Research Papers

arXiv:2606.03949v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (HIL-RL) improves sample efficiency in real-robot manipulation through online human intervention. However, successful trajectories may include suboptimal actions that deviate from the desired task-execution path and force human intervention. Existing HIL-RL methods typically apply the consistent credit assignment principle to all transitions, uniformly propagating discounted terminal rewards through suboptimal segments, ignoring the actual contribution of each transition to task success. This overestimates Q-values for critic learning and indirectly misguides actor updates toward suboptimal behavior patterns. To this end, we propose PACT, a Preference-calibrated Actor-Critic Training framework that leverages the implicit preference signals induced by intervention to perform credit reassignment on identified suboptimal segments while directly guiding policy training for unbiased critic-actor lea

arXiv:2605.13380v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work compares three interaction modalities for human-robot collaboration: passive, reactive, and proactive. We studied 18 participants assembling a seven-layer colored tower from memory while using nearby and distant blocks. In the passive modality participants worked alone; in the reactive modality a mobile robot helped only upon request; in the proactive modality it initiated brick delivery and error signaling without explicit requests. Although robot assistance increased completion time, most participants preferred collaboration: 67% preferred proactive behavior and 78% judged it most useful. These results suggest that timely proactive support can improve user experience in controlled collaborative tasks.

arXiv:2604.25126v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Dexterous robot hands offer rich opportunities for multifunctional manipulation, where a robot must execute multiple skills in sequence while maintaining control over previously grasped objects. Most prior work in dexterous manipulation focuses on single-object, single-skill tasks. In contrast, our insight is that many sequential tasks require resource-aware grasps that conserve fingers for future actions. In this paper, we study sequential grasp-conditioned dexterous manipulation, where a robot first grasps an object and then performs a second, distinct manipulation subtask while preserving the initial grasp. We introduce HANDFUL, a learning framework that models finger usage as a limited resource and encourages exploration of resource-aware grasps through finger-level contact rewards. These grasps are subsequently selected for downstream tasks via curriculum-based policy learning. We further propose HANDFUL-Bench, a simulation bench

arXiv:2604.20557v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Shared Control methods often use impedance control to track target poses in a robotic manipulator. The guidance behavior of such controllers is shaped by the used stiffness gains, which can be varying over time to achieve an adaptive guiding. When multiple target poses are tracked at the same time with varying importance, the corresponding output wrenches have to be arbitrated with weightings changing over time. In this work, we study the stabilization of both variable stiffness in impedance control as well as the arbitration of different controllers through a scaled addition of their output wrenches, reformulating both into a holistic framework. We identify passivity violations in the closed loop system and provide methods to passivate the system. The resulting approach can be used to stabilize standard impedance controllers, allowing for the development of novel and flexible shared control methods. We do not constrain the design of

arXiv:2604.07607v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robot learning increasingly depends on large and diverse data, yet robot data collection remains expensive and difficult to scale. Egocentric human data offer a promising alternative by capturing rich manipulation behavior across everyday environments. However, existing human datasets are often limited in scope, difficult to extend, and fragmented across institutions. We introduce EgoVerse, a collaborative platform for human data-driven robot learning that unifies data collection, processing, and access under a shared framework, enabling contributions from individual researchers, academic labs, and industry partners. The current release includes 1,362 hours (80k episodes) of human demonstrations spanning 1,965 tasks, 240 scenes, and 2,087 unique demonstrators, with standardized formats, manipulation-relevant annotations, and tooling for downstream learning. Beyond the dataset, we conduct a large-scale study of human-to-robot transfer

arXiv:2603.20182v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Although robot-to-robot (R2R) communication improves indoor scene understanding beyond what a single robot can achieve, R2R alone cannot overcome partial observability without substantial exploration overhead or scaling team size. In contrast, many indoor environments already include low-cost Internet of Things (IoT) sensors (e.g., cameras) that provide persistent, building-wide context beyond onboard perception. We therefore introduce IndoorR2X, a benchmark and simulation framework for Large Language Model (LLM)-driven multi-robot task planning with Robot-to-Everything (R2X) perception and communication in indoor environments. IndoorR2X integrates observations from mobile robots and static IoT devices to construct a global semantic state that supports scalable scene understanding, reduces redundant exploration, and enables high-level coordination through LLM-based planning. IndoorR2X provides configurable simulation environments, sen

arXiv:2603.15600v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate process supervision remains a critical challenge for long-horizon robotic manipulation. A primary bottleneck is that current video MLLMs, trained primarily under a Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) paradigm, function as passive "Observers" that recognize ongoing events rather than evaluating the current state relative to the final task goal. In this paper, we introduce PRIMO R1 (Process Reasoning Induced Monitoring), a 7B framework that transforms video MLLMs into active "Critics". We leverage outcome-based Reinforcement Learning to incentivize explicit Chain-of-Thought generation for progress estimation. Furthermore, our architecture constructs a structured temporal input by explicitly anchoring the video sequence between initial and current state images. Supported by the proposed PRIMO Dataset and Benchmark, extensive experiments across diverse in-domain environments and out-of-domain real-world humanoid scenarios demonstrate th

arXiv:2603.07875v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visuomotor policies learned from demonstrations often overfit to nuisance visual factors in raw RGB observations, resulting in brittle behavior under appearance shifts such as background changes and object recoloring. We propose a task-aware observation interface that canonicalizes visual input into a shared representation, improving robustness to out-of-distribution (OOD) appearance changes without modifying or fine-tuning the policy. Given an RGB image and an open-vocabulary specification of task-relevant entities, we use SAM3 to segment the target object and robot/gripper. We construct an L0 observation by repainting segmented entities with predefined semantic colors on a constant background. For tasks requiring stronger geometric cues, we further inject monocular depth from Depth Anything 3 into the segmented regions via depth-guided overwrite, yielding a unified semantic--geometric observation (L1) that remains a standard 3-chann

arXiv:2603.06924v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In classical Informative Path Planning (C-IPP), robots are typically modeled as mobile sensors that acquire digital measurements such as images or radiation levels. In this model, since making a measurement leaves the robot's physical state unchanged, the cost of traversing an edge remains static regardless of when it is traversed. This is a natural assumption for many missions, but does not extend to settings involving physical sample collection, where each collected sample adds mass and increases the energy cost of all subsequent motion. As a result, IPP formulations that ignore this coupling between information gain and load-dependent traversal cost can produce plans that are distance-efficient but energy-suboptimal, collecting fewer samples and less data than the energy budget would permit. In this paper, we first introduce Load-aware Informative Path Planning (LIPP), a strict generalization of C-IPP that explicitly models this co

arXiv:2510.26280v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Humanoids hold great potential for service, industrial, and rescue applications, in which robots must sustain whole-body stability while performing intense, contact-rich interactions with the environment. However, enabling humanoids to generate human-like, adaptive responses under such conditions remains a major challenge. To address this, we propose Thor, a humanoid framework for human-level whole-body reactions in contact-rich environments. Based on the robot's force analysis, we design a force-adaptive torso-tilt (FAT2) reward function to encourage humanoids to exhibit human-like responses during force-interaction tasks. To mitigate the high-dimensional challenges of humanoid control, Thor introduces a reinforcement learning architecture that decouples the upper body, waist, and lower body. Each component shares global observations of the whole body and jointly updates its parameters. Finally, we deploy Thor on the Unitree G1, and

arXiv:2510.07514v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Inverse Kinematics (IK) is a core problem in robotics, in which joint configurations are found to achieve a (collision-free) desired end-effector pose. Modern IK solvers face a fundamental trade-off: analytical methods are fast but lack generality, while numerical optimization-based methods are broadly applicable but prone to local minima and high computational costs. To overcome this challenge, we introduce HJCD-IK, a GPU-accelerated, sampling-based hybrid solver. By pairing a novel orientation-aware greedy coordinate descent initialization with Jacobian-based polishing and a parallel collision filter, our method achieves up to order-of-magnitude gains in speed and accuracy over state-of-the-art solvers, consistently finding collision-free solutions on the accuracy-latency Pareto frontier, while producing a diverse distribution of high-quality samples. We validate our solver on a physical Franka manipulator and release our code open-

arXiv:2509.07162v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous multi-finger grasping is a fundamental capability in robotic manipulation. Optimization-based approaches show strong performance, but tend to be sensitive to initialization and are potentially time-consuming. As an alternative, the generator-evaluator-planner framework has been proposed. A generator generates grasp candidates, an evaluator ranks the proposed grasps, and a motion planner plans a trajectory to the highest-ranked grasp. If the planner doesn't find a trajectory, a new trajectory optimization is started with the next-best grasp as the target and so on. However, executing lower-ranked grasps means a lower chance of grasp success, and multiple trajectory optimizations are time-consuming. Alternatively, relaxing the threshold for motion planning accuracy allows for easier computation of a successful trajectory but implies lower accuracy in estimating grasp success likelihood. It's a lose-lose proposition: either sp

arXiv:2508.05415v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Human manipulation skills represent a pinnacle of voluntary motor functions, requiring the coordination of many degrees of freedom and the processing of high-dimensional sensor input to achieve remarkable dexterity. Thus, this study investigates whether the human hand, with its associated biomechanical properties, sensors, and control mechanisms, is an ideal that should be strived for in robotics. Do robots need anthropomorphic hands? First, characteristics of the human hand in terms of biomechanics and perception are extracted to compare them with currently commercially available robotic hands. From this comparison, research questions are derived that connect manipulation system complexity to skill repertoire size and dexterity. These questions are addressed through a systematic literature review, analyzing the manipulation capabilities demonstrated in 125 papers published between 2019 and 2025. Although complex five-fingered hands a

arXiv:2504.16595v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Packing objects efficiently is a fundamental problem in logistics, warehouse automation, and robotics. When dealing with highly diverse 3D objects (household or grocery items), closed-form solutions are infeasible, and heuristic or model-free Reinforcement Learning~(RL) methods tend to focus solely on geometric optimization, relying on exhaustive searches of the discretized solution space. This leads to long training times (for pure RL) and high latency (heuristics), limited transferability to robotic scenarios, and ultimately ignores object characteristics (fragility, deformability) and human preferences. We propose HERB, a human-augmented RL framework for packing irregular objects, the first to explore the potential of learning from human demonstrations to solve this complex task. It leverages human demonstrations of packing strategies, which inherently exhibit latent factors such as space optimization, stability, and object propert

arXiv:2607.06023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual SLAM is a well-established technology utilized in a wide range of real-world applications. However, its performance still degrades under challenging visual conditions, such as low texture, severe motion blur, and poor illumination. Systems based on deep learning outperform classical geometry-based ones and achieve state-of-the-art results by combining learned 2D data association and uncertainty with differentiable geometric optimization in recurrent architectures. Still, it remains unclear exactly which components are fundamentally responsible for this success. In this paper, we ask: Is the superior performance of deep learning-based systems driven primarily by learned 2D data association, the combination of learned 2D data association and uncertainty, or the recurrent architecture itself? We investigate this question empirically by conducting a controlled study. Our findings reveal that the success of DL-based V-SLAM systems hin