新闻与研究

arXiv:2609.02003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fully-powered knee prostheses, unlike traditional passive knees, can perform controlled positive work, reducing the need for compensatory behaviors by users during energy-intensive activities. While quasi-direct drive (QDD) actuators provide superior torque control, backdrivability, and acoustic noise properties compared to traditional highly-geared actuators, prior QDD prototypes have been too heavy and bulky for commercial translation. In this work, we present the design and validation of a new lightweight (2.6 kg) and low-profile (24.5 cm tip-to-tip build height) QDD knee prosthesis. By optimizing an 18 to 1 two-stage transmission alongside thermal and structural finite-element analyses, we significantly reduce device mass while enabling a peak torque of 145 Nm. Through benchtop tests, we validate the device's high output torque, low backdrive torque (1 Nm), and its precision position and torque control capabilities. We also demonstrat

arXiv:2609.01961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Augmenting the dexterity of human surgeons has the potential to free them from tedious subtasks. We consider debridement (removal of diseased or dead tissue fragments), which is challenging due to imprecision in spatial perception and cable actuation. We develop an augmented dexterity system for surgical debridement that uses visual servoing to align the cable-driven gripper with the target position in the image plane, and then introduces a novel approach to depth control, MACAW: Monocular Adaptive Compact Attention Windows. Across 100 physical trials using the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) robot, camera-frame servoing reduced average gripper position offset from 37 to fewer than 5 pixels within 4 optimization steps, taking an average of only 0.39s. MACAW significantly outperforms procedural and learned VLA baselines, achieving a 93% success rate at 11 seconds per fragment, yielding a throughput of 304 fragments per hour. Extending MACAW t

arXiv:2609.01938v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dexterous manipulation with multi-fingered robot hands promises human-level dexterity, but collecting large-scale dexterous robot hand data remains difficult. Learning from human demonstrations has emerged as a scalable alternative to robot teleoperation, providing strong priors on object interaction and contact strategies. Recent sim-to-real RL methods incorporate such priors, but often (i) omit rewards that explicitly incentivize precise contact, yielding weak real-world performance, and/or (ii) generalize poorly to unseen object instances. We propose DemoMimic (Dexterous Motion Mimic), a policy that manipulates objects by focusing on their geometry local to the contact points. Its contact-centric rewards encourage precise contact and improve sim-to-real consistency, yielding a single real-world policy that transfers across objects of varying shape, scale, mass, and friction wherever local contact structure is preserved. Real-world abla

arXiv:2609.01731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) disaster-response systems require coordinated task assignment and local trajectory control, yet the individual and combined contributions of these coordination layers to mission efficiency and operational safety remain insufficiently characterised under controlled experimental conditions. TriSAR is evaluated as a five-UAV coordination system operating in a physics-based Gazebo simulation of an earthquake-damaged urban environment. A 2 x 2 factorial design compares two task-allocation strategies (Genetic Algorithm and greedy fitness-based allocation) with reactive collision avoidance enabled or disabled. Each of the four configurations was evaluated over 30 stochastic episodes in a common scenario of five UAVs and eight targets. Under greedy allocation, enabling repulsion eliminated recorded collision-threshold violations, confirmed by a Mann-Whitney test (U = 885, p = 4.03 x 10^-12, rank-biserial r = 0.

arXiv:2609.01662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For embodied systems, predictive agreement alone does not determine whether evidence warrants action; evidential origin matters. Repeated inference over one observation can multiply agreement without adding evidence, while source-local values do not reveal whether outputs have separately countable origins. PACT treats evidence countability as a relational variable for provenance-conserving fusion and typed action admission. A supplied provenance partition defines countable units. PACT retains coordinatewise support shared within each unit, accumulates only across units, and maps unmet release conditions to hold, confirm, or fallback. Under the stated assumptions, source-local values cannot identify countability; the coordinatewise meet is the greatest budget satisfying singleton fidelity and insertion non-amplification, with coarsening monotonicity and fixed-partition stability. Across 31,200 evaluations in 48 scene clusters, PACT attains

arXiv:2604.25284v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study cooperative shortest path planning for an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) assisted by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) scout in environments with unknown road blockages that are only discovered when a robot reaches the damaged point. This formulation generalizes the original Canadian Traveller Problem (CTP), which assumes a single ground vehicle and that the traversability status of all incident edges is revealed upon arrival at a vertex. We first analyze the case where the start and the goal are connected by $k$ disjoint paths, and prove that the worst-case competitive ratio $\rho$ for a single UGV is $2k-1$. With UAV assistance, and under the simplifying assumption of negligible initial transit and deadheading UAV costs, the ratio $\rho$ improves to $2(k-1)\frac{v_G}{v_G + v_A} + 1$, where $v_G$ and $v_A$ denote the UGV and UAV speed, respectively. To address general graphs and non-negligible UAV initial transit and deadheadi

arXiv:2603.12665v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated significant advantages in robotic manipulation. However, their reliance on vision and language often leads to suboptimal performance in tasks involving visual occlusion, fine-grained manipulation, and physical contact. To address these challenges, we propose TacVLA, a fine-tuned VLA model by incorporating tactile modalities into the transformer-based policy to enhance fine-grained manipulation capabilities. Specifically, we introduce a contact-aware gating mechanism that selectively activates tactile tokens only when contact is detected, enabling adaptive multimodal fusion while avoiding irrelevant tactile interference. The fused visual, language, and tactile tokens are jointly processed within the transformer architecture to strengthen cross-modal grounding during contact-rich interaction. Extensive experiments on constraint-locked disassembly, in-box picking and robustness evalua

arXiv:2603.10529v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Litter pollution represents a growing environmental problem affecting natural and urban ecosystems worldwide. Waste discarded in public spaces often accumulates in areas that are difficult to access, such as uneven terrains, coastal environments, parks, and roadside vegetation. Over time, these materials degrade and release harmful substances, including toxic chemicals and microplastics, which can contaminate soil and water and pose serious threats to wildlife and human health. Despite increasing awareness of the problem, litter collection is still largely performed manually by human operators, making large-scale cleanup operations labor-intensive, time-consuming, and costly. Robotic solutions have the potential to support and partially automate environmental cleanup tasks. In this work, we present a quadruped robotic system designed for autonomous litter collection in challenging outdoor scenarios. The robot combines the mobility adv

arXiv:2602.22006v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate relative localization is critical for multi-robot cooperation. In robot groups, measurements from different robots arrive asynchronously and with clock time-offsets. Although Continuous-Time (CT) formulations have proved effective for handling asynchronous measurements in single-robot SLAM and calibration, extending CT methods to multi-robot settings faces great challenges in achieving high-accuracy, low-latency, and high-frequency performance. In particular, existing CT methods suffer from the inherent query-time delay of unclamped B-splines and high optimization latency. This paper proposes CT-RIO, a novel Continuous-Time Relative-Inertial Odometry framework. We adopt Clamped Non-Uniform B-splines (C-NUBS) to represent states, eliminating the query-time delay. We further augment C-NUBS with closed-form extension and shrinkage operations that preserve the spline shape, making it suitable for online estimation and enabling fl

arXiv:2602.16365v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Flexible endoscopic continuum manipulators offer high dexterity and access to complex anatomy, but nonlinear hysteresis limits feedforward control accuracy. Closed-loop control can compensate for these errors but requires accurate six-degree-of-freedom (6D) end-effector pose feedback. We present MarUco, a markerless 6D pose estimation framework for closed-loop control using only stereo vision during operation. A photorealistic pseudo-rigid-body simulation pipeline generates large-scale annotated training data without manual labeling. A multifeature fusion network integrates masks, keypoints, heatmaps, and bounding boxes from both stereo views to estimate an initial pose, followed by a learned single-pass render-and-compare module that refines the pose without iterative optimization. Kinematics-free hand-eye calibration estimates camera-to-robot-base extrinsics, and self-supervised adaptation uses unlabeled real stereo pairs to mitigat

arXiv:2602.09227v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In cooperative environments, such as in factories or assistive scenarios, it is important for a robot to communicate its intentions to observers, who could be either other humans or robots. A legible trajectory allows an observer to quickly and accurately predict an agent's intention. In adversarial environments, such as in military operations or games, it is important for a robot to not communicate its intentions to observers. An illegible trajectory leads an observer to incorrectly predict the agent's intention or delays when an observer is able to make a correct prediction about the agent's intention. However, in some environments there are multiple observers, each of whom may be able to see only part of the environment, and each of whom may have different motives. In this work, we introduce the Mixed-Motive Limited-Observability Legible Motion Planning (MMLO-LMP) problem, which requires a motion planner to generate a trajectory th

arXiv:2511.16949v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Dense 3D semantic occupancy perception is critical for mobile robots operating in pedestrian-rich environments, yet it remains underexplored compared to its application in autonomous driving. To address this gap, we present MobileOcc, a semantic occupancy dataset for mobile robots operating in crowded human environments. Our dataset is built using an annotation pipeline that incorporates static object occupancy annotations and a novel mesh optimization framework explicitly designed for human occupancy modeling. It reconstructs deformable human geometry from 2D images, then refines and optimizes it using associated LiDAR point data. Using MobileOcc, we establish benchmarks for two tasks: i) Occupancy prediction and ii) Pedestrian velocity prediction, using different methods, including monocular, stereo, and panoptic occupancy, with metrics and baseline implementations for reproducible comparison. Beyond occupancy prediction, we further

arXiv:2504.20584v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work presents an RGB-D imaging-based approach to marker-free hand-eye calibration using a novel implementation of the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm with a robust point-to-plane (PTP) objective formulated on a Lie algebra. Its applicability is demonstrated through comprehensive experiments using three well known serial manipulators and two RGB-D cameras. With only three randomly chosen robot configurations, our approach achieves approximately 90% successful calibrations, demonstrating 2-3x higher convergence rates to the global optimum compared to both marker-based and marker-free baselines. We also report 2 orders of magnitude faster convergence time (0.8 +/- 0.4 s) for 9 robot configurations over other marker-free methods. Our method exhibits significantly improved accuracy (5 mm in task space) over classical approaches (7 mm in task space) whilst being marker-free. The benchmarking dataset and code are open sourced un

arXiv:2409.20184v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: What is considered safe for a robot operator during physical human-robot collaboration (HRC) is specified in corresponding HRC standards (e.g., ISO 10218-2:2025). The regime that allows collisions between the moving robot and the operator, called Power and Force Limiting (PFL), restricts the permissible contact forces. Using the same fixed contact thresholds on the entire robot surface results unnecessary productivity losses, as the robot needs to stop even when impact forces are within limits. Here we present a framework that decides whether the robot should interrupt motion based on estimated collision force computed individually for different parts of the robot body and dynamically on the fly, based on the Effective Mass (EM) of each robot link. We performed experiments on a simulated and real collaborative robot arm (UR10e) with sensitive skin (AIRSKIN) for collision detection and isolation. To demonstrate the generality of our me