Research Papers

arXiv:2509.24575v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents a framework to prompt multi-robot teams with high-level tasks using natural language expressions. Our objective is to use the reasoning capabilities of language models in understanding and decomposing multi-robot collaboration and decision-making tasks, but in settings where such models cannot be called at deployment time. However, it is hard to specify the behavior of an individual robot from a team instruction, and have it continuously adapt to actions from other robots. This necessitates a framework with the representational capacity required by the logic and semantics of a task, and yet supports decentralized, real-time operation. We solve this dilemma by recognizing that a task can be represented as a deterministic finite automaton, and that recurrent neural networks (RNNs) can encode numerous automata. This allows us to distill the logic and sequential decompositions of sub-tasks obtained from a language mode

arXiv:2509.15443v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Human-to-humanoid imitation learning presents a promising pathway to address the severe data scarcity bottleneck in robotics by utilizing abundant, large-scale human motion collections. However, scaling this paradigm requires addressing two key challenges. First, human motion data acquired from videos, motion capture systems, or generative models often contains spatial noise, jitter, and frame-level flickering, which can be amplified during retargeting and lead to unsafe or physically infeasible robot motions. Second, existing motion retargeting methods typically rely on frame-by-frame numerical optimization, making them too computationally expensive for large-scale dataset synthesis. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Implicit Kinodynamic Motion Retargeting (IKMR), a highly scalable, neural-based data transformation pipeline. IKMR leverages a skeleton-based graph convolutional dual autoencoder to map cross-structural human a

arXiv:2508.02187v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 4D millimeter wave radars (4D radars) are new emerging sensors that provide point clouds of objects with both position and radial velocity measurements. Compared to LiDARs, they are more affordable and reliable sensors for robots' perception under extreme weather conditions. On the other hand, point cloud registration is an essential perception module that provides robot's pose feedback information in applications such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Nevertheless, the 4D radar point clouds are sparse and noisy compared to those of LiDAR, and hence we shall confront great challenges in registering the radar point clouds. To address this issue, we propose a point cloud registration framework for 4D radars based on Generalized Method of Moments. The method does not require explicit point-to-point correspondences between the source and target point clouds, which is difficult to compute for sparse 4D radar point clouds. Mo

arXiv:2504.04991v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Conventional visuomotor imitation learning usually predicts future robot actions directly in the time domain. Such formulations often have limited physical scene awareness and weak memory. In this work, we propose Wavelet Policy, a lightweight imitation learning framework that combines World Prior Memory (WPM) with wavelet-based multi-scale action modeling. Our key idea is to encode persistent physical scene structure from static background images into compact memory tokens, which are fused into world-prior tokens and injected into the encoder during forward propagation. Based on this memory-conditioned representation, we further perform wavelet-domain decomposition over horizon-aligned latent action tokens and adopt a Single-Encoder Multiple-Decoder (SE2MD) architecture to model latent components at different temporal scales. The resulting latent subbands are reconstructed through inverse wavelet transform and finally projected into

arXiv:2606.31613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous aerial inspection of marine infrastructure is frequently compromised by stochastic sea states, introducing risks of high-kinetic impacts, post-landing toppling, and sensory occlusion. This paper proposes a decoupled, multi-vehicle landing framework synchronizing an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) equipped with a 3-RPU stabilized platform with a robust Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The architecture utilizes two independent Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents: a Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) agent providing high-frequency wave-motion compensation for the landing deck, and a multimodal RL agent for the UAVs final approach. Evaluated in high-fidelity maritime simulations, the system achieved a 100% landing success rate across 15 trials in wave states varying from calm to rough. Results show a mean stabilization efficacy of 87.8%, maintaining the landing surface within 1 degree of the horizontal plane for 96% of the mission duratio

arXiv:2606.31073v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) provide a promising interface for high-level robotic task planning, but their use in multi-UAV collaboration remains difficult to evaluate systematically. Existing UAV simulators mainly emphasize dynamics, perception, or low-level control, while existing LLM-agent benchmarks rarely capture aerial-robotics constraints such as partial observability, spatial coverage, UAV assignment, and multi-vehicle coordination. To bridge this gap, we present MultiUAV-Plat, a lightweight, easy-to-use, LLM-agent-oriented simulation platform for multi-UAV collaborative task planning. The platform exposes concise RESTful APIs, agent-facing observations, role-based information access, hidden validation logic, and optional 2D/3D visualization, allowing agents to solve missions through realistic tool interaction rather than privileged simulator access. Built on this platform, the MultiUAV-Plat Benchmark contains 75 mission session

arXiv:2606.31043v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Residual reinforcement learning adapts a pretrained robot policy by learning an additive correction to its actions. While effective when adaptation amounts to shifting the base policy's action distribution, additive corrections cannot change the distribution's shape, scale, or state-dependent geometry -- limitations we formalize as wrong variance, miscalibrated confidence, and non-uniform correction. We show that these matter under dynamics shift: when the base distribution is geometrically mismatched to the shifted system, residual correction can underperform even the unadapted policy. We propose Warp RL, a policy adaptation method that replaces additive residuals with an invertible, state-conditioned transformation of the base policy's action distribution. Instantiated with monotonic rational-quadratic spline flows (arXiv:1906.04032), Warp RL preserves identity initialization, strictly generalizes additive residual correction,

arXiv:2606.30809v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) systems distribute representation capacity uniformly across a scene, ignoring the fact that many downstream robotic tasks engage only a fraction of the reconstructed geometry. This causes valuable onboard compute to be allocated towards optimizing irrelevant parts of the scene, either limiting online capacity or under-optimizing the most relevant parts of the scene. We introduce GaussLite, a task-driven 3DGS mapping system that conditions its representation density on a natural-language task specification. Given a posed RGB-D stream and a task such as "prepare to pick up the object on the desk," GaussLite uses a one-shot LLM parser to extract target and anchor objects, which are grounded per-frame by an open-vocabulary detector and segmented to produce per-pixel relevance masks in real time. The mapper allocates seeding density, gradient flow and scaling by task relevance. At matched Gaussian budget

arXiv:2606.32028v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Video-based embodied world models provide an appealing substrate for robotic manipulation by predicting future states, yet current approaches remain limited by a fundamental entanglement: accurately modeling dynamics typically requires low-level temporal reasoning, while producing high-resolution frames demands expansive visual synthesis according to high-level semantics. This entanglement results in slow inference speed for iterative planning or too coarse predictions to retain contact-rich details. To solve this dilemma, we present Disentangled Video Generation World Model (DVG-WM), an efficient framework that explicitly decomposes world modeling into dynamics learning and visual synthesis. Conditioned on an initial observation and a language instruction, our model first generates a plausible sequence of intermediate visual states to preview the physical interaction and refines them to obtain high-fidelity videos. Furthermore, an ef

arXiv:2606.32027v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reward design remains a central bottleneck for autonomous robot policy improvement, especially in long-horizon manipulation tasks where sparse success labels provide too little signal and binary preferences collapse many competing notions of quality into one ambiguous signal. We introduce Freeform Preference Learning (FPL), a method for learning robot policies from freeform human preferences. Rather than asking annotators which of two trajectories is better overall, FPL lets them define natural-language preference axes, such as speed, safety, quality of placement, or carefulness, and provide pairwise preferences along each axis. These annotations are used to learn a language-conditioned reward model that maps a trajectory and preference label to an axis-specific reward. We use this model to train a reward-conditioned policy that optimizes across the multiple human-specified dimensions. Across four real-world and two simulated long-hor

arXiv:2606.32009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models across robot embodiments require high-quality observation--action supervision to learn deployable action distributions, yet scaling such robot data remains difficult, especially for high-DoF humanoids. Teleoperation provides controller-aligned supervision, while human egocentric videos capture diverse bimanual manipulation but do not directly provide executable robot actions. We introduce Human-as-Humanoid, a human-to-humanoid supervision framework that enables near-real-time human-centric action generation, making human demonstrations usable for high-DoF humanoid VLA training by jointly aligning the robot embodiment, the sensing setup, and the action-label interface. Built on PrimeU, a human-aligned 60-DoF upper-body humanoid, Human-as-Humanoid uses synchronized ego-exo videos to pair deployment-aligned egocentric observations with exocentric motion recovery, retargets the recovered human motion throug

arXiv:2606.31993v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While robotic manipulation capabilities have advanced rapidly, physical safety remains a major barrier to deploying household robots: task success is insufficient if the robot damages itself or its surroundings. Simulation offers a harm-free alternative to costly and dangerous real-world training and evaluation, yet existing simulators lack general mechanisms to detect, quantify, and represent damage. To address this gap, we introduce OOPSIEVERSE, a unified simulation framework and benchmark for damage-aware household manipulation. OOPSIEVERSE provides damage as an explicit, physically-grounded, and taskagnostic signal by converting sources such as contact forces, temperature changes, and liquid interactions into corresponding mechanical, thermal or fluid damage. OOPSIEVERSE comprises two core elements: (1) DAMAGESIM, a simulator-agnostic framework for detecting and quantifying damage during navigation and manipulation, and (2) a suite of

arXiv:2606.31958v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalist robot policies learn a diverse repertoire of behaviors from large-scale pretraining. In principle, this makes them excellent priors for downstream adaptation via reinforcement learning (RL). In practice, however, standard RL methods leveraging this prior optimize directly over robot actions, requiring the base policy's action distribution to be close to that of a performant policy from the start. This assumption breaks down for complex or long-horizon tasks that fall outside the pretraining distribution. Our key insight is that, for sufficiently expressive generalist policies, language prompts are an effective alternative space for learning to solve such tasks: modulating language inputs elicits skills already within the policy's repertoire, which can be composed to solve tasks beyond its zero-shot capabilities. We propose Semantic Action Reinforcement Learning (SARL), which learns to optimize this prompt space through online i

arXiv:2606.31948v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many path planning algorithms have been introduced so far, but most are costly, in path cost and in processing time, in large-scale uncluttered 3D environments such as underground mining stopes explored by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithms are popular because of their probabilistic completeness and rapidity in finding a feasible path in single-query problems. Many of the algorithms (e.g. Informed RRT*, RRT#) developed to improve RRT need considerable time to converge in large environments. Shortcutting an RRT is an old idea that has been proven to outperform RRT variants. This paper introduces a new method, RRT-Rope, that aims at finding a near-optimal solution in a drastically shorter amount of time. The proposed approach benefits from fast computation of a feasible path with an altered version of RRT-connect, and post-processes it quickly with a deterministic shortcutting technique, taking

arXiv:2606.31941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unstructured navigational features, such as irregular planting or discontinuities, remain the primary failure mode for under-canopy agricultural robots. Existing geometric approaches often fail in these scenarios because they compress high-dimensional visual data into deterministic spatial references, effectively discarding the uncertainty and semantic context required to navigate ambiguous terrain. To address this, we present LeCropFollow, a visual navigation framework that bypasses explicit geometric modeling in favor of a learned latent representation. By integrating a self-supervised semantic heatmap extractor with TD-MPC2, a Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) planner, our system optimizes trajectories directly within a latent manifold. The framework operates over the uncompressed heatmap signal, preserving the semantic context that geometric reductions discard. We demonstrate that this representational shift enables zero-shot