Robotics Systems

Shared control often allocates robot authority based on confidence in inferred human intent, assuming reliable autonomous execution. When this assumption fails, high intent confidence can cause over-helping. We present a capability-aware shared-control framework in which a vision-language model (VLM) infers human intent and provides semantic-intent confidence, while a vision-language-action (VLA) policy generates autonomous actions. VLA capability confidence is estimated online from the dispersion and local instability of stochastic action trajectories. We design a nonlinear arbitration policy that combines Bayesian-filtered semantic-intent confidence with VLA capability confidence through a sigmoid mapping to adapt robot authority. Our evaluation combined VLM/VLA confidence assessment with a study involving 12 participants performing pick-and-place and bidirectional stacking under in-distribution and out-of-distribution conditions. The proposed method achieved the highest task success rate (92%), compared with manual teleoperation (83%), intent-only arbitration (44%), and fixed equal-weight blending (10%). It also achieved higher control friendliness and lower authority-weighted disagreement than both shared-control baselines. These results demonstrate the benefit of incorporating VLA capability into authority allocation to mitigate over-helping and improve shared-control performance.

Task planning bridges high-level instructions and executable behavior in long-horizon manipulation, yet modern Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems often leave this intermediate structure implicit. Existing chain-of-thought (CoT) planners also tend to rely on coarse task-level annotations or serialize long reasoning traces token by token. We present X-Planner, a planning front-end that addresses both the supervision and representation of embodied reasoning. Our planning data combine Ego, UMI, and teleoperation under a hierarchy granularity with source-dependent annotation depth. Takeover-time annotations and human-designed failures supervise ongoing error recognition. On the model side, a shared VLM backbone exposes two event-structured plan forms: a discrete interface that emits interpretable event states and a latent interface that relays continuous CoT states across staggered Transformer depths through Staircase Decoding. A frozen latent-to-text reconstruction objective provides a semantic anchor for the latent representation. Offline two-step planning evaluation places X-Planner second among four evaluated models on both BERTScore-F1 and a judge-based Overall score. In real-robot experiments, respectively, outperforming the evaluated baselines. These results characterize planning-text quality and downstream execution.

Robots operating in human-centered environments are typically designed to execute explicit instructions, and most robot-learning datasets likewise pair observations with task instructions or low-level actions. Although recent work has begun to explore proactive embodied assistance, existing resources target different settings and action levels, leaving real-world human-centered multimodal decision-making underexplored. We formulate this problem as \textit{Proactive Robot Action Reasoning} (\textit{ProRobo}), an upstream cognitive decision problem in which a robot must determine which action to take based on multimodal human and environmental cues without explicit action instructions. To support ProRobo, we introduce \textit{ProAction}, a real-world multimodal dataset containing 10K samples of visual observations, audio signals, and text inputs across 12 daily-life scenarios in five common scenes. To construct cognitively grounded high-level action supervision, we develop a two-stage human-in-the-loop pipeline that combines appraisal-guided candidate generation with Affective Theory-of-Mind-guided human refinement, explicitly incorporating contextual judgment about human states, urgency, feasibility, and potential risk into action annotation. Based on this supervision, we benchmark representative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and introduce \textit{MMC2Act}, a reference model that implicitly learns the mapping from multimodal observations to cognitively grounded high-level actions. Experiments across modality settings, subject-disjoint generalization, cross-dataset transfer, and human evaluation show that general-purpose MLLMs struggle with proactively reasoning high-level actions from multimodal cues, whereas training on \textit{ProAction} substantially improves performance.

Coding agents have emerged as a promising paradigm for robot manipulation: a language model writes the robot controller as a program, and agents built in this way now operate robots without robot-specific training.Whether this paradigm is also safe, however, has not been asked. We evaluate coding agent under a safety constraint, where each task pairs a manipulation goal with an obstacle the robot must not touch. The agent pursues the goal but collides with the obstacle in most cases, treating task completion as its sole objective while neglecting safety. The agent reasons about the obstacle in its traces, and the prompt already forbids touching it, so neither perception nor instruction is at fault; the fault lies in the planning, where the stated constraint never becomes a priority. By decomposing manipulation into a route phase and a contact-rich moment, we locate the source of the failure. Along the route, the model cannot prioritize the safety constraint, having no notion of a clearing route and none of replanning once a chosen route becomes infeasible. At the contact, it is unaware that contact execution is bounded by the same constraint. To close this gap, we present SafeHarness, which equips the model with two obstacle-aware harnesses that enable it to prioritize the safety constraint. Obstacle-aware route planning grounds the objects as bounding boxes and draws candidate routes over them as sequences of waypoints. The agent then plans a route in advance, verifies it, replans when necessary, and only then executes it. Obstacle-aware contact execution instead selects the contact position so that the contact itself avoids the obstacle. SafeHarness attains 71.9% task success and 87.5% collision avoidance, surpassing the previous SOTA by 6.5% and 27.0%, respectively. These results are $2.3\times$ and $1.5\times$ those of the same agent without harnesses.

Hierarchical planning frameworks combine skills from multiple robot control policies for long-horizon task execution, where determining when to terminate the current skill and advance to the next subtask is essential. Existing approaches often rely on pre-designed completion signal checkers that are hard to obtain in real-world execution. Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) offer strong reasoning capabilities, but their decision boundaries are not inherently aligned with task completion criteria, while cloud deployment and lengthy reasoning introduce substantial latency, limiting real-time monitoring. We propose StageGuard, an agentic distillation framework for accurate and efficient stage-transition decisions. StageGuard combines teacher-model reasoning with demonstration trajectories to generate structured explanations of subtask completion and policy switching. A lightweight student VLM uses these explanations to generate compact self-explanations, which are used for supervised fine-tuning. We evaluate stage-transition prediction on trajectories from two benchmarks and assess closed-loop task success through integration into hierarchical robot control on BEHAVIOR-1K, with further validation on real robots. Results show substantial improvements in stage-transition prediction while supporting efficient online monitoring.

World Action Models (WAMs) advance beyond conventional visuomotor policies by jointly predicting future world states and robot actions, enabling the policy to learn physical dynamics that support effective control. However, recent tactile WAMs often rely on large-scale pretrained generative backbones to capture contact-rich physical dynamics, which limit their inference efficiency and flexible deployment. In this paper, we present \ABBR{}, an agile tactile World Action Model for contact-rich robot control. \ABBR{} encodes visual and tactile observations into a shared latent that serves as the source of a direct vision-tactile-to-action flow-matching process, which can jointly generate latent representations of action chunks and future visual/tactile latents. A key observation is that vision and tactile signals evolve at inherently different timescales: adjacent visual frames are often highly similar, whereas tactile signals can change abruptly upon contact. We therefore introduce multi-horizon multimodal prediction in \ABBR{}, which provides supervision for visual latent at a larger temporal offset while predicting the tactile latent in the next frame to capture fine-grained contact dynamics. Across nine simulated and five real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, \ABBR{} demonstrates strong and robust performance, outperforming the strongest baseline in success rate while maintaining low inference latency. In particular, in five real-world experiments, \ABBR{} yields a relative gain of $\textbf{29.4\%}$ in overall success rates while achieving inference latency of $\textbf{11.9 ms}$. These results demonstrate that multimodal WAM can be achieved with an agile architecture suitable for precise and high-frequency robot control. More details are available on our project page: https://hanchuzhou.github.io/TARO_project_page/.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are a class of generalist robot policies that map camera images and language instructions directly to robot actions. While promising, these models remain slow at test time, particularly for long-horizon tasks that require many queries to the policy. Recent efforts reduce VLA latency by distilling smaller models, overlapping asynchronous action chunks, or pairing the VLA with a fast low-level policy, but still run a learned policy for the entire task. In contrast to VLA, classical motion planners quickly find collision-free motions, but require an explicit goal and have no semantic understanding of the task. In this work, we present SkipVLA, a hybrid policy that combines a pretrained VLA with a classical motion planner, using the planner for free-space motion and querying the VLA only for contact-rich skills such as grasping and placing. SkipVLA reuses the frozen vision-language backbone of the VLA to predict a target pose for each planned motion, and learns this predictor without additional demonstrations introduced into the system by using what was already learnt by the large VLA. We evaluate SkipVLA with three VLAs on 13 LIBERO tasks in simulation and three pick-and-place tasks on a physical 6-DoF YAM arm, demonstrating up to 2.5x faster task completion and significantly lower energy consumption while achieving the same task success rate.

A vision-language-action (VLA) policy with a flow-matching action expert generates each action chunk (a short command sequence) by integrating a learned velocity field; once its weights are fixed, the success or failure of an earlier rollout cannot change the chunk generated now. Concurrent test-time methods give a frozen policy such an input from retrieved successes, a learned critic, a verifier, or a dynamics model, but none uses the robot's own failed rollouts as negative evidence with nothing but a terminal outcome bit. We introduce TraceFlow, a progress-aligned guidance field that turns the action densities of retrieved successful and failed rollouts into a bounded correction to a frozen flow-matching action expert, using one terminal outcome bit per rollout and no other label. Its TraceBank stores traces, time-ordered state-action records with a terminal label, starts from the target-task training traces, and later admits the deployed robot's own rollouts. On an ordered real-robot packing task the base completes 21 of 50 trials in order, TraceFlow 39, and one stacking round without any weight update 47, with wrong-sequence episodes falling from 20 to 0. In simulation the gain is selective: with per-suite selected settings, TraceFlow raises RoboMemArena Sequence from 78.92% to 91.50% task success and Transferring from 54.41% to 62.00% at stacking round 2, leaves the 26-task aggregate unchanged, lowers Counting and Occlusion by 1.12 and 1.42 points, and changes LIBERO-Plus (Long) by +1.27 points (p = 0.0733). Stacking gains are finite, every branch peaking before round ten, and the bank's success-to-failure ratio predicts no retrieval allocation.

Robots inspecting an assembly must determine which parts are present and whether they are correctly installed. During egocentric assembly assistance, head motion and workpiece handling reveal evidence for these checks, while spoken state confirmations link observations to procedural outcomes. We introduce INSPECT, which learns robot view preferences from records of a smart-glasses assistant that answers part queries and provides next-step guidance. Presence-Invariant TwinSwap (PI-TwinSwap) calibrates object evidence through paired identity interventions. Claim-indexed supervision separates evidence requirements from camera-reproducible observation changes. Object-centered calibration adapts relative view preferences to robot poses, while clause-level screening checks predicted evidence. The robot selects views using only its current observation and known poses, without candidate images. Evaluation uses annotated assistant-video replay to simulate state feedback, without target-domain view labels for policy training. On images of physical gearbox assemblies, INSPECT achieves the highest view utility among the compared non-oracle policies and raises human-rated full verifiability from 34.8% to 41.7% compared with keeping the current view. On commercial angle-grinder recordings in IMPACT, the transferred relative-view selector increases the correct decision rate from 50.6% to 54.3% with a frozen perception head. The source code is available at https://github.com/Kratos-Wen/INSPECT.

Recent factor graph approaches to continuum robot state estimation have been successful for quasi-static applications and spatiotemporal estimation using white-noise kinematic motion priors. However, when inertial effects are significant, these approximations may fail to capture the underlying physics, limiting accuracy during dynamic motions. In contrast, our approach approximates the Cosserat rod dynamics of continuum robots. We write inertia and damping as equivalent applied loads, so that the dynamic balance retains the algebraic form of the static one from prior work with quasi-static robots. Without backbone observations, the framework reduces to a stochastic forward simulation of the robot's motion. Given observations, it jointly refines kinematic and dynamic states and infers external loads, among other states. We validate the approach through simulation and experiments, demonstrating stochastic forward simulation as well as state estimation on tendon-driven continuum robots.

Free-flying robots rely on multiple thrusters to maneuver in space. If one or more of these thrusters fail, the robot may lose control authority and risk mission failure. At the same time, their free-flying nature implies that, even in the absence of actuation, they continue along (locally) straight-line trajectories. In this work we present a probabilistic, proactive, motion planning framework that explicitly accounts for actuator failures in space. We model actuator failure modes as a Markov chain and propagate the probability of successfully reaching the goal along the planning horizon. Precomputed reachable sets evaluate the robot's capabilities of reaching waypoints under potential failures and an RRT$^*$-based planner concatenates these waypoints. The resulting algorithm maximizes the overall target-reaching probability, providing maximally resilient motion plans utilizing free-flying properties. We validate our approach experimentally on a physical free-flyer platform with injected actuator failures.

Blind and low-vision users often need to locate a specific personal object rather than an arbitrary instance of the same category. The task calls for a robot that can move through the space and reach viewpoints the user cannot, and for an accessible interface where the user says which object is meant and learns whether the right one was found. We present RoboFind, a multi-agent framework in which a smartphone teaches the target and a quadruped robot carries out the search. A Target Teaching Agent converts guided smartphone recordings into a semantic target profile and a reusable multi-view reference bank through an accessible capture flow with AR guidance, speech and haptic feedback, and screen-reader support, so later missions refer to a stored object without repeating the teaching process. At runtime, a Navigation Agent explores the environment and proposes candidate targets, a Verification Agent checks each candidate against the stored references, and a Coordination and Recovery Agent completes the mission or triggers recovery and continued search. Across 32 real-robot missions, RoboFind reaches 85.0% success against 25.0% for a reconstructed sequential first-stop baseline over 20 trials with ten targets, and reduces false success from 75.0% to 5.0%. On six shared targets it succeeds in 10/12 trials, against 5/12 for 12 independently executed GPT-6 Astra-only trials. These results show that the multi-agent design fits the demands of personalized object search, where verifying object identity before declaring completion is what makes the outcome something a user can rely on.

Collecting real-world navigation data for mobile robots typically requires platform-specific teleoperation, making large-scale collection expensive and difficult to scale. We introduce Universal Navigation Interface (UNI), a robot-free data collection paradigm that uses a four-wheeled rollator walker (rollator) and smartphone to collect physically constrained human demonstrations. Because the rollator cannot climb stairs, negotiate uncut curbs, or pass through narrow gaps, demonstrations are naturally biased toward wheeled-feasible routes. Using UNI, we collect 37.2 km of real-world navigation data and recover metric trajectories that directly supervise goal-conditioned navigation models. Fine-tuning visual-navigation models on UNI reduces trajectory prediction error by 17.4-24.8% on held-out UNI demonstrations. Evaluation on other navigation datasets shows benefits that vary by dataset and metric. We further demonstrate closed-loop transfer to a powered wheelchair in curb, staircase, and curb-cut scenarios. These results support low-cost physical proxies as a practical source of navigation supervision collected without the target robot.

Herbicide-based weed control is increasingly unsustainable due to rising weed resistance and the adverse environmental impacts of chemical use. While mechanical weed control avoids these drawbacks, it is typically implemented using large machines that cause soil compaction. We propose a novel alternative based on small mobile robots for mechanical weeding. Compared with existing automated mechanical weeding approaches, the proposed method offers reduced soil compaction, simpler automation, and improved scalability. Our solution involves a Boston Dynamics Spot quadruped robot equipped with a custom weed removal tool featuring a milling bit at its end. The tool is rigidly attached to the robot and uses the degrees of freedom of the robot base by actuating the legs, while keeping the feet stationary. We develop a software architecture that enables autonomous weed removal and integrate this system with all other required components. We analyze the accuracy and efficiency of the current proof of concept both in an indoor and outdoor environment and provide recommendations for future work to make the system more accurate and efficient.

Vision-language-action models tell a robot where to move, but not how hard to push. Contact-rich tasks depend on that second quantity, compliance, yet no widely used demonstration interface records it. The obstacle is identifiability as realized pose and measured force cannot separate the operator's intended equilibrium from their stiffness, so VR controllers, SpaceMouse and handheld grippers cannot supply compliance supervision even in principle. Prior compliance-output policies work around this with hand-specified task structure, privileged simulation contact state, or dedicated force and tactile hardware. Four-channel bilateral teleoperation removes the ambiguity directly by using the leader arm as a separate measurement of the intended equilibrium, making per-axis stiffness identifiable by regression using only the joint-torque sensing already on the manipulator. This yields per-timestep, direction-dependent compliance labels at zero annotation cost, which we use to fine-tune a VLA to emit stiffness alongside pose. On a Franka Research 3 wiping task, ours is the only policy of five whose contact force changes when the instruction asks for a firm wipe rather than a normal one (6.4N (normal) to 9.1N (firm) RMS, Cohen's d = 0.89, p = 0.023

Long-horizon robot manipulation requires not only stable local visuomotor control, but also continuous target tracking and reliable task progress assessment throughout execution. This challenge becomes particularly critical when multiple objects share identical appearances and must be manipulated in a prescribed order. In such scenarios, relying solely on a limited-horizon manipulation policy is often insufficient to determine which instance should be operated on and when the task should transition to the next stage. To address this challenge, we propose MaskHarness-WAM, an instance-grounded harness for long-horizon manipulation. The proposed system connects high-level task planning with low-level manipulation policies through target masks, while leveraging visual feedback for subtask scheduling and continuous execution. Since each subtask corresponds to a different target instance, the low-level policy requires a newly established initial target mask under the updated scene at each subtask transition. The harness continuously re-observes the environment, generates, and verifies the target mask at subtask boundaries, thereby updating the instance-level spatial condition provided to the low-level policy. Furthermore, the system advances the manipulation process by switching target instances according to the verified completion status of each subtask. Experiments on a real robot platform demonstrate that MaskHarness-WAM substantially outperforms limited-horizon policies on sequential multi-object manipulation, showing its effectiveness in extending local manipulation skills to reliable long-horizon execution.

Closed-loop robot policies require observation processing, state management, and situation-dependent branching, making them costly to design and tune manually. Although coding agents increasingly support control-code generation and optimization, it remains unclear whether implementations improved on source tasks also support policy acquisition for new tasks. We study this question by treating complete closed-loop implementations as reusable execution experience. For each source task, a coding agent generates policy code from a few successful demonstrations and iteratively improves it using simulation feedback. The validation-selected implementations are retained in a software archive. For new tasks, the agent generates and improves policies using archived implementations, target demonstrations, and execution feedback. The resulting policy is then frozen and executes without further model calls. Across four source tasks in RoboCasa, iterative optimization increases mean success from 28.3% to 64.2%. Across nine target tasks and three independent runs, mean success is 45.2% without references, 41.5% with initial source code, and 57.0% with optimized source code. Optimized references outperform initial references in all three runs on the nine-task average, with a mean gain of 15.6 percentage points. These results demonstrate the value of execution-improved software as a resource for acquiring new policies in this setting, although initial references remain better on two target tasks when averaged across runs.

Adapting robots to new objects and tasks requires interaction experience that can be costly to obtain. We present WorldContact, a contact-centric world model for deformable-object manipulation, constructed from a limited set of high-quality trajectories to generate additional training data efficiently. It predicts object dynamics using larger time steps than the source numerical simulator, which requires small integration steps to resolve rapid motion and prevent interpenetration. We evaluate WorldContact across 16 shopping-bag manipulation tasks. State-rollout measurements on a single H100 GPU show a $10\times$ speedup over the source simulator, excluding rendering and disk I/O. We use the generated data to fine-tune an existing vision-language-action policy and deploy it directly on a real robot. In bag lifting, the same policy achieves 65% single-attempt success when fine-tuned on source simulation data alone, compared with 95% when fine-tuned on the dataset expanded with WorldContact. These results support efficient data generation with WorldContact for robot policy adaptation.

Mechanical intelligence, loosely defined as the reduction in control burden afforded by a robot's physical form, has become a prominent concept in robotics, with instantiations in bioinspired robotics, soft robotics, robotic swarms, and many other areas. However, rigorous theoretical understanding and quantitative measures of mechanical intelligence have lagged behind the engineering systems that the community has developed. In this work, using modern legged robots as a benchmark and exemplar, we propose several information-theoretic metrics for quantifying mechanical intelligence. By viewing body dynamics as both a computational process and a communication channel, we show that several prior insights in legged-robot engineering can be described using information theory, and we quantify how bits are processed by mechanical modes and across robot coordinates. Specifically, we examine the trade-off between explicitly incorporating compliance through series-elastic actuation and using so-called proprioceptive, low-gear-ratio transmissions, and we explore how these mechanisms interact with control policies during locomotion. We develop these results on systems of increasing complexity: a simplified linear model of a robot-leg transmission, a nonlinear single-leg simulation, and simulated quadruped robots controlled by a learned policy while navigating challenging terrain. These results lay the groundwork for broader study of robot mechanisms and their role in embodied computation.

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.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models let robots follow language instructions, but their language backbones of several billion parameters are the main obstacle to running them on robot hardware. Structured pruning reduces that backbone, and removing 63% of it from OpenVLA-OFT drops LIBERO-Long success from 93.2% to 0.8%. A recent approach restores such a model with supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning, which needs online rollouts and hundreds of GPU-hours. We recover most of the lost success entirely offline. Width pruning narrows the blocks but keeps the residual stream at its original size, so teacher and student hidden states have the same shape and are matched directly, without a projector. Training against a cache built in one teacher pass lifts the 63%-reduced student to within 3.5 points of the teacher in about 8 GPU-hours. A sweep over nine ratios locates where the recovery objective starts to matter. Up to 45% reduction the two do not differ significantly on OpenVLA-OFT. Hidden-state distillation then adds +2.1 to +4.5 points there between 63% and 87%, and +9.4 to +22.1 points on CogACT from 63% onward. At 81% on CogACT, a tripled recovery budget narrows the distilled student's gap to the teacher to 3.9 points on average, while supervised recovery stays more than 20 points below. At matched compression, width pruning yields higher success and depth pruning lower latency. On a 6-DoF manipulator, the distilled student at 72% reduction reaches 77.5% success against 59.5% for supervised recovery, runs 2.23x faster on-board than the teacher, and uses 62% less memory.

Teleoperation, a human-in-the-loop control scheme, allows a human operator to remotely command and guide a mobile robot to navigate in off-road environments, yet fluent and user-friendly tele-navigation requires an alignment of traversability evaluation between human and robot. In the teleoperation system, the human operator typically utilizes off-site incomplete and delayed feedback via a human-machine interface to make a judgment of traversability, while the robot makes such an evaluation based on in situ onboard sensory information, which could cause divergent traversability estimation and thus generate mismatched decisions and actions. Existing approaches for traversability modeling, estimation, and prediction are mainly derived from the view of robots, i.e., robot-centric, and are practically suitable for fully autonomous mobile robots, but neglect the influence of human operators. To address this problem, this paper extends the concept of traversability from robot-centric to human-centric by accounting for the operator's cognitive states, such as attention, workload, and risk tolerance or awareness, termed tele-traversability. We first revisit the definitions and roles of traversability in robotics and then extend them to teleoperation settings. Finally, we highlight future trends and open challenges of tele-traversability toward human-centric teleoperation systems.

Robots can recall prior failures without knowing whether recalled evidence remains valid, conflicts with current observations, or is sufficient to guide a decision. We present CoreSense, a robot-system integration architecture that combines traceable episodic evidence with a conflict-aware belief gate and bounded, auditable recommendations. The gate checks scope, provenance, time, contradiction, and support before it permits PROCEED, requests re-observation, abstains, or escalates. Evaluation follows three complementary layers without commanding a physical robot: offline public real-robot data, a frozen signal-level simulation, and a live cloud deployment path. On CableTrace-120 and BotFails-200, belief gating reduces protocol-defined unsafe proceeds from 20% and 40% to 0%. A disjointly calibrated raw-video policy also reaches 0% unsafe proceed, but overblocks every nominal episode. On public data, a ViFailback-BotFails visual detector reaches 0.778 AUROC yet remains all-blocking, whereas cycle-disjoint UR3 telemetry for protective stops yields 0% unsafe proceed, 36.1% overblocking, and 61.9% coverage; grip-loss transfer remains a negative result. Controlled physical corroboration yields 3.3%, 0%, and 42.0%, while conflict-aware fusion yields 4.7%, 0%, and 42.8%. Finally, 20/20 cloud recalls validate a CockroachDB Cloud-Amazon Bedrock deployment path. The evidence supports an auditable integration pattern, not autonomous recovery or certified safety.

Robots must complete their tasks and maintain the achieved outcomes while avoiding safety failures at all times. Strict reach-avoid-stay (sRAS) formalizes this requirement: safely reaching a target and remaining there indefinitely after first entry. We propose an sRAS Q-control barrier function (CBF) safety filter for high-dimensional black-box systems under bounded uncertainty. Our construction combines a stay value encoding safe permanent residence in a target subset with a reach-avoid value encoding safe reachability of this subset while avoiding target states from which safe permanent residence cannot be guaranteed. We prove that these values jointly yield a valid robust discrete-time CBF and lift them to state-action Q-functions for runtime intervention. For exact values and under a measure-zero condition, our filter preserves sRAS feasibility from almost every winnable initial state and keeps the system safely within the target after first entry, against all admissible uncertainty realizations. We adopt reachability-based adversarial reinforcement learning for scalable value approximation using only black-box interactions. Notably, neither synthesis nor deployment of our filter requires known dynamics, affine structure, value derivatives, or hand-designed barriers. We validate our framework in quadruped gap jumping in simulation and hardware, where the robot crosses the gap, lands safely, and remains safe afterward. Simulated F1TENTH races further demonstrate safe overtaking and lead retention.

Robots that follow natural-language instructions in everyday indoor environments must act on incomplete human utterances. Instructions often omit essential information, such as the identity of an out-of-view object, an intended destination, or the user's goal. Existing datasets contain little real-world situated dialogue and provide few practice-grounded criteria for deciding when a robot should act, confirm, clarify, or refuse. We retrospectively analyze a pilot Wizard-of-Oz study in which five participants performed everyday indoor tasks, including door opening, drawer opening, feeding, drinking, and cleaning, with a wheelchair-mounted mobile manipulator while the wizard responded without a formal communication policy. This preserved authentic user behavior but produced inconsistent robot-side decisions, motivating an explicit decision scheme. From 40 episodes, we derived a hierarchical taxonomy of six response modes (ANSWER, REPORT_DONE, REFUSE, CONFIRM, CLARIFY, ACT) and four ambiguity types (intent, referential, spatial, intelligibility). Two human annotators and an AI annotator applied the scheme to the pilot data. Clean-label rates were 91% and 89%, and Cohen's ranged from 0.72 to 0.95 across decision-point, mode, and ambiguity levels for both human-human and human-AI comparisons. Fine-tuning LLaVA-1.6-7B on taxonomy-derived labels for ACT and CLARIFY indicates the feasibility of training vision-language models using annotations from our taxonomy. Remaining boundary cases in decision-point identification and REPORT_DONE motivate a constrained protocol for more consistent dialogue collection.

Robot manipulation policies are improving quickly, and real-robot evaluation remains the standard evidence for that progress. It still relies on a human to reset the scene between rollouts, which consumes operator time and leaves the initial state distribution unspecified, so results reproduce poorly. A recent system, AutoEval, automates both reset and scoring, but only for single-step tasks, because a long-horizon rollout can terminate in combinatorially many configurations that no single learned reset policy covers. We present HALTER, a Harness for Autonomous Long-horizon Task Evaluation and Reset, which restores the scene by planning over a library of learned atomic reset skills, so demonstration cost scales with the size of that library rather than with the number of terminal states. HALTER builds a spatial scene graph online from point clouds and vision foundation models, and an LLM reasons over this graph to score the rollout, plan the reset, and verify that the reset succeeded, without collecting labeled success images for any task. On four long-horizon tasks on a Franka arm, HALTER restores the scene in 76% of episodes, against 52% for AutoEval and 65% for a motion-planning reset, and it estimates the completed-skill fraction correctly in 90% of episodes, against 76%. Its reset-verification verdict is correct in 91% of episodes, compared with 78% for AutoEval. It also cuts the operator time of an evaluation campaign by 72% relative to manual reset. We further measure compositional generalization on three held-out tasks, where HALTER resets 74.7% of episodes against 1.3% for a per-task reset policy, and we ablate the scene representation and the graph update rate.

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.

Enabling robots to adapt to unfamiliar environments as readily as humans remains a moonshot goal of embodied AI. No finite collection of demonstrations can cover every task and situation a robot will encounter, making the ability to learn from context at deployment essential for generalization. Such in-context learning (ICL), however, remains largely beyond the reach of existing robotic policies. The broad agentic capabilities of commercial vision-language models (VLMs), such as GPT-6 Astra, raise a compelling question: can these models learn from demonstrations, examples, and interaction feedback, then translate that information into executable and verifiable robot behavior from a new initial state without gradient updates or persistent changes to task-specific parameters? We introduce GPT-Policy, a general-agent framework for in-context robot learning. GPT-Policy integrates a context compiler that preserves task-relevant visual transitions, a VLM that proposes robot-tool actions, and a constrained controller that verifies and executes each action and reports its outcome. We evaluate its reliability and limitations through task success and efficiency metrics, matched comparisons across models, and controlled context ablations. In real-robot trials, human video demonstrations improve task completion even without robot action labels, while aligned action references yield further gains on contact-sensitive tasks. These findings position GPT-Policy as a step toward robot adaptation through in-context learning, providing an empirical foundation for translating the general-purpose capabilities of VLMs into physical behavior and clarifying the challenges that must be overcome for reliable deployment.

As robot capabilities increase, quadratic programming (QP)-based controllers must account for a similarly increasing number of constraints to ensure safe, reliable operation. Yet, with each added constraint, this introduces more chances of momentary conflict: in which case, a QP solver that returns an "infeasible" status leaves the controller with nothing to execute. To address this, we introduce ElastiQP, a modified dual active-set QP solver that relaxes every inequality constraint with an exact, per-constraint l1 penalty while keeping equality constraints (dynamics) hard. Notably, ElastiQP does so by folding the slack variables into the solver analytically, maintaining a constant size of the condensed linear system. On a suite of robot control benchmarks, ElastiQP achieves microsecond-level performance, matching or outperforming leading modern solvers on feasible problems. On infeasible problems, ElastiQP handles these gracefully, confining violations to strictly the conflicting inequality terms, returning a usable solution up to 40x faster than the best alternative solvers. ElastiQP is available as an open-source C++ header-only library, with Python and JAX interfaces, at https://github.com/StanfordASL/elastiqp.

Conventional motion planning treats collision as a binary constraint, although contact with different objects can have drastically different consequences. A robot may safely brush against a cardboard box while even minor contact with a glass, laptop, or unstable object may be undesirable. Moreover, a direct robot--object collision can move the contacted object and trigger secondary object--object collisions, making the risk of a motion depend on the physical evolution of the scene rather than only on the robot's geometric path. We present CaSCo, a cascade-aware soft-collision motion planning framework in which a vision-language or language model assigns semantic risk to objects and a physics simulator predicts the consequences of candidate robot motions. CaSCo searches for a path that minimizes the total semantic risk of the unique objects displaced either directly by the robot or indirectly through cascaded collisions. Because collisions change the environment, we augment roadmap states with the predicted object arrangement and the set of objects whose risk has already been incurred. We develop an optimal graph-search algorithm with an admissible and consistent cascade-relaxed heuristic and caching and pruning mechanisms for efficient search. Experiments in cluttered manipulation environments evaluate semantic risk, cascade reasoning, planning efficiency, and real-robot operation.

Active perception is essential for robotic manipulation when fixed viewpoints leave task-relevant information occluded or unobserved. However, enabling vision-language-action (VLA) models to reason across changing viewpoints and actively acquire informative observations remains challenging. We present ActiveScale, a framework that advances active perception through coordinated model, data, and hardware designs. Our model augments a VLA with historical video observations and explicit camera-pose supervision, using per-frame pose tokens and a lightweight prediction head to associate observations across viewpoints and support a coherent understanding of the scene. To learn from the camera motion naturally present in human activity, we introduce a scalable human--robot mid-training recipe using 1000 hours of egocentric and robotic data, adapting the model to temporal inputs and pose supervision. We further introduce Active-perception Mobile-manipulation Platform (AMP), a robotic platform that supports active perception and mobile manipulation through single-operator teleoperation, enabling scalable collection of demonstrations that coordinate viewpoint changes and manipulation. Experiments demonstrate improved success rates on active-perception tasks, while ablation studies validate the contributions of camera-pose-aware modeling and egocentric mid-training. Together, these components provide an integrated foundation for studying and developing active perception in robotic manipulation.

Automating biological research requires general-purpose, reproducible robot systems that allow individual wet-lab researchers to delegate robot tasks without performing teleoperation or neural-network training. Vision-language-action policies have been proposed for general-purpose arms, but can lose performance when their operating environment changes. We therefore built WetRobo, a robot kit that can readily transfer between laboratories. It consists of one robot arm, laboratory equipment (an incubator, a reagent bottle with a cap, and a Petri dish), the existing code that moves the arm, teleoperation demonstrations of each task that we recorded, and a general AGENTS.md skill file. A biological experimentalist provides natural-language tasks without collecting local teleoperation training data or training a neural network. The coding agent observes the local laboratory and writes and executes programs, using external tools as needed for adaptation. We demonstrate use of WetRobo with OpenAI Codex (gpt-5.6-sol) on three successful tasks: lifting a Petri dish lid, removing a bottle cap, and opening the incubator door, all in real-world laboratories. The coding agent achieved the cap task in both laboratories, Lab X and Lab Y, whereas a VLA fine-tuned on Lab X demonstrations succeeded there but failed to transfer to Lab Y. These results point to a practical route for laboratory robotics: instead of training a policy for each laboratory, distribute a kit and let a coding agent adapt it in each laboratory. Code, demonstrations, and the evolved programs are available at https://github.com/tsudalab/WetRobo.

Real-robot demonstrations are limited, motivating the use of human manipulation data collected without robots, including egocentric videos and handheld Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) demonstrations. However, differences in viewpoint, embodiment, and available action supervision make it difficult to align representations across these sources according to manipulation motion rather than visual appearance. We introduce UMI-Bridge, which uses UMI as an intermediate domain to align representations according to action equivalence rather than pixel similarity. UMI action supervision anchors the latent representation to end-effector motion and gripper behavior, while synchronized head-wrist observations and paired ego-UMI clips support alignment across views and domains. We train a dual-view latent action model (LAM) on human manipulation data without robot demonstrations, then freeze its wrist teacher and dynamics model to regularize vision-language-action (VLA) post-training on UMI and robot data. The shared wrist interface enables this training-time supervision across both domains while preserving the policy's standard inference architecture. Across three real-robot tasks, UMI-Bridge achieves 91.7% mean success versus 73.3% for Naive Co-training with matched UMI and robot data. On two data-efficiency tasks, it surpasses a full-data Robot-only baseline using 25% of the robot demonstrations together with UMI data. It also achieves 85% and 90% success on two additional tasks learned from UMI demonstrations without task-specific robot demonstrations. These results support action-anchored latent alignment for data-efficient robot learning and UMI-to-robot task transfer.

World models can anticipate the consequences of navigation actions, but predicted action sequences may become invalid during execution, especially when wheel-legged robots encounter dynamic obstacles or change locomotion modes. We propose WAVE-Go, an image-goal navigation framework that separates world-action prediction from interruptible command execution. Its executor adaptively selects an action prefix and cancels pending commands when updated observations invalidate execution. A conditional-risk formulation specifies prefix selection under an estimated cumulative failure budget, while posture and locomotion-mode transitions require clearance, stability, and task-evidence checks. In the reported navigation evaluation, WAVE-Go achieves 74.1% in-distribution success and 63.3% dynamic out-of-distribution success, exceeding the strongest baseline by 4.7 and 7.7 percentage points, respectively, while reducing collisions from 4.4 to 2.9 per 100 m. Compared with interruptible fixed four-command execution, WAVE-Go raises success by 4.0 percentage points while reducing replanning frequency by 51.2% and collision rate by 6.5%. Execution ablations also show that runtime interruption improves success, collision rate, and reaction latency at the cost of additional replanning. These results support adaptive, interruptible execution as a means of balancing navigation performance and planning overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/vigorlee/wave-go.

Adapting to changes in robot dynamics requires learning from new data without discarding experience that may still be useful. In continual model-based reinforcement learning (RL), replay collected before a dynamics change can slow adaptation, while removing it unnecessarily reduces available training data and can be especially costly if earlier dynamics return. We study when recent transitions are preferable to the full replay history. Two quantities characterize this trade-off: change magnitude and age-staleness area under the curve (AUC), measuring how well transition age separates stale from fresh data. Forgetting stale data helps after large permanent shifts but hurts when dynamics recur and older data becomes useful again. Choosing a replay strategy therefore depends on predicting when older data will help or hurt. We test these effects across two locomotion morphologies, two model-based RL algorithms, and Real-World RL benchmark perturbations. Because ground-truth staleness labels are unavailable on deployed robots, we evaluate whether an estimator built from interaction data can still provide the quantities needed to choose a replay strategy after permanent changes. Our results show that replay retention depends on change magnitude and on how the dynamics evolve.

K-12 robotics and AI education remains difficult to scale, especially in rural regions lacking sustained technical mentorship. Programs like FIRST provide competition pathways and instructional opportunities, but they do not eliminate the need for local programming and robotics expertise. We introduce AI, Robotics, & Community (ARC), a hubs-based framework where colleges train undergraduate mentors and host workshops for nearby K-12 teams. Mature school programs can become secondary hubs that support additional schools, creating a self-reinforcing education loop where mentorship reach propagates geographically and can even grow super-linearly. We first evaluate ARC through a trial deployment at one university. The trial created three rural robotics teams. On five-point Likert surveys, mean increases in K-12 programming knowledge, resource access, and practice opportunities were 2.00, 2.25, and 1.25 points. Likewise, undergraduate confidence teaching technical concepts, adapting explanations, managing groups, and finding mentoring enjoyable and meaningful increased by 1.29, 1.14, 1.00, and 1.14 points. Additionally, we create a spatial Markov model of ARC's growth and simulate it using the state of Indiana as a testbed. Under moderate conditions, we find that ARC reaches 74% of Indiana's 1,925 public K-12 schools and produces 992 robotics programs after 40 years, compared with 161 projected under natural growth alone. Together, these results show ARC can create and support rural robotics programs, train undergraduate AI and robotics mentors, and potentially scale mentorship across a region.

Vine robots navigate cluttered environments by extending from their tip. Although their ability to operate in such environments has been extensively demonstrated, little work has addressed growth planning, i.e., finding optimal growth paths. Moreover, existing planners do not account for the growth pressure necessary to follow a given path, which can cause the robot to burst when it is too high. In this paper, we address the problem of finding minimum-pressure paths for vine robots growing around polytopic obstacles. We propose an efficient algorithm that is guaranteed to find globally optimal solutions in 2D and approximate solutions in 3D, with an error that vanishes as a discretization parameter approaches zero. First, we derive a growth pressure equation for vine robots of arbitrary shape, which we use to show that there always exists a minimum-pressure path that is piecewise-linear and can bend only at specific points on the obstacles. We then leverage this observation to reduce the growth-planning problem to a shortest-path problem with time-dependent weights, which we efficiently solve using a modified Dijkstra's algorithm. We demonstrate the speed and scalability of our approach through numerical simulations. We also validate our algorithm with hardware experiments and provide an open-source and high-performance implementation in the Python package, VinePlanner: https://github.com/Ahsoka/VinePlanner.

Least-restrictive safety filters based on Hamilton-Jacobi reachability provide strong safety guarantees by overriding a nominal controller only when the system reaches the boundary of the set of unsafe states defined as a Backward Reachable Tube (BRT). These guarantees, however, rely on the continuous-time nature of the underlying formulation. In practice, robotic systems apply control at discrete sampling intervals, which creates a mismatch where the system may jump into the unsafe BRT between updates, allowing failures that are theoretically avoidable. This work introduces a principled solution based on a one-step expanded BRT that predicts all states capable of reaching the true BRT within a single timestep. By using this expanded boundary as the activation condition for the safety filter, safety interventions occur early enough to ensure correctness under discrete-time execution. We formulate this expanded set as a modified reachability problem and compute it using standard continuous-time solvers.

Video anomaly detection (VAD) is an actively studied task, having wide applications in typical scenarios such as public surveillance and road traffic safety. The task is also relevant for robotic arm interactions, where it has several downstream applications, including learning better interaction and manipulation abilities, triggering recovery procedures when anomalies occur, etc. Despite its relevance, the exploration of anomaly detection in robotic arm manipulation videos is limited by the low number of available resources. To this end, we introduce RoboVAD, a large-scale benchmark for video anomaly detection that comprises challenging cross-domain evaluation scenarios, where certain actions (tasks executed by a robotic arm) and anomaly types (mistakes that occur while performing certain tasks) remain unseen during training. RoboVAD is designed to benchmark VAD methods in realistic scenarios, where robotic arms can perform unforeseen tasks, and thereby encounter new anomaly types. We train and evaluate several state-of-the-art VAD methods, including a novel method specifically adapted for robotic arm manipulation. While the proposed method outperforms many state-of-the-art competitors, all methods remain below a micro-averaged frame-level AUC threshold of 70% in the most challenging evaluation setup, confirming the difficulty of the proposed benchmark. We publicly release our dataset and code at https://zenodo.org/records/22754659.

Soft robotic systems have long been theorized as ideal candidates for use in search and rescue operations; however, there have been significant barriers to entry in graduating soft robotic systems from the laboratory to the field. To address this gap in replicable, reliable soft robot systems, we present the designs for SPROUT, the Soft Pathfinding Robotic Observation Unit. The system has matured over years of interaction with professional urban search and rescue communities, with the goal of operating in dusty, wet, and isolated conditions. This manuscript contains supplementary material, including code, parts manifests, CAD assemblies, and build instructions to allow the broader robotics research community to build their own SPROUT systems. The modular hardware and ROS 2-based software stack support task-specific payloads and control functions, allowing SPROUT to be adapted for applications beyond search and rescue, including infrastructure inspection and archaeology. Here, we demonstrate SPROUT performing a variety of challenging inspection and traversal tasks in collapsed structure training sites used by first responders. The main project page is available online at https://sprout-mitll.github.io/sprout/.

Approaches to incorporating human awareness into mobile robot decision-making mainly focus on collision avoidance in low-level motion planning, often overlooking the challenges posed by human presence and high-level behavior. To address this vacancy, we present HINT-Plan, a novel approach to integrate human intention prediction into robot task planning. HINT-Plan employs Vision Language Models (VLMs) to anticipate high-level human intentions from third-person image observations, convert them into goal states, and solve joint task-planning problems. To effectively enable scene awareness in context-rich environments, we use hierarchical Scene Graphs (SGs) as high-level representations of the environment, and translate environmental topology and actionable knowledge into formal planning language to ensure executable plans. Evaluated in a photorealistic simulation, HINT-Plan achieves an overall success rate of 69.71% in joint human-robot task planning, substantially outperforming the baselines by up to 35.29%, while also reducing functional conflicts. The results show the effectiveness of explicitly incorporating inferred human intentions into formal multi-agent task planning for proactive human-aware robot decision-making.

Robot swarms, by virtue of their decentralised architecture, are a natural tool for scalable, robust modelling of spatial fields, such as water temperature, wind velocity, or terrain elevation. However, existing methods rely on external positioning systems that allow each robot to determine its own position in space. Here, we introduce location-unaware Gaussian process regression (LU-GPR) as a solution to the modelling of spatial fields in the absence of such positioning systems. LU-GPR allows each robot to infer the posterior mean and variance of the field in space, while simultaneously agreeing on a common frame of reference with its peers, using only local sensing and communication. We propose an online algorithm that allows each robot to consistently infer local estimates as its local frame of reference converges to the common one. By means of a product of experts model, each robot also combines the estimates of its peers with its own to obtain a global model. Our results show that LU-GPR scales well with the number of robots and is robust to limited communication ranges. We also demonstrate how it can be used in real-world monitoring scenarios to estimate the flow of an evacuating crowd.

Hybrid dynamical systems provide a powerful modeling framework for robotic systems, particularly in contact-rich environments. However, ensuring safety and performance in such systems remains challenging due to the intricate coupling between continuous dynamics and discrete mode transitions. In this work, we extend classical Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability analysis, a formal verification method for continuous-time nonlinear systems, to hybrid dynamical systems. Our framework characterizes safe sets for hybrid systems through a generalized value function defined over both discrete and continuous states while accounting for control constraints and model uncertainty. We additionally provide a numerical algorithm to compute this value function. Building on these safe sets, we propose two different mechanisms to integrate performance objectives. First, we introduce a hybrid least-restrictive safety filter that intervenes on both the discrete and continuous components of a nominal controller only when necessary to avoid unsafe states, thereby preserving nominal behavior whenever possible. Second, we formulate and compute hybrid backward reach-avoid tubes, enabling the simultaneous enforcement of safety and goal-reaching behavior, an extension not previously addressed within hybrid HJ reachability. This enables the synthesis of continuous and discrete control policies that guarantee both safety and task completion. We validate our framework through simulation studies and real-world experiments on a quadrupedal robot, demonstrating its effectiveness in hybrid mode planning and safety-critical applications.

Vision-language-action (VLA) systems already bring together two valuable resources for robot learning: rich visual representations and demonstrations of successful task execution. Intrinsic Robot Rewarding (IRR) proposes to use these resources for a second, complementary purpose: evaluating the robot's own outcomes and providing feedback for policy improvement. Successful demonstration endpoints define task-specific references, and the policy's frozen visual encoder provides the feature space in which new outcomes are assessed. The core reward mechanism adds a reference bank and a scoring operation to the existing pipeline, without requiring a separate learned evaluator or an additional perception backbone. Our position is that this reuse offers a promising route to lower integration effort, efficient reward computation, and reduced recurring human outcome scoring. Building on established research in visual rewards and learning from experience, IRR brings these ideas into the robot's existing perception and demonstration pipeline. An operational COMAU Racer 3 demonstrator is available at technology readiness level 4 (TRL 4). This laboratory foundation supports the next research step: connecting internal outcome evaluation to physical policy improvement. We present the reward formulation, central research questions, and an evaluation methodology linking reward reliability to task success and supervision effort. The intended contribution is a reusable approach to learn and improve from the data and experience already available in industrial robot systems.

The exploration of high-dimensional spaces remains a challenging problem, in particular in the presence of narrow passages and small clearances. We propose novel sampling-based path-planning methods for high-dimensional spaces combining Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT) and Hit-and-Run (HAR) random walks by decoupling the point being extended from the direction of extension. We also show that RRT and HAR appear as special cases of a generic algorithm coupling the biases used for the point and direction extension, respectively. We further study a sparse-move strategy in which only a fraction p_r of the robots is moved at each step, helping both RRT and the proposed HAR algorithms handle cluttered instances. Tests are presented for two families of models: classical piano mover problems in 3D, and complex molecular systems involving tens of rigid domains moving relatively to one another -- the latter viewed as independent robots exploring the motion space SE(3)N . Within seconds on a standard laptop, our algorithms solve instances with up to 64 robots and 384 degrees of freedom. We conclude by suggesting one of our methods, HARF, as the method of choice for complex multi-robot planning problems, being up to two orders of magnitude faster than the classical RRT moving all robots at each step--when it succeeds at all, and still up to 2.4 fold faster on most instances when both use their best p_r.

Physical AI requires more than increasingly large robot datasets: intelligent robots acquire knowledge through continuous interaction with the physical world. We argue that the defining scientific resource of Physical AI is therefore not raw robot data alone, but robot experience - physically grounded interaction whose observations, actions, embodiment, context, and outcomes preserve the perception-action-consequence loop. We introduce the Robot Data Factory (RDF), a mission-driven infrastructure and methodology for continuously generating, validating, benchmarking, and reusing such experience. RDF organizes heterogeneous robots and environment-specific training grounds through reproducible missions, skill curricula, synchronized multimodal sensing, external ground truth, an agentic robot network, data pipelines, and living benchmarks. Rather than treating datasets as static end products, RDF implements a closed Deploy-Measure-Learn-Repeat cycle in which validated physical experience supports world models, vision-language-action models, embodied policies, digital twins, and subsequent robot deployment. We further formalize robot experience and its quality, introduce a mission-task-skill-episode-dataset-benchmark-capability hierarchy, and derive quantitative scaling laws and an algorithmic synthesis procedure connecting robot fleet size, sensor rates, storage, learning representations, tokenization, training compute, inference, and latency to Embodied-AI cluster requirements. The framework is instantiated in three complementary physical training grounds for domestic, environmental, and energy applications. RDF thus reframes robot data generation as a continuous scientific production process and provides a pathway toward reproducible, scalable, and eventually federated infrastructure for Physical AI.

Runtime Verification is well suited to autonomous and robotic systems because it checks the behaviour that is actually observed during execution. Its main limitation, however, is that it is usually reactive: the monitor detects a violation only after the system has already performed a bad event. This can be too late in domains where failures are costly or unsafe. In this paper we present PREDICTIVE VARANUS, a two-stage verification pipeline that combines VARANUS, a runtime verifier that uses models written in the process algebra Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), with predictive runtime verification for LTL. A CSP model is first used as a conformance gate over the observed event trace; the same model is then translated into a Buchi automaton that constrains the futures explored by a predictive LTL monitor. In this way, out-of-model behaviour is rejected immediately, while model-consistent prefixes can be classified as already guaranteeing satisfaction, already forcing violation, or still being inconclusive for the monitored temporal property. We formalise the combined monitor, explain its implementation, and illustrate the approach on a robotic rover for nuclear-store inspection. The case study shows how the combination of CSP validation and predictive LTL can provide earlier verdicts than standard runtime monitoring while reusing an existing design-time CSP model.

Continuum robots enable smooth shape morphing and safe interaction in confined environments. However, most existing systems are task-specific and depend on external sensing infrastructure, limiting their adaptability and real-world deployment. This paper presents a self-contained modular continuum robotic platform that combines mechanical reconfigurability with onboard pose estimation. The robot is constructed from interchangeable continuum joints with analytically precomputed stiffness, allowing rapid assembly and direct programming of the robot shape. Proprioceptive sensing is achieved using magnetic sensors and a modular learning-based framework, where a single model is trained per joint and reused across configurations. The system is experimentally validated in real world, demonstrating self-sensing capabilities and adaptation without external tracking.

Recent advances in robot imitation learning have produced visuomotor policies that predict actions directly from visual observations. Yet visually similar scenes can require different actions as target position, object height, or contact geometry changes. Pretrained RGB features may map these geometrically distinct states to similar policy inputs, while simply adding depth requires the policy to learn RGB-depth correspondence from the same limited demonstrations used to learn control. We introduce StereoPatch, a patch-aligned RGB-depth representation that binds registered metric geometry directly to the RGB patches used for action prediction. On a shared 2-D patch grid, asymmetric cross-attention incorporates depth information into the corresponding RGB features before action decoding. The resulting StereoPatch Tokens provide a geometry-aware visual representation that can condition general visuomotor policies without changing their underlying learning objectives. Across six real-robot tasks, StereoPatch achieves higher closed-loop success than appearance-only, geometry-only, raw RGB-D, and late-fusion baselines. Additional experiments across three simulation suites evaluate compatibility across visuomotor policy architectures, spatial generalization, and operating limits. Results suggest that resolving control-relevant geometric ambiguity benefits from aligning depth directly with the visual features used for action prediction, rather than supplying it as an independent modality. Project page: https://aus.bot/research/stereopatch/.

Structured spatial data require quantum encodings that preserve geometric relations, expose measurable observables, and remain implementable on finite-depth hardware. This work introduces a quantum representation and circuit architecture for rigid-body transformations and specializes it to Denavit--Hartenberg kinematics of serial open-chain manipulators. Each translational contribution is factorized into a classical metric magnitude and a signed unit direction encoded by a single-qubit Bloch vector, while parameterized rotations reproduce the ordered propagation of frame directions. A selector register prepares probabilities proportional to the contribution magnitudes, and the reduced state of a designated readout qubit encodes their normalized weighted sum. The retained classical scale then reconstructs the metric end-effector position. Two additional readout qubits encode terminal-frame axes, providing a compact and geometrically interpretable pose interface. At the ideal expectation-value level, measured Pauli observables reproduce the corresponding classical kinematic quantities. Alternative circuit architectures realize the same representation with different tradeoffs in qubit count, circuit depth, controlled operations, and measurement requirements. Validation on a serial manipulator yields numerically negligible position and orientation reconstruction errors under ideal simulation. Finite-shot simulations, noisy executions, transpilation analysis, and a hardware demonstration further characterize statistical error, noise sensitivity, and implementation overhead without asserting computational advantage.

This letter investigates how the parameters of a slope-aware variable-admittance filter influence user preferences in force-based interaction with a robotic guide dog for visually impaired individuals. The proposed system consists of a quadruped robot equipped with a sensor-free rigid handle for physical guidance. The framework combines path following, momentum-based interaction-wrench estimation, and a variable-admittance filter whose stiffness and damping are adapted online from slope information extracted by the robot's depth camera. The adaptation policies are evaluated through high-fidelity simulations and a human-subject study involving blindfolded sighted participants. Multiple strategies are compared using a Taguchi L9 design of experiments. Preliminary main-effect results suggest that increasing stiffness uphill and decreasing it downhill improves both objective and subjective metrics, whereas damping shows no significant main effect.

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.

As robotic systems grow more general, legal norms are needed to integrate them into society. This paper extends the isomorphism problem of aligning legal source texts with their encodings, and measures two key challenges to robot normative control: (1) the grounding isomorphism gap, where perception error grounds false atoms for legal reasoning, and (2) the ontological isomorphism gap, where one legal conclusion admits many faithful translations into planning constraints. The paper introduces a legal planning stack that employs Defeasible Deontic Logic (DDL) to constrain a motion planner. The stack leverages learned world models to plan and to provide legal context, enabling ex ante governance that intervenes before an illegal action is executed. It was deployed on a simulated robot arm pushing a cube across a 3x3 grid. The findings were (1) the legislated agent abided substantially more often than the non-legislated one, and modeling perception uncertainty lifted abidance even further, (2) the legal reasoning ran efficiently at runtime and its verdicts were auditable, and (3) the stack adapted to exogenous signals and endogenous rule changes. Both gaps were measured: (4) world model and probe error corrupted the factual input for the DDL reasoner, and (5) a single law admitted several faithful metric interpretations yielding drastically different abidance. Thus, ex ante legislation functions as intended, and closing these gaps with a standardized mapping from the law to runtime constraints and improved fact grounding from perception will yield robust laws that align robot behavior with society's norms. Project page: https://dylanwaldner-cail.github.io/Legislated-Planner/.

Pretrained generative robot policies can produce effective behaviors across diverse environments, but deployment can lead to requirements and preferences that may not have been represented during training. Furthermore, at deployment, an operator, user, or application may assign these requirements and preferences a priority order that can vary across deployments. For example, embodiment-specific feasibility constraints may need to be satisfied first, while user-specific preferences guide behavior among the feasible options. We show that a frozen generative robot policy---based on either diffusion or flow matching---can be steered at inference time to respect such lexicographically ordered deployment objectives. To achieve this, we introduce two modifications to the sampler. First, we apply dynamic-barrier guidance to sampled trajectories, constraining lower-priority updates so that higher-priority costs do not increase (up to first order). Second, we select the executed sample using a cascade that successively filters candidate samples according to each priority level. The policy weights remain unchanged. On a navigation benchmark, we demonstrate that our method improves success, traversability, and preference compliance over the frozen policy, and achieves substantially better compliance than tuned weighted-sum baselines. The same method transfers to a flow-matching manipulation policy on LIBERO, where it improves compliance without reducing task success. A controlled manipulation study further shows that, in settings where a fixed weight can match the desired ordering, the dynamic barrier reaches comparable best performance over a substantially wider range of parameter settings.

In this technical report, we propose Pelican-Sim 1.0, a general world model simulator for embodied intelligence that predicts future observations from visual context and robot actions to support downstream learning and decision making. The model incorporates four key design features: (1) Unified action representation: a 28-dimensional action value space covering most mainstream embodiments, keeping one model valid across heterogeneous devices. (2) Action-visual injection: URDF- and camera-rendered action videos bridge actions and pixels, giving markedly better controllability across embodiments, scenes, and tasks (PSNR +0.904 over alternative fusion baselines). (3) Sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE): sparse MoE layers add capacity for heterogeneous dynamics and absorb the action modality while reducing inter-modality conflict (FVD -6.530 vs. the dense backbone). (4) Efficient rollout generation: causal adaptation and few-step distillation yield a four-step autoregressive simulator, achieving a 5.67-fold speedup over the 35-step model. Benefiting from these designs, we train on approximately one million real-world and simulated trajectories and obtain large gains in action controllability and video quality: PSNR improves over the strongest evaluated baselines by 4.636 on AgiBotWorld Beta, 2.080 on RoboMIND, and 10.343 on RoboTwin, with the adapted EWMBench DYN score up 0.426 on RoboTwin. Relying on this, four downstream applications on RoboTwin succeed: 500 generated trajectories added to 50 demonstrations per task raise policy success from 70% to 93%; policy evaluation reaches a Pearson correlation of 0.994 across five checkpoints; and relative success gains reach 47.7% for action selection and 20.3% for policy improvement. Qualitative generalization across trajectory, scene, object, embodiment, and viewpoint shifts highlights its potential as a general-purpose world model simulator.

This paper presents an online coverage path planning algorithm for unknown environments. During navigation, the initially unknown search area is progressively decomposed into disconnected subareas as new obstacle information is acquired and coverage proceeds. These subareas are organized in an incrementally constructed decomposition tree that preserves their hierarchical parent-child relationships. Based on this tree, a global coverage tour is maintained and updated online by prioritizing newly generated child subareas according to their exploration states and distances from the robot. A local planner then generates coverage motions within each selected subarea, allowing the robot to adapt its trajectory as the environment is gradually revealed. Its performance is evaluated via high-fidelity simulations in complex scenarios. The results show improved coverage efficiency in terms of path length and overlap ratio in comparison to three baseline algorithms.

Robots designed to mediate human groups often fall into the solutionist trap: they are framed as sociable agents that fix problems such as conflict, disengagement, or lack of coordination. We suggest a different way of thinking. Rather than discrete agents, robots can be understood as situated elements of shared environments; catalysts and carriers of group experience whose meaning emerges through how people position, interpret, and interact with them. From this perspective, robots are not there to repair some ostensible dysfunctionality, but to enable group-level sense-making around care, norms, and identity. Our prior work on robotic street furniture suggests that this does not happen by imitating human sociality but by taking the shape of deliberately constrained, group-facing entities that happen and act for \textit{us} without being socially entangled as one of us. We thus understand robots in public spaces not in terms of autonomy or intelligence, but as a relational capacity. This implies designing robots not in our image or for our utility, but grounded in our needs in being and becoming together.

This work investigates the control strategies of complex whole-body robot teleoperation that coordinate active perception, bimanual manipulation, and navigation. We developed a hybrid control framework, combining the free-form and constrained control, for the whole-body teleoperation of the TIAGo mobile manipulator. We conducted a user study to explore people's control strategies under different task constraints such as limited time and low tolerance of errors. Our results highlight the effective use of coordinated control in improving task efficiency and reducing the risk of reaching individual joint limits. We discuss our results and their implications for designing future whole-body robot teleoperation systems.

Magnetic levitation (MagLev) systems have great potential for application in high-mix, low-volume manufacturing due to their scalability and flexibility, enabling highly reconfigurable in-machine material flow. However, their manipulation capabilities remain largely unexploited, as current applications almost exclusively focus on transportation. To enable grasping and manipulation directly on MagLev systems without requiring additional costly handling equipment, such as industrial robot arms, we present the Gripper MagBot, a low-cost parallel 6-DoF manipulator with an integrated 1-DoF gripper that mechanically couples three MagLev movers. The Gripper MagBot supports two operating configurations: a default mode and a single-track mode, selectable depending on the required stability and workspace footprint. To reconfigure a machine, the MagBot can be autonomously dropped off and picked up using a docking station. We showcase pick-and-place examples in simulation, as well as with the real Gripper MagBot using our inverse kinematics controller. CAD files, assembly instructions, a component list, and videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/gripper-magbot.

Robot foundation models achieve strong in-distribution performance but often degrade under visual distribution shifts. When learning to generate actions from pretrained visual representations, models may exploit task-irrelevant visual cues that correlate with demonstrated actions within the training distribution. Such vision-action shortcuts can undermine generalization when these correlations change under distribution shifts. Mitigating these shortcuts requires constraining how visual information is used for action generation while preserving task-relevant spatial information. We propose Latent Interface Training (LIT), a framework-agnostic two-stage strategy that first establishes a spatial-goal-conditioned action prior without images, then constrains visual conditioning through a pose-supervised latent interface. Stage 1 trains the action expert to generate action chunks conditioned on language, robot state, and each demonstrated chunk's terminal SE(3) end-effector pose, learning goal-directed action generation independently of visual cues. Stage 2 introduces a latent interface that aggregates visual and semantic representations and serves as the pretrained action expert's only visual conditioning pathway. The interface is supervised to reconstruct the terminal pose previously used to condition Stage 1, encouraging it to retain the goal-relevant spatial information needed for action generation. Across four vision-language-action and world-action architectures (Pi0.5, MolmoAct2, FAST-WAM, and ImageWAM), LIT improves overall LIBERO-Plus success by 3.87-10.70 percentage points while preserving or improving average LIBERO success. Real-world evaluations show 13.30-16.70 percentage-point gains in success aggregated across three tasks under unseen camera configurations, lighting variations, and distractors.