robotics integrators

Abstract: With advancements in learning-based policies, robots are increasingly being deployed in human-centric environments, such as manufacturing floors and homes, where safe and precise operation requires compensating for unknown loads while remaining compliant during human interactions. Reliably distinguishing between these interaction types is challenging with a single sensing modality, as force signals cannot separate payloads from human pushes, and vision is susceptible to occlusions. We propose a task-agnostic interaction estimation and adaptive control framework that addresses this challenge by fusing force history and 3D point cloud through a transformer-based classifier. Trained with modality dropout for occlusion resilience and fine-tuned from simulation to hardware, the classifier achieves 91.89% accuracy and maintains above 90% under complete occlusion of one modality. The classifier drives a system identification framework that selectively compensates for unknown payloads and a variable-impedance controller that switches between adaptive and reactive modes, while simultaneously estimating interaction forces for downstream tasks, such as human intent estimation. We validate the framework under external perturbations and unknown loads across single-arm manipulation, deployment with an imitation-learning-based policy, intent-driven target switching, and zero-shot bimanual deployment on two Franka arms lifting a box of unknown mass, demonstrating generalization to closed kinematic chains and unseen setups, enabling safe and precise deployment.

Abstract: A robot needs a world model that predicts how its actions will change the scene and a policy that chooses those actions. Models are usually built and evaluated for only one of these roles, and every robot records its actions in its own format. We ask whether one robot world model can serve both roles across different bodies, and what makes this work. We present GreenWAM, a world foundation model for robotics, together with the recipe that produces it: (1) a shared anatomical action space that describes 20 robot families, from bimanual arms to dexterous humanoids, in common joint coordinates; (2) joint training on these families in visual, action-conditioned and world-action modes; and (3) policies that split an action expert off the generator. As a world model, GreenWAM attains top-tier trajectory, depth and 3D accuracy on WorldArena 1.0, ahead of every world-action model and video generator in our comparison. As a policy, it scores among the top entries of the RoboTwin 2.0 leaderboard, reaches the highest zero-shot LIBERO-plus success among the compared methods and is competitive with dedicated vision-language-action and world-action policies on CALVIN and LIBERO. We further adapt GreenWAM to a real humanoid, where it succeeds more often than policies adapted from $π_{0.5}$ and from Cosmos 3 Edge, and distill it into a single-step policy for real-time control. Controlled experiments yield three findings: robot specialization improves world prediction and control together; an action expert helps when split off at the start of adaptation; and keeping world-model modes during policy adaptation preserves robustness to scene changes.

Abstract: Monocular videos of human manipulation provide abundant dexterous demonstrations, yet reconstructing hand-object interaction from a single view and transferring it to robot hands remain difficult, limiting their direct use for robot execution. Prior methods either require task-specific RL training, limiting scalability, or assume clean motion-capture trajectories and thus cannot operate directly on video. We present OmniHOI, a pipeline that turns an RGB video of hand-object interaction into an interaction-faithful trajectory on dexterous hands. The key idea is to enforce physical consistency using the evidence available at each stage: image evidence during reconstruction, contact geometry during retargeting, and dynamics during physics-in-the-loop refinement. Each stage optimizes the corresponding representation directly, correcting errors before they propagate downstream or must be absorbed by a learned policy. Across 150 motion-capture trajectories transferred to each of five dexterous hands with 6 to 22 DoF, we achieve 39-89% success, compared with at most 31% for prior transfer methods. On 60 monocular video clips, we achieve 53% success, compared with 28% for the best prior video-to-robot pipeline. Its trajectories also execute on a real bimanual robot across diverse tasks.

Abstract: Micro unmanned aerial vehicles (micro-UAVs) are small enough to reach confined spaces that larger robots cannot access, but too small to carry the sensing and computing power required for autonomous flight. We move the localization stack entirely off the aerial platform onto a quadruped robot with a 7-degree-of-freedom (DOF) arm, which supplies the micro-UAV (27 g bare, 42 g with fiducial markers) its full 6-DOF pose. A camera at the arm's end-effector detects AprilTag fiducial markers on the drone and composes that observation with the quadruped's own self-localization to place the drone in a shared map frame, so the ground robot localizes its partner, rather than only tracking it relative to the camera. The arm acts as an actively-controlled observer, repositioning to keep the drone in view as both robots move; the drone carries only an inertial measurement unit and fuses the external pose to fly commanded setpoints. In lab flights the external pose is accurate to 12-16 mm, enough to fly the drone autonomously within 2-5 cm of motion-capture-fed control. Having the quadruped actively follow the drone reduces the tracking error from 11.0 cm to 6.9 cm by holding the camera in the close range, where the markers are most accurate.

Abstract: Rapid advances in humanoid robotics have motivated growing interest in the application of humanoids for healthcare and clinical tasks. However, it remains unclear how close contemporary humanoids are to meeting the kinematic demands of robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery. In this work, we address the question of optimal robot positioning through a quantitative analysis of workspace and robot setup configurations. We present a capability-map-based robot setup framework that optimizes humanoid base placement and tool mounting orientation to maximize bimanual humanoid reachability while accounting for tool-tip kinematics and remote-center-of-motion (RCM) constraints. We evaluate three humanoid platforms spanning different body dimensions and kinematic redundancy on workspace reachability for three representative general surgery procedures: cholecystectomy, inguinal hernia repair, and sleeve gastrectomy. The proposed joint optimization of base placement and tool mounting consistently outperforms base-only optimization and heuristic baselines. For cholecystectomy and inguinal hernia repair, which are characterized by relatively small and minimally overlapping workspaces, humanoid reachability approached 90%. For the larger, overlapping multi-port arm workspace of sleeve gastrectomy, humanoids yield substantially lower coverage. These results quantify the near-term promise of humanoids for selected laparoscopic procedures and clarify key limitations that must be addressed for broader deployment.

Abstract: Aerial-ground cooperation requires real-time UAV--UGV relative-state information. Instead of maintaining global estimates for both robots, direct control in a UGV-attached non-inertial frame avoids reliance on global localization. Vision-based relative pose estimation with a passive marker offers a low-cost and effective solution. However, a fixed camera may lose sight of the moving UGV when the required UAV attitude conflicts with the field-of-view (FOV) constraint. To address this, we propose COPA, a robust active-perception framework for global-state-free aerial-ground cooperation. We use a single-axis gimbal to decouple the camera optical axis from the UAV pitch attitude. We derive an active-perception model that relates UAV motion, gimbal angle, and UGV motion to the target image-plane state.A Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) predicts short-horizon UGV acceleration and angular velocity from recent motion history without global-state measurements. The model predictive control (MPC) uses these predictions to jointly optimize UAV and gimbal control. Simulations show that COPA maintains continuous target visibility, while ablation studies confirm that the TCN reduces peak errors during UGV motion transitions. Real-world experiments with UGV accelerations up to 3m/s^2 and yaw rates up to 1.0rad/s demonstrate robust tracking.

Abstract: Robots have significant potential to automate construction processes. However, their industry adoption remains limited, partly because of the programming effort required to adapt robots to diverse tasks. This paper presents a skill sequence planning method that enables a heterogeneous team of multi-functional robots to collaboratively perform construction assembly work using reusable, preprogrammed skills such as grasping, drilling, and fastening. A central controller transforms the digital representation of the building into a construction relationship graph that represents construction entities, their states, and their parent-child relationships. Based on this representation, the system selects the next construction target, generates a symbolic sequence of skills for capable members of the robot team, and produces collision-free geometric motion plans for skill execution. The symbolic planning problem is dynamically regenerated as the construction state changes. An interactive digital twin presents the planned skill sequence and robot states to human co-workers for review and approval before execution. The method is evaluated through a construction assembly case study. By reducing the need to program robots separately for each task variation, the proposed approach supports more flexible deployment of collaborative robot teams in construction.

Abstract: A geometrically valid placement can still be difficult to execute because the selected grasp changes the required end-effector pose, collision geometry, and transport motion. Placement is formulated as a pre-execution ranking problem in which supplied grasp-placement candidates are scored before planning. The model combines a typed target-conditioned point cloud with three pose descriptors and hierarchical heads for planning success and execution success conditioned on planning. On a 30-object, 1,235-scene dataset with scene-group-held-out splits, three-seed top-1 success on covered test groups reaches 85.63 +/- 1.08% for joint selection and 79.84 +/- 0.16% for fixed-target ranking. For the designated frozen seed-42 checkpoint, top-1 success improves from 72.84% to 85.78% over full-pool cuMotion for joint ranking and from 59.65% to 79.67% for fixed-target ranking. Frozen transfer to xArm7/MoveIt requires no xArm-specific retraining. Across 27 locked cases, 13 complete end to end (48.15%). Of the 16 cases that pass Top-5 preflight and begin execution, 13 succeed (81.25%). Candidate-level deployment-feasibility prediction reaches 81.25% recall, 85.20% specificity, and 83.23% balanced accuracy.

Abstract: High-mix low-volume (HMLV) manufacturing requires inspection systems to adapt to changing parts, specifications, and work orders without repeated task-specific programming. Existing inspection automation typically assumes predefined sensing sequences, while general purpose robot agents optimize task completion rather than the completeness and validity of metrological evidence. We formulate task-specified active metrological inspection and propose From Requirements to Admissible Metrological Evidence (FRAME), a hierarchical dual-arm framework that converts an inspection instruction and structured specification into traceable conformance evidence. FRAME coordinates learned manipulation with calibrated laser profilometry: a task manager grounds and schedules requirements, active surface correspondence verifies physical-to-specification localization, and evidence memory tracks measurement provenance, admissibility, and coverage. Learned components may propose inspection targets and physical access actions, but deterministic datum-grounded measurement, admissibility checks, coverage auditing, and conformance evaluation prevent incomplete or unverified evidence from authorizing PASS. A series of physical experiments shows that FRAME achieves higher end-to-end inspection reliability, fewer false accepts, and shorter task completion time.

Abstract: Robotic bioprinting and Direct Ink Writing (DIW) are being explored towards the treatment of Volumetric Muscle Loss (VML). While previous studies have shown the importance of proper parameter selection on the print outcome, existing approaches often rely on time- and material-intensive design of experiments methods, or require large, well-curated datasets for training machine learning models. In this paper, we propose a physics-based closed-loop robotic bioprinting system capable of near real-time parameter adaptation. The system integrates a 3D point cloud camera and fully autonomous vision-based algorithms to provide quantitative evaluation of printed constructs. This evaluation is fed into a controller that adjusts printing parameters to achieve a desired bead thickness. To assess the framework's performance, four experimental configurations were tested, each repeated three times. In these tests, printing began from an arbitrary initial parameter value, and the controller was tasked with adjusting the parameters to reach the desired thickness. The system converged in all trials, achieving a tracking error below 0.5 mm within an average of 5.2 seconds from the start of printing. The low standard deviation of the converged pressure over different tests (0.04 bar on average) demonstrates robustness and repeatability. Additional experiments were conducted with the controller turned off, enabling direct comparison with open-loop DIW bioprinting, further confirming the effectiveness of the proposed closed-loop framework in achieving the desired bead geometry.