新闻与研究

arXiv:2609.23614v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation, requiring robots to regulate not only motion but also how they yield to external forces, has emerged as the next frontier for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, existing VLAs output purely kinematic commands, degrading performance on real-world contact-rich tasks. In this paper, we introduce CompVLA, a unified VLA framework that jointly predicts motion and stiffness matrix from RGB and language inputs. Our approach augments the conventional architecture with a dedicated Compliance Expert, which outputs time-varying stiffness and virtual displacement profiles executed via geometric impedance control. We demonstrate that CompVLA achieves the highest average success rate across diverse contact-rich tasks, outperforming both vanilla and compliance-aware VLA baselines, with ablations confirming each component is essential.

arXiv:2609.23610v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation-trained humanoid proprioceptive odometry faces two transfer challenges: training trajectories generated by specific robot control policies intended for deployment cover only a limited range of motions, while sim-to-real mismatch can make unconstrained predictions unreliable. We address both with Prior-Informed Odometry from Human-Motion Tracking (PRIMO). On the data side, we generate odometry supervision by having the humanoid track diverse retargeted human motions in simulation, decoupling supervision from the deployment policies and broadening the training motion distribution. On the model side, a Prior-Informed estimator uses physics- and symmetry-informed priors to structure velocity and rotation prediction and a coarse raw-context pathway to preserve sensor context alongside encoded features, thereby strengthening sim-to-real generalization. Under a unified real-robot protocol, PRIMO reduces mean error by 31.6%-61.7% relat

arXiv:2609.23580v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reactive vision--language--action (VLA) models struggle with long-horizon manipulation when visually similar observations can correspond to different actions depending on the task stage or interaction history. We refer to this ambiguity as task-state aliasing and introduce TaskAnchor, a lightweight adapter that grounds pretrained VLAs in execution history. TaskAnchor combines history-conditioned visual refinement with a milestone-supervised task-state coordinate, a scalar representing the semantic stage of execution. These signals are injected through the native visual and language interfaces, respectively, without introducing an explicit planner or modifying the action-generation mechanism. On RMBench, TaskAnchor achieves approximately 4.9--5.5$\times$ the average success rates of the published $\pi_{0.5}$ and X-VLA baselines, with consistent gains on RoboMemArena and real robots. The added latency is only 2.08\,ms per action chunk for $

arXiv:2609.23578v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI agents become increasingly capable, agent-driven robotic control is emerging as a compelling paradigm. However, prevailing vision-language-action (VLA) models and world action models (WAMs) still rely on natural-language instructions to specify manipulation tasks, an ill-suited interface for agent-driven control: referentially ambiguous, spatially imprecise, redundant with the agent's inherent language understanding, and entangling intent with execution. We present AR-WAM, a visual-conditioned, agent-ready world action model that replaces language with two complementary conditions: a visual grounding prompt (a bounding box of the target) denoting the interaction object and location, and a learnable operation token dictating the atomic skill to execute. Our compact 0.5B-parameter model, with a frozen pretrained visual encoder and no language encoder, predicts scene evolution within compact latent states while decoding actions, exposi

arXiv:2609.23554v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-cost planar air-bearing testbeds have matured into a standard proxy for free-flying spacecraft GNC, but they remain largely thruster-only and are rarely equipped for contact-rich, inertia-coupled manipulation. Building on the open-source ATMOS testbed, we contribute a reaction wheel and two force/torque-sensed robotic arms (LEVION) with interchangeable end-effectors, integrated as first-class control actuators through a unified ROS 2 abstraction layer. On top of the software stack we build a reinforcement-learning training environment and digital twin, and a controller that exploits these added degrees of freedom, letting classical optimal controllers and learned policies be swapped on the same hardware without modification. We validate the integrated system, PINGU, across four benchmark tasks: point-to-pose navigation (classical LQR vs. sim-to-real PPO), dynamic disturbance rejection under arm-induced center-of-mass shifts, reaction-

arXiv:2609.23504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Task-oriented grasping (TOG) requires robots to grasp functional parts of objects (e.g., the handle of a mug for pouring), yet these affordance regions are frequently occluded in cluttered scenes. Active perception via next-best-view (NBV) planning can resolve such occlusions by moving the camera for more informative observations. However, existing NBV methods typically optimize viewpoints for grasping the target object as a whole without distinguishing which part is task-relevant. A naive adaptation, fully scanning the target object before predicting the affordance, wastes most of the viewpoint budget on task-irrelevant surfaces (e.g., the mug body for pouring). To address this, we propose ATAP, an Affordance-Targeted Active Perception framework that shifts viewpoint planning from exhaustive target scanning to targeted affordance verification. ATAP hypothesizes the occluded target geometry via a generative shape prior and predicts the af

arXiv:2609.23491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Elevator-VIGS, a visual-inertial 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM system that keeps tracking and mapping through elevator rides. Inside a moving elevator, the two sensors are in conflict. The camera sees only the robot's motion relative to the elevator, while the IMU senses that motion plus the elevator's motion relative to the world. This conflict is challenging for existing visual-inertial estimators. If vision dominates, the estimator tracks only the robot's motion within the elevator and misses the elevator's rise, and if the conflict remains, the estimator diverges. We observe that the conflict comes from forcing both observations into a single coordinate frame. We instead estimate the robot's pose in the elevator's coordinate frame, and the elevator's motion relative to the world as a per-keyframe transport state, the elevator's rise and vertical velocity, within dense visual-inertial bundle adjustment. Elevator-VIGS detects ri

arXiv:2609.23487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing wearable exoskeleton architectures are typically constrained by a single mechanical output modality, providing either joint torque around an anatomical joint or linear traction along a limb-training-oriented direction, which limits adaptability to diverse training scenarios. This letter presents a cable-driven switchable actuator (CDSA) that can rapidly switch between torque and tension modes while centralizing all sensing and actuation components at the proximal drive unit. A Coupled Movable Pulley Mechanism (CMPM) provides tension amplification at the distal end-effector, while a bidirectional Cable-Driven Ratchet Mechanism (CDRM) enables mode switching and preload regulation. To eliminate the need for distal instrumentation, multi-source proximal sensors are integrated with a data-driven fusion model to estimate distal output forces. An adaptive dual-mode force control strategy based on iterative learning control (ILC) is furt

arXiv:2609.23486v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robots operating in human-centered environments are typically designed to execute explicit instructions, and most robot-learning datasets likewise pair observations with task instructions or low-level actions. Although recent work has begun to explore proactive embodied assistance, existing resources target different settings and action levels, leaving real-world human-centered multimodal decision-making underexplored. We formulate this problem as \textit{Proactive Robot Action Reasoning} (\textit{ProRobo}), an upstream cognitive decision problem in which a robot must determine which action to take based on multimodal human and environmental cues without explicit action instructions. To support ProRobo, we introduce \textit{ProAction}, a real-world multimodal dataset containing 10K samples of visual observations, audio signals, and text inputs across 12 daily-life scenarios in five common scenes. To construct cognitively grounded high-lev

arXiv:2609.23483v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid loco-manipulation faces two prominent limitations: controllers using continuous velocity commands cannot precisely regulate individual footholds, while specialized foothold-tracking modules are difficult to integrate with whole-body manipulation. Furthermore, standard action-based imitation distillation primarily transfers expert actions, without explicitly encouraging a shared representation of heterogeneous skills. This paper introduces STRIDER, a hierarchical multi-gait framework to bridge these gaps. The framework integrates terrain-aware 3D stepping logic, Adversarial Motion Priors (AMP)-based natural walking, and Cartesian upper-body control: its stepping expert selects feasible footholds in the stance-foot frame and generates clearance-aware swing trajectories. To fuse distinct walking and stepping experts into one executable student policy, we propose Latent Distillation Proximal Policy Optimization (LD-PPO), a distillati

arXiv:2609.23445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bimanual manipulation requires policies that coordinate two arms while adapting their functional roles to scene geometry, object configuration, and task context. Learning such scene-conditioned role adaptation remains challenging, as demonstrations may contain uneven role distributions that limit generalization to underrepresented arm--role configurations. In addition, many bimanual policies predict actions in fixed left- and right-arm action spaces. While this provides a natural parameterization for robot control, it does not explicitly specify how behaviors should transform when functional roles are exchanged across arms. Across different scene initializations, the two arms may follow a similar coordination pattern, but the role-specific behavior assigned to each arm should change with the scene. Therefore, we propose BiRoAD, a Bimanual Role-Adaptive Decomposition framework for learning shared and role-adaptive representations in bimanu

arXiv:2609.23439v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-prehensile manipulation is practical for relocating large, heavy, or geometrically ungraspable objects. Yet, long-horizon pushing of arbitrarily-shaped 3D objects couples three problems: 1) where to push the object so as to approach the target pose, 2) whether each push is stable and reachable, 3) whether subsequent actions remain feasible. We present an object-centric pushing policy within a feedback-guided hierarchical framework. At the low level, a learning-based policy predicts contact actions from a pose- and scale-normalized point cloud, conditioned on a near single-step subgoal. A stability score is applied to evaluate the predicted contacts by a quasi-static sliding-versus-tipping analysis. At the high level, BIT$^*$ first searches for an object path, and the next several subgoals are checked by contact prediction and robot motion planning for future feasibility. Failed motion plans, as feedback, change the local path costs an

arXiv:2609.23432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamic rope manipulation is highly sensitive to unknown object dynamics: the same robot motion can produce substantially different responses across ropes, while explicitly identifying the relevant physical properties is difficult. We present RopeFormer, a history-conditioned framework that uses prior task interaction as context for subsequent control. The policy retains cross-trial action-response history while keeping its weights fixed and requires no explicit online rope-parameter estimation. In matched simulation evaluations across sustained single-arm rotation, bimanual rotation, and transient whipping, retaining context improves subsequent control relative to resetting the same checkpoint, with the benefit varying across rope dynamics and observation settings. We further deploy the frozen policies on a Unitree H1-2 with previously unseen physical ropes. From T1 to T3, target-acquisition time decreases by 30.9% for Rope Swing and 33.

arXiv:2609.23423v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language navigation (VLN) has largely been developed for indoor and terrestrial robots, where language can often be treated as a static goal and motion is approximated by discrete or near-instantaneous actions. These assumptions break down for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs): river navigation requires continuous motion under inertia and limited maneuverability, while long-horizon instructions must be executed through sparse and visually ambiguous maritime landmarks. We introduce RiverVLN, to our knowledge the first benchmark designed for long-horizon USV VLN under continuous riverine motion, and PGT-NAV, a phase-grounded temporal navigation framework for USVs. Rather than directly mapping an entire instruction to motion, PGT-NAV converts it into an ordered sequence of visually verifiable semantic phases and maintains the active phase online through grounded visual and motion evidence. This explicit semantic progress state is fused

arXiv:2609.23418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-guided manipulation can depend on physical properties that visible appearance does not reveal. Temperature is one such property, but object datasets for robot learning rarely associate measured temperatures with object appearance and geometry. We present HEARTH, an object-centric RGB-thermal-3D dataset of 90 physical objects from 18 everyday categories, comprising 145 captured object states. Our pipeline maps apparent surface temperatures onto reconstructed meshes through camera calibration and pose transfer. The dataset includes raw temperature measurements, camera parameters, RGB-textured meshes, and thermal textures for simulation. We use these assets to construct three LIBERO-derived tasks and collect 1,200 demonstrations for fine-tuning a pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) model, $\pi_{0.5}$. In an ablation study, adding thermal observations to the VLA increases success on temperature-dependent object-selection tasks fr