News & Research

arXiv:2609.09234v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-guided reinforcement learning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) remains challenging due to unstable policy optimisation, aggressive exploration, and the cost of high-dimensional visual perception. In this work, we investigate long-horizon UAV visual servoing using compact target-centric cues combined with low-dimensional sensor measurements. Rather than learning directly from RGB images, lightweight target segmentation provides image-space offsets and relative depth, which are combined with quadrotor velocity and projected-gravity measurements into a compact 12D policy observation. We compare Direct PPO with three matched-budget curriculum strategies: a Visual curriculum that progressively expands target placement difficulty, a Dynamics curriculum that gradually relaxes action constraints and smoothing, and a Joint curriculum that combines both progressions. All strategies reach comparable nominal performance, with complementary

arXiv:2609.09217v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legged robots are versatile on land, but their use in underwater environments remains limited. Extending quadruped locomotion to water enables amphibious mobility with applications in inspection, environmental monitoring and disaster response. This paper presents the design, modeling, and experimental validation of a reproducible underwater quadruped robot. The robot is built around custom waterproof motor housings machined from polyoxymethylene plastic, which use off-the-shelf O-rings and dynamic shaft seals. A simplified model is derived to describe the dynamics of this underwater legged system, capturing how drag forces on spherical end effectors transmit torque to the floating base. Building on this model, a closed-loop attitude controller is developed using an error formulation defined on the special orthogonal group SO(3). The controller is evaluated both in simulation and experimentally in a water tank, where the robot tracks desir

arXiv:2609.09213v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study how physical-state inputs affect a 0.8B hybrid language model adapted for manipulation with 6.2M trainable parameters. Six conditions are trained on three LIBERO-Spatial tasks and evaluated over three seeds and 540 held-out rollouts. Conditioning recurrent decay gates on geometric increments yields 28.9% success, compared with 36.7% when those increments are shuffled during training and 24.4% without explicit object/goal geometry. Both geometry policies receive correct inputs at evaluation. A token adapter using the same increments scores 27.8%; differences vary across seeds and remain inconclusive. Token-clock conditioning scores 11.1%, including one seed that fails to converge. In separate robustness tests, a state-only relative-coordinate policy retains 7/10 success under frame relabeling, whereas all four tested visual policies fall to at most 3/20 after a 5 cm object displacement. These results show no reliable advantage fro

arXiv:2609.09210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Teleoperated demonstrations are often multimodal even when the underlying dynamics are nearly deterministic given the executed action. We argue that this multimodality typically mixes three factors--operator habit in action selection, shared physics, and observation nuisance--and that entangled next-observation predictors absorb all three. We formalize the split with a structural causal model a=g(h,z,u), z'=f(z,a), o=r(z,c), and test it with complementary interventions: replacing or shuffling actions at fixed state sharply increases next-state error, whereas appearance and camera changes should not; habit-aware reverse scoring improves ranking of feasible pasts without rewriting the dynamics. The associated adaptation rule is to freeze a shared physics readout and update only a thin interface. On StackCube, DROID, and RH20T this rule improves low-shot transfer relative to training from scratch, retains cleaner dynamics under corrupted ada

arXiv:2608.15380v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In systems built on Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) and using Data Distribution Service (DDS), a single network-impaired or throttled subscriber on a RELIABLE topic can cause backpressure that degrades throughput and latency for all other subscribers, including safety-critical ones sharing the publisher, because the publisher's DDS writer can no longer accept new samples. We present Adaptive Bridge, a proxy-based layer that decouples critical subscribers from degraded or noncritical ones, thereby isolating the critical path through topic splitting and dynamic rate control. The proxy acts as a middleman and subscribes to the original topic and republishes the messages to two independent DDS writers: one RELIABLE writer for critical nodes and one BEST EFFORT writer for noncritical or degraded nodes, thus isolating the degraded nodes and safeguarding the publisher and critical nodes from backpressure. A probe-based classifier acti

arXiv:2606.30097v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) is essential for persistent embodied perception in camera-equipped consumer and service robots. Panoramic cameras offer wide surrounding coverage, but equirectangular projection introduces a periodic horizontal domain in which conventional planar motion models and IoU-based association become unreliable near the 0{\deg}/360{\deg} seam. In addition, large-field-of-view scenes exhibit frequent interactions, scale variation, and occlusion, while frame-wise monocular depth estimates may fluctuate over time. To address these challenges, we propose CylindTrack, a depth-aware cylindrical tracking-by-detection framework for panoramic MOT. CylindTrack introduces Depth-Temporal Trajectory Modeling (DTM) to propagate instance depth as a temporally filtered trajectory-level state, providing more stable geometric cues for association. It further incorporates Spherical Spatio-Temporal Consistency Learning (SSTC), w

arXiv:2505.20498v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-based tactile sensing is widely used in perception, reconstruction, and robotic manipulation, yet collecting large-scale tactile data remains costly due to diverse sensor-object interactions and inconsistencies across sensor instances. Existing approaches to scaling tactile data---simulation and free-form tactile generation---often yield unrealistically rendered signals with poor transfer to highly dynamic real-world tasks. We propose \name, a two-stage controllable tactile image generation framework that generates realistic tactile images conditioned on a single reference tactile image, contact force, and contact pose. By grounding generation in these important physical priors, \name synthesizes realistic samples across different sensors while effectively capturing task-relevant variations. Across a series of downstream tasks and real-world experiments, such as object insertion, imitation learning, and object weighting,

arXiv:2606.10267v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Hierarchical vision-language-action (Hi-VLA) systems have emerged as a promising paradigm for complex robot manipulation, by using high-level VLM planners to decompose tasks into language subgoals executed by low-level VLA controllers. Despite recent empirical progress, there is a lack of unified design principles for these systems: existing Hi-VLA systems differ in how they choose and connect planners, controllers, mechanisms to switch between the two, and how observations and memory are represented in the planner. In this paper, we present a systematic study of Hi-VLA design for robot manipulation. We unify representative Hi-VLA agents under an options-style control framework and benchmark core design choices across short-horizon, long-horizon, and reasoning-intensive tasks. Our analysis distills practical principles for building Hi-VLA systems, showing how model choices and interface mechanisms jointly shape performance. Applying t

arXiv:2605.15548v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Traditional robotic hand metrics focus on static properties such as workspace, manipulability, and grasp stability. However, these metrics do not directly measure dexterity under the standard definition in robotic manipulation: the ability to continuously change an object's pose within the hand while maintaining contact from an initial grasp. We introduce Kinematic Rolling Manipulation Ability (KaRMA), a kinematic-only metric for fine manipulation that quantifies reachable in-hand translation and reorientation of a spherical test object within a two-finger precision pinch through feasible rolling motions. KaRMA enforces joint limits, collision constraints, rolling contact, and antipodal force feasibility, then explores reachable in-hand object poses via breadth-first search over translation and rotation primitives. KaRMA reports three scores: translational coverage (KaRMA-T), rotational coverage (KaRMA-R), and sensitivity to the initi

arXiv:2605.14810v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In obstacle avoidance navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), variations in obstacle scale have received less attention than obstacle number or density. Existing methods typically extract purely geometric features from single-frame depth observations. Such representations tend to neglect small obstacles and lose spatial context under occlusions caused by large obstacles, leading to noticeable degradation in environments with multi-scale obstacles. To address this issue, we propose CMRL, a Collision-aware and Memory-enhanced Reinforcement Learning framework for UAV navigation. The collision-aware latent representation encodes risk-sensitive depth cues to preserve fine-grained obstacle structures, thereby improving sensitivity to small obstacles. The temporal memory module integrates observations across frames, mitigating partial observability caused by large-obstacle occlusions. We evaluate CMRL with multi-scale obstacles, inclu

arXiv:2605.10201v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generalizable manipulation involving cross-type object interactions is a critical yet challenging capability in robotics. To reliably accomplish such tasks, robots must address two fundamental challenges: "where to manipulate" (contact point localization) and "how to manipulate" (subsequent interaction trajectory planning). Existing foundation-model-based approaches often adopt end-to-end learning that obscures the distinction between these stages, exacerbating error accumulation in long-horizon tasks. Furthermore, they typically rely on a single uniform model, which fails to capture the diverse, category-specific features required for heterogeneous objects. To overcome these limitations, we propose HeteroGenManip, a task-conditioned, two-stage framework designed to decouple initial grasp from complex interaction execution. First, Foundation-Correspondence-Guided Grasp module leverages structural priors to align the initial contact st

arXiv:2605.06234v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Embodied agents represent a prominent research focus across both academia and industry. The prevailing paradigm has gradually shifted from reactive assistance, which requires explicit user queries, to proactive assistance, capable of recognizing human needs and offering support without explicit instructions. Nevertheless, existing studies on proactive assistance remain confined to narrow scenarios and primarily emphasize task completeness, whereas real-world agents must operate in open-domain environments while adhering to social expectations. To bridge this gap, we extend the concept of proactive assistance to Social Proactive Intelligence (SPI), characterized by diverse scenarios, social understanding, and robot-centric behaviors. We further introduce RobotEQ, a dedicated benchmark for SPI. We first define two tasks: behavior judgment, emphasizing global contextual understanding, and spatial grounding, focusing on local perceptual d

arXiv:2605.01544v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Imitation learning (IL) has seen remarkable progress, yet field deployment of IL-powered robots remains hindered by the challenge of out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. Fine-tuning pre-trained policies with end-user demonstrations collected in deployment environments is a promising strategy to address this challenge. However, end-user demonstrations are frequently of poor quality, characterized by excessive corrective motions, oscillations, and abrupt adjustments that degrade both learned and fine-tuned policy performance. Existing automated approaches for curating demonstration data require policy rollouts in the environment, making them computationally expensive and impractical for real-world deployment. In this paper, we propose a fast, efficient, and fully automated demonstration ranking metric based on the power spectral density (PSD) of demonstration trajectories. The PSD metric requires no policy learning, environment interact

arXiv:2605.01529v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Imitation learning offers a promising framework for enabling robots to acquire diverse skills from human users. However, most imitation learning algorithms assume access to high-quality demonstrations an unrealistic expectation when collecting data from non-expert users, whose demonstrations often contain inadvertent errors. Naively learning from such demonstrations can result in unsafe policy behavior, while discarding entire demonstrations due to occasional mistakes wastes valuable data, especially in low-data settings. In this work, we introduce GiB (Good-in-Bad), an algorithm that automatically identifies and discards erroneous subtasks within demonstrations while preserving high-quality subtasks. The filtered data can then be used by any policy learning algorithm to train more robust policies. GiB first trains a self-supervised model to learn latent features and assigns binary weights to label each demonstration as good or bad. I

arXiv:2604.12852v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Collaborative transport requires robots to infer partner intent through physical interaction while maintaining stable loco-manipulation. This becomes particularly challenging in complex environments, where interaction signals are difficult to capture and model. We present PAINT, a hierarchical learning framework for partner-agnostic intent-aware collaborative legged transport that represents partner intent as an explicit interaction wrench and recovers it from payload-coupled proprioceptive histories. PAINT decouples intent understanding from terrain-robust locomotion: A high-level policy uses the inferred interaction wrench for transport and reconstructs it through teacher-student training, while a low-level locomotion backbone ensures robust execution. This enables lightweight deployment without external force-torque sensing or payload tracking. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate compliant cooperative transp