Slipsense

Vision-Language-Action models are increasingly effective for robotic manipulation, yet most predict actions directly from current observations without explicitly modeling future scene evolution. Recent methods introduce future prediction to improve action generation, but dense future modeling often requires expensive iterative denoising, while one-step alternatives can underperform their multi-step counterparts. To reconcile efficient future modeling with strong action performance, we present SLIP-VLA, a policy learning framework that equips VLA models with a Single-Step Latent Imagination for future-aware action prediction. SLIP-VLA obtains temporally dense future latent representations with a single denoising update, and we improve the perceptual sufficiency of these representations by aligning intermediate latents with future geometric and semantic features. We further improve their control sufficiency through action-conditioned latent world modeling and inverse dynamics modeling, explicitly coupling latent transitions with robot actions. SLIP-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse simulation benchmarks and real-world manipulation tasks, while its single-step latent imagination takes only 12 ms.

Low-friction surfaces challenge bipedal locomotion by limiting the contact forces available during stepping. Inspired by penguin waddling, we investigate how lateral torso motion and center of mass (COM) placement affect locomotion as surface friction changes. Using a five-actuator biped, we compare an upright-gait strategy with a penguin-inspired torso-over-stance-leg strategy across multiple COM placements in simulation and hardware. In the 3-D simulator MuJoCo, we sweep through sinusoidal leg and hip actuation parameters across four friction coefficients mu = 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7. In simulation, torso-over-stance-leg motion produces more successful controllers and higher forward speeds at low friction, with the highest speed occurring for the high-COM configuration. Hardware experiments show the same low-friction speed trend: at mu=0.12, torso-over-stance-leg motion increases forward speed and reduces cost of transport at both tested COM ratios, and the higher COM also improves both measures. The high-COM penguin configuration is the fastest and most energy efficient while maintaining low sideways foot motion. At mu=0.45, the COM trend reverses: the lower-COM configurations are faster and more energy efficient, while gait strategy has little effect on forward speed but still changes sideways foot motion. These results show that the effects of lateral torso motion and COM placement depend on the available friction, and that forward speed, energy use, and slip-related foot motion can be modulated with a penguin-inspired torso motion on hardware.

Accurate wheel slip estimation is essential for autonomous lunar rover mobility and navigation. Machine Learning models trained on terrestrial data generalize poorly to lunar terrain, and real lunar datasets are scarce due to the limited number of missions and costly data acquisition. We present Fleet-to-Lab, a transfer learning framework that leverages proprioceptive data collected by previously deployed heterogeneous lunar rovers to mitigate the Earth-Moon domain gap in slip estimation for a future deployable unit. We fuse several heterogeneous expert models into a single architecture, using a modest dataset collected after the rover deployment. We propose AcoMerge, a new hybrid swarm-intelligence algorithm that performs model fusion by searching for an optimal combi- nation of expert parameters. Experiments conducted in a high- fidelity physics simulation show balanced accuracy and macro- F1 improvements compared to deep model fusion baselines. AcoMerge exhibits competitive performance with joint training on deep architectures, while achieving higher macro-F1 and balanced accuracy on a smaller model. Overall, our framework shows model fusion as a possible transfer learning alternative for slippage estimation in space robotic missions with limited data.

Slip detection is fundamental to dexterous manipulation, yet existing systems often lack precise characterization of detection latency and cross-platform generalization. We present SlipSense, a multimodal tactile slip-detection framework built on TacV5, a compact sensor integrating a $32 \times 32$ piezoresistive array operating at 240 Hz and a 3-axis MEMS accelerometer operating at 8 kHz. The piezoresistive array captures spatial pressure distributions, while the accelerometer captures friction-induced vibrations, providing complementary slip cues. The framework performs modality-specific encoding, intra-sensor fusion, and cross-modal attention with causal temporal prediction at 240 Hz. Experiments on a dataset of 1.4 million frames spanning 37 objects demonstrate the complementarity of the two modalities. SlipSense achieves 96.7% Macro F1 with a false-positive rate below 1.6%, detecting 76% of slip events within 23.1 ms. When trained solely on UMI data, SlipSense generalizes zero-shot to a Tesollo dexterous hand, transferring across unseen objects, distinct sensor units, and robotic platforms without retraining.

This paper presents a parameter-dependent linear matrix inequality (LMI) framework for trajectory tracking of nonholonomic mobile robots subject to severe multiplicative wheel slip on variable-terrain surfaces. The sampled convex formulation, augmented with grid-to-continuum residual certification, simultaneously establishes semi-global differential input-to-state stability, a prescribed exponential decay rate, regional pole placement, and a gain-bounded feedback proxy for actuator-limited operation. A central contribution is an explicit upper bound on the additive disturbance induced by bounded multiplicative slip in the Kanayama error coordinates, bridging the physical slip mechanism and the convex synthesis paradigm. The auxiliary gain matrix and inverse storage metric are parameterized affinely in the reference velocities, while the storage metric inherits nonlinear dependence through pointwise matrix inversion. Stability is established via a cascade analysis combining variational contraction, forward invariance, slip-induced disturbance bounds, and dissipation-based trajectory reconstruction. Numerical validation compares three controllers across six reference trajectories, six disturbance classes, and a 60-second variable-terrain test featuring six severe slip patches with bidirectional slip ratios reaching +/-50%, replicated on two geometries. Supplementary studies address Gaussian sensor noise, compound stress-testing, and embedded-platform computational feasibility. Across 100 Monte-Carlo runs the proposed controller achieves complete trajectory containment within the certified envelope. On the variable-terrain scenario, peak tracking error is reduced by 12% against the fixed-gain LMI baseline and 49% against the manual baseline, with the constant-gain baseline infeasible at the prescribed decay rate.

Interactive deep image segmentation enables efficient medical image annotation by iteratively refining predictions from user prompts, such as positive and negative clicks. Recent patch-based methods, including nnInteractive, achieve strong segmentation performance but remain limited in annotation workflows by high interaction latency, limited responsiveness to successive interactions, and the lack of support for reversible prompting. Furthermore, evaluation relies predominantly on simulated rather than controlled real-user interaction studies. We present SLIP, an end-to-end trainable framework for interactive 3D medical image segmentation that decouples image encoding from prompt-guided refinement. Image features are computed once and reused, while a lightweight patch memory bank maintains an interaction-aware segmentation state shared across patches. This representation enables prediction updates by propagating interaction context throughout the image, supports reversible prompting without recomputing image features, and substantially reduces interaction latency. By separating image representation from interactive reasoning, SLIP remains compatible with a wide range of image encoders. We train a single SLIP model for general interactive segmentation across diverse anatomical structures and imaging modalities. Beyond standard simulated evaluation, we conduct a controlled prospective user study comparing manual segmentation, nnInteractive, and SLIP across three clinical annotation tasks, six expert participants, and subjective usability measures, addressing the limited human validation of interactive segmentation methods. SLIP achieves SOTA interactive segmentation performance across 13 public datasets while providing lower interaction latency, greater responsiveness, support for reversible prompting, and higher user preference than existing approaches.

Automating radiology report generation is important for improving reporting consistency and clinical workflows . While Contrastive Language--Image Pretraining (CLIP) has advanced medical vision language modeling, existing CLIP-style approaches may still provide insufficient fine-grained semantic supervision for complex report generation. Standard CLIP primarily optimizes cross-modal alignment, without explicitly structuring the textual embedding space that guides visual representation learning. To address this limitation, we propose TextSLIP, a general medical vision-language pretraining framework that augments CLIP with intra-modal text contrastive learning. By improving textual embedding discriminability through self-supervised augmented text pairs, TextSLIP is designed to provide finer-grained linguistic supervision to the visual encoder. As an initial validation, we pretrain TextSLIP on a curated dataset of 7 million brain MRI image-text pairs and fine-tune the pretrained visual encoder within a report generation architecture. In controlled comparisons with CLIP-style baselines, TextSLIP shows consistent improvements on report generation metrics. Ablation studies further suggest that text-side self-supervision contributes to the observed gains. These results indicate that text-level contrastive learning is a promising direction for improving medical visual-textual alignment, while broader validation across additional medical domains remains an important next step.

Force-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) enables tight-clearance assembly under a commanded force ceiling, but practical deployment requires determining an appropriate force limit for each object and recovering from insertion failures without exceeding it. We present a two-layer framework in which a frozen, text-only large language model (LLM) assigns a per-object force ceiling before execution and selects recovery maneuvers from a fixed action menu using compact textual force signatures. The LLM never controls force directly: a low-level controller enforces the force ceiling, the recovery policy cannot increase it, and the hidden breaking-force threshold is known only to the evaluator. We evaluate the framework on fragile bottle placement and 0.4 mm diametral-clearance gear insertion using two grippers (Robotiq 2F-140 and Franka Panda hand). A single policy passes 256/256 evaluation episodes on both fragile and robust objects without breakage, correctly predicts release timing, and completes a full table-pick-and-insert pipeline with a mean peak force of 5.4 N. Under injected in-grip slip, the force-signature recovery strategy resolves 40% and 64% of failures on the two grippers, whereas a press-harder baseline is either ineffective or causes frequent breakage. We also report negative results, including the failure of PPO to solve the task under strict force constraints and unsuccessful learned release strategies. All experiments are conducted in rigid-body simulation with hidden force-threshold breakage; no sim-to-real claim is made.

Conventional traction control architectures intervene only after the adhesion limit of a tire has already been breached. This paper investigates whether Rolling Split Conformal Prediction , monitoring the volatility of non-conformity residuals from a per-driver Random Forest model of expected slip behavior , can serve as a statistically grounded pre-incident warning signal, ahead of gross traction loss. Unlike an earlier internal draft of this work, the evaluation reported here corrects a confound in the slip proxy (vehicle speed is included as an explicit model feature, not left implicit in the target's denominator), uses every racing lap for each driver rather than only the fastest lap, and is scored against real, timestamped incident labels extracted from FIA Race Control Messages and track-limits lap deletions rather than narrated post-hoc. The result is negative: across 19 drivers and 55,563 test-phase telemetry samples, the rolling-volatility detector achieves a mean precision of essentially 0.0 and mean recall of 0.0 against 14 ground-truth incidents, while flagging on average 15.3% of all samples as anomalous , too high a false-alarm rate for any early-warning use. A static 95th-percentile threshold baseline performs no better in any way that would justify the added complexity of the conformal-volatility formulation. Residual autocorrelation diagnostics show the split-conformal exchangeability assumption is violated for every driver (Ljung-Box p < 0.001, n = 19/19), which is one plausible driver of the high false-alarm rate. We report this as a methodologically rigorous negative finding, diagnose its likely causes, and outline what a genuinely predictive version of this approach would require.

Autonomously controlling and handling a vehicle at and beyond its stability limit is a mathematically and computationally demanding task. Prior demonstrations of automated drifting have been limited to research platforms with instantaneous torque delivery and independently actuated wheels, leaving their applicability to production vehicles with actuator latencies and mechanically coupled axles uncertain. To overcome these issues, we design a predictor to compensate for powertrain delays, develop a revised control formulation to accommodate higher actuation latencies as well as a differential coupling on the driven axle, and introduce brake-based velocity stabilization. This paper presents the controller framework, the model extensions, and real-world experimental results. We observe that our controller enables a production sports car with a combustion engine to robustly sustain circular and figure-eight drifts, limiting lateral error to 1.1 m and sideslip overshoot to 0.06 rad despite actuator delays exceeding 250 ms, while mitigating oscillations and maintaining stable path and sideslip tracking. In conclusion, our results establish that autonomous drifting is feasible on production-ready vehicles, opening pathways to advanced safety systems capable of stabilizing cars in scenarios where traditional control fails.

Legged robots rely on accurate ground interaction awareness to traverse variable terrains, such as slippery surfaces. Existing slip detection methods often rely on kinematics and proprioception, which lack the sensitivity to detect early-stage slips that occur prior to catastrophic instability. Thus, this paper presents SlipSense, a novel framework for online force-based slip detection using a custom lightweight sensorized foot for quadrupeds to detect slip. The framework integrates a multimodal sensor design with a LSTM-based model to infer ground reaction forces and detect slip-indicative anomalies during locomotion. The proposed framework is deployed on a Unitree Go1 quadruped to demonstrate blind online slip detection over a slippery terrain. Our method detects early-stage slips down to an average displacement of 24.1 +/-6.4mm with an overall accuracy of 85.9%. This represents a 3.3-fold finer detection resolution and a 24% relative accuracy improvement over a standard kinematic baseline that uses foot velocity inferred through state estimation. The work in this paper serves as a foundation for force-aware gait adaptation in legged robotic locomotion, allowing future controllers to estimate terrain friction and adjust constraints, thus improving the overall stability of the system.

In this letter, we present a hierarchical control framework that enables wheeled bipedal robots to perform planar object sliding tasks with their wheeled legs. The proposed approach formulates a nonlinear model predictive controller (NMPC) based on a reduced-order three rigid bodies (TRB) dynamical model that explicitly accounts for the hip roll degree of freedom and multiple wheel-environment contact modes, which is essential for lateral stepping and pedipulation tasks. Within this framework, the NMPC simultaneously regulates robot locomotion and interaction forces, allowing the robot to stably execute both rolling and object manipulation behaviors. A trajectory-optimization-based robot-object motion planner is developed to generate reference motions that incorporate stick-slip transitions in ground-object contact. Two representative pedipulation motions, namely scooting and lateral sliding, are validated through real-world hardware experiments, in which the robot successfully retrieves a 1 kg object from under a desk and slides a 4 kg object over a distance of 0.228 m via scooting.

This paper introduces a novel tactile sensor for in-hand manipulation with slip-aware control that integrates velocity and force/torque sensing with pressure map estimation into a single device with a deformable contact pad. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first sensor to combine these sensing modalities within a single compliant structure. The sensor features a deformable contact surface and can robustly track both flat and curved surfaces across a wide range of diffuse surface materials. Its performance is evaluated through a comprehensive set of experiments that highlight both its capabilities and limitations. The sensor is designed for rapid and low-cost fabrication using a combination of standard PCB manufacturing and rapid prototyping techniques.

Knowledge of real-time road slipperiness, or even better, a refined estimate of peak grip potential, is a critical input for vehicle warning and intervention control systems. Typically, friction is estimated through dynamics-based recursive estimators by calculating the slip slope; however, its efficacy is heavily constrained by the vehicle dynamic scenario. When the vehicle is cruising and there is little to no slip, these methods become ineffective due to the inability of present-day production-grade sensors, such as wheel speed sensors, and methods to either measure or accurately estimate micro slip, which is crucial for distinguishing different surfaces. To address this challenge, the correlation between vehicle signals and road surface condition during cruising needs to be uncovered using machine learning. In this paper, a feature-based framework and an end-to-end data-driven framework are used to correlate the statistics of vehicle dynamics behavior with the condition of the road surface and perform binary classification into grip, dry or damp, and slip, snow or ice, conditions. A sliding-window approach is adopted to batch a short buffered window of wheel speeds, wheel torques, longitudinal acceleration, steering angle, and yaw rate, which are fed into a machine learning module for predicting the road state. Validation results on public-road data show scenarios where the data-driven method identifies the road surface correctly even during cruising, showing promise for accurate data-driven friction-related state estimators in the field of tire and vehicle dynamics.

Existing language-image pre-training for remote sensing object detection is constrained by Monolithic Label Learning, which relies on exhaustively enumerating open-set categories via black-box data to acquire fine-grained representations, creating a dependency incompatible with the domain's inherent data scarcity. To transcend this bottleneck, we propose SLIP-RS, establishing a Structured-Attribute Decoupling Paradigm that maps the open-ended category space into a finite, physically meaningful attribute space, unlocking fine-grained discriminability via explicit structural logic. This paradigm is realized via two technical pillars: (1) Structured-Attribute Contrastive Learning, which enforces the learning of decoupled intrinsic visual logic via combinatorial attribute augmentation; and (2) Conformal Attribute Reliability Engine, which leverages conformal prediction theory to rigorously distill high-fidelity supervision from noisy sources, yielding RS-Attribute-15M, the largest dataset with over 15 million attribute annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SLIP-RS establishes unprecedented performance in fine-grained detection and cross-domain generalization, validating structured attributes as a vital foundation for remote sensing. Code: https://github.com/facias914/SLIP-RS.

To cope with the large contexts that long-horizon LLM agents produce, modern frameworks increasingly rely on compaction -- invoking an LLM to rewrite the accumulated trajectory into a shorter summary that the agent resumes from. Today, compaction runs synchronously on the critical path of agent execution but this can unpredictably degrade accuracy due to a structural validation gap: the compactor must condense context but is fundamentally unaware of precisely what information the agent will need later. Further, because post-compaction agent steps are conditioned on the new summary, targeted validation criteria do not exist and errors silently propagate through coherent but incorrect behavior. Our key insight is that asynchronous compaction efficiently addresses this gap: by running the compactor in parallel with continued agent execution on the original context, the candidate summary and the agent's next steps are generated independently from the same pre-compaction state, yielding a validation signal independent of the summary itself. We build Slipstream, a trajectory-grounded compaction system that uses a judge to validate the candidate summary against the agent's continued reasoning, checking that it preserves both the agent's forward intent and the key facts and constraints it depends on. Across long-horizon coding (SWE-bench Verified) and web-browsing (BrowseComp) workloads, Slipstream improves task accuracy by up to 8.8 percentage points while reducing end-to-end latency by up to 39.7%.

Robotic fruit harvesting often fails to reliably detect whether a fruit has been successfully picked, limiting efficiency and increasing crop damage. This problem is difficult due to compliant fruit and grippers, variable stem attachment, and occlusions in orchard environments. Prior work has explored vision-based perception and multi-sensor learning approaches for pick state estimation. However, minimal sensor sets and phase-dependent sensing strategies for accurate pick and slip detection remain largely unexplored. In this work, we design and evaluate a multimodal sensing suite integrated into a compliant suction-based apple gripper. Our approach is unique because it identifies which sensors are most informative at different phases of the pick, enabling predictive detection of failures before they occur. The contributions of this paper are a phase-dependent evaluation of multimodal sensors and the identification of minimal sensor sets for reliable pick state classification. Experiments in a real apple orchard show that Random Forest and Multilayer Perceptron classifiers detect successful picks and impending failures with over 90% accuracy, and Random Forest predicts pick/slip events within 0.09 s of human-annotated ground truth.

Regulating grasping force to reduce slippage during dynamic object interaction remains a fundamental challenge in robotic manipulation, especially when objects are manipulated by multiple rolling contacts, have unknown properties (such as mass or surface conditions), and when external sensing is unreliable. In contrast, humans can quickly regulate grasping force by touch, even without visual cues. Inspired by this ability, we aim to enable robotic hands to rapidly explore objects and learn tactile-driven grasping force control under motion and limited sensing. We propose a physics-informed energy abstraction that models the object as a virtual energy container. The inconsistency between the fingers' applied power and the object's retained energy provides a physically grounded signal for inferring slip-aware stability. Building on this abstraction, we employ model-based learning and planning to efficiently model energy dynamics from tactile sensing and perform real-time grasping force optimization. Experiments in both simulation and hardware demonstrate that our method can learn grasping force control from scratch within minutes, effectively reduce slippage, and extend grasp duration across diverse motion-object pairs, all without relying on external sensing or prior object knowledge. (Video: https://youtu.be/l3TJV29Mo6w)