Generating high-fidelity and controllable synthetic data is critical for advancing end-to-end autonomous driving, particularly for addressing the long tail of rare safety-critical scenarios. Existing occupancy-guided methods typically rely on shallow conditioning mechanisms and reference-frame-dependent video synthesis, which limits fine-grained controllability from arbitrary BEV layouts and restricts their applicability for scalable simulation. In this paper, we propose AnyScene, a unified occupancy-centric framework for driving scene generation. AnyScene generates semantic occupancy sequences from BEV layouts through a Spatial-Temporal Occupancy Diffusion Transformer that jointly tokenizes BEV and occupancy features in an autoregressive manner. This design enables precise controllability from cross-dataset and user-defined BEV inputs while naturally supporting long-horizon generation. Building upon the generated occupancy, a Geometry-Grounded View Expansion module treats occupancy as the canonical spatial representation and synthesizes temporally consistent multi-view driving videos in a reference-free and autoregressive fashion, supporting flexible camera configurations at inference time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnyScene achieves state-of-the-art performance in both occupancy and video generation. It exhibits strong generalization to unseen and customized layouts, and provides measurable benefits for downstream tasks such as sparse-view 3D reconstruction.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have quickly become common in various airspaces, representing a wide range of applications from recreation flying to commercial photography and package delivery. With the increasing prevalence of UAVs, it becomes critical that both manned and unmanned aircraft can detect UAVs and other flying objects from long range to effectively track movement and ensure safe operation in shared spaces. While several datasets have been introduced for drone detection, the need for expanded high-quality data persists, especially in the area of high-resolution long-range drone data. To address this, we introduce a high-resolution dataset of 102,532 long-range RGB images of drones, sampled at 5 FPS from 128 distinct video clips taken mid flight during 17 different data collection days spread over 8 months to ensure a wide variety of lighting scenarios, flight locations, and background elements. The dataset boasts comprehensive drone range information across the dataset, as well as 29,630 IR images, all paired with RGB counterparts from the base dataset. As one of the first drone detection datasets to leverage 4K image resolution and paired 640x512 IR images, our work represents a significant advancement to enable the detection of drones at long range. For access to the complete dataset, please visit https://research.coe.drexel.edu/ece/imaple/lrddv3/

3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) is an essential capability for embodied AI, requiring agents to localize objects in 3D scenes based on natural language descriptions. Recent zero-shot methods leverage 2D vision-language models (LVLMs). However, they often rely on existing sets of multi-view images and struggle with the limited semantic and spatial details provided by standard 3D segmentation tools. We present $\textbf{AgentGrounder}$, a zero-shot 3D visual grounding framework that operates directly on colored point clouds without task-specific 3D training. Our approach follows a two-stage design: (1) an offline stage that applies 3D model to build an Object Lookup Table (OLT) with instance IDs, semantic labels, 3D bounding boxes; and (2) an online tool-driven agent that decomposes each query, retrieves only relevant candidates from the OLT, performs geometric scoring, and triggers image rendering on demand when additional visual evidence (e.g., color, material, or viewpoint-sensitive cues) is required. Compared with fixed anchor-target matching pipelines, this design reduces cascading matching errors and improves context-window efficiency by avoiding prompts overloaded with irrelevant objects. We evaluate on ScanRefer and Nr3D under a zero-shot setting and observe consistent improvements over SeeGround in our setup, including +2.5% Acc@0.5 on ScanRefer and +6.3% on Nr3D, with a notable +6.3% gain on Nr3D view-independent queries. These results show that combining selective retrieval, geometric reasoning, and adaptive visual inspection yields a practical and robust foundation for open-vocabulary 3D grounding. Our code is available at https://github.com/be2rlab/AgentGrounder.

Embodied instruction following (EIF) requires agents to understand and execute complex natural language commands within interactive 3D environments. Despite recent advances, existing methods often fail in long-horizon planning and handling irreversible state changes, resulting in low task success rates. To address these challenges, we introduce RePlan-Bot, a novel EIF agent that performs multi-level, continuous replanning throughout task execution. RePlan-Bot integrates a high-level LLM-based auditor for dynamic sub-goal adjustments guided by environmental feedback, a commonsense-guided search mechanism based on a multi-layered instance map for precise and structured object localization, and a lightweight ViT-based corrector to preemptively fix risky low-level actions. Evaluated on the ALFRED benchmark, RePlan-Bot achieves state-of-the-art performance in both seen and unseen environments, demonstrating superior adaptability and reliability.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as proposal generators for evolutionary robot design, yet most loops remain memoryless: simulator results shape the next population but are not preserved as reusable design knowledge. We present Auto-Robotist, a self-evolving LLM agent that distills morphology-search traces into an explicit natural-language skill library. Each skill stores a structural archetype, evidence-grounded positive and negative rules, and the evaluated designs that support them, making design memory inspectable rather than implicit in a population. During search, the agent retrieves skills to condition LLM edits of elite bodies while retaining a Genetic Algorithm (GA) mutation path for exploration; after evaluation, it updates the library through Add, Diagnose, and Merge. Across seven EvoGym tasks spanning locomotion, traversal, and object interaction, Auto-Robotist improves cold-start 5x5 search and transfers learned skills to 10x10 design spaces, where reference-conditioned transfer outperforms GA on every task. These results suggest that LLM agents can convert expensive physical evaluations into reusable, auditable design principles. Our code will be released upon acceptance.

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models and world action models (WAMs) advance robotic manipulation by enriching intermediate representations with auxiliary spatial features or future visual-state prediction. However, these representations largely remain within the observation space and do not share the rigid-body geometry of the action space, forcing the action decoder to implicitly recover this geometry. We propose OASIS, a visuomotor policy that aligns the intermediate representation with the action space via $SE(3)$ end-effector trajectory prediction. OASIS couples a 3D-aware feature encoder that fuses vision-language and metric-depth features with an $SE(3)$ trajectory predictor that produces a camera-frame end-effector trajectory. Conditioned on the predictor's pose-supervised hidden states, the action decoder generates action chunks consistent with rigid-body motion. Across simulation and real-world experiments, OASIS outperforms VLA and WAM baselines in success rate and out-of-distribution generalization. Our project page is available at https://npuhandsome.github.io/OASIS_web.

Embodied Question Answering (EQA) connects perception, reasoning, and interaction within embodied environments. However, existing datasets and benchmarks remain fragmented, each focusing on a limited subset of reasoning skills such as spatial understanding or procedural reasoning, without offering a unified large-scale framework for comprehensive evaluation. We present EQA-Decision, a large-scale embodied QA dataset that systematically covers four complementary dimensions of embodied reasoning: static scene construction, spatial understanding, task dynamics reasoning, and instant decision. The dataset contains over four million question-answer pairs with hierarchical annotations across diverse embodied scenarios. In addition, we develop RoboDecision, a strong baseline model aligned with the EQA-Decision Benchmark, providing a unified framework that jointly evaluates perception, reasoning, and action-level decision-making in embodied environments. Results demonstrate that EQA-Decision effectively benchmarks and enhances VLM capabilities in spatial and interaction reasoning, providing a solid foundation for advancing embodied intelligence research.

The increasing use of drones in human-centric applications highlights the need for designs that can survive collisions and recover rapidly, minimizing risks to both humans and the environment. We present HoLoArm, a quadrotor with compliant arms inspired by the nodus structure of dragonfly wings. This design provides natural flexibility and resilience while preserving flight stability, which is further reinforced by the integration of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) control policy that enhances both recovery and hovering performance. Experimental results demonstrate that HoLoArm can passively deform in any direction, including axial one, and recover within 0.3-0.6 s depending on the direction and level of the impact. The drone can survive collisions at speeds up to 7.6 m/s and carry a 540 g payload while maintaining stable flight. This work contributes to the morphological design of soft aerial robots with high agility and reliable safety, enabling operation in cluttered and human shared environments, and lays the groundwork for future fully soft drones that integrate compliant structures with intelligent control.

Robust and accurate perception of humans in their 3D scene context is essential for integrating robots into everyday environments. Existing approaches, however, often fail to predict plausible and accurate human motion estimates that are consistent with the surrounding scene, especially in the presence of heavy occlusions or partial visibility. This can limit both safety and efficiency for robotic operations. We introduce HumanFlow, a latent diffusion model that unifies human motion tracking and forecasting, conditioned on the 3D scene context. We show that our human motion model produces smooth and accurate predictions under challenging conditions, including heavy occlusions, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in tracking accuracy while being significantly more efficient. Furthermore, we show how HumanFlow's latent space can be tightly coupled with control by conditioning a flow-matching-based, approximate MPC policy on these representations. We validate our policy in simulation with real human trajectories for MAV social navigation, demonstrating superior navigation performance and remaining collision-free, even under partial observability of the human.

In this paper, we address the challenge of performing non-prehensile pushing operations with a compliant robotic manipulation system. To ensure safe operations in human-populated environments, robots must comply with external physical interactions and exhibit passive behavior. To achieve this, we extend a state-of-the-art pushing model to integrate it with impedance-controlled robots. We develop a model predictive control framework built upon this model that enables compliant pushing through optimal modulation of the robot's position/velocity set-point, jointly realizing the required pushing force and contact point adaptation to obtain desired object motion. However, external interactions may induce tracking errors, causing a consequent potentially indefinite increase of the pushing force. To prevent this, we integrate an energy tank passivity filter that further modulates the robot velocity set-point to guarantee passivity and avoid uncontrolled energy buildup. The proposed method has been rigorously tested in simulation and validated through experiments on two different robotic systems, demonstrating passive compliance during human-robot interactions and assessing trajectory tracking performance and robustness to variations in the object's physical parameters.

Autonomous ground robots operating in large-scale outdoor environments require both robust long-range navigation and fine-grained ''last-mile'' exploration. Current advances in visual-language navigation (VLN) work well at short-range tasks, lacking geospatial grounding for long-distance missions. Some OpenStreetMap (OSM)-based methods relying on cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to factual hallucination and cannot conduct ''last-mile'' exploration based on human instruction. To address these challenges, we present G-DRAGON, a retrieval-augmented framework for outdoor, open-world navigation. This framework maps natural-language commands to versioned, local OSM entities via generative retrieval based on lightweight LLM, yielding accurate coordinates for global route planning. A high-level planning module bridges global topological routes with the SLAM system, projecting geospatial waypoints into the robot's navigable frame. For the ''last mile," the framework transitions to frontier-based exploration and open-set semantic voxel mapping to localize open-vocabulary targets. Experimental results in simulation demonstrate our framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, we validate the system in unseen real-world urban environments on an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV), successfully completing person-search missions with trajectories of up to 500m.

Multi-robot task allocation usually assumes some combination of communication, known task models, or a coordinator. We study the opposite extreme, a regime common in practice but overlooked in theory, which we name Zero-Knowledge MRTA (ZK-MRTA): a robot team with no prior knowledge (no task models, not even the latent rank), no communication (no messages, no parameter sharing, no coordinator), and only a partial and privately-noisy view of a public stream of teammates' outcomes. A hidden low-rank structure governs which robot suits which task, and there are far more tasks than rounds, so most (robot, task) pairs are never attempted. Yet each robot can act well on tasks it never attempted, and onboard new tasks, by running online low-rank collaborative filtering over the broadcast (SwarmCF). The advantage over any structure-free learner is categorical, not a constant factor: a structure-free learner is provably at the prior-mean error floor on unseen pairs. We prove a matching per-robot sample complexity (Θ(d) versus Θ(n), in the rank d and the task count n), an anytime (cumulative-reward) separation under task scarcity, and a deterministic condition under which decentralized recovery from the masked broadcast is exact (validated empirically). Experiments quantify the value of the broadcast, a positive scaling law (per-robot unseen-pair skill rises with team size), and the strongest masking-robustness and anytime profile among low-rank methods, recovering most (about 80% on earned skill) of a centralized full-communication ceiling, and holding under capacity-1 contention and in a robotics-grounded sensing instance.

Category-level object pose estimation aims to predict the pose and size of arbitrary objects in specific categories. Existing methods struggle with the inherent incompleteness of observed point clouds, which limits their ability to capture complete object shapes for robust pose reasoning. While point cloud completion offers a promising solution, naively treating it as a separate preprocessing step for partial observations introduces compounding errors and additional computational overhead, ultimately hindering both accuracy and efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose ComPose, a novel unified framework that tightly integrates shape completion to provide complete geometric cues for enhanced pose estimation. At the core of ComPose is a keypoint-based progressive completion module, which recovers full shape representations by progressively predicting a sparse set of keypoints and their surrounding dense point sets, empowering the keypoints to capture holistic object geometries. A geometric relation encoding module further enriches keypoint features with both local and global geometric context. In addition, we introduce a novel geometric relation consistency loss to enforce structural alignment between observed keypoints and their predicted NOCS coordinates, ensuring globally coherent coordinate transformations. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches without relying on category-level shape priors.

Existing embodied control research demonstrates remarkable performance improvements by scaling training data and model size. We instead explore inference-time strategy as an alternative axis. Non-deterministic generative models, such as diffusion and autoregressive models, have been widely adopted in the field of embodied control. However, the single-shot inference paradigm limits their performance. In this paper, we propose \textbf{TapSampling}, a plug-and-play framework for inference-time sampling. First, we introduce an Action-VAE that represents actions in a low-dimensional latent space by mapping policy-generated initial actions into a compressed posterior distribution, from which any number of latent samples can be drawn and decoded into candidate actions that approximate the true action distribution. Second, we formulate action verification as task-progress outcome prediction, using the intrinsic sequential structure of robotic datasets to train a semantically grounded verifier for interpretable action selection. Furthermore, TapSampling is a policy-agnostic framework. Extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that our method substantially improves multiple generalist policies without further policy finetuning. Code and models are available at the project page.

Safety-critical control is essential for humanoid robots operating in complex human-centered environments, where physical safety constraints such as joint limits, self-collision avoidance, obstacle avoidance, and workspace boundaries must be satisfied during real-robot operation. However, existing approaches remain limited because kinematic safety guarantees can be degraded in the presence of unknown disturbances, such as model uncertainties, trajectory-tracking errors, and external perturbations. This paper presents a hierarchical safety-critical whole-body control framework for humanoid robots based on input-to-state safe control barrier functions (ISSf-CBFs). The proposed architecture integrates a kinematic-level whole-body controller (KinWBC), an ISSf-CBF safety filter, and a dynamic-level whole-body controller (DynWBC). KinWBC generates nominal joint-motion references from prioritized tasks; the ISSf-CBF filter minimally modifies these references to satisfy kinematic safety constraints under bounded disturbances; and DynWBC tracks the filtered references while enforcing full-body dynamic feasibility and contact stability. Safety constraints are imposed on a whole-body kinematic model, and the ISSf-CBF parameters are conservatively tuned so that the resulting kinematic safety guarantees can be transferred to full-order humanoid dynamics under unknown disturbances. Simulation and real-robot experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework improves safety margins under model mismatch and reliably enforces multiple safety constraints in real time during locomotion, teleoperation, and single-leg balancing with hand control. Project website: https://kwlee365.github.io/SafeWBC-Website/

Real-time chunking (RTC) lets chunked action policies operate under inference delay by conditioning a newly generated action chunk on actions already committed by the previous chunk. Training-time RTC simulates this delay during learning and avoids expensive guidance at deployment, but its binary prefix mask treats all non-prefix tokens as fully unconstrained. This under-models asynchronous execution: early overlap actions are fixed, while later overlap actions remain editable but should still stay close to the previous plan. We propose Soft RTC, a training-time RTC generalization based on action-prior denoising. Soft RTC constructs corrupted overlap tokens from partially denoised states instead of pure noise and injects the aligned previous chunk as the same prior during inference through a lightweight token-wise blending rule. On the 12 released large Kinetix levels, a short soft window nearly matches hard training-time RTC in overall solve rate (0.809 vs. 0.815), while a medium window reduces high-delay action delta and jerk by 9.1% and 9.6% relative to hard RTC. Both variants keep near-naive runtime, unlike inference-time RTC baselines. A small preliminary real-robot sorting study provides additional evidence that training-time RTC can improve completion and that Soft RTC gives the lowest commanded-action finite-difference metrics among the tested policies.

Robotic perception in unstructured environments remains challenging despite the zero-shot capabilities of foundation models such as SAM. This work attributes performance degradation to non-uniform representation shifts across transformer layers: shallow layers exhibit substantial domain gaps (CKA < 0.5), whereas deep layers transfer effectively (CKA > 0.7). Based on this observation, we propose RepSAM, a representation-guided parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) framework for adapting foundation models to robotic vision. RepSAM employs a theoretically grounded CKA-guided rank allocation strategy combined with a multi-modal fusion module for robust handling of challenging robotic scenarios, including transparent objects and cluttered scenes. Experimental evaluation across six benchmarks and robotic manipulation tasks demonstrates that RepSAM achieves 97.9% of full fine-tuning performance (89.0% vs. 90.9% mIoU) while reducing trainable parameters by 158x (from 632M to 4.0M). RepSAM outperforms DoRA by 7.9% mIoU with just 4 hours of training on a single A100 GPU (a 96x reduction from full fine-tuning, which takes 384 GPU-hours). These improvements are statistically significant (p < 0.01) and translate to a 12.0% absolute improvement in robotic manipulation success rates over the LoRA (RGB) baseline.

The ability to efficiently and reliably learn new tasks has been a foundational challenge in robotics. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization across diverse manipulation tasks, yet pretrained policies consistently fall short of the reliability required for real-world deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning offers a promising path to bridge this gap, but existing approaches either train from scratch without fully leveraging pretrained priors, or fine-tune VLAs without achieving the sample efficiency and success rates that practical deployment demands. We present EXPO-FT, a system for stable, sample-efficient RL finetuning of pretrained VLA policies that closes this gap. Our system solves a suite of challenging manipulation tasks, including routing string lights and inserting the plug to light it up, striking a pool ball into a pocket, and inserting a flower into a wine bottle, each requiring combinations of high precision, dynamic actions, and robustness to varied initial states. Our system achieves perfect task performance (30/30 successes) across all evaluated tasks within an average of 19.1 minutes of online robot data, outperforming both prior RL-from-scratch and VLA finetuning approaches. We release an open-source codebase with the aim of facilitating broader adoption of RL finetuning of VLA models in robotics.

Autonomous exploration is critical for robot mapping unknown environments. Desirable characteristics of exploration algorithms include compute efficiency and small traversed distance during the exploration process. Motivated by these, we present Omnidirectional Path-efficient Aerial 3D expLoration (OPAL), an exploration framework centered on deliberate 360-degree yaw rotation at ambiguous branch points rather than compute-heavy global tour planning. We devise multiple variants of OPAL to determine the frontier-selection strategy once the yaw pan is completed. One variant is model-free, while others use large language models (LLMs) or vision-language models (VLMs). We characterize the performance of these variants while varying the vicinity search radius to include frontiers in the selection process. Through simulations we find that although the time-consuming in-place yaw rotation increases total exploration time relative to more computationally complex baselines such as EDEN and FALCON, OPAL is computationally simpler and achieves shorter travel distances and higher coverage-versus-distance area under the curve. We also show that adjusting the frontier-selection search radius enables a tradeoff between travel distance and total exploration time. We verify our results on a Modal AI drone in two indoor environments by comparing OPAL against FALCON, and find that the traveled distance for a variant of OPAL to be as much as 25% lower than FALCON.

Distribution shift in imitation learning refers to the problem that the agent cannot plan proper actions for a state that has not been visited during the training. This problem can be largely attributed to the inherently narrow state-action coverage provided by expert demonstrations over the full environment. In this paper, we propose a robust offline to adaptive online imitation learning framework that handles the distribution shift problem in a lifelong, multi-phase scheme. In the offline learning phase, we leverage supplementary demonstrations to broaden the state-action coverage of the policy by utilizing a discriminator to effectively train the policy with supplementary demonstrations, thereby enhancing the robustness of the policy to distribution shift. In the subsequent online inference phase, our framework detects the occurrence of distribution shift and conducts self-supervised imitation learning from online experiences to adapt the policy to the online environments. Through extensive evaluations in MuJoCo environments, we demonstrate that our method exhibits better robustness to distribution shift and better adaptation performance to online environments than the baseline algorithms, which indicates superior performance of our framework against the distribution shift.

Biomimetic autonomous underwater vehicle (BAUV) with multi-link mechanism is widely used in aquatic life observation and environmental surveys due to its low power consumption and high maneuverability. An environmental survey requires a path following system that automatically follows specific points. However, the path following system of BAUV is limited, and its evaluation with multi-link mechanism robots has not yet been clarified. The path following system in BAUV requires prior simulation because the model differs depending on the type of biomimetics. In this study, we propose a path following system for BAUVs with a multi-link mechanism and evaluation in underwater simulation. In this result, it was possible to design a path following system suitable for BAUV, determine parameters using a simulator, and evaluate control methods.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have demonstrated immense potential in autonomous driving (AD) by offering human-like reasoning and open-world generalization. However, the excessive computational overhead and high inference latency of these massive models severely hinder their deployment in resource-constrained AD systems. To address this challenge, we propose a novel decision-making framework utilizing a lightweight confidence-aware language model, which bridges the gap between complex multimodal intention reasoning and efficient inference. Specifically, we design a multi-agent collaborative workflow, comprising action voting, confidence assessment, and summarization agents, to generate high-quality, confidence-annotated decision demonstrations via explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. These demonstrations are then distilled into a lightweight language model featuring a dual-head architecture, enabling the joint prediction of decision probabilities and the generation of textual rationales. The distillation is realized via a confidence-aware fine-tuning strategy coupled with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance the model's adaptability and data efficiency. Comprehensive closed-loop experiments on the nuPlan benchmark demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) success rates in both regular and long-tail scenarios while maintaining low inference latency.

The strong dynamic coupling between the manipulator and the base poses a significant challenge to maintaining spacecraft attitude stability, potentially compromising mission safety. In this paper, we propose a Dual-Agent Coordinated Manipulation Planning (DACMP) framework that simultaneously achieves high-precision end-effector pose reaching for a 6-DoF space manipulator and attitude stabilization of the base spacecraft. To enhance learning efficiency, we present a prior policy-guided Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm incorporating the Timestep-level Expert Switching Guidance (TESG) mechanism, thereby promoting global convergence and improving task success rates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DACMP significantly outperforms baseline DRL algorithms in terms of task success rate and control precision. Furthermore, the robustness of DACMP is validated under various challenging scenarios, including system constraints, environmental disturbances, and perception uncertainties. The code and simulation configurations are available on GitHub: https://github.com/HIT-YuhuiHu/DACMP.

Neural network (NN) dynamics models and control policies achieve strong performance in robotics, but providing sound guarantees under uncertainty remains difficult, especially for closed-loop NN systems. Existing reachability tools provide formal over-approximations, yet are often non-differentiable, overly conservative, or too slow for modern learning and online planning pipelines. To address this, we present a parallelizable, differentiable reachability framework in JAX for continuous- and discrete-time systems with analytical and NN-based dynamics and controllers. Our framework combines Taylor-model flowpipe construction with CROWN-style linear bound propagation through a unified representation that preserves affine dependencies while supporting GPU-batched computation and automatic differentiation. Building on this reachability primitive, we develop (i) a certified training method that encourages reachability-friendly dynamics models and controllers, and (ii) a reachability-aware sampling-based MPC scheme with gradient-based refinement. Experiments on non-prehensile manipulation and quadrotor tasks, including hardware and higher-dimensional evaluations (up to 72D), demonstrate practical online planning while maintaining certified reachable-set over-approximations under bounded uncertainty.

World models for partially observed environments must imagine multiple compatible hidden futures and steer between them under counterfactual actions. Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) do this in latent space, but a vector-valued latent has no internal structure for carrying the belief over hidden continuations through blind rollout. We introduce the Unitary World Model JEPA (UWM-JEPA), a JEPA world model with a density-matrix latent on a joint system-environment space and a learned unitary predictor. The construction preserves the joint-state spectrum exactly during rollout, so the predictor itself cannot dissipate the represented uncertainty. On a hidden-velocity indicator task requiring five-step forward simulation under a given action sequence with the target observation masked, UWM-JEPA reaches 0.77 accuracy and degrades monotonically as actions are perturbed; a parameter-matched LSTM-JEPA trained under the same counterfactual-target objective and action head collapses to majority-class accuracy (0.53) under every action condition. Under blind rollout, UWM-JEPA loses fewer than ten points of probe R^2 at short horizons while vector-latent baselines lose forty-one and sixty-eight; both nevertheless tie on a held-out context probe, locating the separation in the predictor rather than the encoder. Action sensitivity itself requires training against counterfactual rather than teacher-forced targets, a finding that applies beyond the unitary parameterisation. For JEPA world models to imagine under partial observability, latent geometry and predictor dynamics matter, not frozen context-encoding capacity alone.

Autonomous driving perception demands accurate and efficient processing of three-dimensional sensor data under strict power constraints. Traditional convolutional neural networks achieve strong detection accuracy but are computationally intensive, limiting their suitability for deployment on resource-constrained neuromorphic platforms. Spiking neural networks offer a compelling alternative through event-driven sparse computation, yet their application to complex real-world perception tasks such as three-dimensional object detection remains limited. In this work, we propose an end-to-end spiking encoder-decoder network for object detection in bird's eye view representations of LiDAR point clouds, trained using surrogate gradient backpropagation. We train two variants: a membrane potential variant that reads continuous neuron state at the output stage for maximum accuracy, achieving $92.05$/$87.04$/$86.51$ AP at $\mathrm{IoU}\!=\!0.5$ (Easy/Moderate/Hard), and, a fully binary spiking variant that operates exclusively on spike trains at every layer for direct neuromorphic deployment. We evaluate four input spike encoding strategies and demonstrate that allowing the network to learn spike representations directly from data outperforms hand-crafted Poisson, latency, and z-axis encoding schemes on the KITTI benchmark, where sequential frames are unavailable and the BEV input is presented repeatedly across timesteps as a proxy for temporal streaming. A block-wise energy analysis demonstrates a $3.33\times$ reduction in synaptic operation energy over an equivalent CNN under conservative loop-based operation. Together, these results demonstrate the viability of spiking neural networks for accurate and energy-efficient neuromorphic perception in autonomous driving.

Greenhouse agriculture in the Mediterranean region faces significant automation challenges due to its unique structural and environmental constraints. These environments are characterized by extremely narrow aisles, heterogeneous terrains ranging from concrete to tilled soil and severe optical interference caused by polyethylene covers, which induce specular reflections and "ghost points" in depth sensors. While autonomous navigation is essential for digitizing agricultural tasks, traditional solutions often rely on expensive 3D LiDAR systems that are economically unscalable for most facilities. To address this, this paper presents GreenSeg, a robust perception framework for autonomous navigation using RGB-D sensing. The proposed method introduces a dual-layer validation strategy: a robust global plane fitting combined with a surface curvature filter for terrain adaptability, and a seed-point-based Region Growing constraint to ensure the spatial continuity of the navigable plane. Experimental validation was conducted using the AGRICOBIOT I platform across four diurnal scenarios with varying solar elevations. The results show that GreenSeg consistently outperforms benchmark segmentation methods, achieving peak improvements of 11.58% in mean Recall and 19.24% in mIoU during critical rotational maneuvers at the end of corridors. These findings confirm that the proposed algorithm enables stable and safe autonomous navigation in unstructured, dynamic agricultural environments that are subject to budget constraints and sensitive to lighting conditions.

Controlling physics-based humanoids from natural-language instructions is a critical step toward general-purpose embodied agents. However, existing methods remain constrained by a tension between semantic expressiveness and physical feasibility, often failing to jointly achieve faithful instruction following, high-quality motion, and stable long-horizon control. We propose SCRIPT, a scalable diffusion policy with a multi-stage training framework for language-driven physics-based humanoid control. The core of SCRIPT is a Joint Action-State-Text Diffusion Transformer (JAST-DiT), which represents actions, physical states, and text as dedicated token streams and couples them through joint attention, enabling direct interaction between language semantics and control dynamics. To stabilize autoregressive control, we introduce a nonlinear history conditioning mechanism, which preserves the dense recent context and samples increasingly sparse cues from long-term history. Beyond supervised imitation pre-training, we propose a post-training stage, further improving the performance using Reinforcement Learning with Hybrid Rewards (RLHR). By injecting learnable noise into the flow-sampling process, RLHR effectively improves motion quality and instruction following within closed-loop simulations using hybrid physical feedback and text rewards. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate that SCRIPT outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods, with gains across text alignment, motion quality, and physical realism metrics. Furthermore, scaling studies on the 1200-hour MotionMillion dataset demonstrate consistent performance gains with model scaling, highlighting SCRIPT's robust scalability for large-scale pre-training. Our code will be publicly available for future research.

Spatial intelligence unfolds through a perception-action loop: agents act to acquire observations, and reason about how observations vary as a function of action. Rather than passively processing what is seen, they actively uncover what is unseen - occluded structure, dynamics, containment, and functionality that cannot be resolved from passive sensing alone. We move beyond prior formulations of spatial intelligence that assume oracle observations by recasting the observer as an actor. We introduce ESI-BENCH, a comprehensive benchmark for embodied spatial intelligence spanning 10 task categories and 29 subcategories built on OmniGibson, grounded in Spelke's core knowledge systems. Agents must decide what abilities to deploy - perception, locomotion, and manipulation - and how to sequence them to actively accumulate task-relevant evidence. We conduct extensive experiments on state-of-the-art MLLMs and find that active exploration substantially outperforms passive counterparts, with agents spontaneously discovering emergent spatial strategies without explicit instructions, while random multi-view often adds noise rather than signal despite consuming far more images. Most failures stem not from weak perception but from action blindness: poor action choices lead to poor observations, which in turn drive cascading errors. While explicit 3D grounding stabilizes reasoning on depth-sensitive tasks, imperfect 3D representation proves more harmful than 2D baselines by distorting spatial relations. Human studies further reveal that unlike humans who seek falsifying viewpoints and revise beliefs under contradiction, models commit prematurely with high confidence regardless of evidence quality, exposing a metacognitive gap that neither better perception nor more embodied interaction alone can close.

Robotic systems lack a principled abstraction for organizing intelligence, capabilities, and execution in a unified manner. Existing approaches either couple skills within monolithic architectures or decompose functionality into loosely coordinated modules or multiple agents, often without a coherent model of identity and control authority. We argue that a robot should be modeled as a single persistent intelligent subject whose capabilities are extended through installable packages. We formalize this view as AEROS (Agent Execution Runtime Operating System), in which each robot corresponds to one persistent agent and capabilities are provided through Embodied Capability Modules (ECMs). Each ECM encapsulates executable skills, models, and tools, while execution constraints and safety guarantees are enforced by a policy-separated runtime. This separation enables modular extensibility, composable capability execution, and consistent system-level safety. We evaluate a reference implementation in PyBullet simulation with a Franka Panda 7-DOF manipulator across eight experiments covering re-planning, failure recovery, policy enforcement, baseline comparison, cross-task generality, ECM hot-swapping, ablation, and failure boundary analysis. Over 100 randomized trials per condition, AEROS achieves 100% task success across three tasks versus baselines (BehaviorTree.CPP-style and ProgPrompt-style at 92--93%, flat pipeline at 67--73%), the policy layer blocks all invalid actions with zero false acceptances, runtime benefits generalize across tasks without task-specific tuning, and ECMs load at runtime with 100% post-swap success.

Fundamental limits on the performance of feedback controllers are essential for benchmarking algorithms, guiding sensor selection, and certifying task feasibility -- yet few general-purpose tools exist for computing them. Existing information-theoretic approaches overestimate the information a sensor must provide by evaluating it against the uncontrolled system, producing bounds that degrade precisely when feedback is most valuable. We derive a lower bound on the minimum expected cost of any causal feedback controller under partial observations by applying the Gibbs variational principle to the joint path measure over states and observations. The bound applies to nonlinear, nonholonomic, and hybrid dynamics with unbounded costs and admits a self-consistent refinement: any good controller concentrates the state, which limits the information the sensor can extract, which tightens the bound. The resulting fixed-point equation has a unique solution computable by bisection, and we provide conditions under which the free energy minimization is provably convex, yielding a certifiably correct numerical bound. On a scalar LQG problem the self-consistent bound captures over 80% of the known optimal cost at moderate sensor noise, and on a nonlinear Dubins car tracking problem it remains informative across all noise levels where a bound using the uncontrolled state distribution is vacuous.

Geo-temporal understanding, the ability to infer location, time, and contextual properties from visual input alone, underpins applications such as disaster management, traffic planning, embodied navigation, world modeling, and geography education. Although recent vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced image geo-localization using cues like landmarks and road signs, their ability to reason about temporal signals and physically grounded spatial cues remains limited. To address this gap, we introduce TimeSpot, a benchmark for evaluating real-world geo-temporal reasoning in VLMs. TimeSpot comprises 1,455 ground-level images from 80 countries and requires structured prediction of temporal attributes (season, month, time of day, daylight phase) and geographic attributes (continent, country, climate zone, environment type, latitude-longitude) directly from visual evidence. It also includes spatial-temporal reasoning tasks that test physical plausibility under real-world uncertainty. Evaluations of state-of-the-art open- and closed-source VLMs show low performance, particularly for temporal inference. While supervised fine-tuning yields improvements, results remain insufficient, highlighting the need for new methods to achieve robust, physically grounded geo-temporal understanding TimeSpot is available at: https://TimeSpot-GT.github.io.

Accurate physics simulation is essential for robotic learning and control, yet analytical simulators often fail to capture complex contact dynamics, while learning-based simulators typically require large amounts of costly real-world data. To bridge this gap, we propose a few-shot real-to-sim approach that combines the physical consistency of analytical formulations with the representational capacity of graph neural network (GNN)-based models. Using only a small amount of real-world data, our method calibrates analytical simulators to generate large-scale synthetic datasets that capture diverse contact interactions. On this foundation, we introduce a mesh-based GNN that implicitly models rigid-body forward dynamics and derive surrogate gradients for collision detection, achieving full differentiability. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach enables learning-based simulators to outperform differentiable baselines in replicating real-world trajectories. In addition, the differentiable design supports gradient-based optimization, which we validate through simulation-based policy learning in multi-object interaction scenarios. Extensive experiments show that our framework not only improves simulation fidelity with minimal supervision but also increases the efficiency of policy learning. Taken together, these findings suggest that differentiable simulation with few-shot real-world grounding provides a powerful direction for advancing future robotic manipulation and control.

Embodied LLMs endow robots with high-level task reasoning, but they cannot reflect on what went wrong or why, turning deployment into a sequence of independent trials where mistakes repeat rather than accumulate into experience. Drawing upon human reflective practitioners, we introduce Reflective Test-Time Planning, which integrates two modes of reflection: \textit{reflection-in-action}, where the agent uses test-time scaling to generate and score multiple candidate actions using internal reflections before execution; and \textit{reflection-on-action}, which uses test-time training to update both its internal reflection model and its action policy based on external reflections after execution. We also include retrospective reflection, allowing the agent to re-evaluate earlier decisions and perform model updates with hindsight for proper long-horizon credit assignment. Experiments on our newly-designed Long-Horizon Household benchmark and MuJoCo Cupboard Fitting benchmark show significant gains over baseline models, with zero-shot generalization to photorealistic HM3D environments and real-robot experiments on a Franka Panda arm. Ablations confirm that reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action are mutually dependent, and that retrospective reflection achieves better credit assignment than step-wise external feedback at lower computational overhead. Qualitative analyses further highlight behavioral correction through reflection.

Reinforcement learning (RL) can refine Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies beyond behavior cloning, but real-world RL remains expensive due to extensive rollouts, resets, supervision, and safety risks. Action-conditioned video world models offer an option to train in virtual environments, yet they exhibit imprecise action following, particularly on subtle near-success failures. Besides, they lack native reward signals for RL. Computing rewards based on inaccurate visual predictions remain unreliable. We introduce World-VLA-Loop, structured around two foundational designs and a higher-level co-evolving paradigm. We first curate SANS, dedicatedly mixing successful and near-success trajectories to improve action-outcome alignment. Then, we train a state-aware video world model that jointly predicts future frames and binary rewards from diffusion latents. It couples reward estimation to the generator rather than a separate module, and in turn, benefits visual prediction. Since VLA behavior shifts during RL, a fixed simulator can misalign with the updated policy, World-VLA-Loop therefore closes the loop by using the refined world model for iterative VLA post-training while feeding rollouts from each improved policy back to augment and fine-tune the world model. Across simulation and real-robot experiments, World-VLA-Loop substantially improves VLA performance while reducing reliance on costly physical interaction.

Grasping accuracy is a critical prerequisite for precise object manipulation, often requiring careful alignment between the robot hand and object. Neural Descriptor Fields (NDF) offer a promising vision-based method to generate grasping poses that generalize across object categories. However, NDF alone can produce inaccurate poses due to imperfect camera calibration, incomplete point clouds, and object variability. Meanwhile, tactile sensing enables more precise contact, but existing approaches typically learn policies limited to simple, predefined contact geometries. In this work, we introduce NeuralTouch, a multimodal framework that integrates NDF and tactile sensing to enable accurate, generalizable grasping through gentle physical interaction. Our approach leverages NDF to implicitly represent the target contact geometry, from which a deep reinforcement learning (RL) policy is trained to refine the grasp using tactile feedback. This policy is conditioned on the neural descriptors and does not require explicit specification of contact types. We validate NeuralTouch through ablation studies in simulation and zero-shot transfer to real-world manipulation tasks--such as peg-out-in-hole and bottle lid opening--without additional fine-tuning. Results show that NeuralTouch significantly improves grasping accuracy and robustness over baseline methods, offering a general framework for precise, contact-rich robotic manipulation.

Planning safe trajectories under model uncertainty is a fundamental challenge. Robust planning ensures safety by considering worst-case realizations, yet ignores uncertainty reduction and leads to overly conservative behavior. Actively reducing uncertainty on-the-fly during a nominal mission defines the dual control problem. Most approaches address this by adding a weighted exploration term to the cost, tuned to trade off the nominal objective and uncertainty reduction, but without formal consideration of when exploration is beneficial. Moreover, safety is enforced in some methods but not in others. We propose a framework that integrates robust planning with active exploration under formal guarantees as follows: The key innovation and contribution is that exploration is pursued only when it provides a verifiable improvement without compromising safety. To achieve this, we utilize our earlier work on gatekeeper as an architecture for safety verification, and extend it so that it generates both safe and informative trajectories that reduce uncertainty and the cost of the mission, or keep it within a user-defined budget. The methodology is evaluated via simulation case studies on the online dual control of a quadrotor under parametric uncertainty.

LIBERO has emerged as a widely adopted benchmark for evaluating Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models; however, its current training and evaluation settings are problematic, often leading to inflated performance estimates and preventing fair model comparison. To address these issues, we introduce LIBERO-PRO, an extended LIBERO benchmark that systematically evaluates model performance under reasonable perturbations across four dimensions: manipulated objects, initial states, task instructions, and environments. Experimental results reveal that, although existing models achieve over 90% accuracy under the standard LIBERO evaluation, their performance collapses to 0.0% under our generalized setting. Crucially, this discrepancy exposes the models' reliance on rote memorization of action sequences and environment layouts from the training set, rather than genuine task understanding or environmental perception. For instance, models persist in executing grasping actions when the target object is replaced with irrelevant items, and their outputs remain unchanged even when given corrupted instructions or even messy tokens. These findings expose the severe flaws in current evaluation practices, and we call on the community to abandon misleading methodologies in favor of robust assessments of model generalization and comprehension. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Zxy-MLlab/LIBERO-PRO.

Reliable long-range flight of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in GNSS-denied environments is challenging: integrating odometry leads to drift, loop closures are unavailable in previously unseen areas and embedded platforms provide limited computational power. We present a fully onboard UAV system developed for the SPRIN-D Funke Fully Autonomous Flight Challenge, which required 9 km long-range waypoint navigation below 25 m AGL (Above Ground Level) without GNSS or prior dense mapping. The system integrates perception, mapping, planning, and control with a lightweight drift-correction method that matches LiDAR-derived local heightmaps to a prior geo-data heightmap via gradient-template matching and fuses the evidence with odometry in a clustered particle filter. Deployed during the competition, the system executed kilometer-scale flights across urban, forest, and open-field terrain and reduced drift substantially relative to raw odometry, while running in real time on CPU-only hardware. We describe the system architecture, the localization pipeline, and the competition evaluation, and we report practical insights from field deployment that inform the design of GNSS-denied UAV autonomy.

In nature, animals often need to move/manipulate objects comparable in weight/size to their own bodies. Compared to grasping and carrying, pushing provides a more straightforward and efficient non-prehensile manipulation strategy, avoiding complex grasp design while leveraging direct contact to regulate an object's pose during interaction. Achieving effective pushing, however, requires both sufficient manipulation capability and stable whole-body coordination, which is particularly challenging when dealing with heavy or irregular objects. To address these challenges, we propose HeLoM, a learning-based hierarchical whole-body manipulation framework for hexapod robots that exploits coordinated multi-limb control and is applicable to multi-legged robotic systems. Inspired by the cooperative strategies of multi-legged insects, our framework leverages multiple contact points and high degrees of freedom to enable efficient and dynamic whole-body coordination during object interaction. HeLoM's high-level planner plans pushing behaviors, while its low-level controller maintains locomotion stability and generates dynamically consistent joint actions. This design enables the robot to maintain balance while executing continuous and controllable pushing behaviors through coordinated foreleg interaction and supportive hind-leg propulsion. We validate the effectiveness of HeLoM through both simulation and real-world experiments. Results show that our framework can stably push objects of varying sizes and unknown physical properties to designated goal poses in the real world.

We present RoboManipBaselines, an open-source software framework for imitation learning research in robotic manipulation. The framework supports the entire imitation learning pipeline, including data collection, policy training, and rollout, across both simulation and real-world environments. Its design emphasizes integration through a consistent workflow, generality across diverse environments and robot platforms, extensibility for easily adding new robots, tasks, and policies, and reproducibility through evaluations using publicly available datasets. RoboManipBaselines systematically implements the core components of imitation learning: environment, dataset, and policy. Through a unified interface, the framework supports multiple simulators and real robot environments, as well as multimodal sensors and a wide variety of policy models. We further present benchmark evaluations in both simulation and real-world environments and introduce several research applications, including data augmentation, integration with tactile models, interactive robotic systems, 3D sensing evaluation, and hardware extensions. These results demonstrate that RoboManipBaselines provides a useful foundation for advancing research and experimental validation in robotic manipulation using imitation learning. https://isri-aist.github.io/RoboManipBaselines-ProjectPage

Few-shot adaptation of vision-language models remains fundamentally limited by how negative class signals are handled at inference. Existing methods apply uniform negative suppression across all queries, ignoring that the most damaging confusions are query-specific and shift with support-set geometry. We introduce SCAN (Selective Confusion-Aware Negatives), a framework that addresses this gap through three targeted contributions. In inference, query-adaptive negative routing restricts suppression to the top-K most confusable classes per query, requiring zero additional parameters. Generic negative text templates are replaced with LLM-bootstrapped contrastive prompts that describe discriminative attributes between confusable class pairs, sharpening the textual decision boundary where it matters most. A parameter-free adaptive fusion weight estimated from support-set Fisher discriminability removes the need for manual tuning of the vision-language trade-off. Evaluated across 11 standard benchmarks, SCAN consistently outperforms prior prompt-based and adapter-based methods by an average of 4.61% at 16-shot, with gains of up to 7.70% on fine-grained datasets where inter-class confusion is most severe. SCAN also generalizes strongly under distribution shift, improving by 2.95% on average across four ImageNet OOD variants, and maintains robust performance under significant label noise, with accuracy under 50% label corruption still exceeding the clean baseline of the strongest competing method.

Picking manipulators are task specific robots, with fewer degrees of freedom compared to general-purpose manipulators, and are heavily used in industry. The efficiency of the picking robots is highly dependent on the path planning solution, which is commonly based on sampling-based multi-query methods. The planner is robustly able to solve the problem, but its heavy use of collision-detection limits the planning capabilities for online use. We approach this problem by presenting a novel implicit obstacle representation for path planning, a neural signed configuration distance function (nSCDF), which allows us to form collision-free balls in the configuration space. We use the ball representation to re-formulate a state of the art multi-query path planner, i.e., instead of points, we use balls in the graph. Our planner returns a collision-free corridor, which allows us to use convex programming to produce optimized paths. From our numerical experiments, we observe that our planner produces paths that are close to those from an asymptotically optimal path planner, in significantly less time.

Tactile sensing is critical for learning-based dexterous manipulation, yet principled guidelines for sensor placement remain largely absent. While dense sensor arrays provide rich contact feedback, they impose significant hardware costs and can even degrade policy performance by introducing redundant or conflicting inputs. This paper presents the first systematic framework for quantifying the contribution of individual tactile sensors to deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policy performance. We propose a two-stage approach: a coarse empirical pruning phase that reduces the sensor count on the Shadow Hand from 92 to 21 while retaining 93\% task performance, followed by a fine-grained active learning phase that combines Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) with Lasso regression to rank the functional importance of each remaining sensor. Our analysis reveals that sensors on the thumb, ring finger, and little finger dominate manipulation performance, while middle-finger sensors exhibit negative contributions -- actively degrading policy learning. Ablation studies across three manipulation tasks (block, egg, and pen) confirm that a 14-sensor configuration preserves over 90\% of the full-array performance. Zero-shot transfer experiments on two novel objects and cross-platform validation on the Allegro and Leap Hand further demonstrate that the identified importance rankings generalize across tasks and robot morphologies. These findings establish quantitative deployment guidelines that enable practitioners to select cost-effective sensor configurations with predictable performance trade-offs.

We present FusionCore, an open-source ROS 2 sensor fusion package that fuses IMU, wheel encoder odometry, GPS, and Visual SLAM pose into a single 100 Hz odometry stream using a 23-state Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF). The 23rd state is an online estimate of the wheel encoder's systematic yaw rate bias, identified through GPS heading cross-covariance and subtracted during GPS blackouts to reduce heading drift in coast mode. FusionCore also estimates gyroscope and accelerometer biases as explicit filter states, handles GPS natively in ECEF without a separate coordinate projection node, applies per-sensor Mahalanobis chi-squared outlier gating calibrated to measurement degrees of freedom, and adapts sensor noise covariance automatically from the innovation sequence. VSLAM pose fusion enables GPS-denied operation with any visual odometry or SLAM system, including automatic recovery from map reinitialization. We evaluate against robot_localization on twelve full-length sequences (55-92 min each) from the NCLT public dataset. FusionCore achieves lower Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE) on ten of twelve sequences, with improvements ranging from 1.2x to 22.2x on winning sequences. The robot_localization UKF diverges numerically on all twelve sequences. FusionCore is available at https://github.com/manankharwar/fusioncore under the Apache 2.0 license.

High-fidelity 3D Gaussian head avatar generation is critical for applications such as AR/VR, telepresence, and digital humans. Existing methods depend on multi-view datasets, 3D captures, or intermediate 2D view synthesis. In contrast, we learn both conditional and unconditional 3D head models from randomly sampled 2D images alone, without using multi-view data, 3D supervision, or intermediate view generation. We introduce MVCHead, a single-shot state space model that enforces multi-view consistency (MVC) directly in the 3D representation while regressing 3D Gaussians under these constraints. At its core, we propose a Hierarchical State Space (HiSS) block that progressively refines Gaussians from coarse to fine, while capturing long-range dependencies. Within each HiSS block, we modify Mamba's standard unidirectional scan with the proposed Hierarchical Bi-directional State Scan (HiBiSS) that aligns recurrence with the axes along which multi-view inconsistencies are strongest. Finally, we design an SE(3) Multi-view Critic that judges whether a set of self-renders arises from a single underlying 3D configuration, rewarding cross-view pixel alignment without observing real multi-view pairs. MVCHead achieves state-of-the-art perceptual quality, surpasses prior methods in both texture and geometric consistency, and maintains comparable shape consistency. To demonstrate scalability, we release FaceGS-10K, the first large-scale dataset of ready-to-use 3D Gaussian head assets for training and evaluation of 3D head models. Project Page and code: https://humansensinglab.github.io/MVCHead/

Recent advances in imitation learning and vision-language models highlight the need for high-fidelity tactile perception, with 6-DoF tactile object pose estimation providing a crucial foundation for precise robotic manipulation. We introduce InvariantCloud, a 6-DoF pose estimation framework that leverages the global invariance of surface marker constellations on vision-based tactile sensors. In contrast to recent approaches, our one-shot globally invariant point cloud registration suppresses cumulative drift and overcomes long-standing limitations in accurately estimating yaw (Z-axis) rotation. Experimental verifications show that InvariantCloud achieves superior yaw tracking accuracy and re-localization repeatability compared to existing benchmarks, demonstrating its precision and robustness in long-sequence manipulation tasks.

Training data for olfaction is scattered through disparate, non-standardized datasets that limit the ability to build representative world models. Olfactory navigation is a highly dynamic and non-stationary task that benefits from real-time continual learning. We introduce an adaptive framework called Grow-Prune-Freeze (GPF) networks that enable an agent to continually learn through growing, pruning, and freezing early layers of its policy in response to world complexity. Grounding GPFs in non-linear random matrix theory, we show that the work of Pennington & Worth (2017) can be extended from single hidden layers to n-layer continual-learning models, and that eigenvalue composition of network weights is preserved as successive layers are added. We show that GPFs based on Expected SARSA achieve a 94% success rate on turbulent plume navigation - a partially observable, non-stationary task representative of the "big world" challenges that motivate adaptive learning in robotics - and provide supporting methodology for applying GPFs in other world models. Further experiments amount evidence that GPFs may generalize well to other machine learning tasks such as reinforcement learning in Atari, image classification, and autoregressive language models. We open source all code and data to encourage improvements on and more research in olfactory robotics.

Soft pneumatic actuators are widely used in soft robotics because they can produce large motions while remaining compliant enough to interact safely with objects, environments, and the human body. However, their performance is not solely determined by pressure. Instead, the response depends on the way the actuator is built, including the shape of its chambers, the placement of reinforcements, the use of folds, material stiffness, and the constraints that guide its deformation. As the literature has expanded, it has become more difficult to determine which mechanism is most suitable for a given application and which reported results can be compared across studies. This review examines soft pneumatic actuators according to the design strategies used to generate four motion classes: linear, bending, twisting, and omnidirectional actuation. For each class, it analyzes the structural features that define the deformation path, including braid angle, fold geometry, fiber orientation, chamber arrangement, structural asymmetry, and internal constraint layers. It then discusses how the design choice affect motion output, force generation, air demand, repeatability, durability, fabrication difficulty, and robotic integration. The review further identifies key conditions that must be considered when selecting or comparing actuators, including pressure, loading condition, actuator size, pneumatic supply, and hysteresis This approach helps explain why actuators with similar motion outputs may differ substantially in design requirements, pneumatic demand, and practical suitability. It also highlights the design priorities needed for compact, efficient, repeatable, and deployable soft pneumatic systems in wearable, biomedical, and mobile robotic applications.

Learning universal policies from cross-embodied data remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. Although Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are pre-trained on large and diverse datasets, they typically rely on embodiment-specific fine-tuning to achieve strong performance in downstream tasks. This requirement severely limits their generalization capability and restricts knowledge transfer across embodiments performing similar tasks. To overcome these limitations, we focus on cross-embodied settings with shared robotic bases and heterogeneous end-effectors, and propose X-DiffVLA, a diffusion-based VLA model featuring a unified cross-embodied action head. X-DiffVLA can leverage the generative strengths of diffusion models to capture both the diversity and latent correlations in cross-embodied datasets. Specifically, we introduce Embodiment Forcing, a classifier-free guidance technique to implicitly steer action generation toward embodiment-specific functional components, capturing fine-grained structural nuances without explicit supervision. In addition, a Morphological Tree Diffusion approach is designed to strengthen behavioral correlations across diverse end-effectors, maximizing the transferability of heterogeneous demonstrations. Experimental results across RoboCasa and Isaac Gym, covering different embodiments from grippers to dexterous hands, show that X-DiffVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance, with improvements of 15.3% and 12.5%, respectively. Real-world evaluations further validate the robustness of the proposed framework and its effectiveness in scalable cross-embodied policy learning.

4D radar is increasingly attractive for robotic mapping because it provides range, azimuth, elevation, and Doppler measurements while remaining robust in adverse visibility conditions. Although recent radar and radar--inertial odometry methods have achieved promising online state estimation performance, offline global map refinement for 4D radar remains underexplored. This paper presents RAMBA, a radar bundle-adjustment framework for globally consistent 4D radar mapping. Given initial poses and radar frames from a radar--inertial odometry front-end, RAMBA jointly refines radar frame states using covariance-weighted geometric residuals, IMU preintegration factors, and radar ego-velocity constraints. The geometric residuals extend pairwise GICP to a multi-frame optimization by forming voxel-based correspondences across selected frames and weighting each residual with point covariances. To improve robustness against drift and revisits, RAMBA enforces temporal consistency during correspondence formation while explicitly supporting loop-closure constraints. Experiments on the ColoRadar and SNAIL Radar datasets show that RAMBA improves map consistency and usually enhances trajectory accuracy over radar--inertial odometry and pose-graph optimization baselines.

Limbless terrestrial animals exhibit exceptional locomotor versatility and control, currently unmatched by engineered counterparts. Here, we introduce a computational framework that enables soft synthetic snakes to navigate unstructured, heterogeneous 3D terrains. Our approach is grounded in bio-inspired actuation and sensing models that reduce the control complexity inherent to high-degree-of-freedom, continuum bodies. These models are integrated into a reinforcement learning architecture to derive environment-traversing policies. Training first occurs in simplified, homogeneous terrains to learn locomotion primitives. These are then composed into adaptive strategies for complex landscapes. We demonstrate robustness by deploying a snake in high-fidelity 3D environments reconstructed from real-world imaging, achieving reliable navigation. Overall, this work provides a physically-realistic simulation platform and practical insights for the control of continuum systems in natural terrains.

In Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-degraded environments, pseudolites (PLs) provide additional signal sources to enhance positioning performance, but their integration in optimization-based frameworks remains limited. This paper presents a loosely coupled factor graph optimization (FGO) framework that fuses the GNSS/PL least-squares (LS) solutions with inertial measurement unit (IMU) data. The evaluation considers low GNSS visibility scenarios with four high-elevation GNSS satellites and up to two PL transmitters over an 80~s window. FGO achieves a 22.8\% to 41.3\% reduction in mean 3D error compared to standard LS methods. Compared to a GNSS-IMU baseline, incorporating PL transmitters further improves positioning accuracy, with performance depending on geometry.

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has become the de facto standard for training legged robots, thanks to its robustness and scalability in massively parallel simulation environments like IsaacLab. However, its on-policy nature makes it inherently sample-inefficient, preventing its use for continuous adaptation and fine-tuning on real hardware. Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), by contrast, is an off-policy algorithm that can reuse past experience, making it a natural candidate for sim-to-real transfer workflows where the same algorithm can be used both in simulation and for online learning on the real robot. Despite these advantages, SAC has consistently failed to match PPO's empirical performance in massively parallel training settings. This work identifies the root causes of this gap and introduces targeted modifications, covering policy initialization, timeout-aware critic targets, and multi-step return estimation, that enable SAC to train stably at scale. Evaluated across multiple legged robot platforms and diverse locomotion tasks, our approach closes the performance gap with PPO entirely.

We present ARCANE-PedSynth, an open-source CARLA-based software framework for generating synthetic multi-pedestrian datasets with dense behavioural annotations for pedestrian crossing prediction in autonomous driving. The framework overcomes CARLA's native 9% crossing rate through a hybrid AI-manual pedestrian control architecture, enabling configurable target rates up to 75%. A 12-state behavioural finite state machine with five character archetypes produces diverse crossing behaviours. The framework generates synchronised RGB, LiDAR, and DVS data with per-frame crossing labels, behavioural states, and estimated 2D pose keypoints. We demonstrate ARCANE-PedSynth through PedSynth++, an example dataset generated with the framework, comprising 533 multi-pedestrian clips across 12 weather conditions with RGB, LiDAR, and DVS streams. ARCANE-PedSynth is fully reproducible via CLI parameterisation and Docker containerisation.

Modern robotic policies increasingly rely on action chunking to execute complex tasks in the physical world. While action chunking improves temporal consistency at moderate action frequencies, it becomes insufficient when the action frequency is further increased (e.g., to 60~Hz). At such high frequencies, policies often fail to generate actions that are both temporally smooth and spatially consistent. We address this challenge by shifting high-frequency action learning from the action space to a latent space with variational autoencoder (VAE). This formulation significantly improves both temporal and spatial consistency of high-frequency control. To enable smooth real-time execution, we further introduce Reuse-then-Refine, a chunk-level refine strategy that improves continuity between adjacent action chunks under asynchronous inference. As a result, robots controlled by our policy can execute complex contact-rich tasks continuously, with less pauses and jerky motions. Experiments on three real-world contact-rich robotic tasks show that our approach consistently completes tasks with smooth motions. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/tars-robotics/RTR.

Diffusion models excel at generating diverse and multimodal trajectories for robotic planning, yet their iterative denoising process introduces latency that is incompatible with high-frequency closed-loop control. To address this problem, we propose Dynamic Neural Koopman Distillation, a framework that distills multistep diffusion inference into a single forward pass while retaining the multimodal expressivity of the teacher model. Specifically, we introduce a Factorized Dynamic Koopman layer that models the denoising process through a factorized latent transition with state-dependent modal gains. We evaluate the proposed method on standard D4RL MuJoCo locomotion benchmarks and a physical Kinova manipulator, comparing against one-step baselines. The results show that our method significantly outperforms existing one-step distillation approaches on the reported locomotion tasks, and reduces the inference latency to the millisecond regime compared with the teacher policy. Hardware experiments further demonstrate that our method enables smooth and fast closed-loop execution while maintaining task success and comparable accuracy. A project page is available at https://fdkoopman.github.io/.

We present MuJoCoUni, a downstream MuJoCo distribution for online robot learning and batched physics evaluation. Alongside the open-loop batched trajectory generation already provided by upstream mujoco.rollout, MuJoCoUni supplies runtime primitives for stateful environment execution. The target workloads need high-throughput parallel execution while retaining upstream CPU MuJoCo semantics for models, sensors, contact, and constraints. Its core object, BatchEnvPool, is a C++/pybind11 executor that owns per-environment mjModel copies, per-thread mjData workers, and an internal thread pool. It provides final-state-only short stepping, sparse reset, reset-lifecycle domain randomization, batched sensor forward evaluation without advancing dynamics, and batched Jacobian and height-field queries. The implementation is confined to the Python binding layer; MuJoCo's solver, contact model, integrator, and core source tree retain upstream semantics. This report describes the BatchEnvPool API, implementation boundary, relationship to rollout, and the validation and benchmark scripts shipped with the open-source mujoco-uni package, which is installed with \texttt{pip install mujoco-uni}.

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) play an important role in modern automotive intelligence, significantly enhancing vehicle safety and stability. The performance of ADAS critically relies on accurate and reliable vehicle state estimation, particularly from vehicle dynamic sensors. Among these signals, wheel load is a key variable for chassis control and safety-critical functions, yet it remains difficult to estimate robustly due to complex suspension geometry, nonlinear dynamics, and measurement noise. To address this issue, we propose DBPnet, a Bayesian physics-informed neural network (PINN) with a physics-aware embedding module inspired by damper characteristics. First, this paper presents a suspension linkage-level modeling (SLLM) approach that constructs a nonlinear instantaneous dynamic model by explicitly considering the complex geometric structure of the suspension. Building upon SLLM, Bayesian inference is integrated into the PINN to effectively cope with noise and uncertainty in the vehicle chassis system, thereby improving the model's robustness. Then, a physics-informed loss function is employed to ensure consistency with fundamental physical principles, while the damper characteristics-inspired embedding module extracts temporal variation features of input signals and incorporates them into each layer of the PINN, ensuring that physical observations guide the neural network without being constrained by fixed physical models. Extensive evaluations on high-fidelity simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that our DBPnet consistently achieves lower RMSE and MaxError than baseline methods. These results highlight the potential of our DBPnet to advance wheel load estimation and contribute to the development of more reliable ADAS actuator functions.

Sampling-based model predictive control methods, such as Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI), offer derivative-free optimization and robustness in complex robotic systems. However, standard MPPI relies on cost-based soft penalties that cannot guarantee hard-constraint satisfaction, severely limiting its applicability to highly constrained tasks such as closed-chain manipulation. To address this, we propose Manifold-Constrained MPPI (MC-MPPI), a real-time sampling-based control framework that enforces manifold-based equality constraints while preserving the computational advantages of MPPI. The key idea is to decouple the constrained optimal control problem into latent-space planning and execution-level correction. At the planning stage, a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) learns a low-dimensional latent representation of the constraint manifold, enabling MPPI to efficiently generate near-feasible candidate trajectories without per-sample modification. Since this reference enables accurate linearization of the equality constraints, an execution-level Quadratic Programming (QP) controller resolves the residual manifold mismatch in a single solve rather than through iterative projection. Experiments on a 14-DoF closed-chain dual-arm system in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that MC-MPPI operates stably at 100 Hz, reliably navigates dynamic environments while effectively maintaining hard equality constraints, and significantly outperforms baseline methods in tracking accuracy. Supplementary videos and implementation details are available at https://rcilab.github.io/mcmppi.

Off-dynamics offline reinforcement learning seeks to learn a target-domain policy from a large source dataset and a limited target dataset under mismatched transition dynamics. Existing approaches such as reward augmentation and data filtering are constrained to the source dataset and cannot synthesize new target behavior to improve coverage beyond the collected source trajectories. While recent model-based methods attempt to address this by learning target-aware dynamics, the generated experience is constructed only at the transition level, which leads to accumulated errors over long horizons. These limitations necessitate a shift toward trajectory-level generation for off-dynamics offline RL. We propose CEDGE, a Cross-domain Energy-guided Diffusion GEneration framework. CEDGE trains a trajectory diffusion model on source-domain trajectories and adapts the generated samples to the target domain through energy guidance. This guidance is derived by minimizing the distribution mismatch between the source and desired target-domain trajectories and is decomposed into return, domain, and behavior energy components. The resulting energy-guided trajectories are useful both for direct planning and as synthetic data for policy learning. Since target adaptation is achieved via energy guidance rather than retraining the diffusion model, CEDGE can be efficiently adapted to new target dynamics compared to previous methods. Experiments on the ODRL benchmark demonstrate that trajectory-level energy-guided generation improves diffusion planning under dynamics shifts and produces synthetic data that improves downstream target policy learning.

LiDAR model selection is a critical issue in roadside sensing systems, as it directly determines both perception capability and deployment cost. However, the lack of empirical benchmarks for comparing perception performance across different LiDAR configurations has greatly constrained scientific sensor selection and deployment planning. To address this gap, we present MR-LiDAR, a controlled multi-resolution LiDAR benchmark for roadside perception diagnostics. Using 16-, 32-, 80-, and 128-beam LiDARs in identical roadside scenarios, we collect point clouds and ground-truth annotations for diverse traffic participants, including vehicles and vulnerable road users (VRUs), across varying distances. This controlled design isolates intrinsic LiDAR specifications, particularly beam count and beam distribution, as the key variables for precise performance diagnostics. Based on MR-LiDAR, we conduct systematic empirical analyses to examine how beam count, beam distribution, target distance, object category, and vehicle occlusion affect LiDAR perception performance. The results reveal that all of these factors have substantial impacts. In particular, contrary to the common assumption that higher beam counts always yield better perception, we show that an 80-beam LiDAR with optimized beam distribution can match or even outperform a 128-beam LiDAR with uniform beam distribution. In addition, we provide a practical reference guide for LiDAR selection, including target point-count statistics and detection performance comparisons based on two widely used detection algorithms. This work offers a diagnostic benchmark and practical guidance for determining cost-effective LiDAR configurations in roadside perception applications.

Accurate and reliable navigation is essential for autonomous ground vehicle operations. Standard INS/GNSS fusion relies on GNSS position updates, which provide limited observability of orientation and inertial sensor error states, particularly during low-dynamic motion. In this work, we propose utilizing past GNSS measurements alongside a motion model to extract meaningful vehicle acceleration information. This acceleration measurement is then integrated into the INS/GNSS filter to improve its robustness and accuracy. The proposed approach is evaluated on two real-world unmanned ground vehicle datasets collected from different mobile platforms and inertial sensor grades. Results demonstrate consistent positioning accuracy improvements relative to the standard position-aided filter, with mean position root mean square error improvements of 11.40 % and 20.74 % on the two datasets, respectively.

We propose Drift-Resistant Navigation World Model, a generative model that mitigates both perceptual drift and geometric drift in conventional rollout-based navigation world models. Existing methods recursively feed generated content into subsequent steps, causing noise accumulation and degraded predictions, i.e., perceptual drift. Meanwhile, their predictions often deviate from the agent's motion, resulting in geometry drift. We address both types of drift by redesigning world-model prediction as an anchor-guided rollout. Instead of rolling out every frame sequentially, we first predict sparse future anchors that serve as stable long-range targets, and then generate intermediate frames within each chunk conditioned on both past context and future anchors. Importantly, these sparse anchors also provide geometric constraints, supported by bidirectional epipolar geometry, to localize where corresponding content should appear in the intermediate frames. Experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines in long-horizon visual quality, geometric consistency, and multi-view coherence. These gains further translate into improved downstream planning performance under the same planners, highlighting the importance of drift-resistant, geometry-aware prediction for reliable navigation world models.

We present a kinematic and transmission-aware design framework for a serial spherical mechanism with an additional translational degree of freedom for microsurgery. The first contribution is an analytical workspace formulation that provides geometric insight into reachable motion and enables rapid selection of rotation axis orientations without numerical optimization. The second contribution is a dynamics-informed methodology for mechanisms driven by self-locking transmissions, supporting evaluation of torque requirements for a prescribed workspace geometry. The framework is accompanied by an open-source software package for friction identification and inverse dynamics analysis. Experiments on a purpose-built robotic tool for vitreoretinal surgery validate the predictive capability of the models and demonstrate their practical utility for engineering design.

This paper presents a novel passivity-based semi-autonomous attitude control framework, with a particular focus on attitude kinematics defined on the special orthogonal group $SO(3)$. While human-robot interaction facilitates the successful execution of complex tasks, ensuring stability of human-in-the-loop systems on the $SO(3)$ manifold remains a largely unsolved challenge. We first propose a new control architecture in which a multi-robot system preserves invariance of the average information fed back to the human operator through so-called stealthy control, and the human intervention is mediated through a virtual leader, which is coupled with the robots via a passivity-based attitude synchronization law. We then rigorously prove closed-loop stability of the proposed human-in-the-loop system under the assumption that the human behaves as a passive system. To support this analysis, simulation studies are conducted to identify the human operator as a dynamical system, and to examine passivity properties of the identified model.

The motion planning problem for robotic manipulation can be addressed through classical or deep learning approaches. Existing methods face significant challenges in generalizing to diverse settings. In this study, we present a method with high generalization capability that generates collision-free trajectories using diffusion models where the denoising process is guided by the gradient of the total collision cost. We are also presenting a dynamic approach for choosing start step of the gradient guidance. Experimental results demonstrate that guiding the diffusion model dynamically with the sum of collision costs offers more robust performance by overcoming the generalization issues faced by competing methods. The proposed model demonstrates its effectiveness by achieving the highest performance on diverse test settings in M$π$nets\ dataset among the compared methods.

This paper presents reinforcement learning (RL) policies for dynamic quadrupedal locomotion in planetary exploration scenarios. Building on a taskoptimized quadruped with a 5-bar leg design, we develop RL policies for walking, vertical jumping, forward jumping, and in-flight attitude control, explicitly tailored to the reduced gravity on Mars. These policies jointly enable such robots to overcome obstacles larger than themselves through coordinated jumping and precise in-flight reorientation for safe landings. We demonstrate Sim2Real transfer of the attitude control policy on the Olympus quadruped through single-axis reorientation tests, while all locomotion policies are validated in simulation. A complete Mars exploration mission scenario demonstrates coordinated policy deployment across challenging terrain. Experimental results show 90° attitude reorientation in 2.6 seconds, with simulations demonstrating 3.1 meter vertical jumps and 3.9 meter forward jumps under Martian gravity conditions. - Supplementary video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlSJ3P87A4A

Recent work explores new opportunities at the intersection of vision-language-action models (VLAs) and geometric foundation models (GFMs) for 3D reconstruction, such as VGGT. While the resulting geometric VLAs often show improved performance, it remains unclear (i) if modern VLAs already have sufficient geometric understanding to start with, (ii) what is the best architecture to inject geometric understanding into a VLA, and (iii) what is the effect of other design choices that affect geometric VLAs. In this paper we provide a rigorous experimental analysis to shed light on these questions, for a specific choice of VLA (GR00T-N1.5) and GFM (VGGT). Our first contribution is to formalize prior work's intuition that current VLAs lack geometric understanding, by providing a rigorous analysis based on linear probing. The analysis quantifies, for the first time, the "geometric gap" between VLAs and GFMs. Our second contribution is to identify and compare different strategies to bridge GFMs with VLAs. We implement three different architectures, which differ in the way they inject geometry in the VLA, while keeping low-level implementation details as similar as possible, to ensure a fair comparison. Finally, we analyze the impact of non-architectural choices (e.g., training data, number of cameras, reconstruction quality) on the performance of the geometric VLAs.

A robot resolving ``put the cup on that one'' must fuse gesture, language, and scene geometry, yet 3D grounding benchmarks only partially capture this regime: descriptions are written post-hoc, gestures are templated, or pointing is staged for the camera. MM-Conv captures natural co-speech gesture from dyadic VR interaction alongside full-body motion capture and 3D scene graphs. We use it to evaluate pose-language fusion with a decoupled late-fusion architecture in which pose and text pathways share no learned parameters. The two choices together make category, pose, and text contributions easier to isolate through controlled ablations. Fusion with frozen MiniLM category embeddings exceeds pose alone and the best text-only pathway on every reference type, reaching 31.9% top-1. The learned scalar gate flips between opposing policies depending on whether the text pathway has category access. This is a reliability diagnostic: fusion-accuracy claims for semantic grounding systems are indistinguishable from category-representation artifacts unless pathways are architecturally decoupled.

This paper presents MuGen, a data-driven framework for learning and deploying multi-skill locomotion on humanoid robots. MuGen enables a robot to perform expressive motions like humans under the guidance of example motion sequences. To achieve this, we employ vector-quantized autoencoders (VQ-VAEs) trained with model-based reinforcement learning, resulting in a generative representation of locomotion that captures key patterns of human motion from hours of heterogeneous human performance data. We employ a teacher-student learning framework and develop a new policy distillation strategy to enable a deployable student policy learning this efficient latent representation. This policy allows the robot to track and mimic unseen human motions and further enables the robot to reuse the learned latent space for other tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework through a diverse set of motions and accurate execution.

Flapping-Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles (FWMAVs) provide exceptional maneuverability and aerodynamic efficiency but pose significant challenges for onboard control due to nonlinear dynamics and stringent Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) constraints, as exemplified by a butterfly-inspired robot less than 30 gram. To this end, we present a hierarchical neuromorphic control framework that enables fully onboard, closed-loop flight on a widely available, resource-constrained ESP32 microcontroller with a unit cost of approximately $5. Specifically, our method deploys two lightweight Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) onboard: one for state estimation from raw sensory feedback and another for control via modulation of a Central Pattern Generator (CPG) for wing actuation. Trained by imitation learning, the system achieves stable pitch and heading angle tracking during untethered real-world flight. Experimental results further reveal that the SNN-based controller reduces latency by 36% (1059us to 680us) and power by 18% (0.033W to 0.027W) for inference compared to the conventional Artificial Neural Network (ANN) baseline, demonstrating the viability of spike-based computation without specialized hardware. To the best of our knowledge, this work constitutes the first demonstration of fully onboard neuromorphic control for autonomous flight of a FWMAV, highlighting the potential of SNNs to enable energy-efficient autonomy under stringent SWaP constraints. Visual abstract: http://bit.ly/4nI8ECY Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Espikify-76E3/

We present the first systematic study of faithfulness in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) driving models, analyzing 300 Alpamayo-R1-10B inferences across 100 diverse PhysicalAI-AV scenarios. Our main finding is that output natural-language rationales with trajectories may be significantly unfaithful: (i) overall reasoning fidelity is only 42.5%, with Chain-of-Causation matching scene reality less than half the time; (ii) 94 missed pedestrians in one-third of pedestrian-relevant scenes; (iii) 97.7% trajectory fragility under mild visual perturbations; and (iv) only 48.3% mean reasoning-action consistency, with 53.3% of inferences exhibiting low consistency, including 37.9% of stop-claimed cases where the model continues instead. We formalize faithfulness information-theoretically, define entity and action fidelity with verification criteria, and outline a four-component safety architecture aligned with these results.

While reinforcement learning (RL) enables robots to acquire skills autonomously, its real-world deployment is severely limited by inefficient and unsafe exploration. Human-in-the-loop interventions offer a practical solution, yet existing methods typically exploit these interventions as auxiliary training signals, without fully capturing the richer information they provide about when and how autonomy should be guided. Human interventions often encode relative preferences over behavior under safety and task constraints, rather than prescribing exact actions to imitate. Motivated by this perspective, we propose Online Human Preference as Guidance in Reinforcement Learning (OHP-RL), a framework that leverages human interventions as preference information to guide policy learning. OHP-RL introduces a state-dependent preference gate that adaptively regulates when and to what extent human interventions should shape policy learning. This design enables the agent to benefit from intermittent and imperfect human feedback while preserving autonomous exploration and stable policy optimization. We evaluate OHP-RL on three challenging real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks on a Franka robot. Across all tasks, OHP-RL consistently achieves strong success rates, faster convergence, and substantially lower human intervention effort than prior approaches. Moreover, the learned policies exhibit more stable and human-aligned behavior throughout training.

We present a dual-barrier control barrier function (CBF) safety filter for real-time, safety-critical velocity control of holonomic robots operating in incrementally built occupancy grid maps. As a robot explores an unknown environment, unmapped regions introduce irreducible uncertainty, since obstacle geometry beyond the explored frontier is unknown, making entry into such regions a source of collision risk, especially with front-facing sensors. To address this, we enforce two constraints: avoidance of mapped obstacles and restriction from unexplored regions. Both constraints are derived analytically from the occupancy grid's signed distance field, yielding a closed-form safety filter that requires only a small linear system solve per cycle. On resource-constrained platforms such as the Raspberry Pi, where SLAM and planning already consume significant compute, the low overhead of the proposed filter preserves resources. An adaptive gain schedule relaxes the frontier constraint in information-rich regions and tightens it in well-mapped areas, improving exploration efficiency while maintaining safety. The filter operates in velocity space as a minimally invasive correction and composes with arbitrary nominal controllers, including learning-based methods. Hardware flight experiments on a PX4-controlled quadrotor demonstrate zero collisions across multiple indoor runs.

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (Embodied AI) integrates perception, cognition, planning, and interaction into agents that operate in open-world, safety-critical environments. As these systems gain autonomy and enter domains such as transportation, healthcare, and industrial or assistive robotics, ensuring their safety becomes both technically challenging and socially indispensable. Unlike digital AI systems, embodied agents must act under uncertain sensing, incomplete knowledge, and dynamic human-robot interactions, where failures can directly lead to physical harm. This survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of safety research in embodied AI, examining attacks and defenses across the full embodied pipeline, from perception and cognition to planning, action and interaction, and agentic system. We introduce a multi-level taxonomy that unifies fragmented lines of work and connects embodied-specific safety findings with broader advances in vision, language, and multimodal foundation models. Our review synthesizes insights from over 500 papers spanning adversarial, backdoor, jailbreak, and hardware-level attacks; attack detection, safe training and robust inference; and risk-aware human-agent interaction. This analysis reveals several overlooked challenges, including the fragility of multimodal perception fusion, the instability of planning under jailbreak attacks, and the trustworthiness of human-agent interaction in open-ended scenarios. By organizing the field into a coherent framework and identifying critical research gaps, this survey provides a roadmap for building embodied agents that are not only capable and autonomous but also safe, robust, and reliable in real-world deployment.

Generating intelligent robot behavior in contact-rich settings is a research problem where zeroth-order methods currently prevail. Developing methods that make use of first/second order information about rigid-body dynamics in the presence of contact holds great promise in terms of increasing the solution speed and computational efficiency. The main bottleneck in this research direction is the difficulty in obtaining gradients and Hessians that are actually useful for numerical optimization, due to pathologies in all three steps of a common simulation pipeline: i) collision detection, ii) contact dynamics, iii) time integration. This abstract proposes a method that aims to address the collision detection part of the puzzle, via a novel pipeline designed from scratch with smooth (i.e. twice) differentiability and massive vectorizability on GPUs as the main priorities. This is in contrast to standard collision detection routines that are instead optimized for runtime on CPUs and minimal memory footprint, but do employ logic and control flow that hinder differentiability and vectorization. The proposed pipeline consists of the following contributions: i) highly expressive and compute efficient SDF representations, ii) differentiable broad-phase and narrow-phase routines that use these representations to generate vertex-SDF and edge-SDF contacts, iii) a differentiable routine for convex decomposition based contact blending.

To address the scale mismatch caused by large altitude variations in UAV visual place recognition, we propose a monocular vision-only altitude-adaptive geo-localization framework. The method first estimates relative altitude from a single downward-looking image by transforming the input into the frequency domain and formulating altitude estimation as a regression-as-classification (RAC) problem. The estimated altitude is then used to crop the query image to a canonical scale, after which a classification-then-retrieval visual place recognition module performs coarse localization. To improve retrieval robustness under varying image quality, we further introduce a quality-adaptive margin classifier (QAMC) and refine the final location by weighted coordinate estimation over the top retrieved candidates. Experiments on two synthetic datasets and two real-flight datasets show that the relative altitude estimation (RAE) module yields clear overall improvements in downstream retrieval performance under significant altitude changes. With our visual place recognition module, altitude adaptation improves average R@1 and R@5 by 41.50 and 56.83 percentage points, respectively, compared with using the same retrieval pipeline without altitude normalization, and the full system runs at 13.3 frames/s on the reported workstation hardware. These results indicate that relative altitude estimation provides an effective scale prior for cross-altitude UAV geo-localization and supports GPS-denied coarse initialization without auxiliary range sensors or temporal inputs.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist robotic control. Built upon vision-language model (VLM) architectures, VLAs predict actions conditioned on visual observations and language instructions, achieving strong performance and generalization across tasks. However, VLAs face two major challenges: a limited context window for input frames and inefficient inference due to the quadratic attention complexity and large parameter counts. To this end, we propose DySta, a framework that disentangles visual inputs into multi-level static and dynamic tokens, which enables (1) retaining a single copy of static tokens across frames to significantly reduce context length, and (2) reusing the key-value (KV) cache of static tokens through a lightweight recache gate that updates only when necessary. This design enables efficient multi-frame integration and efficient inference. In addition, we introduce a new benchmark that more effectively evaluates the multi-frame integration ability of VLAs. Experiments show that Dysta improves multi-frame integration by 24.5% across metrics on our benchmark and 23.3% in absolute success rate on real-world memory-dependent tasks, while accelerating inference by 2.0x (with +2.3% success rate) on simulation benchmarks and 2.2x (with +10.6% success rate) on real-world general tasks.

Existing motion planning methods often struggle with rapid-motion obstacles due to an insufficient understanding of environmental changes. To address this, we propose integrating motion planners with Doppler LiDARs, which provide not only ranging measurements but also instantaneous point velocities. However, this integration is nontrivial due to the requirements of high accuracy and high frequency. To this end, we introduce Doppler Planning Network (DPNet), which tracks and reacts to rapid obstacles via Doppler model-based learning. We first propose a Doppler Kalman neural network (D-KalmanNet) to track obstacle states under a partially observable Gaussian state space model. We then leverage the predicted motions of obstacles to construct a Doppler-tuned model predictive control (DT-MPC) framework for ego-motion planning, enabling runtime auto-tuning of controller parameters. These two modules allow DPNet to learn fast environmental changes from minimal data while remaining lightweight, achieving high frequency and high accuracy in both tracking and planning. Experiments on high-fidelity simulator and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of DPNet over extensive benchmark schemes. Code available at https://github.com/UUwei-zuo/DPNet

This paper presents a systematic topology optimization framework for designing a soft pneumatic gripper (SPG), explicitly considering the design-dependent nature of the actuating load. The load is modeled using Darcy's law with an added drainage term. A 2D soft arm unit is optimized by formulating it as a compliant mechanism design problem using the robust formulation. The problem is posed as a min-max optimization, where the output deformations of blueprint and eroded designs are considered. A volume constraint is imposed on the blueprint part, while a strain-energy constraint is enforced on the eroded part. The MMA is employed to solve the optimization problem and obtain the optimized soft unit. Finite element analysis with the Ogden material model confirms that the optimized 2D unit outperforms a conventional rectangular design under pneumatic loading. The optimized 2D unit is extruded to obtain a 3D module, and ten such units are assembled to create a soft arm. Deformation profiles of the optimized arm are analysed under different pressure loads. Four arms are 3D-printed and integrated with a supporting structure to realize the proposed SPG. The gripping performance of the SPG is demonstrated on objects with different weights, sizes, stiffness, and shapes.

Social robot navigation increasingly relies on large language models for reasoning, path planning, and enabling movement in dynamic human spaces. However, relying solely on LLMs for planning often leads to unpredictable and unsafe behaviors, especially in dynamic human spaces, due to limited physical grounding and weak logical consistency. In this work, we introduce NaviWM, a socially-aware robot Navigation World Model that augments LLM reasoning with a structured world model and a logic-driven chain-of-thought process. NaviWM consists of two main components: (1) a spatial-temporal world model that captures the positions, velocities, and activities of agents in the environment, and (2) a deductive reasoning module that guides LLMs through a multi-step, logic-based inference process. This integration enables the robot to generate navigation decisions that are both socially compliant and physically safe, under well-defined constraints such as personal space, collision avoidance, and timing. Unlike previous methods based on prompting or fine-tuning, NaviWM encodes social norms as first-order logic, enabling interpretable and verifiable reasoning. Experiments show that NaviWM improves success rates and reduces social violations, particularly in crowded environments. These results demonstrate the benefit of combining formal reasoning with LLMs for robust social navigation. Additional experimental details and demo videos for this work can be found at: https://sites.google.com/view/NaviWM.

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show strong generalization capabilities, yet they lack introspective mechanisms for anticipating failures and requesting help from a human supervisor. We present \textbf{INSIGHT}, a learning framework for leveraging token-level uncertainty signals to predict when a VLA should request help. Using $π_0$-FAST as the underlying model, we extract per-token \emph{entropy}, \emph{log-probability}, and Dirichlet-based estimates of \emph{aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty}, and train compact transformer classifiers to map these sequences to help triggers. We explore supervision regimes for strong or weak supervision, and extensively compare them across in-distribution and out-of-distribution tasks. Our results show a trade-off: strong labels enable models to capture fine-grained uncertainty dynamics for reliable help detection, while weak labels, though noisier, still support competitive introspection when training and evaluation are aligned, offering a scalable path when dense annotation is impractical. Crucially, we find that modeling the temporal evolution of token-level uncertainty signals with transformers provides far greater predictive power than static sequence-level scores. This study provides the first systematic evaluation of uncertainty-based introspection in VLAs, opening future avenues for active learning and for real-time error mitigation through selective human intervention.

Pruning is a typical acceleration technique for compute-bound models by removing computation on unimportant values. Recently, it has been applied to accelerate Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model inference. However, existing acceleration methods focus on local information from the current action step and ignore the global context, leading to >20% success rate drop and limited speedup in some scenarios. In this paper, we point out spatial-temporal consistency in VLA tasks: input images in consecutive steps exhibit high similarity, and propose the key insight that token selection should combine local information with global context of the model. Based on this, we propose SpecPrune-VLA, a training-free, two-level pruning method with heuristic control. (1) Action-level static pruning. We leverage global history and local attention to statically reduce visual tokens per action. (2) Layer-level dynamic pruning. We prune tokens adaptively per layer based on layer-wise importance. (3) Lightweight action-aware controller: We classify actions as coarse- or fine-grained by the speed of the end effector and adjust pruning aggressiveness accordingly. Extensive experiments show that SpecPrune-VLA achieves up to 1.57$\times$ speedup in LIBERO simulation and 1.70$\times$ on real-world tasks, with negligible success rate degradation.

One central goal of robotics is to enable robots to interact with the physical world. Traditional manipulation studies primarily focus on single robots and relatively small objects. However, factory and domestic environments often require large-object manipulation, such as moving tables, where multiple robots must work collaboratively. Existing studies still lack a generalizable framework that can handle diverse objects, tasks, and robot team sizes. In this work, we propose CollaBot, a generalist framework for simultaneous collaborative manipulation. First, we use SEEM for scene segmentation and target-object extraction. Then, we propose a collaborative grasping framework that decomposes the task into local grasp pose generation and global coordination. Finally, we design a two-stage planning module to generate collision-free trajectories for task execution. Experimental results across different settings with varying objects, tasks, and numbers of robots indicate that our framework achieves a 72% success rate. This marks a substantial improvement over behavior cloning-based methods, validating the advantages of the proposed framework in complex multi-robot cooperative tasks. Real-world experiments further demonstrate the feasibility of our method in practical applications.

Underwater ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles) are indispensable for subsea exploration and task execution, yet typical teleoperation engines based on egocentric (first-person) video feeds restrict human operators' field-of-view and limit precise maneuvering in complex, unstructured underwater environments. To address this, we first propose EgoExo, a geometry-driven solution integrated into a visual SLAM pipeline that synthesizes on-demand exocentric (third-person) views from egocentric camera feeds. We further propose EgoExo++, which extends beyond 2D exocentric view synthesis (EgoExo) to augment a piecewise planar 2.5D ground surface estimation on-the-fly. Its anchor-free aerial viewpoint supports ground-relative reasoning, such as clearance and terrain-based navigation marker following. The computations involved are closed-form and rely solely on egocentric views and monocular SLAM estimates, which makes it portable across existing teleoperation engines and robust to varying waterbody characteristics. We validate the geometric accuracy of our approach through extensive experiments of 2-DOF indoor navigation and 6-DOF underwater cave exploration in challenging low-light conditions. To assess operational benefits, we conduct two user studies with simulation and real-world data, each involving 15 participants, comparing baseline egocentric teleoperation and EgoExo++. Results indicate improved system usability (SUS), reduced perceived workload (NASA-TLX), and significant gains in objective teleoperation performance, including 16% faster missions, 5-fold reduction in path deviation ratio, and fewer collision events (2 vs. 5 across trials). Furthermore, we highlight the role of EgoExo++ augmented visuals in supporting shared autonomy and embodied teleoperation. The source packages for EgoExo++ are available at: https://github.com/uf-robopi/EgoExo.

In recent years, multimodal locomotion capabilities have enabled robots to maneuver in both terrestrial and aerial domains. However, most of these robots are designed only for locomotion, and few possess the manipulation capabilities required for practical tasks. By adding a manipulator, ground robots can perform manipulation, and some drones with robotic arms have demonstrated aerial manipulation. Nonetheless, such multirotors cannot be directly used for manipulation on the ground, and this configuration itself is unsuitable for air-ground hybrid locomotion. This is because their thruster-centralized structure makes it difficult to achieve both sufficient degrees of freedom (DoF) for manipulation and stable motion with contact and transformation. Therefore, in this work, we develop a new multilink multirotor with thrusters on each link and capable of contact with the environments. This robot can perform terrestrial rolling locomotion, aerial flight locomotion, and manipulation in multiple environments using joint actuation. First, we introduce a minimal configuration design of the proposed robot. We also describe a kinematic model and propose a design for each component based on this model. Second, we propose a real-time control method based on nonlinear optimization that considers contact and joint motion, which can be applied to various multirotors. Third, we propose motion strategies that include contact constraints specific to air-ground hybrid multilink multirotors, and analyze the limitations of manipulation capabilities based on multi-contact model. Finally, we demonstrate a variety of motions in both domains using the implemented prototype. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of air-ground hybrid locomotion and manipulation by a multilink multirotor.

Registration algorithms, such as Iterative Closest Point (ICP), have proven effective in mobile robot localization algorithms over the last decades. However, they are susceptible to failure when a robot sustains extreme velocities and accelerations. For example, this kind of motion can happen after a collision, causing a point cloud to be heavily skewed. While point cloud de-skewing methods have been explored in the past to increase localization and mapping accuracy, these methods still rely on highly accurate odometry systems or ideal navigation conditions. In this paper, we present a method taking into account the remaining motion uncertainties of the trajectory used to de-skew a point cloud along with the environment geometry to increase the robustness of current registration algorithms. We compare our method to three other solutions in a test bench producing 3D maps with peak accelerations of 200 m/s^2 and 800 rad/s^2. In these extreme scenarios, we demonstrate that our method decreases the error by 9.26 % in translation and by 21.84 % in rotation. The proposed method is generic enough to be integrated to many variants of weighted ICP without adaptation and supports localization robustness in harsher terrains.

This paper presents Elevator-LIO, a LiDAR-inertial odometry framework designed to achieve continuous robot localization during elevator travel, thereby supporting cross-floor robotic tasks. To address the state-estimation problem in non-inertial frames, Elevator-LIO establishes a decoupled state-estimation model that separately models the robot motion relative to the elevator and the elevator motion itself, and embeds it into a mode-dependent iterated error-state Kalman filter framework. This framework degenerates to conventional LIO estimation in ordinary indoor environments, while enabling the propagation and constrained update of elevator-related states in elevator non-inertial environments, thereby achieving continuous and stable localization. An elevator mode manager detects elevator entry and exit events using LiDAR ranging statistics and estimated states, and introduces event-triggered zero-velocity and zero-acceleration updates when the elevator stops to suppress accumulated vertical drift. In addition, this paper adopts an adaptive voxel downsampling strategy to maintain a stable number of effective points under significant environmental scale changes. We conduct extensive experiments on 20 real-world sequences containing 79 elevator rides, including practical challenges such as large-scale spaces, long vertical travel, dynamic pedestrian interference, and mirror reflections. The results show that Elevator-LIO maintains continuous localization accuracy in all sequences, with terminal height error below 1 cm in 17 sequences. In contrast, existing representative localization systems perform poorly on these elevator sequences. Tests on the Hilti 2022/2023 datasets further show that the proposed method remains competitive in standard indoor scenarios. The project page is available at https://xiaofan4122.github.io/Elevator_LIO_Page/.

Although quadcopters boast impressive traversal capabilities enabled by their omnidirectional maneuverability, the need for continuous pilot control in complex environments impedes their application in GNSS and telemetry-denied scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel sensorimotor policy that uses stereo-vision depth and visual-inertial odometry (VIO) to autonomously navigate through obstacles in an unknown environment to reach a goal point. The policy is comprised of a pre-trained autoencoder as the perception head followed by a planning and control LSTM network which outputs velocity commands that can be followed by an off-the-shelf commercial drone. We leverage reinforcement and privileged learning paradigms to train the policy in simulation through a two-stage process: 1) initial training with optimal trajectories generated by a global motion planner acting as a supervisory backbone, 2) further fine-tuning in a curriculum environment. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we employ domain randomization and reward shaping to create a policy that is both robust to noise and domain shift. In outdoor experiments, our approach achieves successful zero-shot transfer to both obstacle environments and a drone platform that were never encountered during training.

Selecting the most suitable algorithm for a given problem instance remains a challenging task, particularly in online or dynamic environments where problem characteristics evolve over time. Relying solely on instantaneous performance metrics can result in a reactive and unstable behaviour, often leading to suboptimal algorithm switching. This paper introduces a computationally efficient approach for aggregating an algorithm's performance across multiple problem instances that is fairly immune to erratic variations in instance features. Inspired by features inherent to Reinforcement Learning (RL), this technique encapsulates rewards and penalties into a latent yield that, in turn, triggers exploitation and exploration, consequently resulting in adaptive algorithm switching. The proposed technique employs island models, inspired by Genetic Algorithms, to facilitate parallel exploration and performance exchanges among algorithm populations inhabiting local repertoires. Experimental evaluations on sorting algorithms and robotic obstacle avoidance tasks demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach, highlighting its potential in domains where adaptive algorithm selection is critical.

Flow-matching robot policies commonly use action-chunking inference for efficient closed-loop control, but chunk boundaries can introduce discontinuous action transitions. Existing RTC guidance improves continuity by injecting correction signals during denoising, yet its weight schedule is weak at intermediate timesteps and its unconstrained correction direction may introduce transverse perturbations. We propose POTR, a **p**rior-corrected **o**rthogonal **t**rust-**r**egion guidance method. First, we incorporate a data-prior scale $σ_d$ into the RTC guidance weight, yielding stronger intermediate-time correction. Second, we decompose the guidance vector into components parallel and perpendicular to the denoising velocity, and constrain the perpendicular component within a trust region. On LIBERO with $π_{0.5}$, POTR improves success rate and consistently reduces chunk-boundary discontinuity, acceleration, and jerk compared with RTC. Ablations show that the prior-corrected weight provides the main correction gain, while the orthogonal trust region further improves stability.

Robotic manipulation of deformable linear objects (DLOs) presents significant challenges due to complex dynamics and frequent self-occlusions. Existing robotic knot tying methods typically rely on precise topological state tracking with ordered keypoints and explicit edge connectivity. This reliance makes them prone to failures due to tracking drift and topology mismatch caused by repeated bending and crossings during knot formation.To address these limitations, we introduce RoboHitch, a novel framework that learns to perform hitch knot tying from human demonstrations using only disordered 3D keypoints and RGB images. This eliminates the need for explicit topological order, allowing for more flexible manipulation. Our method employs a dynamic Graph Autoencoder to extract geometric features from untracked keypoints, complemented by a Convolutional Autoencoder that captures essential visual context. A bidirectional cross-attention mechanism then fuses these modalities to jointly predict pick and place affordances, facilitating implicit reasoning about the rope's state and enabling knot tying under occlusion.Real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach, successfully completing hitch knots in scenarios with self-occlusions.

Robotic assistants in long-term human-robot collaboration need to assist users under partial observations while leveraging cross-day interaction history. However, human traits and routines are often unknown at the beginning of collaboration, making passive infer-then-act assistance ineffective and inefficient. To address this challenge, we study a cross-day proactive asking setting for continual task assistance and propose PACT (Proactive Asking for Continual Task Assistance), an ask-or-act framework that determines whether clarification should be sought before taking action. PACT leverages current observations together with accumulated interaction history to evaluate contextual sufficiency, enabling the robot to provide more reliable assistance and progressively adapt to the user over time. We implement its primary learned instantiation using reinforcement learning and evaluate alternative instantiations under the same framework. To assess such behavior, we further introduce a clarification utility metric that quantifies the trade-off between assistance accuracy and the frequency of clarification requests. Experiments in multi-day embodied collaboration scenarios demonstrate that, compared with passive inference baselines, PACT consistently improves both assistance accuracy and clarification utility, highlighting the importance of proactive asking in continual human-robot collaboration.

We present IsaacIPC, a robotic simulation framework that couples GPU accelerated incremental potential contact (IPC) with IsaacSim/Lab. IsaacIPC maps simulated deformation between simulation and visual meshes, enabling real-time realistic rendering with applications to data collection and policy evaluation. For tactile sensing, we introduce the geometric mortar contact potential (GMCP), which defines a barrier potential over contact samples on tactile surfaces to better resolve contact-pressure distributions. We evaluate GMCP on contact benchmarks and demonstrate IsaacIPC on rigid-deformable robotic simulations including a quadruped robot, a dexterous hand, and a universal manipulation interface (UMI) gripper.

Planetary rovers operating in extraterrestrial environments often encounter significant mobility challenges due to varying terrain features such as gradients and granularity. While recent works in multimodal wheel design have explored adjustments in stiffness, compliance, and diameter as a means to improve terrain adaptability, full wheel grouser-adjustable designs remain largely unexplored. Grousers are a compelling feature to actuate, as granular terrains tend to require increased grouser height for improved wheel performance. As a result, we introduce [Anonymized Robot Name], a multimodal wheel capable of continuously adjusting its grouser height for terrain adaptation. The platform was evaluated across four representative surfaces, including vinyl flooring, coarse rock, pea gravel, and sand under two packing states, spanning a range of granular conditions. Results from 750 experimental trials demonstrate that adaptive deployment reduces slip by 30.0--58.0\% and improves travel time and energy consumption by up to 77.4\% in granular regimes relative to fixed configurations. Using the terrain trial data, a simplified scaling analysis was developed and validated, suggesting a relationship between terrain granularity and optimal grouser height for the tested configuration. No single grouser height minimized slip across all terrains, underscoring the limitations of fixed-wheel systems commonly used for planetary exploration. This observation reinforces the potential of grouser-adaptive morphology, such as [Anonymized Robot Name], as an effective solution for enhancing rover mobility across diverse and mobility-challenging extraterrestrial environments.

Bidirectional thrust grants quadrotors a second equilibrium condition and increased control authority, expanding the envelope of possible aggressive maneuvers and enabling inverted flight, perching, and sensing. Prior geometric control approaches extend differential flatness through Hopf fibration-based attitude representations to support bidirectional thrust, but struggle with actuator saturation and motor reversal delay during inversions, requiring heuristic thrust posture scheduling and waypoint tuning. We propose a learning-based framework that modulates a constant reference trajectory to perform compact, position-constrained quadrotor inversions while remaining compatible with traditional trajectory generation and tracking across flight regimes. Separate policies are trained via reinforcement learning for nominal-to-inverted and inverted-to-nominal transitions. In JAX-based simulation, the proposed method achieves the lowest position deviation and settling time across all evaluated baselines, reducing position root mean square error (RMSE) by 32% and settling time by 57% relative to the strongest optimization-based baseline. Hardware experiments demonstrate successful inversion across multiple yaw configurations with position RMSE below 0.35m, and compatibility with downstream trajectory generation and control through circular flight in both regimes. Additionally, we provide an open-source implementation of the proposed framework.

In this paper, we introduce a model of evolution and learning in robots that co-optimizes a distribution of latent design vectors (genotypes) and a mixture of control experts (neural modules), which are gated by the latent coordinates of each decoded design (phenotype). This provides a scalable alternative to co-design algorithms that either train an individual policy for every robot, which is inefficient, or a monolithic universal controller for all robots, which results in overly conservative structures and behaviors. Our approach lies somewhere between these two extremes, preserving ancestral knowledge in a unified yet modular framework in which different body plans activate and deactivate different combinations of learned sensorimotor circuits for goal-directed behavior. This allows one part of the controller to be overhauled to better suit new species of designs as they emerge without disrupting the hard-earned knowledge contained within other expert modules. It also allows pretrained expert policies to be directly plugged into the mixture, which can steer evolution into otherwise unexplored areas of latent space containing desired morphological traits. We refer to this process as "evo by demo" and explore how it may be used to guide freeform evolution toward canonical structures defined by the pretrained model. Videos and code can be found at: https://eco-moe.github.io.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for generalist robot manipulation, yet they remain limited by insufficient spatial reasoning, particularly in determining where to interact in complex visual scenes. While recent efforts introduce various forms of visual planning to address this issue, existing approaches either rely on global geometric cues, symbolic intermediate representations, or externally generated visual signals, which are often weakly coupled with downstream action prediction. In this work, we revisit visual planning in VLA systems and argue that effective planning should be local, visually grounded, internally generated, and directly aligned with action. Based on this insight, we propose Afford-VLA, a unified framework that internalizes task-conditioned affordance as an explicit visual planning interface within VLA models. Concretely, we introduce learnable <AFF> tokens to query task-relevant interaction regions, decode affordance masks from multimodal features, and convert them into compact embeddings that directly condition action generation. This design enables affordance to be both generated and utilized within the VLA, forming a tightly coupled perception-action pathway. To further support this integration, we adopt a training strategy that allows the affordance pathway to be jointly optimized with action prediction, improving its effectiveness for downstream control. We evaluate our method on multiple simulation benchmarks, including LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and SimplerEnv, achieving consistent state-of-the-art performance, along with strong real-world results. These findings demonstrate that internalizing affordance as action-aligned visual planning provides a powerful paradigm for improving VLA systems.

In robotic applications, actuators are typically designed to be stiff with minimal backlash to ensure precision and repeatability. However, this limits compliance, leading to potential damage and poor force control in uncertain environments. Series Elastic Actuation (SEA) introduces compliance to enhance disturbance rejection and enable force measurement via Hooke's Law but reduces system bandwidth. A custom Series Elastic (SE) element was retrofitted to a black-box actuator to mitigate non-linearities like backlash and static friction. Integrating the SE element enabled high-fidelity force measurements, improving force control bandwidth and performance. A torsional SE element was designed through Finite Element (FE) analysis, yielding a stiffness of 2155.4 Nm/rad. Open-loop force control bandwidth was measured for the original motor and the SEA-integrated configuration, while closed-loop bandwidth was assessed using feedback from the SEA and a commercial force sensor. The SEA module increased bandwidth from 10.32 Hz to 30.32 Hz, a 2.93X improvement. Additionally, it outperformed the commercial sensor by 7.63% despite costing 25 GBP, a fraction of the price.

We consider the problem of combining potential field and ergodic search on multi-robot systems. Traditional ergodic search algorithms use metrics for ergodicity that account for the desired distribution at different scales. Recently, a heat equation-driven ergodic approach was proposed, which adds flexibility to the smoothing of the ergodic metric. However, such an approach, as it is an isotropic diffusion, propagates the error uniformly in all directions, regardless of changes in the desired distribution. We introduce a general class of anisotropic diffusion formulation of the ergodicity problem, which generates a potential field for the ergodic search. We demonstrate that this approach generalizes previous results, which consider radial basis functions and the solution of the heat equation to represent the difference between the goal density distribution and the covered trajectories. In our solution, the agent movement is directed using the gradient of the solution of the Perona-Malik diffusion, and our formulation includes the heat equation as a special case. We demonstrate the methodology with a series of simulations in different scenarios.

Visual navigation ability is strongly tied to its underlying representation of the world. Unlike classical 3D maps that require globally-consistent geometry, image- or object-relative topological graphs almost entirely do away with geometric understanding. But, this comes at the cost of navigation capability, often limiting it to merely teach-and-repeat. In this work, we propose a novel map representation in the form of pixel-relative connectivity, which is geometrically accurate but does not require global geometric consistency. Inspired by recent progress in 3D grounded image matching, we construct a map from an image sequence through inter-image connectivity based on pixel correspondences in the relative 3D coordinate systems of individual image pairs. We then use this pixel-level graph to perform global path planning by approximating and sparsifying intra-image pixel connectivity. Through this, we derive a ''WayPixel Costmap'' representation and train a controller conditioned on it to predict a trajectory rollout. We show that this dense pixel-level costmap based on relative geometry is a more accurate conditioning variable for control prediction than its image- and object-level counterparts. This enables a highly capable navigation system, as validated on four types of navigation tasks in the simulator and through real world demonstrations.

Fisheye cameras are increasingly adopted in robotics for near-field manipulation, navigation, and immersive perception, yet indoor depth benchmarks with accurate ground truth are still missing. To address this, we introduce WideDepth - the first indoor dataset for fisheye depth estimation, featuring 101 scenes containing 5K high-resolution stereo pairs labeled with millimeter-level ground truth depth and disparity. Our dataset also includes paired pinhole and fisheye samples across varying fields of view and baselines in both horizontal and vertical stereo setups. We further propose a method to adapt pinhole-trained stereo models to fisheye images and introduce a novel stereo fisheye image generation pipeline based on high-resolution LiDAR scans. Leveraging these methods, we thoroughly evaluate state-of-the-art monocular depth, stereo matching, and depth completion models on our benchmark. Additionally, we provide 18K LiDAR-derived sparse depth training samples, achieving up to a 62% performance boost on fisheye data when fine-tuning pinhole-based stereo models. In summary, the high precision and versatility of our benchmark set a strong foundation for advancing research in fisheye depth estimation and robotics perception. Project page: https://ilyaind.github.io/WideDepth

Robots deployed in dynamic environments must contend with environment-driven changes that reshape computation at runtime: new tasks may appear, precedence relations can shift, and overall workload structure evolves, all of which degrade performance, especially when multi-task inference is required under tight resource and real-time budgets. We present RED, a real-time scheduling framework for multi-task deep neural network workloads on resource-constrained robotic platforms that adapts to Robotic Environmental Dynamics (RED) while preserving end-to-end timing guarantees under modeling assumptions. The core of RED is a deadline-aware scheduler that assigns intermediate sub-deadlines, allowing it to accommodate evolving computation graphs and asynchronous inference induced by unpredictable conditions. The framework also supports flexible deployment of MIMONet (multi-input multi-output neural networks), commonly used in multi-tasking robots to alleviate memory pressure through weight sharing. RED explicitly leverages this shared-parameter property via a workload refinement and graph-reconstruction procedure that aligns MIMONet structure with schedulability requirements, improving compatibility and efficiency. We implement RED on NVIDIA Jetson family platforms and on an Apple M-series MacBook and evaluate it on navigation-oriented workloads representative of real robotic scenarios. Experiments show consistent gains over existing methods in throughput, deadline satisfaction, robustness to interference, adaptability, and runtime overhead.

Large language models (LLMs) are promising for autonomous driving, but semantics-only decision policies can yield physically unsafe behavior in dynamic traffic. Existing methods either perform online language reasoning without explicit dynamics verification or use world models mainly in offline pipelines, leaving a gap between semantic intent and physical feasibility at decision time. We propose Reason--Imagine--Act (RIA), a closed-loop framework that couples an LLM reasoner with an action-conditioned world model for online safety verification. At each step, the LLM proposes an action template and candidate sub-actions, the world model performs short-horizon rollouts, and a safety scorer selects the safest executable action with feedback to the next reasoning step. Under a unified CARLA point-goal protocol (1000 episodes), RIA achieves 80.05% route completion, 51.10% arrival rate, and 0.20% collision rate. Under the same closed-loop interface, RIA consistently outperforms training-free baselines, including CARLA TM and MADA, on core closed-loop metrics. For reproducibility, code is available at https://github.com/pku-smart-city/source_code/tree/main/RIA.

Autonomous robots operating in open and changing environments cannot always rely on predefined inputs, outputs, and action routines. Although existing learning methods enable robots to improve their performance through environmental interaction, the objects of learning are often fixed in advance, such as input features, recognition outputs, network structures, task goals, or action sequences. This limits their ability to adapt when new features, new categories, or more efficient task routines appear during long-term operation. To address this problem, this paper proposes a thinking-learning interaction model for autonomous robots. The core idea is that thinking guides learning by identifying potential changes, selecting useful evidence, organizing training materials, and planning verification actions, while learning promotes thinking by updating task knowledge, feature-selection experience, action strategies, and future reasoning processes. Based on this bidirectional mechanism, the robot can gradually move beyond predefined learning settings and adapt its recognition relations and action relations through continuous interaction with the environment. Specifically, the proposed model supports adaptive input feature discovery, output category expansion, learning model update, and action routine reconstruction. Experimental results show that the proposed model improves the final recognition accuracy from 0.419 to 0.845 in feature adaptation, achieves higher new-category formation accuracy and model-update success rate, and reduces the average action length from 13.0 to 4.0 in action routine reconstruction. In learning-enhanced thinking, the useful evidence selection rate increases from 0.272 to 0.965, indicating that learning results can effectively improve future evidence selection and reasoning.

Large language models achieve strong performance in language generation and knowledge-intensive tasks, yet remain limited in settings requiring causal reasoning, persistent state tracking, and long-horizon planning. We argue that these limitations may arise from an objective-level mismatch between sequence prediction and reasoning over latent environment dynamics. To formalize this distinction, we introduce Latent Dynamics Inference (LDI), a conceptual perspective that interprets language and multimodal observations as partial evidence of underlying transition dynamics. To empirically investigate this perspective, we introduce Flux, a sequential reasoning environment specified entirely through natural-language rules. As a proof-of-concept case study, the rules are first compiled into an explicit state-transition simulator, illustrating that structured latent transition dynamics can, in some cases, be operationally extracted from textual rule descriptions. This enables a controlled comparison between the LLMs operating purely over textual observations and reinforcement-learning agents trained directly within the extracted latent state space. Within this case study, agents operating with explicit access to the latent state space exhibit substantially more stable behavior in long-horizon gameplay, achieving an aggregate win rate of approximately 79% versus 11% for LLMs. Qualitative analysis further reveals failure modes consistent with unstable persistent state tracking, including invalid actions, state-tracking errors, and short-horizon reasoning failures. The complete implementation of the Flux environment available at https://github.com/FeisalAlaswad/FLUX-RL-Agent Within the evaluated setting, these results suggest that strong sequence prediction alone may struggle to support robust long-horizon dynamic reasoning without mechanisms for persistent state tracking and transition modeling

Alzheimer's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder marked by progressive declines in memory and language that reduce independence in daily life, motivating socially assistive robotic support. This paper presents MEMOR-E, a mobile quadruped robot with an interactive tablet interface that assists patients and caregivers through medication reminders, routine guidance, memory oriented interactions, and companionship. We evaluated the feasibility of fine tuning large language models (LLMs) to emulate stage consistent cognitive behavior and interpret responses across standard neuropsychological language tasks, using audio transcriptions from 235 Alzheimer's patients and synthetically generated healthy controls. We also report findings on using in context learning (ICL) in LLMs, where a second LLM produced domain and severity level cognitive error summaries. Our results show that MEMOR-E can generate stage aware, non diagnostic cognitive summaries that support personalized assistive interactions, while explainable AI mechanisms translate model outputs into transparent, human readable evidence to enable caregiver oversight and trustworthy human robot interaction.

The Intelligent Driver Model (IDM) is a cornerstone of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), valued for its interpretable parameters and effectiveness in car-following behavior modeling. However, its inherent conservatism leads to prolonged stabilization and reduced traffic efficiency, which have received limited attention. In this paper, we propose SEIDM (Safe and Efficient Intelligent Driver Model), an enhanced IDM extension designed to improve traffic flow efficiency without sacrificing safety. SEIDM introduces an adaptive safety factor to dynamically modulate the impact of the safe deceleration term in acceleration decisions. This allows vehicles to follow more assertively under safe conditions while behaving more cautiously in potential hazards. Extensive urban traffic simulations show that SEIDM achieves significantly shorter stabilization spacing and faster convergence to traffic flow equilibrium, outperforming the original IDM and its variants in traffic stability and efficiency.

We present VILAS, a fully low-cost, modular robotic manipulation platform designed to support end-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) policy learning and deployment on accessible hardware. The system integrates a Fairino FR5 collaborative arm, a Jodell RG52-50 electric gripper, and a dual-camera perception module, unified through a ZMQ-based communication architecture that seamlessly coordinates teleoperation, data collection, and policy deployment within a single framework. To enable safe manipulation of fragile objects without relying on explicit force sensing, we design a kirigami-based soft compliant gripper extension that induces predictable deformation under compressive loading, providing gentle and repeatable contact with delicate targets. We deploy and evaluate three state-of-the-art VLA models on the VILAS platform: pi_0, pi_0.5, and GR00T N1.6. All models are fine-tuned from publicly released pretrained checkpoints using an identical demonstration dataset collected via our teleoperation pipeline. Experiments on a grape grasping task validate the effectiveness of the proposed system, confirming that capable manipulation policies can be successfully trained and deployed on low-cost modular hardware. Our results further provide practical insights into the deployment characteristics of current VLA models in real-world settings.

Surface manipulation tasks require robots to generate trajectories that comprehensively cover complex 3D surfaces while maintaining precise end-effector poses. Existing ergodic trajectory optimization (TO) methods demonstrate success in coverage tasks, while struggling with point-cloud targets due to the nonconvex optimization landscapes and the inadequate handling of SE(3) constraints in sampling-as-optimization (SAO) techniques. In this work, we introduce a preconditioned SE(3) Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) approach for SAO ergodic trajectory generation. Our proposed approach comprises multiple innovations. First, we reformulate point-cloud ergodic coverage as a manifold-aware sampling problem. Second, we derive SE(3)-specific SVGD particle updates, and, third, we develop a preconditioner to accelerate TO convergence. Our sampling-based framework consistently identifies superior local optima compared to strong optimization-based and SAO baselines while preserving the SE(3) geometric structure. Experiments on a 3D point-cloud surface coverage benchmark and robotic surface drawing tasks demonstrate that our method achieves superior coverage quality with tractable computation in our setting relative to existing TO and SAO approaches, and is validated in real-world robot experiments.

Enabling robots to perform novel manipulation tasks from natural language instructions remains a fundamental challenge in robotics, despite significant progress in generalized problem solving with foundational models. Large vision and language models (VLMs) are capable of processing high-dimensional input data for visual scene and language understanding, as well as decomposing tasks into a sequence of logical steps; however, they struggle to ground those steps in embodied robot motion. On the other hand, robotics foundation models output action commands, but require in-domain fine-tuning or experience before they are able to perform novel tasks successfully. At its core, there still remains the fundamental challenge of connecting abstract task reasoning with low-level motion control. To address this disconnect, we propose Language Movement Primitives (LMPs), a framework that grounds VLM reasoning in Dynamic Movement Primitive (DMP) parameterization. Our key insight is that DMPs provide a small number of interpretable parameters, and VLMs can set these parameters to specify diverse, continuous, and stable trajectories. Put another way: VLMs can reason over free-form natural language task descriptions, and semantically ground their desired motions into DMPs -- bridging the gap between high-level task reasoning and low-level position and velocity control. Building on this combination of VLMs and DMPs, we formulate our LMP pipeline for zero-shot robot manipulation that effectively completes tabletop manipulation problems by generating a sequence of DMP motions. Across 31 real-world manipulation tasks, we show that LMP achieves 65% task success as compared to 35% for the best performing baseline. See videos at our website: https://collab.me.vt.edu/lmp

Safe decision-making algorithms for control of mobile robots often require the existence of feedback to verify the safety of proposed actions. This feedback is assumed to be directly available during the development or deployment of the control system. It can take the form of either an explicit constraint formulation or a set of hand-labeled safety data, both of which can be inaccurate or time consuming to produce. Many recently developed simulators can handle complex interactions and varied environments. These environments have implicit safety constraints that may be hard to model. By leveraging one of these simulators, we can construct a proxy for a safety function that bypasses the need for hand designed feedback in capturing these constraints. We present an algorithm that approximates safety by using reversibility and a positive-invariance assumption on the unsafe state space. This method employs the Model-Predictive Path Integral algorithm (MPPI) to establish this reversibility and verify a proposed action. First the action is projected via the simulator to a future state. Then if MPPI can find a path back to a previous state in the trajectory, that state is guaranteed to be outside the unsafe (positive invariant) set. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can approximate the performance of a safety oracle while avoiding classification of unsafe states as safe.

With the growing use of large language models and conversational interfaces in human-robot interaction, robots' ability to answer user questions is more important than ever. We therefore introduce a dataset of 1,893 user questions for household robots, collected from 100 participants and organized into 12 categories and 70 subcategories. Most work in explainable robotics focuses on why-questions. In contrast, our dataset provides a wide variety of questions, from questions about simple execution details to questions about how the robot would act in hypothetical scenarios -- thus giving roboticists valuable insights into what questions their robot needs to be able to answer. To collect the dataset, we created 15 video stimuli and 7 text stimuli, depicting robots performing varied household tasks. We then asked participants on Prolific what questions they would want to ask the robot in each portrayed situation. In the final dataset, the most frequent categories are questions about task execution details (21.4%), the robot's capabilities (12.6%), and performance assessments (10.7%). Although questions about how robots would handle potentially difficult scenarios and ensure correct behavior are less frequent, users rank them as the most important for robots to be able to answer. Moreover, we find that users who identify as novices in robotics ask different questions than more experienced users. Novices are more likely to inquire about simple facts, such as what the robot did or the current state of the environment. As robots enter environments shared with humans and language becomes central to giving instructions and interaction, this dataset provides a valuable foundation for (i) identifying the information robots need to log and expose to conversational interfaces, (ii) benchmarking question-answering modules, and (iii) designing explanation strategies that align with user expectations.