Task-Specified Active Metrological Inspection with Measurement-Steered VLA Manipulation and Deterministic Evidence Gating

Robotic laser profiling is widely used for dimensional verification and surface inspection, yet measurement fidelity is often dominated by sensor configuration rather than robot motion. Industrial profilers expose multiple coupled parameters, including sampling frequency, measurement range, exposure time, receiver dynamic range, and illumination, that are still tuned by trial-and-error; mismatches can cause saturation, clipping, or missing returns that cannot be recovered downstream. We formulate instruction-conditioned sensing parameter recommendation; given a pre-scan RGB observation and a natural-language inspection instruction, infer a discrete configuration over key parameters of a robot-mounted profiler. To benchmark this problem, we develop Instruct-Obs2Param, a real-world multimodal dataset linking inspection intents and multi-view pose and illumination variation across 16 objects to canonical parameter regimes. We then propose ScanHD, a hyperdimensional computing framework that binds instruction and observation into a task-aware code and performs parameter-wise associative reasoning with compact memories, matching discrete scanner regimes while yielding stable, interpretable, low-latency decisions. On Instruct-Obs2Param, ScanHD achieves 92.7% average exact accuracy and 98.1% average Win@1 accuracy across the five parameters, with strong cross-split generalization and low-latency inference suitable for deployment, outperforming rule-based heuristics, conventional multimodal models, and multimodal large language models. This work enables autonomous, instruction-conditioned sensing configuration from task intent and scene context, eliminating manual tuning and elevating sensor configuration from a static setting to an adaptive decision variable.

Precision visual inspection underpins quality assurance across aerospace, semiconductor, and medical manufacturing, where undetected surface anomalies on high-value parts translate directly into scrap, rework, and field failures. Robotic visual inspection requires precise alignment between the end-effector and local surface geometry in the presence of perception noise and surface irregularities. In industrial settings, a human operator is often kept in the loop via teleoperation or shared autonomy, introducing real-time adjustments that render purely offline motion planning inadequate. This motivates control architectures capable of reactive, compliant behavior under combined human and perceptual uncertainty. This paper presents a novel real-time, closed-loop robotic orientation control pipeline for precision visual inspection, with an admittance-based framework that unifies operator input and perception-driven surface alignment. We design the end-effector as a virtual sphere moving through a viscous medium, such that the resulting physically interpretable mass--damper system generates synchronized, compliant motion from orientation error and operator commands. We validate the framework on a 6-DOF manipulator demonstrating stable normal-tracking and a final mean orientation error of 0.4°.

Harsh and rapidly varying orbital illumination introduces failure modes during spacecraft inspection. Existing planners rely on line-of-sight inspection metrics which perform occlusion checks against a known target and conflate geometric visibility with task-relevant information. These metrics overlook illumination effects including eclipse, self-shadowing, and specular reflection from spacecraft materials and tend to declare components as inspected despite the corresponding images lacking sufficient information. We propose an inspection-planning framework that replaces geometric visibility with a learned measure of camera information derived from a classifier variational autoencoder (VAE) that operates directly on the captured image. The encoder model is trained to classify spacecraft surface components from rendered patches, and its total latent variance is used to learn the varying illumination of said components, replacing binary visibility checks with a continuous, image-grounded quantity. We evaluate the approach by implementing a Guidance, Navigation, and Control architecture in a photorealistic physics simulator, and vary lighting and viewing geometries with multiple orbits. We show that, although all approaches successfully maximize their own objective, our approach results in better illumination: a mean brightness of $0.57$, with $81.6\%$ of observations above $0.25$, compared with $0.02$ ($3.0\%$) for geometric planning with an illumination band and $0.04$ ($6.0\%$) for purely geometric planning.