Research Papers

arXiv:2606.21387v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legged-wheeled robots have long been studied for their potential to combine the efficient flat-ground mobility of wheels with the rough-terrain capability of legs. However, examples of their application to long-range autonomous navigation in real environments remain limited. This paper reports our effort to build a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based locomotion controller and an autonomous navigation system for the commercially available legged-wheeled robot Go2-W, and to apply them to long-range autonomous navigation in a real environment. For locomotion control, we extended a proprioception-only policy, which we had previously developed for quadruped robots, to the 16-DoF legged-wheeled robot. We also found that wheeled locomotion concentrates the load on the hip joints and causes heat concentration that hinders sustained travel, and obtained a policy that suppresses it by distributing the load. We evaluated the system at the Tsukub

arXiv:2606.21372v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models rely on discrete action tokenizers to bridge continuous robot control and autoregressive sequence modeling, yet existing tokenizers often trade off between compression, latency, and downstream performance. We revisit this design through the lens of neural audio codecs-convolutional encoder-decoder architectures with residual vector quantization that serve as the standard front end for audio foundation models. Motivated by their success, we introduce the Neural Action Codec (NAC), which treats short robot action trajectories as multi-channel 1D signals and compresses them using a multi-scale RVQGAN architecture. We observe that audio-specific mel-spectrogram objectives are ill-suited for kinematic signals; however, by replacing them with simple time-domain and non-mel spectral reconstruction losses, audio-codec-style models can autoencode actions with high fidelity without substantial architectural chang

arXiv:2606.21264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physically localizing unauthorized wireless devices remains a critical bottleneck in cyber-physical security operations, where rogue access points can provide entry points for lateral movement and persistent compromise. While such devices can often be detected through network-side mechanisms, determining their physical location typically requires dense sensing infrastructure, site-specific RF fingerprinting, or manual inspection, limiting timely incident response. We investigate whether a single commodity robot can autonomously detect and localize rogue wireless devices under zero-configuration constraints, without RF fingerprinting, pre-installed sensors, or site calibration. We present RogueRover, an end-to-end system in which a quadruped robot autonomously patrols, collects spatially labeled RSSI measurements via a standard 802.11 interface, and estimates device locations offline. We evaluate the system across 11 patrol runs in a real

arXiv:2606.21258v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent 3DGS-SLAM systems enable real-time operation by leveraging conventional feature matching or ICP-based tracking, thereby avoiding the heavy dense photometric optimization used in earlier approaches. However, feature matching remains prone to failure in textureless environments, while ICP-based tracking struggles in structureless or geometrically degenerate scenes due to ill-conditioned optimization. To address this issue, we propose Spectral GS-SLAM, an efficient yet robust tracking framework that integrates ICP with complementary feature-based constraints. Our method mitigates numerical instability by adaptively compensating under-constrained directions in degenerate scenarios, without interfering with the shared Gaussian representation used for mapping. We further introduce a Gaussian-aware planarity weighting mechanism that exploits the intrinsic covariance structure of 3D Gaussians to characterize scene geometry and guide inform

arXiv:2606.21245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human hand grasp adaptation depends mainly on the synergy between physical structure and biological feedback. Inspired by this biomechanical principle, the Safe Thumb-Index Robotic (STIR) Hand was developed as a minimal, lightweight, and low-cost two-digit prototype featuring an asymmetric thumb-index configuration. By pairing an underactuated, tendon-driven mechanical design with flexible strain gauges embedded into silicone-encapsulated soft joints, the system achieves passive grasp adaptation while establishing both internal proprioception and external perception. Unsupervised analysis was carried out on a dataset of the STIR hand grasping 20 different objects, along with an object classification task and an ablation study to highlight the contribution of the soft joint sensors. The object classification task discriminated object size, shape, and material stiffness with a high classification accuracy. In contrast to traditional industr

arXiv:2606.21223v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable localization is essential for intelligent transportation systems (ITS), including autonomous vehicles, quadruped last-mile carriers, and infrastructure-inspection unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Although tightly-coupled multi-sensor fusion improves accuracy in favorable conditions, deployed systems remain vulnerable to sensor degradation -- poor illumination, LiDAR degeneracy, wheel slippage, and GNSS outage -- and to spatiotemporal calibration errors. These failures are common in urban canyons, tunnels, and high-speed corridors, where localization drift can degrade route tracking, tunnel passage continuity, and local map alignment. This paper presents Ultra-Fusion, a tightly-coupled multi-sensor localization framework based on a unified sliding-window estimator. Asynchronous measurements are timestamp-ordered and converted into optional factors within one optimization window, supporting WIO, VIO, LIO, and LVIO with optional whe

arXiv:2606.21220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inspection of offshore wind turbine rotor blades is critical for predictive maintenance to maximise efficiency and extend operational lifetime. However, it remains a challenging task due to remote locations, large structural dimensions, and the limitations of current UAV-compatible sensor systems. While existing approaches can detect certain types of surface anomalies, reliable classification of defect types often remains a manual and error-prone process. This paper presents the design of a UAV-mounted multimodal sensor network combining an industrial RGB camera, a passive thermal infrared camera, and an in-house developed 3D scanner. All sensors are co-calibrated into a common coordinate frame, enabling spatial superimposition of geometric, colour, and thermal data. The system is designed to operate at close range, addressing three fundamental sensing challenges: platform motion, large field of view, and millimetre-level measurement accu

arXiv:2606.21216v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trained policies for real-world robotics rely on computer vision components, typically in the form of pre-trained visual encoders. These encoders are an essential component and it has been shown that their power does not emerge from training on robotics downstream losses alone. Pre-training with auxiliary losses in the form of computer-vision pre-text tasks is a defining factor and heavily conditions agent performance in robotics tasks. In this unprecedented large-scale study, we ran 966 navigation episodes of static point goal navigation in a real-world building for 24km and asked which components really matter for the computer vision aspects of robotics: we evaluate state-of-the art visual encoders in realistic conditions. We explore the usefulness of heterogeneous multi-teacher distillation leading to encoders with multiple different and complementary skills. We investigate how much information from these encoders is necessary for robo

arXiv:2606.21188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long horizon, contact-rich manipulation is inherently partially observable. This is as a single visual observation rarely captures a robot's full action context, including prior attempts, interactions, or progress. Consequently, standard visuomotor policies or vision-language-action models are prone to struggle in such tasks due to a lack of memory. To address this, we introduce Compressed Action Memory Policy (CAMP) based on the insight that a robot's own action history serves as a highly informative, self-supervised signal, enabling the policy to learn a robust, compact history representation. In our approach, we train a memory module to maintain a compressed representation of past actions, forcing it to encode a latent behavioral memory of all the robot's past interactions that can then be used to better contextualize future actions. This allows our approach to implicitly track generalized task progress and learn from failed attempts w

arXiv:2606.21148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Functional robotic grasping requires a policy that generalizes across diverse object geometries and poses while maintaining task-specific contact precision. We study this challenge through mug-handle grasping, where thin handles, instance variation, and upright or inverted placements make both perception and control sensitive to object configuration. Grasp pose detection methods operate open-loop and are sensitive to estimation errors on thin handle structures. Learned visuomotor policies must implicitly learn to handle the coupled variation in visual appearance and action direction induced by different object placements, limiting generalization. We propose AnyMug, a canonicalized visuomotor reinforcement learning framework for functional grasping that trains a single closed-loop policy entirely in simulation and deploys it zero-shot on a real robot. AnyMug introduces observation-action canonicalization, which transforms both the depth ob

arXiv:2606.21139v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent action pretraining learns representations of visual change from pairs of observations, but existing methods typically encode each transition as a single unstructured representation that entangles transition extent and transition mode. We introduce Polar Latent Actions with Radial structure (PoLAR), which imposes a radial-direction structure on latent actions, encouraging radius to encode transition extent and direction to retain transition mode. PoLAR uses temporal offset between two observations as a weak proxy for transition extent, encouraging latent action from observation pairs separated by larger temporal gaps to occupy larger radii. We instantiate this structure in hyperbolic space, whose expanding volume with radius offers a natural fit for more diverse transition modes at larger extents. Across in-task and large-scale pretraining settings, PoLAR improves downstream policy performance in simulation and real-world robot expe

arXiv:2606.21100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The integration of pretrained encoders with diffusion policies has become a dominant paradigm for visual robotic manipulation. However, it still struggles to generalize across complex environments with varying factors such as lighting and surface textures. To address this, we propose FAME, a framework that integrates a factor-aware mixture-of-experts (MoE) with a pretrained encoder to enhance generalization to environmental variations. FAME follows a three-stage training process: (1) policy warmup, where a diffusion policy is trained on standard-environment data with a frozen encoder; (2) factor-specific adapter training, where lightweight adapters inserted between the frozen encoder and the temporarily frozen policy are trained on customized datasets, each targeting a distinct environmental variation; and (3) joint fine-tuning, where a central router and the warmed policy are trained on mixed data to handle multiple factors jointly. FAME

arXiv:2606.21093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic inspection relies on accurate sensing to acquire high-fidelity geometric measurements for defect detection and metrology. While prior work has focused on robot motion and viewpoint planning, how to configure sensing parameters remains largely underexplored, despite their decisive impact on measurement quality. We propose SenseHD, a robotic sensing system that formulates scanner configuration as an instruction-conditioned sensing decision. Instead of predicting precise parameter values, SenseHD treats sensing parameters as discrete sensing actions and selects stable sensing regimes through hyperdimensional associative memory. Experiments on a real robotic inspection platform demonstrate that SenseHD robustly selects appropriate sensing configurations and significantly improves inspection reliability, while remaining lightweight and efficient compared to baseline methods.

arXiv:2606.21088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving robust and generalizable manipulation across diverse environments remains a fundamental challenge in embodied robotics. Recent world action models achieve strong in-domain performance, yet their gains do not extend proportionally to out-of-distribution scenarios. We attribute this to a structural mismatch between visual and action modalities, whose intrinsically heterogeneous manifolds cause joint optimization to disproportionately degrade action robustness under distribution shift. To address this, we propose MV-WAM, a novel end-to-end framework that jointly models visual prediction, action generation, and value estimation designed to effectively leverage video priors during both training and inference for enhanced action generalization. Key to this unification is a cross-modality causal mask that hierarchically grounds actions in predicted video frames and value function tokens in both modalities. To further narrow the general

arXiv:2606.21047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Acoustic microrobots have emerged as a promising frontier for targeted drug delivery and minimally invasive medicine due to their high-power density and biocompatibility. Despite wide-ranging designs, conventional acoustic microrobots mostly rely on air microbubbles trapped within confined microcavities within the robot body, which suffer from limited operational longevity due to rapid gas dissolution and resultant shifts in resonance frequency. In this paper, we propose a robust, membrane-based acoustic microrobot that overcomes these limitations by employing a thin flexible Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) membrane bonded over confined microcavities for microstreaming. The introduced design physically prevents gas diffusion, ensuring stable performance over extended periods at high actuation voltages. We systematically characterized the membrane-based acoustic actuator longevity, demonstrating consistent streaming and propulsion for over 24