtained by training a specialized controller. A specialized skill is quick to train, converges reliably because the problem it faces is narrow, and can be validated on its own, none of which is true of a single end-to-end policy asked to cover everything. What remains fragile is the transition between them. We argue that the composition of independent sub-policies deserves to be treated as a research problem in its own right, rather than as an implementation detail left to whatever mechanism happens to be at hand. Reliable composition is what turns a collection of separate skills into a repertoire that can be used, extended and shared. More fundamentally, if control can be passed between specialized policies safely, and at any moment, the choice of what the robot should do next can be delegated to a component of an entirely different natur

arXiv:2609.14633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in data-driven robot manipulation policies have substantially improved task execution and generalization. However, real-world deployment still relies heavily on humans for failure assessment, correction, and environment reset, while models often fail to continually learn from failures and corrective experience. We present REVOLVE (Robot Evolving via Orchestrated Loops, Verification, and Experience), an automated closed-loop framework for evolving robot manipulation with minimal human intervention. Built on a unified software platform, REVOLVE integrates data collection, policy training and deployment, failure recovery, and continual learning into a single closed-loop workflow. Its Automated Reset and Collection (ARC) architecture automatically resets the environment and intervenes to correct policy failures. Dual-Loop Evolution (DLE) continually improves the manipulation policy and agent by feeding real-world interaction a

arXiv:2609.14589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Imposing explicit trajectory constraints in robot visual servoing remains challenging. Existing tracking methods achieve fast responses by mapping visual residuals to control velocities, but they have weak constraints on the intermediate motion process, which lead to trajectory discontinuity, oscillation, or conservative behaviors. To enable constrained tracking for moving targets, this paper proposes a servo tracking method based on imitation trajectory constraints. A dynamic model describing the robot approaching a moving target is formulated and analyzed for convergence. A time-scalable deformation mechanism and a trajectory modulation incorporating shape and amplitude components are introduced to generate a series of trajectories in real time, from which tracking points are adaptively determined to form dynamic constraints. The robot velocity is then computed from target pose differentials or tracked key features to follow the constra

arXiv:2609.14567v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown considerable promise for robotic decision-making, yet deploying multi-agent RL (MARL) on physical multi-robot systems in industrial environments remains challenging. This paper investigates the real-world applicability of decentralized MARL for multi-robot multi-machine tending. We propose Feature-fusion Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (FMAPPO), which fuses 2D LiDAR measurements with task-specific state information to enable safe decentralized multi-robot task assignment and navigation. A complete simulation-to-reality pipeline was developed using high-fidelity robotic simulation and ROS2 and deployed on physical mobile-manipulator platforms operating under realistic real-world conditions, with the robotic arms disabled during the experiments. We further investigate the sensitivity of the learned policy to command update frequency, an important consideration for real-world deployment. Compara

arXiv:2609.14561v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Active exploration and semantic navigation require an embodied agent to build memory from partial observations, predict how the evolution of observed spatial memory may support future motion, and convert that prediction into actionable plans. We present GLAM, a goal-conditioned latent world model trained over global spatiotemporal memory, and GLAM NAV, the complete navigation system built around it. Given historical map tokens, a navigation goal, and the current robot pose, GLAM jointly predicts future map representations and robot-centric waypoint latents, allowing future spatial context and navigation intent to be inferred in a shared representation space. The model follows a JEPA-like latent prediction paradigm, operates directly on map-level latent tokens rather than RGB reconstruction, and uses a pretrained waypoint encoder-decoder to supervise and decode navigation plans within GLAM NAV. Training data are collected by replaying Obje

arXiv:2609.14543v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mobile robots typically rely on geometric maps for obstacle avoidance and path planning, but the resulting obstacle representation does not always match how an object should affect navigation. A low lying cable may be missed, a flexible curtain may create spurious blockage, and a traffic cone may require an exclusion region larger than its observed footprint. We present NavPatch, an object level correction layer that assigns ADD, REMOVE, or EXTEND to navigation relevant object categories through periodic scene understanding with a vision-language model. Open vocabulary grounding localizes object instances, and LiDAR and RGB-D observations provide 3D support. Observation quality filtering and cross frame maintenance determine when each correction patch is committed, replaced, or revoked. In 50 real robot trials across five layouts, NavPatch achieves an overall success rate of 86.0%. An ablation study of four configurations with 200 runs in

arXiv:2609.14539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work proposes a model-based fault detection and diagnosis framework for underwater vehicles subject to actuator faults that explicitly accounts for the presence of unmodeled dynamics. To this end, a Moving Horizon Estimator (MHE) is developed to estimate the lumped disturbance, capturing both unmodeled and fault effects. Gaussian Processes (GPs) are employed to approximate the unmodeled dynamics, providing predictions of the corresponding mean and uncertainty across diverse operating conditions. During online operation, the residual between the MHE lumped disturbance estimate and the GP prediction is evaluated using a Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test. By incorporating GP-based predictions within the diagnostic framework, robustness to unmodeled dynamics is achieved, enabling effective fault detection and isolation as well as accurate quantitative estimation of fault magnitude. The proposed methodology is experimentally validated in

arXiv:2609.14450v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cleaning water bodies such as swimming pools and lakes typically demands significant manual effort or reliance on costly, sensor-intensive robotic systems. This paper presents EcoBoat, a low-cost autonomous surface vehicle built on a modified hull, designed to collect floating debris in both indoor and outdoor water bodies. For indoor environments, EcoBoat uses ultrasonic sensors to detect boundaries and obstacles, combining random-walk motion with boundary-following behavior. For outdoor environments, it relies on GPS-based geofencing paired with a random-walk strategy for area coverage. A key design feature is a Tesla-valve-inspired collection basket that allows debris intake during forward motion while preventing its escape during turning or braking. Field experiments in pools and lakes validated the design through iterative refinement, demonstrating that a minimalist sensing and computation approach can achieve effective, versatile de

arXiv:2609.14432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing humanoid locomotion systems primarily focus on stability and task execution, while integrating expressiveness with explicit locomotion control remains challenging. We propose EMoG, an emotion-modulated gait generation framework for expressive humanoid locomotion. EMoG introduces an emotional-style code with continuously adjustable intensity. Conditioned on this code and physical commands, a lightweight MLP generates expressive, command-consistent periodic gait trajectories in real time, which are tracked by a unified reinforcement learning policy for physical execution. To support training, we collect a large-scale emotion-annotated gait dataset from professional performers and develop an automated pipeline to extract physically consistent periodic gait cycles. EMoG also integrates an LLM-based parser that converts free-form language into emotional style and motion parameters for interactive control. Experiments demonstrate conti

arXiv:2609.14426v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a learning-based approach to kinodynamic online motion planning for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) operating at a fixed altitude in unknown dynamic environments, where real-time avoidance of both static and dynamic obstacles must be achieved under conditions of extreme partial observability. The UAV is controlled with a single degree of freedom (yaw only), resulting in constrained, nonholonomic motion similar to fixed-wing platforms. The proposed framework integrates a behavior grid map representation with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for stable policy learning in continuous control. The key idea is the co-design of a state representation and control policy that enables reliable navigation using only three low-cost directional range sensors, without reliance on dense sensing modalities such as LiDAR or vision-based systems. The behavior grid map dynamically aggregates sparse meas