Papers for

autonomous warehouse operators

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Robot policies learn safe actions from simple feasibility checks

Learning Safe Flow Matching Robot Policies from Binary Feasibility Oracles

Abstract: Robot foundation models increasingly rely on flow-based action generation for general-purpose manipulation, yet the generated actions are not guaranteed to satisfy physical constraints such as joint limits and collision avoidance. This problem is especially challenging when the feasible set cannot be described analytically and is accessible only through black-box feasibility oracles. We study this practical oracle-only setting and propose an oracle-guided differentiable safeguard for safe flow-matching robot policies. The safeguard uses binary feasibility queries to correct unsafe updates in the forward pass, while extracting local boundary information to provide constraint-aware learning signals in the backward pass. Combined with discrete-time flow matching, the same safeguard is used during training and inference, enabling forward--backward aligned policy learning without explicit or differentiable constraint models. Experiments on obstacle-aware robotic manipulation demonstrate 100% constraint satisfaction while preserving task performance.

Thu 29 OctRoboticsArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Robots must follow safety rules like avoiding obstacles, but sometimes it's hard to define these rules precisely. The authors created a method that only needs simple yes-no safety tests to teach robots how to move safely. Their approach adjusts the robot’s plans in real time to avoid unsafe moves and learns from these adjustments. This lets robots safely complete tasks without needing detailed safety models.
Open → 2610.40075v1

Category-level object pose method works well from synthetic to real scenes

GenCOPE: Syn2Real Generalized Category-Level Object Pose Estimation for Robotic Picking

Abstract: Category-level object pose estimation (COPE), capable of generalizing to intra-class unknown objects, has become a core technique for robotic 3D scene understanding. However, existing COPE methods still require labor-intensive recollection of real-world training data for novel object categories, which limits their scalability in practical applications. This paper aims to achieve synthetic-to-real (Syn2Real) generalized COPE, where a model is trained solely on rendered synthetic data and directly generalized to real-world deployments. The central challenge lies in the significant domain gap between synthetic and real-world data, particularly in texture appearance. To address this, we aim to enhance domain generalization by learning domain-invariant representations that capture semantic commonalities among objects within the same category. We introduce 2D and 3D semantic consistency constraints to reduce the sensitivity of feature encoders to domain-specific features. In addition, we propose an end-to-end pose regression framework that performs 2D-3D cross consistency learning, leveraging dense cross-modality fusion to further refine pose estimation. Since simplicity and effectiveness are essential for real-world robotic deployment, our model operates exclusively on global features, yielding a highly lightweight and efficient architecture. Extensive experiments on the REAL275 and Wild6D benchmarks, as well as real-world robotic manipulation scenes, show superior Syn2Real generalization performance of our paradigm. Code and demos are released at https://paperreview99.github.io/GenCOPE/.

Thu 1 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Robots need to understand where objects are in 3D to pick them up correctly. Most methods require real photos of objects for training, which takes a lot of work. The authors present a system trained only on computer-generated images that can still figure out the poses of real-world objects it has never seen before. They do this by teaching the system to focus on features common across all objects of the same type, ignoring details like texture that differ between fake and real images. Their approach works well on standard tests and in actual robot picking tasks.
Open → 2610.01758v1

Federated learning improves robot manipulation across different tasks

Federated Subspace Guided Vision-Language-Action Policy Distillation for Non-IID Multi-Robot Manipulation

Abstract: Federated learning offers a natural way for multiple robots to jointly improve manipulation policies without requiring centralized access to training demonstrations. However, non-IID task and environment distributions can induce representation drift and mutually incompatible robot-policy updates, making naive parameter aggregation destructive. We present FedDRMan, a federated subspace-guided distillation framework for heterogeneous robot manipulation. At each communication round, the server model provides a frozen teacher for local behavior cloning, while low-rank multimodal subspace and action-distribution distillation preserve globally useful representation geometry and policy behavior. To address heterogeneous aggregation, FedDRMan groups clients by update compatibility and maintains a persistent model for each cluster. The server then spectrally rebalances each compatible aggregate to mitigate attenuation of weaker task-relevant robot-policy update directions. Extensive experiments on LIBERO across diverse non-IID settings, heterogeneity levels, client participation variation, together with ablations and aggregation analyses, show that FedDRMan substantially improves knowledge transfer and consistently outperforms strong federated baselines achieving a peak mean success rate of 80.7%, 11.6 percentage points above the strongest evaluated federated baseline.

Sat 26 SeptRoboticsComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
The gist
Training multiple robots to work together on different tasks is tricky because their experiences and environments vary a lot. The authors designed a method called FedDRMan that helps robots share useful skills without needing to pool all their data in one place. Their system groups robots with similar updates and carefully blends their knowledge to keep important behaviors intact. Tests showed FedDRMan helped robots learn better manipulation skills than other federation methods, boosting success rates by a noticeable margin.
Open → 2609.32239v1