Papers for
industrial robot integrators
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 teams cut communication while keeping high success rates
Minimum Sufficient Communication for Independent Behaviour Tree Robot Teams
Abstract: We present an experimental framework for determining sufficient communication in robot teams running fixed, independent Behaviour Trees with private blackboards. Within a declared policy family, we vary message content and admission frequency and measure traffic in recipient-weighted bits per robot decision. A dense sweep identifies candidate policies for comparison with full-state communication. We retest selected candidates and the reference on fresh, paired scenarios, using one-sided simultaneous confidence bounds to assess whether success remains within five percentage points of the full-state reference. The bounds also assess whether tested cheaper policies can be ruled out as insufficient. Depending on the evidence, the framework reports an exact minimum, a positive bracket, a sufficient upper bound, or an unresolved boundary. Experiments with eight content policies across four warehouse conditions identify zero communication as the exact minimum under low contention. In the scaled condition, the no-release policy at gate $q=0.992222$ is confirmed sufficient, achieving 96.33% success at an estimated rate of 738.55 bits per robot decision, or 0.544% of full-state traffic. The positive minimum remains unresolved. These claims apply only to the declared policy family, sampled gate values and operating conditions.
Gpu-accelerated planner improves multi-arm robot coordination efficiency
cuArms: GPU-Accelerated Conflict-Based Planning for Multi-Arm Manipulation
Abstract: Multi-arm manipulation has the potential to dramatically improve the throughput, efficiency, and dexterity of many manipulation tasks. Recent work coordinates multiple robot arms in a shared workcell by allocating and scheduling tasks for greater parallelism, jointly planning multi-arm motions, or directly learning multi-arm policies. So far, these approaches are either too slow, rely on domain-specific assumptions, or scale poorly with the number of robots and task horizon. Thus, we introduce cuArms, a conflict-based planner co-designed with GPU parallelism that efficiently decomposes the search space using reusable multi-modal roadmaps for individual robots and resolves conflicts and deadlocks through a lazy search. To jointly optimize task assignment, schedules, motions, and manipulation skills, we integrate a high-level scheduler that proposes candidate skeletons for cuArms to ground into coordinated manipulation plans. Experimental results show that our method establishes a new state of the art, with real-time initial solutions and anytime improvements in both motion quality and scheduling, without days of domain-specific training required by learning approaches. Videos of both simulated and real-world industrial tasks are available on https://cuarms.github.io/.
Robot world models improve dual-arm garment manipulation with partial views
In-Context Learning World Models for Robot Dual-Arm Manipulation of Soft Garment with Partial Observations
Abstract: Robust manipulation of soft objects, such as garments, is a critical skill for service and household robots to adopt, but remains challenging due to its high-dimensional state space, and material-dependent deformations. Humans address this challenge by using mental world models that "imagine" the shape and material properties from partial observations, which enables them to predict how actions affect future states. As such, embedding such world models in robots allows for better generalization in manipulating a wide variety of garments in the real world. However, learned world models typically require large amounts of real world data that is strenuous to collect, and a mechanism to infer latent properties that govern dynamics. We present a Soft-Object World Model that performs generative full-state estimation and action-conditioned dynamics prediction using a transformer backbone trained on large-scale simulated soft object interactions, with measures to mitigate the sim-to-real gap. By learning to infer latent shape and material cues through in-context learning over a variable-length partial point-cloud history, the model generalizes across robot embodiments, material parameters, garment types and shapes, and manipulation coordination modes without weight updates. The world model is then integrated with a Goal-Conditioned action planner for motion synthesis. We validate the approach in simulation and real world for bimanual garment folding, reporting improvements in reconstruction fidelity, prediction accuracy, and task success.
Reinforced Iterative Learning control improves robot arm tracking accuracy
Reinforced Iterative Learning Control for elastic joint arms: Guaranteed cross-trajectory generalization under model uncertainties
Abstract: Trajectory tracking for compliant robots is challenging due to nonlinear dynamics and modeling uncertainties, often requiring learning-based methods to avoid explicit parameter identification. Iterative Learning Control (ILC) ensures theoretically high precision and preserves the passive compliance of the robot. However, traditional ILC requires a separate learning phase for each new trajectory. Conversely, Reinforcement Learning (RL) generalizes to new trajectories, but practically suffers from high sample complexity and limited tracking precision. This work proposes Reinforced Iterative Learning Control (RILC) that combines the strengths of both approaches to achieve fast adaptation and guaranteed tracking convergence across diverse trajectories. By establishing a concurrent coupling between the two controllers, RILC overcomes the high initial errors and slow adaptation of traditional ILC, enabling high-performance tracking from the very first trials. In this architecture, ILC provides high-quality samples, while RL contributes as a generalizing best-effort policy across iterations. Additionally, a theoretical proof is presented to show that the RL component preserves ILC stability and, under specific conditions, can also reduce the error bound asymptotically. The efficacy of this framework is demonstrated through simulation and experiments on an underactuated 4-degree-of-freedom serial elastic robot using different trajectories and modeling mismatches.
Method adapts robot control by reading human intent during remote tasks
Intent-Informed Model Predictive Control for Shared Autonomy in Remote Manipulation Tasks
Abstract: Shared autonomy is a control paradigm that combines human cognitive abilities with robot precision to enable effective remote manipulation in complex environments. A key challenge is how to adapt the level of autonomy using information extracted from the human, task, and/or environment. In this paper, we propose a novel arbitration strategy that dynamically adjusts the level of autonomy in the system using the entropy of a belief distribution derived from a multimodal intent inference. Human intent is modeled with a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN), which updates beliefs over goals given real-time operator gaze data and robot arm motion during teleoperation. We then formulate the blending of human input and autonomous control as a Model Predictive Control (MPC) problem, where the system's autonomous behavior is guided by the belief distribution. This approach enables continuous, gradual transitions across the full spectrum of autonomy levels, from direct teleoperation to full autonomy. To validate our approach, we conducted experiments to compare the performance of our proposed algorithm against two MPC-based shared autonomy methods. Compared to the baselines, our approach achieved reductions of at least 61% in object retrieval time, 44% in trajectory length, and 60% in human control input. Participants reported high perceived control, predictability, intent recognition, and responsiveness, along with low workload.
Heterogeneous robotic hands work together for better object handling
Embodiment-Aware Planning for Heterogeneous Bimanual Manipulation
Abstract: Many manipulation tasks that are effortless for dexterous human hands remain challenging for robotic systems equipped with simple, task-specialized grippers. Industrial platforms commonly rely on end-effectors such as suction cups or parallel-jaw grippers, yet no single mode can reliably satisfy the diverse constraints encountered across different phases of complex manipulation tasks, including pickup, reorientation, insertion, and constrained placement. In this work, we investigate whether complementary simple grippers within a heterogeneous bimanual setup can collectively realize tasks that exceed the capability of any individual gripper alone. Given a single human demonstration specifying the desired object motion, we formulate embodiment-aware execution as a finite-horizon optimization over arm-trajectory assignments. At each segment, the planner determines whether single-arm manipulation or a coordinated dual arm handover is required, jointly reasoning over heterogeneous grasp feasibility, motion constraints, manipulability, and cross-gripper compatibility. Exploiting this formulation, we compute globally consistent assignments with explicit switching regularization. Experiments on a dual Franka FR3 platform equipped with suction and parallel-jaw grippers demonstrate improved feasibility and reliability in tasks that are infeasible under single-gripper execution.
Whole body control lets robots hold and move bulky objects easily
Whole-Body Dexterity
Abstract: Current humanoid dexterous manipulation remains largely confined to end-effectors and simple grasps, falling short of humans' ability to engage the entire body by bracing and sliding bulky objects against the arms and torso. We introduce Whole-Body Dexterity (WBD), a general framework that uses the robot's body and appendages as contact surfaces to grasp and manipulate objects. Our sim-to-real pipeline first generates a dataset of feasible whole-body grasps, then trains reinforcement-learning experts on a general any-to-any repositioning objective by sampling initial and goal grasps from the dataset, and distills these experts into a single policy that uses proprioception and object geometry. We show that the distilled policy transfers zero-shot to a real Unitree G1, where it repositions a basketball and a cardboard box to regions around the torso and completes a long-horizon task that stows a box under one arm, carries it from a shelf to a table, and places it. The controller operates interactively, steered by coarse motion references from a human teleoperator. Across real-world whole-body manipulation tasks, the distilled controller completes 90% of trials, compared with 18% for direct retargeting and 4% for a generalist whole-body controller.
Robot reflex control enables faster safer human-robot interactions
Sub-Millisecond Reflexes for Continuous Physical Human-Robot Interaction
Abstract: Continuous physical human-robot interaction requires robots to rapidly adapt their control behaviour without interrupting task execution. However, existing ROS 2 control architectures rely on stop-to-switch mechanisms that introduce substantial delays and interrupt execution. We present an open-source, sub-millisecond reflex engine based on an enhanced ROS 2-compatible multimode controller that enables deterministic switching between control modalities and integrates reflex behaviours for mitigating contact hazards and kinematic limit violations. Experiments on a Franka Robotics manipulator demonstrate switching delays below 0.1 ms, more than four orders of magnitude faster than conventional ros2_control, while maintaining continuous operation during safety-critical events. In a multi-stage manipulation task, the proposed framework reduced execution time by 3.5% and peak trajectory jerk by more than threefold. By eliminating runtime middleware overhead, controller transitions are implemented as lock-free pointer operations, enabling reflex-level responsiveness within an open-source robotics framework.
Upper-limb robots better adapt to user intent and strength changes
Attribution-Gated Joint Estimation of Intention and Capability for Assist-as-Needed Upper-Limb Robots
Abstract: Assist-as-needed (AAN) control must distinguish between changes in intended motion and changes in effective voluntary torque capability, even though both can produce similar kinematic and interaction responses. A dual-measurand multimodal MHE-MPC architecture is developed as the base framework, in which the intended trajectory and the task-dependent effective voluntary torque capability are estimated online as distinct quantities, and both estimates are used to adapt robotic assistance. Building on this architecture, the ambiguity between the two update channels is formulated as a continuous credit-assignment problem and resolved by an attribution gate. A trajectory-change indicator is obtained from persistent corrective interaction, whereas a capability-change indicator is derived from the residual between normalized muscle activation and dynamics-reconstructed voluntary torque. Nine healthy participants completed factorial target-height-load trials and a pre-post fatigue cup-transport task. Without target-height input, the gated method generated correctly ordered Low-Middle-High references under every load: target changes were preferentially assigned to trajectory adaptation, whereas added load shifted adaptation toward the capability channel. It achieved the lowest RMSE in all nine conditions (0.017 rad versus 0.041 rad for ungated dual estimation and 0.127 rad for fixed-reference error-based AAN). Post-fatigue capability estimates decreased and assistance increased at all heights, supporting functional feasibility.
Human object motions guide robots with different bodies
Human Demonstrations as Post-Training Data for Any Robot Body: Retargeting the Object, Not the Hand
Abstract: Human demonstrations are today used largely for pretraining vision-language-action models, with little ability to use the same data for target-embodiment or task-oriented training, which scalable deployment of robots in industrial and general environments depends on. A human demonstration recorded on a simple and scalable device such as a mobile phone can serve as post-training data for a robot whose body differs in structure and capability from the human who recorded it. This is made possible not by retargeting the hand's motion but the object's. A capture yields a body-free record: the object's pose over time, its contact intervals, and a reconstructed 3D object with provenance. Any robot, given as a URDF and a short descriptor, is solved against that record and scored in simulation against the demonstrated object motion as ground truth: the human-to-simulation leg of human-to-simulation-to-robot transfer, measured per robot. Each (robot, episode) pair gets one outcome: pass, failure with a named mode, or refusal, with its reason, before any motion. The method runs as a working system over a growing collection; the set analysed here is a sample of it: 42 captures solved on 8 robots, 157 pairs, of which 31.2% pass, 52.2% fail, 14.0% are refused and 2.5% are unauditable (kinematic feasibility, +/-50 mm / +/-15 deg, in simulation). Refusals held up: every pair the checks refuse on stored evidence yet ran anyway failed (13 of 13; 5 on a body whose public model welds its hand). A description file could not be shown to screen a robot: its outcomes were barely more predictable than guessing. No policy has yet been trained on the record. The record decides what a robot may post-train on; whether the policy then works on the real robot is the simulation-to-robot question, answered downstream.
Robot estimates arm movement limits during handover tasks
Active Perception of Upper-Limb Functional Mobility through Human-Robot Handovers
Abstract: The reintegration of people in the workplace after an upper-limb injury is often a long process. Collaborative robots and humanoids operating in shared workspaces must adapt their behavior to the physical capabilities of their human partners. Achieving this requires robots to autonomously estimate task-relevant human mobility during interaction, without relying on external clinical assessments. In this work, we formulate the estimation of upper-limb functional mobility as an active perception problem. We model task-available upper-limb functional ranges of motion through impairment coefficients that parameterize reductions of healthy joint limits, and integrate this representation into a human model used by the robot during interaction. Based on this formulation, we propose an online active perception pipeline in which the robot actively probes the user through repeated handover requests while progressively updating a Bayesian belief over the impairment coefficients. This enables the robot to continuously refine its internal model of the user's joint-level capabilities through interaction rather than passive observation. The proposed framework was evaluated through simulation studies and a proof-of-concept physical validation with a robotic platform and enacted human impairments, demonstrating that the pipeline can accurately recover the impairment coefficients during real human-robot handovers.
Modular agricultural robot sprays diseased tomato leaves precisely
MARTS: A Modular Agricultural Robot for Targeted Spraying of Diseased Tomato Plants in Greenhouses
Abstract: Broadcast spraying remains the dominant method of disease control in greenhouse tomato production, yet it treats healthy and diseased tissue alike, exposes workers to hazardous aerosols, and depends on operator skill. This paper presents MARTS (Modular Agricultural Robot for Targeted Spraying), a low-cost robotic platform that closes the loop from plant-level disease detection to leaf-localised spray delivery in commercial greenhouses. MARTS integrates a Clearpath Husky A200 mobile base, a UR5 manipulator, a novel modular spraying end-effector built around a single 12 V micro-diaphragm pump, and a wrist-mounted Intel RealSense D435 RGB-D camera. Disease detection reuses our previously published Tomato Leaf Disease Vision Language Model (TLDVLM; Grounding DINO, SAM-2 and LoRA-tuned BLIP-2, 97.27% accuracy over 10 classes); this work focuses on actuation, control and system integration. A ROS pipeline lifts detections into 3D targets, generates collision-aware nozzle poses at a 120 mm stand-off using fitted leaf normals, and scales pump pulse duration to lesion area. Water-sensitive paper calibration showed a linear pulse-volume relationship (R^2 = 0.994). In MuJoCo simulation, an adaptive base-repositioning strategy achieved 100% coverage of 18 waypoints with a maximum orientation error of 1.1 deg. Deployed at the SILAL commercial greenhouse (Al Ain, UAE) on cherry tomatoes under natural infection, MARTS treated 312 diseased leaves in 12 autonomous trials with 92.4% targeting success, 18.7 mm mean spray-centre error, 6.1% adjacent-leaf overspray, and a 71% reduction in pesticide volume versus broadcast spraying. Mean cycle time was 4.8 s per leaf, and the spraying subsystem costs USD 412, 6-10x lower than comparable systems, showing that accurate leaf-level targeting is achievable on commodity hardware.
NMR tracking system design improves position and orientation accuracy
Information-based Unified Design Framework for NMR Magnetic Tracking System
Abstract: Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) magnetic tracking offers a promising alternative to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based localization for medical robotic guidance. However, scalar field measurements and field-aligned marker moments constrain position and orientation tracking, requiring careful configuration design. We present a unified information-based framework that uses local covariance analysis to evaluate receiver geometry, marker separation, and external source configuration in on/off-board NMR tracking. Numerical evaluation shows that planar-array precision depends jointly on receiver count and geometry, with triangular lattice arrays achieving the lowest best-case position uncertainty among the evaluated layouts for 9--20 receivers. Two spatially separated, field-aligned markers enable device-axis tracking, with predicted angular uncertainty below $2^\circ$ at the evaluated workspace center for suitable marker separations. We further establish point-dipole source--receiver duality, unifying the analysis of on/off-board NMR tracking. These
Human-like arm control improves real-time humanoid robot teleoperation
Human-Like Redundancy Resolution for Real-Time Bimanual Humanoid Teleoperation
Abstract: Real-time bimanual humanoid teleoperation requires accurate wrist tracking while keeping arm configurations predictable. Because a 7-DoF arm admits multiple elbow configurations for the same wrist pose, wrist-only tracking can cause elbow drift or abrupt configuration changes. Fixed anthropomorphic constraints can stabilize elbow posture, but they can also block the redundant adjustments needed near singular configurations. We propose a human-like redundancy-resolution framework that combines adaptive elbow guidance with singularity-robust wrist tracking. Shoulder-wrist geometric retargeting generates robot-scale wrist targets. An adaptive elbow-offset criterion uses the offset direction to guide posture and scales this guidance by the offset magnitude, so the redundant degree of freedom is progressively released as the human arm straightens. A hierarchical velocity solver prioritizes wrist tracking and projects the adaptive elbow guidance into the wrist-task null space. In a fixed-wrist-target ablation, adaptive guidance reduces mean elbow-direction error by 54.4% compared with removing this guidance. In a workspace-boundary stress test, singularity-robust tracking reduces peak raw joint-velocity demand by 97.9% compared with the undamped pseudoinverse. Real-world bimanual tasks and cross-platform retargeting show applicability across robot morphologies.
Impedance control improves robot handling of hinged and sliding objects
Constraint-Decomposed Impedance Control from Generative Policy for Articulated Object Manipulation
Abstract: Articulated object manipulation tasks such as opening doors, tightening bolts, and pulling drawers impose kinematic constraints on a robot end-effector's motion that neural policies may fail to satisfy. Unlike hybrid force-position control that strictly separates force and position control into orthogonal subspaces, impedance control modulates a mechanical impedance system in the form of a virtual inertia, damping, and stiffness. However, selecting task-appropriate impedance gains remains challenging for robot policies. In this paper, we address this problem for the case of manipulating articulated objects. Our constraint-decomposed impedance control method uses the sampling diversity of a generative policy to estimate the feasible motion directions in twist space. The key idea is to infer the feasible and constrained subspaces of twists from an ensemble of trajectories generated by the policy from the same observation. Principal component analysis (PCA) of the end-effector twists determines the feasible twist subspace, which is then used to form 6x6 impedance gain matrices. For many common articulated objects, the feasible twist subspace is independent of the object configuration, so the subspace and resulting gains are estimated once and held fixed during manipulation, minimizing computational overhead. For less common cases where this independence does not hold, we instead estimate a configuration-independent twist subspace of higher dimension that contains the local feasible subspaces, allowing the same fixed-gain strategy to be used. Experiments across simulated and real-world single- and multi-DoF objects show that the proposed method consistently reduces constraint-violating contact loads relative to isotropic impedance control while maintaining task execution.
Usdcraft builds realistic robot parts from partial 3d scans
USDCraft: Geometrically Grounded Programmatic Modeling of Articulated 3D Assets for Simulation
Abstract: Geometrically faithful and functional articulated 3D assets are essential for real-to-sim robot manipulation, where policies trained in simulation must transfer to physical objects. Recent mesh-based methods learn to infer articulation from annotated 3D assets, but deployment remains challenging when real-world objects fall outside the training distribution or their meshes are incomplete or corrupted. To address these limitations, we formulate articulated asset reconstruction as programmatic modeling grounded in partial geometric evidence and introduce USDCraft, a framework in which a pretrained LLM writes and revises executable programs for simulation-ready articulated assets without task-specific training. We propose source geometry analysis, which converts the source mesh into a metric textual description that distinguishes observed surface from unknown space, and iterative geometric rechecking, which re-encodes each candidate in the same representation so that discrepancies point to program edits while unobserved regions remain open to completion. Visual feedback and physical authoring guidance complete the modeling process, which produces articulated USD assets with explicit physical properties that load into Isaac Sim without manual adjustment. Experiments demonstrate leading articulation recovery on two benchmarks and validate USDCraft's effectiveness for real-to-sim-to-real robot manipulation.
Robot hand throws multiple objects faster and more accurately
Fast Planning for Multi-object Multi-target Throwing
Abstract: Robot throwing has emerged as a promising technique for improving efficiency in logistics and warehouse automation, by enlarging the workspace and speeding up the process. To significantly increase the throwing system's throughput, we develop strategies for throwing multiple objects in one swipe. Such multi-object multi-target throwing (MOMT) leverages the large degrees of freedom of anthropomorphic hands. The key is to quickly generate fast and feasible throwing motions, which involves a complex trade-off between short trajectory duration and short planning time. We solve this problem in two stages. Offline, we build a model of the feasible set by combining object's inverted flying dynamics and the robot's kinematics and dynamics. Online, we generate feasible throws through fast solution matching and filtering of object's valid detach state and robot's feasible state that can compose sequences of throws in less than 5 ms. We validate the framework on a 7-DoF manipulator equipped with a multi-fingered hand. In simulation, coordinated two-object throwing reduces execution time by up to 46% compared to independent single-object planning, and this improvement is maintained when scaling to three objects. Real-world experiments with two objects confirm a 29% reduction; the remaining gap to the theoretical 50% is attributed to inter-throw transition overhead. When target positions are randomly changed mid-execution, the system re-plans and successfully reaches the new targets within 100 ms latency without stopping the robot. These results establish the first unified planning framework for MOMT throwing -- demonstrating scalability to multiple objects in simulation and real-world feasibility on two-object tasks -- advancing the frontier of high-throughput robotic manipulation. A video summarizing the method and the hardware experiments is available at https://liuyangdh.github.io/momt-video
Virtual model control enables compliant reaching under uncertainty
Virtual model control for compliant reaching under uncertainties
Abstract: Virtual Model Control (VMC) is an approach to design a controller for force-controlled robots in complex uncertain environments. While this method was primarily investigated for legged robot locomotion in the past, it can be more generally applicable to other types of robotic systems. This paper investigates the VMC framework for reaching tasks in a force-controlled robotic arm. We propose six different approaches to designing virtual models in order to achieve reaching tasks in environments with obstacles and uncertainties. A force-controlled 8 degree-of-freedom humanoid robot was used to validate the proposed approach in the real world. We conducted three experiments to test the performance of VMC controllers in terms of predictability, sensitivity to external force, and adaptability against known and unknown obstacles. Experimental analyses show that, even though the proposed approach needs to sacrifice accuracy and trajectory optimality, it enables us to design complex reaching motions under uncertainties, in an intuitive and extendable manner.
Hybrid method solves humanoid robot arm movements quickly and reliably
Real-Time Conformal-Seeded Hybrid Inverse Kinematics for Offset Redundant Manipulators
Abstract: This paper presents a conformal-seeded hybrid strategy for solving inverse kinematics of offset, redundant 7-DoF robot arms of the humanoid class. Analytical inverse kinematics (AIK) provides closed-form solutions with very low computational cost. However, for offset kinematic structures, the exact closed-form solution is generally unavailable, and practical AIK must rely on an approximate or simplified kinematic model. In contrast, numerical inverse kinematics (NIK) can achieve high-precision solutions on the full kinematic model. However, its convergence is highly sensitive to initialization. To overcome these limitations, we propose a two-stage hybrid inverse kinematics framework with conformal-calibrated seed selection. First, an approximate analytical model efficiently enumerates a finite set of candidate joint solutions. Second, we rank these candidates using a lightweight learned predictor of post-refinement difficulty, wrapped by split-conformal prediction into a calibrated upper bound that serves as the selection score. The best-ranked seed is then refined using a Levenberg-Marquardt solver on the full kinematic model. The proposed method combines fast candidate generation, learned seed ranking with a calibrated difficulty bound, and accurate numerical refinement, achieving real-time performance of less than 40us and a success rate of 100% in our evaluation on reachable targets. We validate the approach through large-scale stochastic simulation across the workspace and experimental demonstrations with motion planning on a humanoid robot arm. Demonstration videos are available at https://youtu.be/aeiBmw1XRbw.
EyeRobot 2 improves robot grasping using active stereo vision
EyeRobot 2.0: Active Gaze for Precise Manipulation without Wrist Cameras
Abstract: Inspired by human vision, we introduce a framework using active gaze to enable fine-grained bimanual manipulation with only a single stereo camera. EyeRobot 2.0 physically attends to a 3D fixation point in the scene by swiveling two eye viewpoints to center their gaze on it. The resulting images are processed foveally by allocating more visual tokens to the image centers, focusing computation on task-relevant features. Such Active Visual Fixation (AVF) requires carefully coordinated gaze during task execution, which we accomplish hierarchically by first training a low-level gaze servoing policy conditioned on a goal object, then training a target selector which emits fixation goals based on task progress. Both modules are trained with RL on real-world data: the first is trained with a dense geometric reward and the second co-trains with the BC gripper policy which allows it to discover fixation sequences that can resemble a human's fixation sequence while performing the task. EyeRobot 2.0 further takes advantage of fixation by canonicalizing gripper information into a fixation-relative SE(3) frame, which compacts the size of the action distribution to learn. We collect teleoperation data for 7 real-world and 6 simulated tasks, and conduct over 1000 physical and 1800 simulated robot trials comparing EyeRobot 2.0 against passive stereo and ego + wrist camera policies trained on the same data. Removing wrist cameras is costly for standard policies: with only passive stereo, real-world success drops from 52% to 27%. EyeRobot 2.0 closes this gap with only stereo, outperforming passive stereo by 40% in real and 20% in sim. It matches ego + wrist policies when their wrist views are clear (69% vs. 64%), and more than doubles their success when grasped objects occlude the wrist cameras (48% vs. 22%)
X-Reset trains robot hands to grasp diverse objects using human resets
X-Reset: Scaling Object-Centric Reinforcement Learning via Cross-Embodiment Resets
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) in simulation can train dexterous manipulation policies without robot demonstrations, but training a single generalist policy with task-agnostic rewards faces a severe exploration problem: approaching, grasping, and reorienting diverse objects with many degrees of freedom is difficult to discover from scratch. Prior works make exploration tractable with high-quality robot demonstrations, per-task reward shaping, or by restricting policies to narrow modes of behavior. We propose X-Reset, a framework that instead resolves exploration with human hand-object demonstrations. Rather than imitating or tracking retargeted human motion, X-Reset kinematically retargets hand-object states to noisy robot states, filters out states that are unstable in simulation, and samples the remainder as resets during RL training with general-purpose object-centric rewards. The resulting policy depends only on object state and goal, with demonstrations entering training through the reset distribution. We show that X-Reset trains generalist policies on 20 objects across three embodiments---a 22-DoF hand on two different arms and a parallel-jaw gripper---and resolves the exploration challenges of RL from scratch. X-Reset scales with the number of training objects, generalizes to unseen objects, can learn from imperfect hand-pose estimates, and transfers behaviors zero-shot from sim-to-real.
Whole-body tactile sensing boosts humanoid robot control success
Uni-VLaT: Whole-Body Tactile Adaptation of VLA Policies for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
Abstract: Physical contact often determines how a humanoid should respond during loco-manipulation, yet vision and proprioception alone are often insufficient to characterize physical interaction, especially when the contact region is occluded. Unlike sparse force or torque measurements at predefined regions, distributed tactile sensing preserves spatially resolved contact patterns across the robot body. We therefore study how to integrate such whole-body tactile information into vision-language-action (VLA) policies for contact-rich control. Our approach, Uni-VLaT, introduces a tactile pathway whose latent state is trained not only for action generation, but also to predict future tactile, proprioceptive, and visual representations. This predictive objective builds a tactile-anchored multimodal context, encouraging a more structured understanding of the physical world. We evaluate Uni-VLaT on five real-robot tasks covering tactile-triggered locomotion, sustained physical interaction, human-robot contact, and loco-manipulation. Uni-VLaT achieves a 75% average success rate, outperforming a baseline without tactile input by 43 points and a tactile-input baseline without predictive supervision by 7 points. Across two pretrained VLA backbones, our method improves Table Sweeping by 30 points on both backbones and Back-Tap Walking by 85-90 points. Ablations further show that contextualized tactile prediction and absolute future targets are critical to performance. These results indicate that predictive tactile learning provides an effective route for extending pretrained VLA policies to whole-body physical interaction.
DexAgent generates adaptable robot skills from human videos for dexterous tasks
DexAgent: An Agentic Human2Sim2Robot Framework for Dexterous Manipulation with Self-Evolving Tool Library
Abstract: Human videos offer a scalable source of demonstrations for dexterous robot manipulation. However, existing human-to-simulation-to-robot (Human2Sim2Robot) pipelines rely on predefined procedures that struggle to accommodate diverse object properties and interactions, particularly those involving articulated and deformable objects. We introduce DexAgent, an agentic Human2Sim2Robot framework that converts a single egocentric human video and a task prompt into physically grounded robot trajectories for policy training. It operates through four stages: semantic understanding of human videos, property-based simulation reconstruction, robot trajectory optimization, and robot data generation. At each stage, DexAgent adapts its approach to the task and object properties by selecting suitable skills from its tool library or developing new ones when needed. Property-specific verifiers assess stage outcomes for physical validity and task-specific requirements and provide feedback for refinement, preventing error propagation through the workflow. This adaptive, verification-guided process allows DexAgent to process diverse objects and long-horizon tasks. In the final stage, DexAgent varies object and robot states in simulation to generate diverse robot trajectories from a single human video, then retextures the rendered observations to facilitate sim-to-real transfer. Newly developed skills and verifiers are retained in its tool library, making it self-evolving to accumulate reusable capabilities. This reduces processing time as DexAgent encounters more human videos. Across eleven real-world tasks, policies trained with DexAgent-generated data achieve a 3.5x higher success rate than competing baselines. Project website: https://dexagent123.github.io/.
RoboICL improves robot control using GPT-6 Astra with fewer mistakes
RoboICL: Embodied In-Context Learning with GPT-6 Astra
Abstract: General-purpose vision-language models offer a promising way to zero-shot robot control: \gptastra{} excels at open-ended and language- or image-conditioned manipulation but remains substantially weaker on high-precision and long-horizon tasks. We introduce \emph{RoboICL}, an in-context robot-control framework that narrows these gaps without robot-specific parameter updates or a learned VLA. RoboICL separates \emph{demonstration context}, which provides recorded examples when available, from \emph{interaction memory}, which accumulates the model's own actions and observed outcomes. Both use a shared observation--action--receipt--observation grammar. To preserve experience across task stages, RoboICL combines sampled demonstration blocks with bounded anchored memory. Fixed anchors keep earlier rollout interactions available for in-context learning, while the latest interaction supports immediate error correction. Across 30 RoboDojo tasks, using zero shot for Open and one demonstration elsewhere, RoboICL improves on official zero-shot \gptastra{} by 20--27 progress-score points in every category. It leads the leaderboard baselines on Memory and Open, achieves comparable performance to the strongest Precision baseline, and remains competitive on Long-Horizon. Its 30-task Overall score is 50.64, versus 33.68 for the strongest baseline. On a separate ten-task subset, RoboICL scores 60.60, within 2.00 points of the $π_{0.5}$ + \gptastra{} hybrid approach. On three real-robot tasks, mean progress rises from 14.45 at zero shot to 63.33 at one shot and 78.89 at three shots. On two development tasks, optional Jev-gated action reuse reduces \gptastra{} calls by 33--48\%. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/Mosi-AI/RoboICL}{https://github.com/Mosi-AI/RoboICL}.
Distributed controller keeps warehouse robots safely on track
Safety-Filtered Distributed Koopman-MPC
Abstract: Distributed model predictive control (DMPC) often constructs both predictions and collision constraints from neighbor trajectories, so packet loss can remove both. We separate these roles: received trajectories drive Koopman-MPC, while local sensing and shelf geometry define a hard-constrained quadratic program (QP) that projects the applied input. Its radial demand is the least constant acceleration that keeps a supporting-plane clearance nonnegative throughout one zero-order-hold interval. Complementary pair rows recover the coupled demand without exchanging safety decisions. We give an intersample separation theorem under bounded snapshot and directional plant errors, an exact max-min test for simultaneous local feasibility, and a sensing-radius condition for switching interaction graphs. Anticipatory high-order rows may be relaxed for performance, but the finite-hold rows contain no safety slack. Matched eight-robot warehouse simulations use a frozen Koopman model, nonlinear drift, bounded inputs and speed, shelf constraints, a 120 ms control period, and packet dropout. The full controller is collision-free in 20/20 matched trials and reaches 160/160 robot goals; predictive Koopman-MPC without the final projection is collision-free in 1/20 trials. All 38,400 full-method hard-row sets pass the online feasibility test, and every local QP solves. Five-stream fleet sweeps are collision-free and hard-row feasible through 16 robots; the 20-robot boundary fails only after the online margin turns negative, while the reconstructed per-agent critical path remains below the sampling period. Bounded-sensing and differential-drive tests provide additional deployment stress.
Vision combined with touch improves cluttered dexterous robot grasping
When Does Touch Matter? Charting the Vision-Interaction Gap in Cluttered Dexterous Grasping
Abstract: Dexterous grasping in clutter poses a basic sensing question: when do tactile measurements and external wrench estimates improve on visual geometry? Occlusion and contact can obscure grasp quality, motivating a controlled evaluation of these interaction signals. We present a controlled real-world study over five tabletop scene conditions on a dexterous system that combines vision, per-finger and wrist wrench estimates, and distributed fingertip taxels. With demonstrations, visual observations, action space, and compliant control fixed, we compare vision-only, wrench, taxel, and combined policies plus representation and fusion baselines. The combined policy succeeds in 24/25 trials versus 14/25 for vision only, and 15/15 versus 6/15 across the three confined conditions. Ablations show that wrench and taxel feedback are complementary. Behavioral comparisons show that interaction feedback enables earlier rejection of inadequate contacts, regrasping before lift, and more stable grasps. To our knowledge, this is the first real-world study to combine and separately evaluate these interaction modalities for target-oriented dexterous grasping in clutter. These results chart a widening vision-interaction gap and position cluttered dexterous grasping as a benchmark for determining when the learned policy needs interaction sensing. Project website: https://interaction-dex-grasp.github.io/
Robot learns best camera views to inspect assembly parts automatically
INSPECT: Learning Robot View Selection from Assistant Use
Abstract: Robots inspecting an assembly must determine which parts are present and whether they are correctly installed. During egocentric assembly assistance, head motion and workpiece handling reveal evidence for these checks, while spoken state confirmations link observations to procedural outcomes. We introduce INSPECT, which learns robot view preferences from records of a smart-glasses assistant that answers part queries and provides next-step guidance. Presence-Invariant TwinSwap (PI-TwinSwap) calibrates object evidence through paired identity interventions. Claim-indexed supervision separates evidence requirements from camera-reproducible observation changes. Object-centered calibration adapts relative view preferences to robot poses, while clause-level screening checks predicted evidence. The robot selects views using only its current observation and known poses, without candidate images. Evaluation uses annotated assistant-video replay to simulate state feedback, without target-domain view labels for policy training. On images of physical gearbox assemblies, INSPECT achieves the highest view utility among the compared non-oracle policies and raises human-rated full verifiability from 34.8% to 41.7% compared with keeping the current view. On commercial angle-grinder recordings in IMPACT, the transferred relative-view selector increases the correct decision rate from 50.6% to 54.3% with a frozen perception head. The source code is available at https://github.com/Kratos-Wen/INSPECT.
Atomic motion coordinate improves language-steered robot arm actions
Atomic Motion Coordinate for Language-Steerable and Force-Responsive Manipulation
Abstract: Can changing only the language instruction redirect a VLA policy's end effector, or does the visually driven motion prior dominate? We present Atomic Motion Coordinate, a geometry-grounded coordinate for steerable and force-responsive manipulation. Each arm owns thirteen signed translation, rotation, and hold atoms grounded from text and forward kinematics with vision withheld, and the coordinate is injected into every action-expert block via weighted codebook alignment. Contact history modulates the same coordinate through a bounded spherical residual that is recomputed from a fixed nominal latent to regenerate only the unexecuted horizon suffix. Across 7,520 offline horizon interventions, opposite-atom separation reaches 92.5/83.1% (single/dual) versus 39.1/24.0% for LA4VLA-style. Across 50 real-robot trials per task, AMC raises OOD fruit progress from 60.5% to 87.8%; force adaptation raises Plug/Vase from 59.0/71.5% to 78.5/75.2%.
Multi-agent robot tasks improved by logic-guided data and policies
LTLDiff: Finite Linear Temporal Logic-Guided Data Generation and Diffusion Policies for Multi-agent Robotic Manipulation
Abstract: Multi-agent robotic manipulation tasks require coordination among agents to satisfy task-level temporal, logical, and safety constraints. Recently, diffusion policies have been used to perform the task. However, they still suffer from desynchronization, incorrect action ordering, and coordination failures in tasks that require simultaneous or sequential multi-agent interaction. Therefore, LTLDiff is proposed as a framework that combines Finite Linear Temporal Logic (LTLf) specification learning for both the generation of demonstrations and learning via diffusion policies. Each task has a specific LTLf formula that is learned from a set of natural language instructions using a large-scale language model. To enable a fixed-dimensional vector embedding of the learned specification from the language model, LTLf uses an abstract syntax tree representation scheme. This embedding of logic serves as a condition for (i) logic-guided data collection and (ii) diffusion-based policy training, encouraging trajectories that are consistent with the desired ordering and coordination requirements. Experiments on multi-agent LTLDiff manipulation tasks demonstrate improved task success rates compared to the baseline. Together, these contributions demonstrate the effectiveness of LTLDiff for coordinated multi-agent manipulation.