Papers for

robotics automation teams

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 control method improves timing for dynamic object tasks

Shared Execution-Clock Drifting Policy for Dynamic Precision Manipulation

Abstract: Manipulation under time constraints requires both accurate actions and an execution rhythm that matches the evolving scene. This becomes critical when a robot must intercept moving objects or complete a sequence of adjustments before a deadline. Although one-step policies reduce generation cost, their directly predicted action sequences leave temporal allocation implicit. We propose Shared Execution-Clock Drifting (SECD), which makes execution rhythm an explicit part of one-step action generation. Conditioned on an observation and a latent sample, the policy jointly predicts a progress-indexed action curve and a shared monotone clock that maps fixed control times to locations on the curve. Demonstration-derived alignment anchors this decomposition, which is trained jointly through drifting on the decoded actions. The resulting policy retains a fixed-rate control interface and requires one network evaluation. We evaluate SECD across four real-robot tasks with inference on NVIDIA Thor. Across 300 trials, it achieves 77.00% task-averaged success and outperforms the evaluated one-step baselines on every task, including 91% success in cup retrieval from a 16 m/min conveyor and 54% in restoring and folding a crumpled shirt within 90 s. A fixed-clock variant reaches 79% on the same conveyor protocol. Complementary state-based RoboMimic experiments, including cross-seed ablations on Transport and Square, further support the joint design of the temporal representation and demonstration alignment. Project page: https://secd-anonymous-ewn.pages.dev/

Sun 20 SeptRobotics
The gist
Some robots need to act quickly and precisely, like catching moving things or finishing tasks before time runs out. The authors created a new way that helps robots plan their movements and timing at the same time, so actions happen at the right speed. This approach predicts both what the robot should do and the rhythm it should follow, based on what it sees. Tests showed this method works better than others on several robot tasks, including grabbing moving cups and folding clothes.
Open → 2609.23305v1