automated warehouse teams

Abstract: People often learn how an unfamiliar object moves through a small exploratory push, using its response to guide their next motion. Inspired by this behavior, we study humanoids pushing carts whose mass and caster stiffness are initially unknown. Our object-centric framework closes online estimation, flow-based planning, and whole-body control into a loop, creating a tension: replacing the plan whenever the belief shifts disrupts the maneuver under way, while keeping it strands the robot on a path its evidence has ruled out. Belief-Overlap Partial Inversion (BOPI) scales revision to agreement, inverting the flow under the old belief only as far as the beliefs disagree before reconstructing under the new one. Across 18 simulated goals it lowers pooled final position and yaw error by roughly 33% and 47% against fixed-depth replanning, and on hardware it translates and turns a non-holonomic cart.

Abstract: We present ZeroBot, a real2sim framework for learning a robot manipulation task from scratch in minutes under challenging conditions: zero human demonstrations, zero policy pre-training, and zero known object models. Given only a single view of an object and a goal pose for that object, ZeroBot uses image-to-3D generative models to obtain a complete object mesh, which is used in simulation for large-scale parallel reinforcement learning. To accelerate training, we introduce an action space which leverages the generated geometry and learned value function to sample states involving robot-object contact. When evaluated on real-world tasks including grasping, pushing, articulated object interaction, and multi-stage manipulation, ZeroBot achieves an 87% success rate with an average training time of 119 seconds. These results show the value of using image-to-3D models in a real2sim framework for rapid, autonomous robot learning.

Abstract: We present a laser-tracker-assisted hand-eye calibration method for camera-equipped mobile robots. The method combines laser-tracker-based 3D metrology with camera-based 2D observations. Building on our previous laser-tracker-assisted camera-to-robot calibration method for ground-observing mobile robots, we present a generalized formulation for calibrating the camera pose in the coordinate system of tracker-localized mobile robots. The new approach relaxes assumptions of our previous method on robot and camera configuration by chaining multiple calibration targets resulting in a more general approach supporting various camera-equipped mobile robot systems.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: Estimating the 3D center of mass of unknown objects is challenging when grasping is infeasible, geometry is irregular, or mass distribution is uneven. We present a force-based method that estimates CoM height and mass from a single sub-critical tipping experiment by a robot manipulator. The robot applies a quasistatic elevated push and retract motion, using force-angle measurements recorded during tipping to identify parameters from the object trajectory. Our proposed push-retract cycle mitigates frictional bias, enabling generalized fitting. We experimentally validate our method using a robot manipulator with a six-axis force torque sensor on varying types of objects without prior shape information and without specific models. We also propose a method to prevent toppling, keeping the object in a sub-critical tipping regime by leveraging a safety margin. In experimental studies, our method recovers mass, CoM height, and toppling angle with relative errors below 5.0 percent across all unknown objects. This work demonstrates reliable 3D inertial parameter estimation under proper safety thresholds in tipping. Our proposed method informs and enables reliable non-prehensile manipulation and robotic grasping of challenging objects that were previously infeasible.