cs.ROSep 22, 2026

Fisheye-VLA: Decoupling Coverage and Acuity for Manipulation with a Single Fisheye Camera

Authors: Ziang Ren, Zike Yan, Raymond Zhang, Xuguo He, Zhongyu Li

Organizations: Hong Kong Embodied AI Lab · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · DeepCybo · University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

Abstract

Manipulation requires both broad scene awareness and detailed local feedback, yet conventional camera rigs provide them through separate front and wrist cameras. We present Fisheye-VLA, a visual interface that brings these capabilities together using a single passive fisheye. A global view preserves the workspace, while local perspective crops direct detail toward the interaction. The key design question is where this local visual budget should go. We answer it through a controlled re-rendering study, comparing alternative crop directions on the same recorded observations. The study finds that end-effector-centered views capture most of the estimated benefit of a much larger candidate pool, motivating a compact allocation around both hands. Our interface uses calibrated end-effector projection and motion lead to track the crops, while a shared ray encoding preserves their spatial meaning as they move. Integrated with a pretrained VLA, it achieves 84% and 82% success in the two expanded tabletop regions, where some target placements extend beyond the front-camera coverage, and supports shelf and conveyor manipulation. Ablations show that local crops and their viewing directions become more important in the larger workspace regions. The results demonstrate that a single fisheye can support these manipulation tasks without physical wrist cameras.

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