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.
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/.
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.