Human-Robot Interaction

We investigate the challenges of enabling effective collaboration between human operators and heterogeneous autonomous agents in complex, dynamic environments by developing an interaction platform that allows study of operator behavior and supports intent inference and decision-making using state-of-the-art frameworks. We demonstrate the extent to which the operator's perception, decisions, and actions could be supported by autonomous systems during search-and-rescue operations with our platform.

We focus on human-robot collaborative transport, a challenging task of broad relevance spanning logistics, manufacturing, and the home, in which a user and a robot work together to relocate a large or heavy object. To act as an effective partner, the robot should reduce the user's effort by contributing to efficient relocation of the object while remaining physically responsive to them. Prior work often addresses these capabilities separately, producing robots that may move the object efficiently but resist user input, or accommodate the user but depend on continuous guidance. Our key insight is that obstacle-constrained collaborative transport requires integrating predictions of human collaborative behavior with compliant robot control. To this end, we introduce PROACT, a framework for human-robot collaborative transport that incorporates anticipation into compliant whole-body control through a learned model of human collaborative behavior. Trained on a large-scale, real-world dataset of dyadic human transport demonstrations, our transformer architecture distills collaborative behavior into predictions of future object motion. Across 108 real-world trials with a 9-DoF mobile manipulator, PROACT reduces mean interaction work by 59.2% and 20.4%, and mean completion time by 12.9% and 6.9%, relative to compliance-only and MPC baselines, respectively. Footage from our experiments can be found at https://youtu.be/qAGvQfVPjbk.

Diffusion models offer flexible motion generation, but translating this flexibility into feedback-responsive humanoid control remains challenging. Hierarchical systems steer motion through references that may exceed a separate tracker's capabilities, leaving recovery and physical execution largely to the tracker. Action-only diffusion generates actions directly but lacks an explicit future-state trajectory for test-time motion objectives. Joint state-action diffusion provides this representation, yet representative controllers often depend on privileged full-body states, and support for learned behavior selection and test-time motion steering remains fragmented. We present PredActor, a predictive action diffusion policy that brings these complementary steering capabilities into one directly executed policy using proprioceptive observations. Conditioned on proprioceptive history and optional task context, PredActor jointly generates executable actions and an internal future-state trajectory. Classifier-free guidance strengthens text-conditioned behavior, while classifier guidance steers predicted states toward test-time objectives. Only actions are executed, without a separate motion-reference tracker or externally estimated full-body states as policy inputs. In simulation, PredActor reaches all 15 destination targets and achieves a text retrieval score of 0.580, compared with 0.373 for conditional action diffusion, with similar observed disturbance survival. To make this guided policy practical onboard, rolling denoising and computation-preserving runtime optimizations reduce the complete callback to 16.790 ms median and 19.383 ms p95 on a Jetson Orin NX, both below the 20 ms control period. We deploy PredActor on a Unitree G1; evaluations across simulation and physical hardware demonstrate text-conditioned motion, disturbance response, joystick control, and semantic interpolation.

% !TEX root = ../main.tex Real-time embodied companion interaction requires a robot to infer user intent from streaming speech, generate timely responses, and execute expressive, interruptible motions. Existing systems typically decouple dialogue orchestration from gesture synthesis, relying on offline motion generation from complete audio. This separation leaves open how a deployed robot can dynamically synchronize response content, prosodic timing, and physical safety under incremental inputs and uncertain turn boundaries. We present MIRA, a unified framework for real-time full-duplex embodied companion interaction. Given streaming user speech, dialogue history, and vocal affect, MIRA predicts both the response text and an explicit embodiment cue that routes the response to the appropriate physical behavior. Discrete social behaviors (\eg listening and greeting) are mapped to validated robot trajectories, while speaking responses are accompanied by streaming, generative co-speech motion. For co-speech motion generation, we propose ROSCO, a prefix-conditioned diffusion model for streaming audio-to-joint motion generation. We further design RHPC, an inference scheme that maintains a sufficiently long temporal context for motion prediction while bounding physical commitment to a short, interruptible prefix. At the interaction level, we design CORTEX, a dual-timescale interaction policy that combines low-latency barge-in preemption and streaming response generation with deliberative turn decisions, backed by a robot-side execution layer that enforces physical safety constraints during execution. MIRA is deployed on an Astribot S1 humanoid robot. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate competitive audio-motion alignment relative to state-of-the-art motion-generation baselines, while real-robot deployment measurements characterize streaming responsiveness and interruption handling.

Body-cue recognition can support assistive robots, but benchmark accuracy does not guarantee reliable behavior under a robot-camera viewpoint. We present Nuni, a bedside robot prototype that treats a detected distress cue as a reason to ask rather than a reason to alert. We compare two X3D-UGT RGB appearance classifiers, which reach 97.7% and 94.8% six-way accuracy on NTU RGB+D, with a pose-centric hybrid pipeline on 28 single-actor scripted clips recorded from the robot camera. The hybrid path achieved 0.71 six-way macro recall, versus 0.25 and 0.29 for the fine-tuned and from-scratch RGB variants. More importantly for interaction, it produced a question-triggering distress cue in 12/16 distress clips and would have prompted unnecessarily in 2/8 normal clips; the RGB variants yielded a question-triggering cue in only 2/16 and 3/16 distress clips. We separately tested the question-first controller through event injection. All 13 state-transition trials passed: valid responses caused stand-down, two unanswered prompts produced one alert, and three boundary conditions were handled correctly. These results are a preliminary technical evaluation, not a user study or medical validation, but they show how interaction policy can limit the consequences of uncertain perception.

Hyper-redundant robots are well suited for confined-space manipulation due to their high dexterity, but safe operation in cluttered environments remains challenging. In addition, their slender structures often lead to uneven load distributions and nonuniform tracking errors along the body. To address these issues, this work proposes a weighted control barrier functions (W-CBFs) framework that enforces safety constraints while reducing tracking errors caused by uneven loading. The proposed controller was first evaluated on a circular path-following task under different obstacle configurations. With fixed weights, compared to the non-weighted method, the maximum reduction in root-mean-square (RMS) tracking error was 59.6% in simulation and 87.7% in physical experiments. An adaptive weighting strategy was then investigated based on the discrepancy between simulated and experimental performance under different mapping functions. The RMS errors were further reduced by 21.9% and 8.5%, respectively, although the error increases when obstacles were located close to the robot body. Finally, the robot was evaluated in a cleaning task requiring coverage of a rectangular area and compared with manual teleoperation. Although the controller was not explicitly optimized for area coverage, the autonomous strategy achieved comparable or better coverage performance while avoiding collisions with the surrounding frame, whereas collisions occurred during manual operation.

Robots can recover from failures by asking bystanders for help, but effective human-in-the-loop recovery requires communication that accounts for differences in people's knowledge. Prior inverse-semantics work generates requests using a single listener model, leaving differences in listener knowledge untested. We introduce Listener Differences in Human-Robot Interaction (LD-HRI), a game, dataset, and benchmark that evaluates speakers through human listener performance. Our evaluation examines request properties, large language model (LLM) speakers, and inverse-semantics request-selection algorithms under controlled differences in listener information. The corpus contains 446 human-written requests and 1{,}302 listener trials. We additionally evaluated 24 frozen LLM-written requests with 70 human listeners across 560 trials. Novice success is descriptively higher with model-written requests across all four tasks, yet both request sources leave substantial expert--novice gaps, including 16 percentage points for LLM requests. LD-HRI makes these gaps measurable, providing a foundation for designing more robust communication in human-robot and human-agent interaction.

Underwater human--robot interaction requires gesture commands that are both easy for divers to use and reliable for robots to recognize. We investigate these aspects through a closed-loop diver--robot interaction framework integrating a compact seven-gesture vocabulary, lightweight landmark-based recognition, and command-level interaction logic. We evaluate the framework through a user study and underwater robot experiments in a laboratory tank and a swimming pool. The user study supported the reproducibility of the gestures after brief learning. Recognition analysis further showed that visual similarity was associated with gesture confusion, while intermediate poses during gesture formation introduced temporal ambiguity. Command-level processing mitigated the effects of transient recognition errors on robot execution, reducing unintended triggers and premature task interruptions. These findings show that reliable underwater gesture interaction depends on human usability, gesture recognizability, and execution reliability in underwater interaction.

We present LYRIC, a generative flow-matching controller for language-driven physics-based contact-rich interaction control, that enables simulated characters to perform contact-rich whole-body object interactions from a free-form language instruction and a sparse terminal object goal. To obtain reliable expert trajectories from imperfect motion-capture references, a single tracking policy is trained using geometry-conditioned interaction rewards and relaxed reference tracking near hand-object contact. To guide interaction progress without prescribing a full-body kinematic reference, we factorize the controller into a task-level planner that predicts short-horizon object and humanoid-root trajectories, and an action generator that resolves whole-body motion and contacts in closed loop. After behavior cloning, we freeze the planner and post-tune the action generator on policy using the planner's predictions as stable supervision for intermediate task progression. In a controlled OMOMO evaluation, our tracker achieves 64.3% success compared with 53.2% for an InterMimic reimplementation, while a unified policy achieves 76.5% on the full OMOMO dataset. On the held-out split, LYRIC achieves 90.3% task success, compared with 74.2% for the strongest matched kinematic-planner baseline, with better semantic alignment and motion quality. Without retraining, the controller also supports test-time object-waypoint guidance. Qualitative results further demonstrate robust, natural contact-rich interactions and zero-shot transfer to novel object shapes. The webpage is available at https://neu-vi.github.io/LYRIC/

Assembly, wear, and component replacement perturb the sensor extrinsics and joint zeros encoded by a humanoid CAD model. Existing procedures calibrate one sensor pair or require external fiducials. Using only robot-native motion and onboard sensing, we present OmniCalib, a target-free workflow that calibrates the full upper limbs---all 14 arm joint zeros and the extrinsics of both wrist and chest cameras---as well as lower limbs and the multi-camera head rig. Each module matches a robot-native task to a parameter block, checks observability, and writes only supported corrections to the CAD model. Our depth ICP method recovers all 14 arm joint zeros and calibrates all RGB-D camera extrinsics without any calibration target. Relative to CAD, the estimated extrinsic corrections are 10.56 mm and 1.74 degrees for the left wrist, 6.33 mm and 1.25 degrees for the right wrist, and 9.81 mm and 0.929 degrees for the chest RGB-D camera. ICP point-to-plane residual is 2.09 mm. On the same injected offsets, ICP and ArUco recover all 14 joint zeros below the 0.1-degree encoder-resolution reference. On an AGIBOT A3 Ultra humanoid, four static double-support stances recover all 12 lower-limb joint-zero offsets injected with an RMS error of 0.063 degrees. The head module combines multi-camera visual odometry with legged odometry and dynamic compensation through the live ROS transform tree. Using only planar walking, it attains a mean SO(3) error of 1.061 degrees across three sequences. The best sequence reaches 0.775 degrees, competitive with iKalibr at 0.902 degrees from rich 6-DOF excitation. Rig-relative angles repeat within 0.140 degrees. Injection recovery and held-out tests validate each observable block.

Safety and comfort in human-robot physical in-teractions are essential aspects in the development of social technologies, where natural gestures, such as handshakes, represent a challenge due to their direct physical contact. The implementation of series elastic actuators (SEA) to absorb impacts is proposed as a design strategy that favors safer interactions. This paper presents an experimental study aimed at evaluating how the incorporation of SEAs in robotic arms influences perceived safety and the interaction experience dur-ing handshaking. The design allows a direct comparison of the effect of rigidity versus the incorporation of elastic elements, in order to identify the advantages of SEAs in improving the physical safety and social acceptance of robotic systems in everyday contexts. The experiment was carried out with 10 volunteers (6 men and 4 women), who performed two interactions with each robotic arm: one with rigid joints and the other with flexible joints using SEA. During testing, objective data on end-effector trajectories were collected, as well as subjective information through a perception survey focused on safety, naturalness, and confidence during the handshake. The survey results show increased perceptions of safety and comfort with the SEA-equipped arm, supporting its potential to facilitate safer and more socially accepted human-robot interactions.

Ensuring intrinsic safety in physical human robot interaction (pHRI) is a critical requirement for social and service robots. While Series Elastic Actuators (SEAs) offer hardware based compliance, traditional metallic designs often require complex, multi part assemblies. This paper presents the design, finite element analysis (FEA), and experimental validation of a low stiffness, torsional spring for SEAs, manufactured via 3D printed thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU). The compliant element exhibits a highly linear torque deformation response (Ks = 0.066 Nm/degree), matching numerical predictions with under 3% deviation, a variance attributed to FDM structural anisotropy. To accommodate external interactions using standard position limited servomotors, a hybrid position controller with torque threshold switching was implemented. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the system ability to accurately track non stationary trajectories and safely yield to external disturbances. Furthermore, the inherent material damping of the TPU acts as a passive low pass filter, preventing high frequency oscillations during control mode transitions. The proposed architecture offers a cost effective, reliable, and easily manufacturable solution for safe pHRI.

Open datasets describing human behavior in environments shared with mobile robots remain limited, particularly for retail activities that combine locomotion, reaching, object handling, and robot guided movement. This paper introduces OHRID Retail, an open, human centered multimodal dataset collected from 16 healthy adults performing a simulated shelf picking task under three within participant conditions: no robot, low speed robot guidance, and high speed robot guidance. Each participant completed two trials per condition. Whole body kinematics were recorded using 17 Xsens Awinda inertial sensors and muscle activity was measured at 10 locations using Delsys Trigno surface electromyography sensors. Descriptive analyses demonstrate variation in whole body movement intensity and muscle activation across robot interaction conditions and body locations. OHRID Retail provides openly available raw recordings, processed measures, documentation, and reproducible analysis resources. The dataset can support research in human activity recognition, multimodal sensor fusion, occupational biomechanics, ergonomics, human aware robot navigation, and human robot interaction in retail and related shared environments.

A central challenge across control and learning is the design of mechanisms regulating the interactions between humans and autonomous agents. Inspired by the free energy principle from computational neuroscience, we introduce a control-theoretical framework to integrate human preferences online into an agent policy. We turn the framework into an open control architecture and validate our approach using a human-in-the-loop experimental testbed involving a rover navigating via onboard sensing. The human, remotely located and equipped with virtual reality headsets, shares the same sensory information as the rover. Human preferences are provided to the rover via gestures which introduce both cooperative and competitive interactions between the agent goal and the preferences. The experiments show that interactions are regulated, validating the proposed approach.

Multi-robot navigation in human-shared spaces is inherently interactive: coordinated robot motions influence how nearby entities respond, while those responses provide valuable information for subsequent robot decisions. However, existing methods typically address action-conditioned prediction, multi-robot planning, or online adaptation separately, and therefore lack a unified mechanism for modeling joint robot-entity interactions and adapting future decisions from executed interaction outcomes. To address this gap, we propose TRACER, a bi-directional receding-horizon framework that closes the loop between prediction and adaptation. TRACER evaluates candidate (i.e., alternative feasible future motion plans for the robot team) trajectories using a per-entity probabilistic response model that separates individual-robot effects from non-additive pairwise interactions; after executing the selected trajectory prefix, it updates persistent identity-bound beliefs over latent response modes using the synchronized observed responses. These updated beliefs then guide subsequent candidate evaluation under probabilistic safety and response-aware cost criteria. Experiments show that (i) TRACER more accurately captures non-additive multi-robot interaction effects than a capacity-matched additive predictor, (ii) persistent identity-consistent evidence improves response prediction and downstream replanning, and (iii) the complete TRACER framework improves collision-free completion over an independent-robot baseline on the SocialGym2 multi-robot social-navigation benchmark.

Learning generalizable robot manipulation policies requires large-scale and diverse interaction data, yet collecting real-world demonstrations remains costly and difficult to scale. Existing approaches to data collection are either dependent on specific robot hardware that limits crowdsourcing and transferability, or suffer from incomplete annotation and limited behavioral diversity. Inspired by how games sustain long-term human engagement, we explore an alternative paradigm that turns data collection into an engaging gameplay experience and transfers the resulting human manipulation experience to real robots. We present Project Kitchen, a VR-based gamified egocentric data collection platform that elicits diverse, goal-directed manipulation while remaining independent of specific robot embodiments and hardware, making it applicable to broader and potentially large-scale deployment. To bridge the game-to-real gap, we further introduce Game2Policy, which extracts embodiment-invariant affordance cues, including contact points and sub-goal states, from gameplay trajectories. An affordance model is pre-trained on game-collected data and then jointly fine-tuned with downstream policies using only a handful of real-robot demonstrations. Experiments show that Game2Policy improves average success rates by 10.0 points in simulation and 18.3 points on real robots in the few-shot setting. User studies and quantitative analyses further show that Project Kitchen promotes diverse manipulation behaviors and provides an engaging data collection experience. These results demonstrate the potential of gamified virtual environments as a scalable source of manipulation knowledge. The platform and code will be released upon acceptance.

Generalized morphology control requires a single policy to transform information across limbs with different physical roles, coordinate whole-body motion, and remain efficient as body size grows. Existing communication mechanisms address these requirements only partially. We introduce RecMorph, a topology-guided spatial recurrent architecture that uses recurrent sequence computation to jointly perform cross-limb communication and representation transformation. A depth-first traversal converts the kinematic tree into a morphology-derived sequence, along which shared bidirectional transitions progressively transform limb information before action decoding. Residual preservation, RMS normalization, and input-dependent channel modulation stabilize this repeated spatial transformation, yielding linear token complexity at fixed model width and depth. Across five UNIMAL tasks, RecMorph achieves the strongest mean final training performance among the evaluated generalized morphology controllers and the highest measured inference throughput on FT, while generalizing to unseen variations and bodies with up to 30 limbs. We further migrate representative generalized controllers from UNIMAL benchmarks to a four-platform quadruped setting. RecMorph achieves the best macro-averaged performance under nominal and high friction, reduces nominal velocity RMSE by 43.5% relative to specialist MLPs, and one shared policy completes 40 physical Go1/Go2 trials without falls. These results show that topology-guided recurrent transformation provides an effective and efficient communication mechanism for Generalized Morphology Control and remains effective when transferred from procedural bodies to physical robot platforms. Code and experimental resources are publicly available at https://github.com/quanruirao/RecMorph.

Humans often observe others before interacting and adjust their behavior accordingly. Robot navigation in crowds, however, often represents pedestrians mainly by observed geometric states, leaving individual differences in interaction tendencies implicit. We propose PRISM (Predictive Representation of Interaction Style and Motion), a framework that infers interaction traits from passive observations of human-human interactions. PRISM encodes human trajectories into a continuous ordinal latent space with a transformer encoder trained by Rank-N-Contrast loss, and pairs each inferred trait with a temporal-stability score supplied to the navigation policy. In randomized crowd simulations, PRISM reduces collision rates over the geometry-only baseline and yields small improvements in navigation-time and path-length metrics. These results suggest the utility of passive latent-trait inference for social navigation in dynamic crowds.

Contact-rich physical human--robot interaction (pHRI) imposes time-varying demands associated with physical interaction, motor regulation, and physiological response, motivating continuous assessment of interaction workload. This paper presents an online multimodal assessment framework that integrates interaction wrench, planar tool-center-point (TCP) kinematics, and skin conductance level (SCL) into four interpretable workload-related factors. Their relative contributions are adjusted using path curvature to reflect changes in motion demand and task progression to account for gradual physiological variation over time. The framework was evaluated with 24 participants across 18 controlled combinations of temperature, acoustic noise, and illuminance under two admittance-control modes. Strict leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) evaluation used standardized pupil diameter ($\mathrm{PD}_z$) as an independent physiological reference and included comparisons with static variants and representative state-of-the-art learning-based baselines. The proposed framework achieves a cohort-mean $30\,\mathrm{s}$ block-wise Spearman correlation of $ρ_{30}=0.308$ with the physiological reference, with positive subject-level correspondence in 23 of 24 participants. Its overall performance is comparable to the state-of-the-art learning-based baseline. At the same time, our framework keeps the assessment process transparent through explicit workload-related factors and defined weighting rules, while outperforming the corresponding fixed-weight formulation. The framework also maintains consistent performance across the two tested admittance-control modes. These results support a transparent and interpretable approach to continuous interaction workload assessment in contact-rich pHRI.

Humans efficiently learn new tasks by reusing a rich repertoire of motor skills across different goals and contexts. A similar strategy can also be used to enable simulated characters to efficiently perform new tasks by leveraging reusable motor skills. To support a wide range of downstream tasks, the learned repertoire should be diverse, consisting of distinct behaviors as well as spatial and temporal variation within each behavior. A commonly used method for learning diverse skills is by maximizing the mutual information between skill latents and the states produced by a policy. The marginal state entropy promotes broad behavioral coverage, while the conditional entropy encourages consistent behaviors from each latent. However, directly estimating the marginal state entropy is intractable in high-dimensional control problems. Prior methods therefore rely on indirect latent-space approximations or coarse estimators of the state distribution. These approximations may not effectively promote broad coverage of the state space, resulting in skills with limited behavioral diversity and reduced utility for downstream tasks. In this work, we propose Diffusion Skill Discovery (DSD), a skill discovery method that uses a diffusion model to approximate the entropy gradient of the policy-induced state distribution through score matching. The resulting objective encourages the discovery of skills that produce a broader range of behaviors for high-dimensional humanoid control. The learned skills are reused in two downstream control settings: hierarchical control with a task-specific high-level policy and zero-shot control through latent selection from offline trajectories. Our experiments show that DSD discovers a broader repertoire of reusable motor skills than prior skill discovery methods, leading to the emergence of complex and agile behaviors that can be reused across downstream tasks.

Humanoid robots often execute motion commands through whole-body controllers (WBCs) that track targets while maintaining balance and stability. However, most WBCs are blind to scene geometry, which can lead to collisions from imperfect target motions that are geometrically unsafe due to perception, planning, or teleoperation errors. We propose RECAL, a Robot--Environment Cross-Attention Layer that wraps a blind WBC to trade off target tracking against collision avoidance using external scene geometry. RECAL supports collision-aware tracking of floating-base and end-effector commands, including collision avoidance for held objects. It represents the robot, held objects, and environment as point clouds, using cross-attention between robot/object points and the environment to produce geometry-aware control features. In simulation, RECAL improves collision avoidance while preserving target-tracking performance across frozen-arm and adaptive-arm locomotion, object-carrying, and standing-manipulation scenarios relative to alternative geometry-aware WBC architectures. We further demonstrate the controller on a real Digit V3 humanoid robot.

This paper presents Auto-HSI, a method for generating personalized human-swarm interaction (HSI) interfaces on demand. The objective is to enable untrained operators to use natural language descriptions and gesture demonstrations to explain how they want the robots to collectively behave in response to their gestures. Based on these inputs, the code should automatically be generated for personalized state machines that will control the robots as desired, in response to the desired gesture inputs. In the developed Auto-HSI prototype, the generated code produces a personalized interface for centralized control using one- and two-handed gestures, enabling a user to teleoperate the robots' motion, formation shape, and shape deformation. We test the gesture tracking and code generation components of Auto-HSI against performance benchmarks. We then test the full Auto-HSI prototype in ``live'' operation experiments, in which real human operators centrally control 50 simulated robots in a physics-based simulator, under nominal and noisy conditions. In these experiments, robots are teleoperated to: score a goal, traverse a maze that requires shape deformation, and score two simultaneous goals by splitting into two groups. We also demonstrate a real human operator making live updates to their personalized Auto-HSI interface during operation (in simulation). Finally, we demonstrate live operation of real robots.

Safe control of humanoid robots remains challenging due to their high-dimensional dynamics, contact-rich interactions, and sensitivity to disturbances. Although reinforcement learning has enabled effective locomotion and motion tracking, learned policies can still generate unsafe actions that lead to instability or falls. In this work, we propose residual reinforcement learning as an implicit safety-filtering mechanism for safe humanoid control. Instead of relying on a single nominal policy to simultaneously balance performance, safety, and robustness, we decouple performance and safety. The nominal policy focuses solely on task performance, while a residual policy learns safety corrections. This decoupling leads to a better performance--safety Pareto trade-off and avoids the need for careful tuning of multiple competing reward terms within a single policy training. We show that the residual policy can act as an implicit safety filter.

The introduction of human-robot collaboration (HRC) in industrial assembly operations is revolutionizing the manufacturing landscape. In this evolving environment, operators are required to seamlessly coordinate their manual tasks with real-time task information and robotic behaviors. These demands fluctuate during operation, yet conventional workload assessments depend on body-worn physiological sensors that complicate practical deployment. Here, we present a vision-based attention--action framework for continuous and interpretable workload-related assessment in HRC assembly. The framework combines RGB-D observations with robot states and calibrated task-related areas to construct a temporally confirmed representation of operator behavior. This representation identifies where task demand is concentrated and explains how it develops when attention and action diverge, the task context changes, or the operator hesitates. We evaluated the framework in a three-level collaborative gearbox assembly experiment with ten participants, using subjective ratings and synchronized physiological signals as independent references. Raw NASA-TLX ratings confirmed increasing perceived workload across conditions, with significant effects on overall workload and its mental and temporal dimensions. The vision-derived HRC-CWL output was significantly associated with ECG-derived features in seven of nine participants with complete correlation data. Synchronized interaction episodes further showed temporal correspondence between detected hesitation and physiological activity. Real-time deployment demonstrated that the framework can operate without requiring operators to wear additional sensors. These findings support HRC-CWL as an interpretable behavioral proxy for cognitive ergonomics analysis and adaptive robot assistance, rather than a direct psychophysiological measure of workload.

Embodied navigation requires agents to ground instructions or object goals in spatial observations and translate plans into successful execution. As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) become increasingly capable, they offer stronger support for navigation without task-specific training; however, improved semantic reasoning alone does not ensure that proposed actions remain consistent with spatial evidence, task progress, and execution outcomes. We introduce HarnessVLN, a zero-shot, training-free framework that unifies instruction-following and object-goal navigation through a shared Agent Harness. The Harness coordinates perception, memory, and execution tools through a unified interface, validating planner proposals for evidential support, geometric feasibility, and subgoal consistency before dispatch. It jointly manages hierarchical event memory and a persistent Spatiotemporal Graph to track task progress, preserve spatial evidence, and contextualize failures. Structured execution feedback updates this shared state, guiding subsequent planning, recovery, and termination. Across R2R, RxR, HM3D-v2, and HM3D-OVON, HarnessVLN achieves success rates of 60.8%, 53.9%, 76.0%, and 59.3%, respectively, outperforming prior training-free state-of-the-art methods. Humanoid robot deployment further demonstrates its applicability to both navigation tasks in real-world environments. The project page is available at https://agibot-harnessvln.netlify.app/.

Socially assistive robots (SARs) can support structured health and well-being interventions, but hardware and cost constraints limit interaction complexity and longitudinal real-world deployments. We present DART: Deployable Architecture for Robot-Mediated Tasks, an architecture that extends SARs through a web application and cloud infrastructure, enabling visual content, user input, remote computation, and persistent data storage synergistically with the robot's physical embodiment, speech, and movement. We evaluated DART by instantiating it in an interatively-developed full-stack HRI system for helping university students with elevated generalized anxiety to complete cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) homework exercises. The resulting system, which used the low-cost open-source Blossom robot platform, was refined and evaluated through a participatory design process and multiple user studies, and finally evaluated in an in-lab study with 103 participants, and then a six-week in-home deployment with four participants. In the in-lab evaluation, participants showed significant within-session reductions in stress, state anxiety, and negative affect, and gave the platform a mean System Usability Scale score of 78.89. In the home deployment, the mean System Usability Scale score was 87.5, with positive qualitative feedback on usability. Participants across both groups identified speech input, visual presentation, and web-robot synchronization as priorities for improvement. These findings validate DART as an effective architecture for extending the capabilities of a low-cost SAR in both in-lab single-session and in real-world longitudinal deployments.

Interaction paradigms used in robot-assisted autism intervention have historically employed robots as teachers, clinical assistants, or more-abled peers to promote a variety of social skills. These modalities often leverage the expertise of trained practitioners to ensure that child-robot interactions are productive or clinically grounded to yield positive therapeutic benefits for children across the autism spectrum. Yet, despite the fact that the majority of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) attend mainstream schools and spend 80% or more of their time in the general classroom [27], there is a paucity of research incorporating validated classroom teaching pedagogies into robot-assisted autism interventions. In this work, we introduce a novel teaching methodology for advancing social skills in school-aged children with ASD. We evaluate the effectiveness of a novel robot-assisted autism intervention which incorporates the learning-by-teaching pedagogy and explores the comparative benefits of employing a robot versus a human confederate for improved performance on a set of social skills tasks. Results show that 80% of study participants performed better in the robot condition (mean performance in the robot condition=63%, mean performance in the confederate condition=37%), irrespective of the scenario order. Further, 90% of all participants were significantly more engaged in the robot condition (mean engagement: robot=61%, confederate=32%) and, while the effect did not result in the confederate condition, analyses indicate that overall engagement in the robot condition contributed to improved performance. These results suggest that robots employed in a learning-by-teaching context may help enhance engagement and improve performance on a simple social skills task for children with ASD.

Existing humanoid locomotion systems primarily focus on stability and task execution, while integrating expressiveness with explicit locomotion control remains challenging. We propose EMoG, an emotion-modulated gait generation framework for expressive humanoid locomotion. EMoG introduces an emotional-style code with continuously adjustable intensity. Conditioned on this code and physical commands, a lightweight MLP generates expressive, command-consistent periodic gait trajectories in real time, which are tracked by a unified reinforcement learning policy for physical execution. To support training, we collect a large-scale emotion-annotated gait dataset from professional performers and develop an automated pipeline to extract physically consistent periodic gait cycles. EMoG also integrates an LLM-based parser that converts free-form language into emotional style and motion parameters for interactive control. Experiments demonstrate that our system achieves continuous gait-style modulation with perceptible expressive cues while maintaining command tracking. EMoG provides a practical approach to parameterized emotional-style walking for human-robot interaction.

Human video datasets offer an abundant and diverse source of interaction data that can complement expensive real-robot data. To bridge the human-to-robot embodiment gap, existing approaches either robotize videos in task-matched settings or address observation and action alignment separately. In this work, we systematically examine whether robotized human videos can serve as an effective and scalable source of robot-aligned supervision. To this end, we develop a robotization pipeline that converts heterogeneous human videos into robot-aligned observations and action trajectories while inferring missing intermediate signals across annotation levels. Using this pipeline, we construct the HuRo dataset, comprising about 630K robotized episodes and 142M processed frames from five human-video sources. Across four real-world manipulation tasks, pretraining a VLA policy on increasing amounts of robotized human-video data improves overall completion from 51.5% to 80.3% and OOD completion under spatial and visual shifts from 34.9% to 72.2%. Ablations further show that visual robotization improves OOD robustness and that end-to-end pretraining with retargeted actions outperforms visual-only transfer. Project website: https://3587jjh.github.io/HuRo.

A confidence-aware multimodal fusion framework (CAMF) is proposed to realize reliable human intention prediction for industrial human-robot collaboration. This framework fuses four heterogeneous modalities including object 6D pose, gaze, skeletal motion and IMU-based hand motion. It embeds a confidence-trend-driven dynamic fusion mechanism into BiLSTM to adaptively balance bidirectional temporal features according to real-time modality reliability. A confidence-guided balanced learning strategy combined with a confidence freezing mechanism is further adopted to adjust network gradients dynamically, suppress noise from low-quality modalities and mitigate cross-modal learning bias. A physical platform based on the UR3 collaborative robot is built for experimental validation. Comparative results show that the proposed method reaches an intention recognition accuracy of 91.86% and outperforms existing multimodal fusion approaches in overall performance and stability. It also maintains satisfactory accuracy under low light and partial occlusion interference. In practical assembly tasks, the framework enables proactive and stable human-robot cooperation with strong environmental adaptability.

We study the problem of navigating cluttered indoor environments with a humanoid robot. Unlike conventional methods that model navigation as a 2D path planning problem, humanoid traversal in cluttered environments requires continuous geometry-aware whole-body adaptation, including coordinated arm placement, torso adjustment, and gait modulation for collision-free movement through complex 3D spaces. We introduce TANGO, the first whole-body vision-language navigation framework for language-conditioned humanoid traversal in cluttered environments. Given a natural-language instruction and egocentric RGB observations, TANGO directly predicts 29-DoF joint-space actions for downstream whole-body control. We train TANGO entirely in simulation by synthesizing diverse collision-free traversal behaviors via global path planning, kinematic whole-body motion generation, obstacle-aware motion editing, and RL-based tracking. This pipeline provides dynamically feasible action supervision for learning language-conditioned whole-body policies. In extensive simulation experiments, TANGO demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in vision-language navigation, while outperforming strong modular baselines in navigating challenging scenes requiring obstacle negotiation. Lastly, we deploy TANGO zero-shot on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot, and observe robust language-guided traversal in cluttered real-world scenes without training on any real-world navigation data.

In multi-party human-robot interaction, a robot must continuously decide whom to address and what to say to participate effectively in the conversation. In real-world interactions, this is challenging because several behaviours may be plausible at the same time: a robot might continue a topic with one participant, involve another through a question, or address the whole group, with the appropriate choice depending on both whom it addresses and the interaction context. Current approaches remain limited in representing uncertainty when several behaviours are plausible and in structuring decisions into semantically meaningful intermediate steps that make robot decisions easier to interpret. Addressing these, we present HiBRIDGE, a hierarchical Bayesian neural network framework for group-robot dialogue management. Its Bayesian formulation enables uncertainty-aware prediction and robust learning from limited interaction data, while the hierarchical approach formulates behaviour selection as a structured, multi-stage decision process. We further use decision-tree surrogates to investigate whether this structure can support more interpretable explanations. Across three offline group-HRI datasets, our findings show that Bayesian formulations outperform their deterministic counterparts and several state-of-the-art baselines. Next, through an online study (N=20), we show that explanations derived from the hierarchical model are rated as more helpful for understanding robot behaviour and are preferred over those derived from the flat model. Finally, through our in-person study (N=12), we demonstrate the feasibility of HiBRIDGE for autonomous real-time group interaction, with both hierarchical and flat Bayesian variants positively perceived. Overall, HiBRIDGE combines strong predictive performance with a structured decision process that supports more interpretable explanations of robot behaviour.

Many pedestrian trajectory prediction algorithms have been proposed to improve the safety of navigation for mobile robots working in human-robot coexistence environments. Some pedestrian trajectory prediction algorithms extract information about obstacles near pedestrians from top-down view images to improve the accuracy of trajectory prediction. However, mobile robots typically create local occupancy maps using LiDAR, rather than top-down view images. Meanwhile, the vision sensors on board robots provide egocentric view images, which contain fine-grained behavioral information about the pedestrians near the robot. To better use the information collected by LiDAR and on-board vision sensors, we propose MamMA, a Mamba-based pedestrian trajectory prediction algorithm considering occupancy maps and pedestrian awareness states. MamMA divides the occupancy map by patches and extracts obstacle features from each patch to create map features. Pedestrian awareness states are divided and considered, as some studies show that awareness states affect the perception and speed of pedestrians. Furthermore, a Mamba-based model is proposed to predict the future trajectories of pedestrians based on different types of features. Experiments on the STCrowd, SiT, JRDB, ETH, and UCY datasets show that MamMA achieves better average displacement error and final displacement error than the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Flying humanoids are expected to perform tasks in diverse environments, while their existing locomotion is mainly limited to aerial flight and ground walking. The capability to move in complex three-dimensional space can greatly expand their application range. For such walking motion on ceilings and similar anti-gravity environments, whole-body MPC is effective. However, the discontinuous changes in dynamic structure accompanying contact switching during walking can induce thrust spikes, resulting in control instability. Therefore, in this work, we propose and implement a real-time whole-body MPC framework for anti-gravity bipedal walking. First, we formulate whole-body MPC using the time derivative of thrust, namely thrust-rate, as the control input. This formulation guarantees continuity of the thrust trajectory during contact switching while preserving the sparse structure of the optimal control problem for fast computation. Second, we address the lack of natural support forces in anti-gravity environments. We introduce lower bounds on the foot-normal component of the contact force, and smoothly transfer them during the doublesupport phase. Finally, we implement the proposed framework and demonstrate anti-gravity walking by a flying humanoid through simulation and a hardware experiment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of multi-contact whole-body MPC for a transformable aerial robot and walking by a flying humanoid beyond the ground.

Anticipating whether a person will interact from one's own perspective is a highly intuitive task for humans, that relies on a combination of cues. We investigate how humans perform at predicting a person's intention to interact from a service robot's point of view, using pose-only or full video input, then benchmark different lightweight pose-based models and state-of-the-art vision-language models. We conducted our benchmark on the HUI360 dataset on a fixed pilot subset of 100 test tracks (25 positive, 75 negative). We found that with pose-only input, human annotators outperform lightweight trained pose models but not by large margins (+0.08 in F1-Score). But when given full egocentric video with a target bounding box, human annotators perform substantially better and largely outperform the Vision-Language Models (+0.2 in F1-Score). We also compared VLMs of different size and under different input conditions, and found that the best results do not correlate with model size. Our result confirms that predicting interactions is a challenging task for social robots and that reasoning-capable models are necessary but their actual reasoning capabilities alone do not suffice to match the social intuition of humans.

IRWOZ has improved industrial human-robot interaction (HRI) dialogue systems through domain-specific annotations. However, its initial version contains substantial noise in dialogue states and utterances, limiting state-tracking accuracy. We introduce IRWOZ 2.0, which addresses these limitations through large language model (LLM) enhanced generation (Mistral/Claude-3.5) and quality refinements. Our improved dataset expands to 390 dialogues across 4 industrial domains (Assembly, Delivery, Position, Relocation), featuring manual corrections and automated typo removal. Benchmark experiments on dialogue state tracking demonstrate significant improvements, with GPT-2's BLEU-4 score increasing from 0.1651 to 0.5604 compared to original IRWOZ. To support industrial HRI research, we publicly released IRWOZ 2.0 dataset at https://ieee-dataport.org/documents/irwoz-20-large-language-model-driven-dialogue-dataset-industrial-robot-conversations

Contact-rich loco-manipulation requires a bridge between semantic action generation and physical interaction control. Existing Vision-language-action (VLA) models generate task-level actions from visual and linguistic observations, but cannot interpret the physical interactions induced by those actions. While the whole-body control (WBC) policy can stabilize the robot, it cannot distinguish task-relevant interaction forces from forces induced by external disturbances during manipulation. Although force/torque sensors provide direct measurements of physical interactions, retrofitting them entails additional hardware costs and substantial integration effort, particularly for platforms not designed with sensor integration in mind. To address this problem, we propose FWBC-VLA, a force-aware framework that bridges task-level VLA action generation and low-level whole-body compensation control for wheeled-legged robots. First, we introduce HSR-Force, a sensorless residual-torque estimator for inferring contact strength and its temporal variation. These contact estimates are then encoded as tokens and injected into the VLA action expert during action decoding, enabling the policy to perceive contact onset, sustained loading, and release. For loco-manipulation tasks, all parameters of the pretrained VLA backbone are fine-tuned on our WL&Arm Dataset, which comprises more than 5,000 episodes. Moreover, the robot's proprioceptive state, the Jacobian-derived body-frame force estimate, and the estimated contact state are jointly fed into a compensation generator to produce corrective actions. The manipulation-centric actions are subsequently combined with the corrective actions and passed to the WBC policy for execution. Real-world experiments on whiteboard wiping and door opening with a door closer demonstrate the effectiveness of our FWBC-VLA in contact-rich loco-manipulation.

Developing humanoid robots capable of leveraging human behavioral data is essential for general-purpose embodiment, yet conventional development remains bottlenecked by a decoupled paradigm that isolates hardware design from whole-body control. This approach leads to suboptimal systems that compromise human-like fluidity and agility. To bridge this gap, we introduce a data-driven morphology-control co-design framework that optimizes humanoid morphology for human-like movement. To quantify morphological fidelity, we also introduce a novel metric that jointly considers kinematic retargeting fidelity to human motion and dynamic tracking performance. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across all metrics compared to baseline humanoids (Bumi, K1, and Toddlerbot). Finally, we realize this design in Bridge, an open-source, 88cm-tall humanoid platform released alongside its control policy. We demonstrate that Bridge captures human motion data with superior fidelity, exhibiting exceptional performance across foundational locomotion, robust balance, and highly dynamic maneuvers. Videos and open-source materials: https://sites.google.com/view/bridgerobot.

Highly varying production sets increasing challenges for robotic manufacturing and indoor logistics. New capabilities for agility, flexibility, and robustness are needed. Robot skills, integrating motions, tool operations, and sensor perceptions consistently provide an execution mechanism for a versatile set of tasks with varying parameters. In this paper, easy-to-use CAD-model based programming and execution system for parametrized skills and skill monitors is showcased. The execution control structure is dynamic and parametrized, based on a modified Behavior Tree, where only event based communication is used. A human-robot-crane collaborative skill is shown as a test example, where a human instructs an overhead crane and a manipulator in inserting a heavy object supported by the crane, and guided by the manipulator, into the goal.

This paper presents an experimental design for constructing a multimodal dataset to analyze user engagement in human-robot interaction (HRI). Prior studies have mainly relied on observable behavioral cues, with limited frameworks integrating physiological signals. We therefore propose a structured data-collection protocol to build a multimodal dataset that includes wearable physiological signals, behavioral data, and self-report measures under different levels of task complexity defined in this experiment.

There is tremendous value in humanoid robots taking on physically demanding, hazardous, and repetitive work in spaces built for humans. However, a useful robot for these spaces must coordinate locomotion, whole-body motion, perception, contact, and operator supervision. We present a robot-local, runtime-editable behavior authoring and runtime system that addresses these challenges. We argue that behavior architecture can be a primary enabler of capability, speed, and reliability, and that runtime editability enables fast behavior creation, adaptation, extension, and combination. Our behavior architecture combines object-centric Affordance Templates, a tree structure that provides organization and logic, and runtime-editable perception through a behavior scene and primitive scene actions. Our operator interface remains continuously synchronized to the robot for runtime authoring, monitoring, and repair. Action primitives execute through a whole-body controller that supports concurrent body motions and walking. Demonstrations of our system cover six task variants on Unitree H1-2 and Alex. We execute a push door traversal in 34 seconds and sort six balls by color in 45 seconds under human disturbance. Timed authoring sessions show scratch creation of new loco-manipulation behaviors and adaptation of existing ones in hours. Comparison against the literature finds our approach to be competitive with recent learned systems.

We present ADAPT, an end-to-end framework for interactive, text-conditioned humanoid whole-body control. Unlike dominant text-to-motion pipelines that generate kinematic motions for a separate tracker, ADAPT solves language control with an end-to-end closed-loop control framework, where the robot must continuously respond to changing commands while maintaining balance, natural motion, and smooth transitions. ADAPT learns a diffusion-based action prior from text-labeled humanoid state-action trajectories, enabling diverse motion skills to be directly executed from language commands. To improve long-horizon robustness and smooth prompt switching, we train a lightweight residual reinforcement learning policy on top of the frozen diffusion controller. We further show that the same diffusion policy can be reused as a steerable text-conditioned motion prior for downstream task adaptation. Experiments demonstrate robust language-grounded skill execution, smooth interactive transitions, and style-preserving downstream control.

Physical human--robot interaction software often couples desired-behavior specification with constrained realization; we treat these as separate layers. A \emph{behavior layer} supplies a desired contact-port acceleration $a_k^{\mathrm{id}}=f_θ(e_k,\dot e_k,F_{h,k})$. A \emph{realization layer} converts it into constrained robot commands and reports total desired-versus-realized acceleration error instead of hiding it in saturation. A same-objective unconstrained counterfactual separates regularization from constraint intervention, while plant data expose model error. This paper implements a receding-horizon quadratic program realizing memoryless affine behaviors. Changing the behavior modifies objective coefficients through $(C_θ,G_θ)$ while the robot-command variable and feasible set remain unchanged. A planar study instantiates impedance and admittance; the same running layer accepts an impedance--admittance--impedance reassignment without reconstruction, under its existing rate limit. On a torque-controlled 7-DOF Franka FR3 in MuJoCo, the runtime freezes task-space dynamics per solve and enforces torque feasibility across its horizon. Under a sustained 20N push, it holds a slack-relaxed workspace boundary to within approximately 0.1--0.2mm, versus 4.4cm (impedance) and 4.7cm (admittance) overshoot from instantaneous clipping. A derated actuator budget then activates the torque constraint: horizon-wide enforcement keeps its frozen-model plan feasible to $2.1\times10^{-4}$N$\cdot$m, whereas a first-step-only ablation plans up to 11.329N$\cdot$m beyond budget; on the executed nonlinear plant, where both share the same local-model error, the gap is smaller but still favors horizon-wide enforcement (0.161 vs.\ 0.380~N$\cdot$m). These results are a focused proof of behavior--realization separation.

Better probability scores do not establish that evidence has been counted correctly. Repeated inference over one observation can improve predictions without adding an evidential origin. Source-local numerical attributes alone cannot in general distinguish repeated derivations from separately countable acquisitions. PACT (Provenance-Aware evidence Conservation and Typed action admission) separates evidence magnitude from countability through a supplied provenance partition. Under singleton fidelity and insertion non-amplification, the coordinatewise meet is the unique pointwise greatest admissible within-component rule. Component budgets add under stated commensurability and separate-component additivity assumptions. Matched reassignments hold numerical outputs fixed while varying the counting relation. In four of 12 replicated-source tests on HandWritten, false refinement lowers macro-averaged negative log-likelihood and Brier score while increasing normalized common-support area under the risk-coverage curve (ncsAURC). In the controlled handover benchmark, removing the constructed adversarial-consensus condition leaves a 0.056 reduction in ncsAURC for provenance-partition aggregation relative to singleton aggregation under the same score functional. The corroboration contrast disappears, and method ranking remains selection-score dependent. In offline, reference-based human-robot collaboration with four prompts per camera and all other admission inputs fixed, duplicating each prompt output within its camera from multiplicity one to eight leaves all 720 PACT typed responses per checkpoint unchanged. Probability quality and evidence countability require separate evaluation.

Many people now see AI systems as not just productivity tools but as social companions. Researchers are eager to study the consequences of AI companionship behaviors, such as validation, which evoke trust, empathy, and attachment in human-human interaction. However, human-AI interaction data is limited and unreliable, slowing research progress. We scale small amounts of real-world data by simulating multi-turn human-chatbot dialogue across a range of chatbot behaviors and use cases. We release CompanionSim: a simulation framework with 2,240 simulated human-chatbot conversations representing 16 chatbot behaviors across seven use cases. Human participants annotated the simulated conversations and real-world conversations in two experiments probing perceptions of companionship behaviors. We conducted Study 1 with a U.S. representative sample ($N_{1}~=~628$) and Study 2 across the U.S., U.K., India, and Nigeria ($N_{2}~=~3,646$). Surprisingly, we find that companionship behaviors reduced likability, humanlikeness, and trust in AI chatbots. These effects were larger in particular subgroups: women and older participants saw companionship chatbots as less likable, humanlike, and trustworthy. We encourage researchers to leverage real-world and synthetic data together to study the differential impacts of AI companions and to create benchmark evaluations of AI chatbots.

To improve torque capacity and energy efficiency of humanoid ankles, this paper proposes a 2-DoF parallel elastic actuator (PEA). The main novelty of the proposed design lies in its dual-cam, single-gas-spring architecture, which enables torque compensation in both pitch and roll using a shared elastic element, thereby improving structural compactness compared with conventional multi-element compensation schemes. By leveraging parallel gas springs and customized cam modules, the proposed architecture provides dual-axis torque assistance tailored to specific task requirements. The second key contribution is the formulation of a coupled 2-DoF mathematical model that explicitly captures the interdependence between the two compensation units through the shared spring. Based on this model, an optimization-based design framework is developed to synthesize customized cam profiles from prescribed torque references, establishing a systematic link from task requirements to hardware realization. The complete lower-leg CAD integration is presented in detail. Static FEA and kinematic simulations confirm the design's feasibility and torque-relief effectiveness. The results highlight the proposed design as a compact, customizable solution for 2-DoF humanoid ankle torque compensation.

Traversing sparse 3D structures requires humanoid robots to perceive thin, overhanging geometry while executing agile, accurate whole-body motions. We study this problem through monkey-bar traversal, where the robot must jump to the structure, traverse it through sparse bar interactions, and land safely. For this task, we present a reinforcement-learning-based perceptive control system that operates directly on observations from a head-mounted solid-state lidar. To extract task-relevant geometry from the sparse returns, the policy consumes the raw lidar scan through an attention-based encoder with recurrent memory. This policy is obtained by a phase-scheduled teacher- student pipeline that combines privileged experts for jumping up, brachiating, and jumping down. For transfer to hardware, we model lidar noise, battery-voltage sag, and actuator thermal limits, and equip the humanoid with passive hook end-effectors for robust bar interaction. On hardware, the resulting policy completes the full jump-up->brachiation->jump-down sequence in 14 of 15 trials across three bar configurations and reaches brachiation speeds up to 0.5 m/s. Beyond brachiation, the same perception backbone supports a separately trained policy that ducks beneath thin overhead obstacles with 2 cm cross-sections.

People read a humanoid robot's motion in social settings not only for the action performed but for the affect conveyed. Motion carrying that affect has so far been generated for human avatars, where style is taken from a reference clip or an emotion word, neither of which can be quantitatively parameterized. We present PAMoR, which turns affect into a measured control parameter: a valence-arousal (V-A) coordinate computed natively on robot kinematics. It is obtained in closed form from postural expansion and movement energy, and these measurements serve directly as generation conditions, with no human annotation. An action prior and two affect priors, trained in a shared latent space, are composed at each denoising step: the action prior fixes what is performed, the affect priors modulate how. Whole-body motion rolls out autoregressively on a 29-DoF Unitree G1 in real time, with action and affect both editable. Generated motion tracks the commanded V-A over its full range while text-to-motion fidelity still matches text-only baselines. In a perceptual study, raters identify the commanded emotion on 0.38 of trials, above both baselines and approaching the 0.44 reported for acted human bodies.

Physical human-robot collaboration requires a robot to provide assistance when human intention is clear while remaining compliant when several future motions are plausible. We present an adaptive stiffness framework based on generative action-chunk sampling. Conditioned on an RGB image and external joint-torque estimates, the policy samples multiple latent variables from an observation-conditioned prior and decodes them into future action chunks. Variation among the sampled action chunks is used to continuously adapt joint stiffness and damping. Greater variation makes the robot more compliant to facilitate human guidance, whereas lower variation provides firmer assistance. In a real-world collaborative transport task with four possible directions, the proposed method achieved an average success rate of 0.95, compared with 0.83 for a fixed-stiffness ablation and 0.69 for a deterministic baseline. Near direction determination, variation among the sampled action chunks increased, and the controller reduced stiffness accordingly. These results suggest that variation among actions sampled by a generative policy can serve as an online control signal for balancing assistance and compliance in physical human-robot interaction.

General-purpose motion trackers enable humanoid robots to follow diverse whole-body motions while maintaining balance, but are trained only on flat ground, failing to exploit bipedal mobility over complex terrain. Cross-terrain controllers, meanwhile, are task-specific or accept only low-dimensional locomotion commands. We introduce InterTrack, the first behavior world model (BWM) for robust whole-body tracking with environment interaction. Its Transformer jointly predicts the next action, state, and behavior distribution, learning environment-conditioned dynamics. To scale interaction training data, an automatic annotation pipeline reconstructs 3D support geometry from retargeted motions. At deployment, the policy handles commands implausible in the current environment in a "best-effort" manner. Quantitatively, InterTrack achieves an 81.3% success rate on terrain interaction (4.3 times the best evaluated baseline) and a 99.3% fall-recovery rate, while also improving free-space tracking and outperforming three leading tracking baselines across all of these regimes. To our knowledge, we provide the first demonstration of real-time cross-terrain whole-body teleoperation on a humanoid robot, alongside object interaction, stable responses to missing supports, and robust recovery from falls.

Large-scale manipulation data is essential for robot learning, yet collecting robot demonstrations remains expensive and difficult to scale. Meanwhile, abundant egocentric human manipulation videos provide rich behavioral experiences, but transferring them across embodiments remains challenging due to differences between human hands and robotic end-effectors. Recent advances in video world models offer a promising pathway to synthesize robot-centric manipulation videos from human observations, while their cross-embodiment transfer capability remains largely unexplored. Therefore, we introduce H2R-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating cross-embodiment human-to-robot manipulation video generation, where models transform egocentric human demonstrations into robot manipulation videos under specified embodiments. Each benchmark instance contains a human demonstration video, target embodiment constraints, and source-grounded annotations covering task goals, action events, functional contacts, and object responses. H2R-Bench evaluates generated videos through five dimensions, including goal-state completion, action-event completion, functional contact transfer, embodiment correctness, and general video quality. We benchmark eleven state-of-the-art video generation models across six manipulation families and two robot embodiments. Our evaluation reveals that current video world models remain limited in human-to-robot manipulation transfer: even leading models often fail in embodiment consistency, functional interaction, and task execution. H2R-Bench provides a systematic diagnostic framework for evaluating whether video world models can bridge the human-to-robot embodiment gap and convert human manipulation observations into robot-centric training resources.

Human-to-robot (H2R) object handover is a fundamental capability for human-robot collaboration, yet progress is hindered by the scarcity of large-scale, human-centric datasets and the significant sim-to-real gap. To address these challenges, we introduce Hand2Bot, an RGB-D video dataset that provides rich contextual information such as body posture and facial expressions, specifically collected for handover scenarios with real-world noise patterns. We further propose PassGen, a generative pipeline that leverages stable video diffusion and an Intention-Aware Temporal Face Encoder to synthesize realistic handover sequences while ensuring hand-object consistency. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we implement a morphology-based depth editing strategy that replicates realistic sensor noise found in physical depth maps. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our framework achieves high intention identification accuracy and low false trigger rates in both ablation studies and real-world deployment on a physical robot platform. Our results confirm that training on PassGen allows for robust zero-shot transfer and earlier intention anticipation compared to traditional hand-centric baselines, effectively enabling socially aware robotic behavior in shared workspaces.

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) for humanoid robots poses challenges existing benchmarks fail to address: bipedal locomotion imposes physical constraints absent from wheeled agents, humanoid morphologies vary across platforms, and egocentric observations are distorted by locomotion-induced camera dynamics. We present HumanoidVLN, a physics-grounded simulator and benchmark for VLN across diverse humanoid embodiments. Built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim, our platform supports an extensible set of humanoid configurations, demonstrated on four robots (Unitree G1, Unitree H1, Internal-A, Internal-B) spanning 10-12 lower-body DoF and heights from 1.17m to 1.80m, via a hierarchical control stack combining a reinforcement learning locomotion policy with interchangeable PD or MPC path trackers. New robots and VLN models integrate with minimal effort; we demonstrate compatibility with NaVILA, DualVLN, StreamVLN, and JanusVLN. Environments are drawn from artist-designed scenes and 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructions, filtered for navigable areas exceeding 100 square meters. Instructions are generated by a dual generator-reviewer plus paraphraser multi-agent pipeline with human-in-the-loop verification, yielding 933 collision-aware reference episodes, each paired with one fine-grained instruction and three coarse-grained stylistic variants (formal, natural, casual). Across four models and four embodiments, JanusVLN achieves the highest mean success rate of 43.55% and nDTW of 48.38. In a 20-episode sim-to-real pilot with DualVLN and the Unitree G1, navigation errors correlate strongly (r=0.935), with a mean absolute difference of 0.68m and mean trajectory similarity of 0.782 (+/-0.188) nDTW. These results highlight the interaction between VLN models, controllers, and humanoid embodiments under physical execution. Code, benchmark, and data will be released upon acceptance at https://humanoid-vln.github.io/.

Human movement is inherently variable, with variability structured according to task relevance: movements are typically more consistent at task-critical points and more flexible elsewhere. In human-robot interaction (HRI), however, model-based assistance strategies commonly assume deterministic human behavior and suppress such variability, potentially altering how interactions are experienced and lowering sense of agency. While movement variability is increasingly recognized as functionally meaningful, its deliberate preservation in assisted interaction, and its consequences for user experience, remain underexplored. In this paper, we empirically investigate how different assistance strategies shape human movement variability, task performance, and subjective interaction experience in a shared control setting. We introduce an autonomy-supportive shared control strategy that preserves users' natural movement structure. This approach is evaluated in a user study in which participants push an intelligent powered wheelchair under three conditions: no assistance, conventional variability-reducing assistance, and variability-preserving assistance. While task-relevant performance remained comparable across assisted modes, preserving natural movement variability led to more favorable interaction experiences. In particular, participants reported significantly higher perceived agency compared to conventional assistance and highest perceived usefulness. These findings suggest that variability-aware assistance can support both performance and user autonomy in physical human-robot collaboration. More broadly, the results highlight the importance of designing assistive robotic systems that respect the embodied structure of human movement rather than treating variability as noise to be neglected or eliminated.

Human-AI research often evaluates individual capabilities, combined performance, or final outputs, but these approaches do not preserve how one party's response becomes part of the conditions under which the other party's next contribution is formed. This article introduces socioduality, a sequential, reciprocal, and history-carrying relational process between two distinguishable parties in which a response from one party becomes part of the observable conditions under which the other party's subsequent contribution, judgement, decision, or action is formed. Specified for human-AI dyads, the construct uses nested units: moves, confirmed sociodual episodes, linked pathways, and the broader interaction container. A minimum episode A1-B1-A2 requires evidence of response contingency and return contingency; candidate episodes are classified as confirmed, non-sociodual, or indeterminate before secondary coding of response orientation and substantive contribution re-formation. Three propositions address history-conditioned formation, pathway divergence, and robustness differences among endpoint-equivalent pathways. A frozen operational protocol was calibrated on three previously unseen natural human-AI records through two separately executed model-based evaluator series. Move and candidate reconstruction converged exactly in two cases and differed by one local multimodal unitisation decision in the third; remaining disagreement was concentrated at return-contingency boundaries. Socioduality therefore provides a bounded and empirically tractable process construct for analysing how human and AI contributions are formed through interaction while preserving pathway information that endpoint-centred analysis cannot recover.

As robots increasingly operate in human-populated environments, anticipating human intentions is essential for enabling proactive and socially aware behavior. Automatic anticipation of human-robot interactions is thus emerging as a crucial perception challenge for embodied agents. To this end, we introduce HUI360, the largest dataset for human-robot interaction anticipation in the wild and its set of baselines. The dataset was collected from a mobile robot, in the wild, over multiple days within a 3-month period, and in several environments, capturing natural, spontaneous behaviors from both passersby and users, and encompassing a diverse range of individuals. This variety enables evaluating and improving the generalization capabilities of interaction anticipation models. We designed a pipeline and share code for automatic interaction annotation in arbitrary 360-degree equirectangular videos, along with interfaces for manual refinement. Using this pipeline, we release the HUI360 open set of 1M pre-processed annotations, including detailed 2D poses, facial keypoints, and segmentation masks, obtained using state-of-the-art computer vision methods and manually curated to ensure high-quality tracking and interaction annotation. Additionally, we release the raw panoptic 360-degree images captured from the robot's egocentric viewpoint (on demand, for research purpose only in compliance with GDPR). Finally, we establish benchmark baselines for interaction anticipation, including the first cross-dataset evaluations for this task: to this end, we also release 6M annotations for another existing in-the-wild outdoor dataset collected from a mobile robot (SSUP-HRI). Dataset and code can be found at https://hucebot.github.io/hui360.

Humanoid locomotion in highly confined environments requires navigating dense environmental obstacles and complex self-collision bounds while maintaining multi-contact dynamic feasibility. Traditional trajectory optimizers frequently struggle in these restricted spaces, as navigating the large collision space with splines on particle abstractions is insufficient and leads to poor local minima. To address this, we propose a three-stage whole-body planning framework that formulates kinematic path planning directly over kinematically reachable rigid-body volumes. By integrating differentiable collision avoidance into a reachability-constrained formulation, our framework synthesizes volume-informed guides that reliably guide a full-order trajectory optimizer over long horizons. We show that these optimized plans serve as high-quality references to train a residual reinforcement learning policy for robust online execution. We validate our approach on the Unitree G1 humanoid across three benchmark testbeds exceeding NIST emergency response standards, achieving restricted confinement ratios ($C_r < 1.5$). Our framework generates feasible trajectories across 12-to-18-second tasks with complex foot and hand contacts where standard baselines fail, while the learned policy successfully tracks these plans under extensive domain randomization in physics simulation.

Real-world online reinforcement learning (RL) provides a promising approach for training robotic manipulation policies directly in the physical world, avoiding the sim-to-real gap and enabling continuous policy refinement through human-in-the-loop interaction. Recent methods have demonstrated sample-efficient learning through human intervention but remain limited to small randomization ranges and encounter challenges with the non-stationarity induced by concurrently training multiple agents. To address these limitations, we introduce a unified framework that combines centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) and a Hybrid Reward Architecture (HRA). This enables multiple actors to share a centralized multi-head critic. The critic is decomposed into task and grasp heads, corresponding to the sparse task reward and a potential-based grasping reward, respectively. We accordingly reformulate the critic and actor objectives to exploit the decomposed Q-values while explicitly accounting for the categorical action distribution of the discrete gripper policy. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework substantially improves both sample efficiency and policy performance. We validate our approach on two robotic arms and a simulated humanoid robot across tennis ball and banana pick-and-place, pot reset, and simulated block relocation tasks under dimension-wise domain randomization, approximately 5-25x larger than those considered in prior work. Compared with a state-of-the-art baseline, our method improves the success rate from 60% to 80% on tennis ball pick-and-place, from 60% to 90% on banana pick-and-place, and from 25% to 95% on simulated block relocation, while also successfully accomplishing a task where the baseline consistently fails. Videos and more details are available at our project website: https://hil-harc.github.io/.

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) plays a vital role in dynamic, high mix, low volume industrial scenarios such as remanufacturing, which frequently face workcell rearrangements. Traditional setups are constrained by power and data cabling, restricting modularity and reconfigurations, while the selection of commercial wireless devices suitable for real-time perception and safe collaboration are limited in availability. This paper presents a highly flexible, wireless, 5G-based system that serves as a versatile experimental testbed for applications including remanufacturing, operator training, and user studies. To eliminate infrastructure barriers, the workcell integrates a novel battery-powered, multi-sensor platform prototype. Additionally, to support operator safety and system adaptability across environmental shifts, the system integrates a computer vision module for object detection and pose estimation, further augmented for robust hand recognition. Trained on synthetic and real data, the model reliably detects oriented grasping poses and human hands across varying lighting and background conditions (with an mAP@50-95 of 97.74 +- 0.10% and a mean inference time of 12.5 ms). Offloading these computationally intensive tasks to the edge via 5G, the proposed architecture contributes to resolving the bandwidth-latency trade-off. To demonstrate portability, the system was implemented in both Hungary and Norway, and was evaluated across a combination of public and private, Standalone and Non-Standalone 5G infrastructures. The performed network experiments produced results in round-trip response times down to 12 ms in case of compatible network-device pairings, suitable for safe, adaptive HRC. However, these measurements also revealed practical limitations related to interoperability in current 5G deployments that should be addressed in future works.

Despite the demand for robots in high-value clinical tasks like bathing, contemporary systems still lack the safety and reliability required for complex, sustained physical interaction with humans. A key challenge hindering the development of such systems is that collecting, understanding, and effectively transferring highly dynamic, contact-rich human bathing demonstrations is difficult, even with modern motion and tactile sensing equipment. We present a straightforward, but effective framework for doing so with high fidelity by utilizing contact regions as a key processing primitive. We use our framework to build a dataset of bathing demonstrations performed by trained clinicians on human subjects. We then use this dataset to design and control an arm-mounted dexterous soft hand to perform bathing tasks on a mannequin using open- and closed-loop strategies. Our dataset is the first to provide high quality synchronized motion, shape, contact, and force during sustained, contact-rich human-human interaction, and our transfer strategies demonstrate effective use of these data across multiple levels of the robotics stack. All relevant materials will be publicly released to enable further advancements in physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) research.