industrial automation developers

Abstract: Cyber-physical systems are increasingly complex, requiring high throughput, low-latency data processing across multiple cores and compute devices. Additional functional safety challenges dictate the need for high system availability in the presence of failures. Together, these requirements are addressed using a network of compute nodes across which data processing, control and functional safety tasks are distributed. A key challenge is how to address the service requirements of independent data flows, spanning a set of hosts and I/O devices. In this paper, we show how to develop connectivity between hosts using a custom xDCI gadget driver that uses USB interrupters to differentiate the processing of separate data flows. Our solution is the first to handle both isochronous and bulk communication at USB 3.0 transfer rates, with predictable bus latencies down to the granularity of a 125 microsecond microframe, which is sufficient for many CPS control operations. We present an end-to-end solution that couples the predictable execution of user-level tasks with interrupt processing and data communication, so that multiple virtual connections are able to share a common bus. This work is not only applicable to host networking but also device I/O, which makes it arguably desirable for CPS scenarios requiring short-range communication, such as in vehicle control area networks or robotics.

Abstract: General-purpose dexterous manipulation requires policies to transfer knowledge from related tasks to new tasks with only a few target demonstrations. Existing benchmarks often provide too many target demonstrations. They also leave the differences between source and target tasks uncontrolled. As a result, they cannot clearly distinguish knowledge transfer from task memorization. Our key insight is the Core-Gen principle. Core tasks are related tasks that share a functional interaction and provide source knowledge, while a Gen task is a novel target within the same functional family that has only a few demonstrations. This setup tests whether a policy can reuse functional interaction knowledge. Based on this principle, we propose Evo-DexBench, which controls both source-task relatedness and target-task exposure. It comprises 30 tasks in six functional families and a VR teleoperation pipeline. The resulting dataset covers three everyday scenes per task. It contains 1,248 multimodal demonstrations collected with simulated Shadow Hands equipped with 123 taxels. Experiments show that even the best-performing method achieves an average success rate of only 38.5%, highlighting the challenges existing methods face in transferring functional interaction knowledge. Further analysis shows that, across the two tasks, joint Core+Gen training improves performance by 12% and 38%, respectively, over training on Core followed by fine-tuning on Gen. This indicates that joint training makes better use of Core knowledge and that functionally matched Core data yields greater gains in success rate than mismatched data. We release the Evo-DexBench dataset and benchmark to support the evaluation of dexterous manipulation policies' generalization across related tasks.

Abstract: Learning robot policies from demonstrations is often limited by the cost of collecting diverse, high-quality expert data. While an appealing alternative is to expand a single successful demonstration into a diverse set of successful trajectories, existing augmentation methods typically rely on manually designed transformation rules or complex trajectory planning, requiring substantial task-specific engineering and human effort. We introduce OneDemo, a reinforcement learning framework that learns to edit a single successful demonstration for new task configurations. We formulate demonstration editing as a structured reinforcement learning problem, in which an editor learns, from sparse task-success rewards, both when to transition between object-centric trajectory segments and how to geometrically adapt each segment. The learned editor serves both as a task policy and as a reusable demonstration generator. Across 15 Meta-World tasks, OneDemo reaches a 92.7% success rate within 53.7k environment interactions on average. Across 9 DexMimicGen tasks, it generates successful demonstrations with a 98.4% average success rate, and BC-RNN policies trained on the generated data achieve 99.6% average success at matched dataset scale. These results show that learning to edit a single successful demonstration provides a structured and effective basis for both policy learning and scalable demonstration generation.

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the synthesis of Micro Neural Policies (MNP) to enable safe and robust real-time robotic control on computationally constrained embedded devices. We demonstrate that integrating Evolution Strategy (ES) and Statistical Model Checking (SMC)-based verification for policy search can drastically reduce neural network size without compromising safety and robustness. We conduct a large-scale training and evaluation of MNP on Cartpole and Quadrotor control tasks, varying control frequencies and network architectures. After validating these policies in simulation, we evaluate their deployability through zero-shot transfer to physical systems. Our experiments show that MNP can successfully achieve safe sim-to-real transfer without sacrificing control performance. We then show that the policies' memory footprint, ranging from 0.5 to 7.5 kB, allows deployment on microcontrollers, where they achieve real-time inference latency with under 25 ns of jitter while leaving the chip idle for over 97% of the time for additional workloads. This makes them a highly practical solution for severely resource-constrained robotic systems.

Abstract: Collision avoidance among convex bodies is a fundamental problem in robotics. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide a practical framework for real-time safety filtering due to their computational efficiency. For general convex bodies, exact separation measures, such as distance or scaling factor, are typically computed through optimization. Existing CBF formulations often obtain the required gradient via differentiable optimization (diffOpt), adding computational overhead. In contrast, we leverage the Gilbert-Johnson-Keerthi (GJK) algorithm to obtain the current witness pair---the pair of points realizing the minimum distance or penetration depth---and formulate a CBF, termed GJK-CBF, whose gradient is constructed directly from the relative rigid-body motion of the witness pair, without resorting to diffOpt. This formulation applies to both 2D and 3D environments across a broad class of convex body pairs, provided that at least one in each one-to-one interaction is strictly convex. The proposed GJK-CBF is validated in various scenarios, including multi-robot position swapping in both 2D and 3D, navigation through a vertical slit in 3D, and its applicability to manipulators. The results demonstrate collision-free motion across all scenarios while reducing the conservativeness introduced by geometric approximations, particularly in narrow environments.

Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly envisioned as core components of scientific and engineering agents, yet their ability to interpret physical fields remains poorly understood. Existing physics benchmarks largely emphasize textbook problem solving or intuitive physical reasoning, leaving open whether MLLMs can infer physically meaningful information from continuous field observations. We introduce PhysFieldBench, a benchmark comprising 24 tasks and 1,160 evaluation examples across controlled equation fields, simulated physical fields, and observed physical fields. The tasks assess three forms of inference: identifying physical mechanisms, comparing latent control variables, and predicting outcome properties. Across representative open-source and proprietary MLLMs, zero-shot performance is low: the best model achieves a chance-normalized score of 29.3, while several open-source models remain near chance. In contrast, a task-specific supervised vision transformer performs substantially better, demonstrating that the inputs contain learnable physical information. To diagnose these failures, a structured self-explanation analysis attributes most errors to missed visual patterns and incorrect visual-to-physical mappings. Further, to explore whether post-training can improve physical inference and generalize to unseen tasks, we compare supervised fine-tuning with final answers or chain-of-thought supervision and reinforcement learning. Final-answer supervision performs best overall but transfers less effectively, whereas reinforcement learning after chain-of-thought supervision achieves the best generalization. Together, these findings highlight the need to improve visual-to-physical grounding and cross-task generalization for MLLMs to reliably interpret physical fields in scientific and engineering workflows.

Abstract: Generalist robot manipulation policies have developed rapidly, yet their reliable evaluation remains challenging due to fundamental flaws in existing simulation benchmarks: prominent sim-to-real gaps, narrow task coverage, and unfair evaluation caused by ambiguous training-test pipelines. Prior works only partially resolve these issues and lack simultaneous faithfulness, diversity, and fairness, while static benchmark designs fail to sustain long-term policy development. We present X2Real, an evolvable simulation benchmark for faithfully evaluating the real-world performance of robotic manipulation policies based on Nvidia Isaac Lab-Arena. Following three core principles (faithfulness, diversity, and fairness), X2Real calibrates simulation visual and physical properties to align with real hardware, achieving a 0.84 linear correlation between simulated and real-robot evaluation results. It features a comprehensive taxonomy with 10 capability dimensions and 44 hierarchical long-horizon tasks, covering basic manipulation skills and advanced capacities such as visual grounding, language understanding, and bimanual control. We further adopt multi-axis domain randomization and strictly disjoint training-evaluation pipelines to mitigate benchmark exploitation and ensure credible evaluation. Powered by a custom physical domain-specific language, the Mana simulation ecosystem supports modular task design and iterative performance analysis, alongside a nearly 300-hour annotated simulation trajectory dataset. X2Real offers a faithful, diverse, and fair evolving evaluation infrastructure, effectively bridging the sim-to-real evaluation gap and supporting the advancement of generalist robotic manipulation policies.

Abstract: Open-vocabulary visual grounding enables robots to localise task-relevant entities from natural-language queries without dependence on predefined perceptual taxonomies. However, existing benchmarks largely rely on short category labels and web-scraped imagery, leaving it unclear whether open-vocabulary models can robustly ground diverse queries and visual conditions under real deployments. We introduce \textbf{Pro-Bench}, a prompt-conditioned benchmark for open-vocabulary visual grounding in heterogeneous, real-world environments. Pro-Bench includes $13k+$ RGB frames from independent robotic domains (subterranean, industrial, indoor, outdoor, urban), with $74.5k$ manual instance annotations and $515$ target queries covering categorical, attributive, relational, affordance, state, part-whole, negative, and compositional semantics. We benchmarked $16$ open-vocabulary model configurations in strict zero-shot inference, measuring localisation accuracy across IoU thresholds, end-to-end inference latency, prompt-induced performance variation, and target recovery consistency. Our results show that prompt-robustness is strongly architecture-dependent. Most model configurations ($10/16$) perform best with short category labels, whereas free-form queries yield the highest accuracy for only one. Moreover, similar aggregate mAP can conceal substantial differences in consistent target recovery across reformulations. Pro-Bench enables systematic evaluation of these gaps and supports prompt-robust visual grounding. Pro-Bench: https://pro-bench.github.io/.

Abstract: This study developed and evaluated a deep-learning-based perception framework for selective robotic cotton picking. The dataset contained 1,008 annotated field images collected using three cameras under varying natural lighting and weather conditions. Object-detection models from the YOLOv8 through YOLOv13 families were evaluated using their default configurations, while segmentation performance was assessed using YOLOv8-seg, YOLOv11-seg, YOLOv12-seg, the Segment Anything Model (SAM), SAMv2.1, FastSAM, and Grounded-SAM with the Recognize Anything Model (RAM). Among the detection models, GELAN-s achieved the most favorable balance between mean average precision (mAP) and inference speed, obtaining an mAP of 86.1%, precision of 81.6%, recall of 76.6%, and an F1-score of 79.0%, with an average inference time of 42.3 ms per image. Among the direct segmentation models, YOLOv12-m-seg provided the most favorable balance between AP@0.5 and FPS, achieving a segmentation AP@0.5 of 83.7% with an inference time of 20.4 ms per image. In the detection-prompted segmentation approach, bounding-box prompts generated by GELAN-s improved the localization of cotton bolls for SAM and SAMv2.1, while SAMv2.1 Tiny consistently outperformed FastSAM and Grounded-SAM with RAM. In the area-based evaluation against manually annotated segmentation masks, YOLOv12-m-seg achieved an $R^2$ value of 0.966, compared with 0.860 for GELAN-s + SAMv2.1 Tiny. Field experiments conducted using a UR5e robotic manipulator, a custom end-effector, and a ZED2i stereo camera further validated the effectiveness of the YOLOv12-m-seg model for real-time cotton boll detection, segmentation, and selective picking under varying confidence levels. These results demonstrate that YOLOv12-m-seg provides an efficient perception model for robotic cotton harvesting and has strong potential for field deployment.

Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies are commonly adapted to new manipulation settings through additional gradient updates, which limits rapid deployment when task-specific data or compute is scarce. We present ICI-VLA, a training and retrieval framework that equips a text-action VLM with few-shot test-time adaptation through in-context demonstrations. Unlike mainstream VLA designs based on action-specific multimodal fusion, ICI-VLA retains the native text-generation interface. ICI-VLA updates its parameters only during offline training; at inference, the policy remains fixed and conditions action generation on retrieved micro-demonstrations. The framework decomposes long trajectories into short, semantically labeled examples and trains an RD-Encoder with positives mined by Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), aligning the retrieved context with the phase and geometry of the current subtask. We further introduce Target Action Masking, a context-corruption objective designed to reduce direct action copying and increase reliance on the current observation. ICI-VLA reaches average success rates of 97.7% on LIBERO and 60.4% on RoboTwin 2.0, exceeding the highest reported baseline average on RoboTwin 2.0 by 19.3 percentage points. It also achieves 83.2% across four physical tasks. These results indicate that a fixed VLA policy can benefit from conditioning on spatiotemporally aligned demonstrations at test time.