A.D.A.M.O. (Agent for language-Driven Actions with Multimodal Observations): A Visual-Symbolic Framework for Virtual Humans

Vision-language-action (VLA) models inherit a shared synchronous clock from vision-language pretraining, processing every input at one rate. This is misaligned with physical interaction, where a high-frequency modality changes at hundreds of hertz, vision evolves more slowly, and language stays constant across an episode. A synchronous VLA oversamples slow modalities, undersamples fast ones, and caps action generation at the lowest effective frequency. We hypothesize that decoupling temporal processing per modality, letting each update and retain information at its own sensor rate, yields stronger representations and more robust control. We present DAM-VLA, which maintains per-modality latent buffers refreshed at sensor rates and read continuously by the action head, integrating new high-frequency modalities through gated cross-attention that leaves the pretrained backbone intact. Across seven contact-rich real-world manipulation tasks, DAM-VLA more than doubles the average success rate of the strongest synchronous baseline (95.2% vs.\ 40.95%) while sustaining smooth, reactive 100,Hz control. Project website: intuitive-robots.github.io/DAM-VLA/

As AI agents become increasingly capable, agent-driven robotic control is emerging as a compelling paradigm. However, prevailing vision-language-action (VLA) models and world action models (WAMs) still rely on natural-language instructions to specify manipulation tasks, an ill-suited interface for agent-driven control: referentially ambiguous, spatially imprecise, redundant with the agent's inherent language understanding, and entangling intent with execution. We present AR-WAM, a visual-conditioned, agent-ready world action model that replaces language with two complementary conditions: a visual grounding prompt (a bounding box of the target) denoting the interaction object and location, and a learnable operation token dictating the atomic skill to execute. Our compact 0.5B-parameter model, with a frozen pretrained visual encoder and no language encoder, predicts scene evolution within compact latent states while decoding actions, exposing the policy's intent through explicit, supervisable reasoning signals. A model-agnostic compatibility layer provides three primitives (detect, execute, and query) so that local VLMs or online agent APIs can drive the policy directly, with long-horizon memory and closed-loop error recovery delegated to the agent side. On RoboTwin 2.0, RMBench, and a real Astribot S1 dual-arm platform, AR-WAM matches the strongest baselines on standard manipulation (87.2% average success) and outperforms them on memory-dependent and real-robot long-horizon tasks, improving success rates by 5.9% and 36.7%, respectively, while maintaining the lowest inference latency (14.1 ms).

Vision-language-action (VLA) models unify visual perception, language understanding, and action generation, offering new opportunities for automation in additive manufacturing (AM). However, deployment in AM remains challenging because adapting these models to unseen robot embodiments is costly, and performance can degrade under environment changes. In this work, we present a framework for deploying OpenVLA-OFT on a FAIRINO FR3 robot in a fixed AM workcell. A data pipeline converts monocular real-world demonstrations into OpenVLA-compatible TFDS/RLDS datasets to support adaptation to the FR3 embodiment. At runtime, each inference request predicts an eight-step chunk of 7-D actions. The FR3 executes each chunk open loop before capturing a new observation, providing closed-loop feedback between chunks. The system uses a cloud-edge architecture in which the FR3 client streams observations to a remote inference server through a FastAPI interface. In 42 physical A-to-B object-transfer trials, evenly split between red and blue targets, the system succeeded in 39 (92.9%). All three failures occurred during final placement, when insufficient release-height control caused the object to topple. An illumination sweep identified a low-error luminance range of 85-125 on a 0-255 scale, with the lowest mean spatial error at 95.