Today's 30 papers show the VLA research agenda shifting from raw capability toward trustworthiness and diagnosis. BrainWAM identifies a concrete failure when combining VLM semantic priors with world-action-model predictive dynamics under naive joint attention — semantic shortcuts drown out the predictive signal — and fixes it with separated, action-aligned pathways to reach state-of-the-art NAVSIM scores (89.5 PDMS / 89.6 EPDMS). Temporal GRPO names and repairs a specific credit-assignment bug in outcome-driven VLA RL post-training, where one trajectory-level advantage can penalize a rollout's genuinely good early stages for a later failure. FIRE-VLA goes further, turning unresolved failure groups into privileged self-distillation targets and cutting nuScenes L2 error from 1.848m to 1.500m, with the gain concentrated in rare severe rollouts rather than average-case improvement. Meanwhile Decoding Task Progress and ContactGuard attack reliability from the inspection side rather than the training side: the former finds task progress linearly readable from π0.5's activations even before robot-specific fine-tuning, turning an interpretability finding into a competitive OOD detector, while the latter predicts a chunked policy's short-horizon consequences in latent space and aborts before contact commits. Five of today's papers treat the VLA itself as something to monitor, diagnose, and selectively retrain, rather than a monolith to simply scale up.
A second cluster treats world models and video generation as infrastructure whose outputs need independent validation as much as new architectures need building. DreamX-Phi injects per-arm SE(3) geometric encoding to stop action-conditioned video predictions from moving the wrong arm, and S2-HWM adds sparse event-structured hierarchy so a world model can plan in variable-duration jumps instead of fixed primitive steps, lifting PegTransfer success 22.7 points over a flat DreamerV3 baseline. But the same batch includes H2R-Bench, which benchmarks eleven state-of-the-art video generation models on cross-embodiment human-to-robot transfer and finds that even the leading ones routinely fail at embodiment consistency and functional interaction — a direct check on how much the generative side can currently be trusted. That skepticism-alongside-generation pattern repeats in HumanTracker and HumanoidVLN, both of which argue existing evaluation (kinematic pose averaging, wheeled-robot VLN benchmarks) misses what actually matters physically, and build new perceptually- or physically-grounded benchmarks instead of new policies.
A third, quieter theme is squeezing more capability out of existing data and hardware rather than collecting more of either. Seeker learns where to look purely from action supervision, lifting real-robot success from 48.3% to 76.7%; FUSE actively repositions to resolve occluded affordances at 1.33x less compute than full exploration; SAP-Nav's active-viewpoint verification beats training-based baselines by 12.2% SR without any task-specific training at all. Deliberate Practice makes the underlying question explicit — given a fixed practice budget, which skills are even worth learning — and solves it exactly via a bilinear program. A smaller field-robotics thread (two genetic-fuzzy-system papers from the same authors, applied to spacecraft rendezvous and planetary multi-robot coordination, plus AMR-Pose's LED-marker AUV pose estimation) shows classical, interpretable control still earns its keep in domains — space, underwater, unstructured terrain — where training data and communication are scarce even as deep learning dominates the rest of the batch.
Spatial representation, localization, and navigation policies for social, aerial, and open-vocabulary settings, from continuous-time VINS splines to active-perception object search.
Training, monitoring, and failure-recovery techniques that treat vision-language-action policies as systems to be inspected and repaired rather than black boxes to retrain from scratch.
Methods that make manipulation policies and demonstrations more data- and time-efficient, from budgeted skill practice to action-derived attention and safer teleoperation.
Action-conditioned video and world models that generate or benchmark manipulation and handover footage across robot embodiments.
Mechanical design and physically grounded perception for continuum, aerial, and soft robotic hardware.
Benchmark datasets and simulation platforms purpose-built to evaluate humanoid, glider, and VLN systems against perceptually or physically grounded ground truth.
Fuzzy-logic and marker-based control for coordination and pose estimation in space, planetary, and underwater field robotics.
Training and evaluating spatial reasoning in embodied agents requires diverse environments that are both geometrically faithful and semantically queryable. Synthetic simulators offer ground truth semantics but sacrifice realism; simulators based on reconstructions of real-world environments have realistic appearance but lack ground truth semantics by default. We propose using Semantic Radiance Fields (SRF) as simulators for spatial reasoning agents. SRFs are a representation that unifies these requirements by lifting 2D semantic segmentations from pretrained vision models into a 3D radiance field that jointly encodes geometry, appearance, and per-class semantic identity. The resulting fields are reconstructed from posed RGB captures of real scenes and support novel-view synthesis, semantic and free-space queries within a single grounded representation. This enables the efficient generation of diverse real-world environments to train and evaluate spatial reasoning models. As an example application, we outline an SRF-driven simulator for an orchard apple-reaching task, in which the radiance field supplies camera rendering, semantic ground truth, and occupancy queries to a physics engine.
Social robots are expected to operate across diverse environments, where similar arrangements can imply different socially appropriate actions, e.g., starting a conversation may be acceptable in a crowded home but disruptive in an office meeting. Because such norms and environments cannot all be anticipated in advance, robots require continual learning (CL) to adapt from sequential experience while retaining previously acquired knowledge. Prior work has studied CL for generating socially appropriate robot actions, but it has not addressed domain-incremental settings in which the robot incrementally encounters diverse contexts (e.g., living room, meeting room, office, hallway), where both environmental (e.g., whether the space is open or cluttered with furniture) and social cues (e.g., how people or other agents are positioned around the robot) jointly shape the appropriateness of robot actions. We address this gap with the Explicit Disentanglement Dual-Branch (EDD) framework. EDD explicitly separates environmental and social-agent related knowledge and uses replay-based rehearsal to mitigate forgetting while learning the appropriateness of robot actions (e.g., cleaning, serving, starting a conversation) across several indoor domains. Experiments show that EDD outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines, and ablation studies further evaluate different disentanglement strategies and the sensitivity to domain ordering. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Cambridge-AFAR/Mind-the-Context.git.
Developing effective robot navigation methods in crowded environments is essential for real-world applications. Although recent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods have improved navigation performance in crowded environments, they often focus primarily on task-centric objectives and underrepresent social compliance objectives. In this paper, we introduce a novel proxemics-based reward formulation for DRL social navigation that provides a dense, interpretable social learning signal while maintaining navigation efficiency. Our approach models each human's personal space as a radial Gaussian-mixture field derived from Hall's proxemics theory and computes a robot-centric local cost over the robot's field of view. We integrate the proposed reward into established DRL navigation methods and evaluate it in simulation across multiple crowd scenarios, reward baselines, and crowd densities using both navigation metrics and social metrics. Results show that the proposed reward consistently improves social metrics in simulation while maintaining competitive navigation performance relative to the compared reward models.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Vision-Language Navigation (UAV-VLN) requires agents to follow language instructions, infer spatial structure from sparse multi-view observations, and execute feasible 3D motion in complex outdoor environments. Despite recent progress with large language models, most existing methods still map vision-language inputs directly to actions, providing limited explicit scene grounding and future-aware spatial reasoning. We propose AirForesight, a current-to-future spatial map imagination framework for UAV-VLN. AirForesight first learns a structured current-map representation from multi-view observations. This representation is jointly supervised by current-map reconstruction and future-trajectory prediction, encouraging it to encode both present scene structure and future motion intent. Under structured causal attention, the current spatial knowledge is propagated to future-map reasoning, and the resulting current and future representations are aggregated to predict the next 3D waypoint. To make spatial imagination more relevant to navigation, we introduce a cross-space planning consistency loss that encourages directional agreement between the predicted map-space trajectory and the expert action direction derived from the ground-truth waypoint displacement. Experiments on OpenUAV and AerialVLN-S, together with extensive ablations, demonstrate strong performance and support the effectiveness and stability of the proposed framework.
Hierarchical open-vocabulary object navigation (OVON) requires agents to follow free-form instructions that may specify targets through scene-, room-, region-, and instance-level cues in unseen environments. Although recent work LangMap has formalized this setting, reliably solving it under partial observations remains challenging: spatial grounding requires persistent environment-level evidence, whereas target verification requires clear and discriminative candidate views. We present SAP-Nav, a fully online, zero-shot framework that addresses both requirements through active perception. SAP-Nav incrementally constructs a Queryable Spatial-Semantic Representation from actively acquired room views, enabling spatial semantic queries from any explored location. It further employs Active Viewpoint Verification to assess whether the current observation provides sufficient evidence and, when necessary, reposition the agent to a more informative viewpoint before verifying candidates against category and attribute constraints. Although designed for hierarchical OVON, SAP-Nav supports both hierarchical and standard category-level OVON without task-specific training or precomputed scene maps. Experiments on LangMap and HM3D-OVON show that SAP-Nav achieves the overall best performance, including a 12.2% improvement in SR over training-based methods on region-level navigation. Real-world robot experiments further demonstrate its practical feasibility. Code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
Visual-inertial navigation systems estimate six-degree-of-freedom motion by fusing visual and inertial data. Modern discrete-time methods with IMU preintegration provide strong accuracy and efficiency, but keyframe-based representations can be less flexible when residuals must be evaluated at arbitrary timestamps or when motion-dependent temporal resolution is needed. Continuous-time splines address this issue by representing the trajectory as a smooth temporal function, but uniformly spaced knots can under-represent rapid dynamics or over-parameterize static intervals. This letter proposes ASPIRE-VINS, a continuous-time VINS framework that combines adaptive knot placement (AKP), multi-resolution splines (MRS), and 3D measurement-space residuals (3D-MSR). AKP allocates knots according to local motion variation, MRS adds bounded local refinement in tangent space, and 3D-MSR provides bearing consistency by aligning transformed features with calibrated observation rays in 3D measurement space. Experiments show that ASPIRE-VINS achieves competitive or lower trajectory errors than the compared baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of motion-adaptive continuous-time trajectory modeling under diverse motion and sensing conditions.
Autonomous driving requires planning under both semantic constraints and predictive dynamics. Existing end-to-end driving approaches, however, typically emphasize only one side of this requirement: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models exploit VLM priors for semantic reasoning, while World Action Models (WAMs) provide future-aware prediction through generative world modeling. This naturally motivates a unified planner that can leverage both semantic priors and predictive dynamics. However, we find that a naive combination through joint token-level attention suffers from an attention-allocation mismatch, where semantic shortcuts dominate the shared attention space and suppress predictive dynamics. Inspired by neuroscience evidence that complex behavior arises from coordination among functionally specialized systems, we propose BrainWAM, a structured action-space coordination framework that converts semantic reasoning and predictive world modeling into two specialized action-oriented pathways, and aligns them at the level of compact action representations. We further introduce an asynchronous rectified-flow inference strategy with decoupled video and action denoising, which shortens inference latency while preserving planning-relevant predictive context. BrainWAM reaches state-of-the-art performance on both NAVSIM v1 (89.5 PDMS) and NAVSIM v2 (89.6 EPDMS), consistently outperforming VLA-only or WAM-only methods, highlighting BrainWAM as a practical and promising direction for autonomous driving systems.
Outcome-driven reinforcement learning offers a scalable way to post-train vision-language-action (VLA) policies from sparse task-success feedback. In common GRPO-based VLA post-training, one rollout-level advantage is applied to every action in the trajectory. A rollout that completes several valid stages but fails later can therefore penalize the actions that produced its earlier progress. We call this trajectory-level credit aliasing. Temporal GRPO addresses this problem by constructing detectable task stages, aligning each rollout with stage-specific action intervals, and comparing only rollouts that have entered the same stage. The resulting stage advantages are applied to their corresponding intervals in a single policy update. On RoboTwin 2.0, Temporal GRPO improves task success and sample efficiency, with consistent gains across task horizons. Controlled updates on LIBERO-Long preserve shared prerequisite stages and concentrate improvement at the first stage where rollout outcomes diverge.
Contact-rich manipulation failures are often detected only after the robot has committed to contact. This is especially limiting in wrist-camera setups: close gripper--object views help observe contact, but a poor approach may already push, miss, slip, or disturb the object before conventional detectors react. We introduce \emph{ContactGuard}, a pre-contact execution monitor for chunked visuomotor policies. Given the policy's planned action chunk, ContactGuard predicts its short-horizon consequence in latent visual space and aborts if the predicted future latent indicates likely failure. Its latent world model is trained from unlabelled robot trajectories to predict compact multi-view visual embeddings under planned actions, avoiding pixel-level video prediction. A lightweight failure probe is then trained from a small labelled set of pre-contact clips. At deployment, ContactGuard anchors prediction before an imminent contact event, rolls the model forward under the policy's own actions, and verifies the predicted post-contact latent. Across real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, ContactGuard predicts failure more accurately than direct and corrupted-action ablations, and transfers to live robot as a pre-contact abort signal without modifying the underlying policy.
Vision-language-action models (VLAs) are moving rapidly towards deployment as general-purpose manipulation policies, but we currently lack basic tools for understanding what these models represent internally or for monitoring them at runtime. Leveraging ideas from mechanistic interpretability, we probe the residual stream of $π_{0.5}$ and find that task progress, the normalized time remaining in a trajectory, is linearly readable from the activations. We find that this signal is present in the pretrained PaliGemma backbone prior to training on any robot-specific data. A single linear probe generalizes to unseen tasks and varies under language counterfactuals when trained on multi-prompt data, but does not enable meaningful steering of the policy. These properties make the signal directly useful for instrumenting deployed VLAs. We use the probe as a simple label-free OOD detector, which detects stalled task progress, and find it competitive with state-of-the-art methods. Our results suggest that VLAs have rich, linearly readable internal representations of semantic quantities like task progress, and that learning to read these signals offers a lightweight, interpretable path toward monitoring deployed visuomotor policies.
Reinforcement learning improves autonomous-driving vision-language-action (VLA) models by evaluating trajectories sampled from the current policy. Group relative policy optimization (GRPO) learns from reward differences within each rollout group. When all sampled trajectories are poor, this relative signal can rank failures without identifying behavior outside the failed region. We introduce FIRE-VLA, a failure-informed self-evolution framework that converts such unresolved failures into privileged supervision for the next policy. Low-reward, low-diversity groups trigger self-distillation from a frozen round-start copy of the same model. Teacher and student have the same parameter scale, but only the teacher observes the hidden future trajectory. Supervision follows the student's generated prefix and is restricted to answer tokens, while GRPO remains active for every group. The updated policy supplies the teacher for the next round, allowing the routed failure distribution to change with the policy without requiring a larger external teacher. Starting from the same Qwen2.5-VL-3B SFT checkpoint, the comparison matches student rollout and policy-update counts. On 6,019 examples from 150 held-out nuScenes scenes, FIRE-VLA retains comparable single-sample planning, reduces G=4 mean L2 from 1.848 to 1.500 m, and lowers evaluation-persistent failure prevalence from 13.03% to 11.20%. The reduction in mean error arises mainly from rare severe rollouts rather than uniform improvement across ordinary trajectories.
We consider the problem of autonomously learning robot skills under a limited practice budget for sequential tasks. We propose an active skill learning algorithm, \emph{Deliberate Practice (DP)}, that computes a provably \emph{budget-optimal} allocation---practicing skills that maximize expected cumulative reward while being learnable within the budget. DP estimates both the time needed to master skills and the cumulative reward of the task plans that the skills unlock. Computing a budget-optimal allocation is challenging as it requires reasoning about combinatorially many skill plans over a large practice budget. Our key contribution is a bilinear program that can compute this exactly using off-the-shelf solvers. Through simulated and real-world experiments on long-horizon manipulation tasks, we show that our approach allows robots to optimally use limited practice time to acquire useful policies and improve long-horizon planning.
Visual bottlenecks that focus policy inputs on regions of interest (ROIs) can improve data-efficient visuomotor learning by separating where to look from how to act. Many ROI interfaces rely on external spatial labels, such as gaze, object classes, or affordance annotations. Label-free alternatives often derive crops from trajectories by detecting gripper or motion events and centering a fixed crop at the projected end-effector. Such action-derived crops are useful spatial priors that require no additional labels, but they encode fixed choices about event timing, proxy points, and crop scale. When the visual evidence needed for control lies away from the end-effector or changes continuously with task progress, these crops can become misaligned. We propose Seeker, a task- and state-conditioned readout that learns attention from action. Starting from frozen DINOv3 features, Seeker iteratively updates a query with gathered visual evidence, producing progression-aware ROIs solely from action supervision. The learned ROI serves as a spatial interface for RGB cropping, mask-guided background augmentation, and point-cloud filtering. In simulation and the real world, Seeker improves data efficiency and robustness over no-crop, augmentation, and action-derived crop baselines. On real robots, Seeker raises average in-domain success from the best baseline's 48.3% to 76.7% and success under lighting/background shifts from 20.0% to 60.0%.
Recent advances in teleoperation have enabled robotic manipulators to perform dexterous, human-arm-like motions. However, human operators may fail to avoid suddenly appearing obstacles promptly and effectively, particularly under network latency or limited attention, thereby creating safety risks. To address this issue, we propose a lightweight and modular framework for proactive collision avoidance, operating directly at the end-effector velocity-command level. After preprocessing the point cloud, the framework first predicts potential collisions based on time-to-collision (TTC) with integrated overshoot protection, and subsequently rotates the relative-velocity vector using Rodrigues' rotation formula. The deflection changes only the direction of the relative velocity while preserving its magnitude, thereby mitigating the deadlock problem commonly encountered by conventional artificial potential field (APF) methods. The prediction module compensates for point-cloud processing latency introduced by complex teleoperation pipelines, while the lightweight design enables the high-frequency control required for teleoperation. Simulations across diverse scenarios show that the proposed method achieves a higher end-effector collision avoidance rate than the baseline methods. Experiments on a physical robotic system further validate its collision-avoidance effectiveness.
Embodied agents must often identify and interact with objects based on their function rather than their identity, requiring them to actively acquire observations that reveal discriminative functional evidence. Existing affordance grounding methods operate from fixed viewpoints and lack mechanisms for deciding where to look when functional cues are occluded or incomplete. We introduce Active Functional Affordance Grounding, a new task in which an agent sequentially explores a scene to identify and spatially ground an object satisfying a functional query. To address this problem, we propose FUSE, an adaptive semantic-geometric evidence acquisition framework that combines explicit uncertainty-driven exploration with a learned amortized planner to efficiently select informative viewpoints. We further introduce a Habitat-based benchmark for evaluating active functional grounding. Experiments show that FUSE achieves the highest observed non-oracle grounding performance while reducing computation by 1.33x relative to fully explicit exploration, and remains effective across multiple affordance knowledge sources.
Dexterous manipulation promises substantially richer robot interaction with the physical world, but learning these behaviours remains constrained by the difficulty of collecting consistent, complete-task demonstrations. Unlike parallel-jaw manipulation, dexterous tasks require the operator to coordinate arm motion with precise, contact-rich finger behaviour throughout the task. We introduce NestDex, a nested policy-learning framework that reduces this burden by using learned hand skills to assist demonstration collection. The operator controls the arm and regulates the active hand skill through a single-DoF clutch, rather than directly specifying the full finger trajectory. The inner hand policy adapts its motion from the latest proprioceptive history, while a vision-language selector activates the appropriate skill for each task stage. The resulting demonstrations train a separate outer visuomotor policy that controls both the arm and hand without the inner policies at deployment. A hand-action variational autoencoder provides compact hand-action targets while retaining arm commands in joint space. Across real-world dexterous manipulation experiments, NestDex improves demonstration reliability and efficiency, and the resulting empirical evaluations support effective autonomous policy learning. Video Demo are available at project website https://aus.bot/research/nestdex.
We present \textbf{DreamX-Phi 1.0}, an action-conditioned video world model for robotic manipulation that, given an observed frame, a language instruction, and a prescribed action sequence comprising end-effector poses and gripper states, predicts the resulting future observations. Yet realism alone does not guarantee faithfulness: a convincing rollout can still move the wrong arm or lose the manipulated object. To ensure the prediction respects each arm's commanded path, we inject per-arm $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ transformations into attention via \textbf{PRoPE-style geometric encoding}, preserving arm identity and rigid-motion structure. Action control alone does not fully constrain scene geometry or the evolution of small manipulated objects. We therefore add a lightweight \textbf{depth branch} for scene-level geometry and use \textbf{SAM3 masks} with a frozen \textbf{V-JEPA teacher} to maintain object consistency throughout grasping. We further distill the multi-step generator into a few-step student via distribution-matching distillation for efficient deployment. At the time of writing, \model{} achieves first place on Track~1 and second place on Track~2 of the WorldArena~2.0 Challenge. Our model and code will be publicly available.
Long-horizon surgical robot manipulation is challenging because task rewards are sparse, while meaningful interaction changes occur at irregular intervals. Existing world-model agents typically imagine at primitive-step resolution, leaving variable-duration task progress implicit. Manually specified stages can provide intermediate structure, but their task specific boundaries are difficult to align with state-dependent interaction transitions. We propose S2-HWM, a Sparse Event-Structured Hierarchical World Model that learns sparse event evidence from primitive latent trajectories to coordinate an event-level manager and a primitive-step worker. The event evidence schedules manager goal updates, and each selected latent goal conditions the worker's primitive actions until the next update. The learned event evidence also forms variable-duration segments for an Event Transition Model (ETM), which predicts the next?boundary stochastic state, segment duration, and accumulated segment reward. Chaining these event-level predictions provides a variable-duration continuation beyond the primitive imagination horizon for manager learning, while the worker retains primitive-step actor-critic learning. On a SurRoL-based PegTransfer task, S2-HWM achieves a success rate of 98.7%, outperforming the flat GAS DreamerV3 baseline by 22.7 percentage points.
Human-to-robot (H2R) object handover is a fundamental capability for human-robot collaboration, yet progress is hindered by the scarcity of large-scale, human-centric datasets and the significant sim-to-real gap. To address these challenges, we introduce Hand2Bot, an RGB-D video dataset that provides rich contextual information such as body posture and facial expressions, specifically collected for handover scenarios with real-world noise patterns. We further propose PassGen, a generative pipeline that leverages stable video diffusion and an Intention-Aware Temporal Face Encoder to synthesize realistic handover sequences while ensuring hand-object consistency. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we implement a morphology-based depth editing strategy that replicates realistic sensor noise found in physical depth maps. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our framework achieves high intention identification accuracy and low false trigger rates in both ablation studies and real-world deployment on a physical robot platform. Our results confirm that training on PassGen allows for robust zero-shot transfer and earlier intention anticipation compared to traditional hand-centric baselines, effectively enabling socially aware robotic behavior in shared workspaces.
Large-scale manipulation data is essential for robot learning, yet collecting robot demonstrations remains expensive and difficult to scale. Meanwhile, abundant egocentric human manipulation videos provide rich behavioral experiences, but transferring them across embodiments remains challenging due to differences between human hands and robotic end-effectors. Recent advances in video world models offer a promising pathway to synthesize robot-centric manipulation videos from human observations, while their cross-embodiment transfer capability remains largely unexplored. Therefore, we introduce H2R-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating cross-embodiment human-to-robot manipulation video generation, where models transform egocentric human demonstrations into robot manipulation videos under specified embodiments. Each benchmark instance contains a human demonstration video, target embodiment constraints, and source-grounded annotations covering task goals, action events, functional contacts, and object responses. H2R-Bench evaluates generated videos through five dimensions, including goal-state completion, action-event completion, functional contact transfer, embodiment correctness, and general video quality. We benchmark eleven state-of-the-art video generation models across six manipulation families and two robot embodiments. Our evaluation reveals that current video world models remain limited in human-to-robot manipulation transfer: even leading models often fail in embodiment consistency, functional interaction, and task execution. H2R-Bench provides a systematic diagnostic framework for evaluating whether video world models can bridge the human-to-robot embodiment gap and convert human manipulation observations into robot-centric training resources.
Shape and force sensing have long been critical bottlenecks in the development of compact capstan-driven continuum surgical robots, primarily due to the difficulty of obtaining cable tension information within the confined capstan assembly. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents an integrated design-modeling-sensing approach based on the concept of actuation-perception co-design. A compliant element is introduced into the motor mounting bracket of the drive system, enabling micro-deformation under the cable reaction force and thereby allowing real-time cable tension measurement without occupying the compact capstan space. To address the modeling complexity arising from unconventional joint configurations introduced by the spatial cable routing strategy, a parallel computation framework based on a multibody short-thick-beam model is proposed, which captures shear effects in short beam segments and synergistic multi-cable interactions while achieving real-time performance. Building on this framework, stable shape and force sensing is achieved by incorporating a proximal multi-axis force/torque sensor as an additional measurement anchor. Following this design-modeling-sensing framework, capstan-driven continuum surgical robots with single- and dual-segment configurations are developed. Experimental results validate the proposed framework in both single- and dual-segment continuum robots, demonstrating real-time tip pose estimation together with contact force and location perception. By enabling cable tension feedback without compromising the compact capstan architecture, the proposed framework makes integrated perception feasible for capstan-driven continuum surgical robots.
Understanding hand-object interaction from egocentric vision is essential for modeling how people physically engage with the surrounding world. Yet reasoning about physically grounded interaction requires estimating the forces acting on hands and objects, beyond localizing contact. We present EgoPHI, the first method that jointly estimates dense contact maps and 3D force distributions on hand and object meshes from a single monocular RGB image and object geometry. To address the lack of scalable ground-truth force annotations, we introduce a physics-based simulation pipeline that augments existing hand-object datasets with dense per-vertex force supervision. EgoPHI then learns dense 3D contact and force on interacting hand and articulated object meshes, extending vision-based force estimation beyond image-space or planar settings. Our evaluation on in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks shows that EgoPHI improves force estimation over existing approaches while generalizing to unseen datasets. To evaluate sim-to-real transfer, we constructed two physical objects that capture dense object contact and force magnitude and used them to record a dataset of interactions from eight participants across diverse touch and grasp types. Our results demonstrate that EgoPHI recovers meaningful 3D contact and force distributions in simulated, out-of-distribution, and real-world settings, advancing egocentric hand-object understanding from contact localization toward physically grounded interaction reasoning.
Manufacturing complex soft pneumatic actuators remains challenging because geometric fidelity, compliance, structural integrity, and airtightness must be achieved simultaneously. This study presents a manufacturing-focused evaluation of several fabrication routes for complex pneumatic structures, including heat-shrink forming, silicone casting, powder- and liquid-based additive manufacturing, and fused deposition modeling (FDM). The processes were assessed through process screening, baseline fabrication, failure analysis, and process improvement to distinguish inherent process limitations from correctable manufacturing defects. Heat-shrink forming was limited by geometric conformity, casting by mold accessibility and bonded interfaces, powder-based methods by residual material trapped within enclosed passages, and digital light processing by the material properties and post-processing requirements of the investigated system. FDM provided the most adaptable route because its dominant defects could be progressively reduced through process optimization. The results further showed that airtightness depends not only on nominal wall thickness but also on extrusion-path architecture, while support-free geometry is important when access for internal post-processing is limited. These findings establish a practical design-for-manufacturing approach in which process selection is guided by the compatibility between actuator architecture and manufacturing constraints. The proposed approach provides practical guidance for developing complex, flexible, and airtight soft pneumatic actuators for soft robotic applications
Aerial physical interaction requires aerial manipulation platforms to generate large interaction forces and torques while maintaining precise end-effector control. However, conventional underactuated aerial manipulators suffer from strong position-attitude coupling, whereas fully actuated platform designs often face structural complexity, limited payload capacity, and insufficient torque output. This paper presents FAM-DQ, a dual-quadrotor based fully actuated aerial manipulator designed for high-torque physical interaction tasks. By mounting two quadrotor propulsion modules at the ends of a central frame through passive joints, while using a gear-driven servo to regulate the pointing direction, FAM-DQ achieves decoupled $6$-DoF end-effector control with omnidirectional manipulation capability and enhanced torque output. Experiments including trajectory tracking, attitude tracking, static torque measurement, and screw driving validate the proposed design. FAM-DQ achieves a maximum torque of $1.019~\mathrm{N}\cdot\mathrm{m}$ with a total mass of $0.447~\mathrm{kg}$, corresponding to a torque-to-mass ratio of $2.28~\mathrm{N}\cdot\mathrm{m/kg}$.
Repeated in-situ evaluation of ocean-glider planners requires scarce vehicles, operators, deployment and recovery resources, and ocean conditions that cannot be reset for competing algorithms. We present a guided, installation-free browser-native digital test range that transforms a selected region into a reproducible four-dimensional experiment. The system leads users from regional domain selection through mission-scoped bathymetry, time/depth forcing, science objectives, optional task decomposition, route specification, current-advected execution, observation generation, and scoring. Its primary contribution is a common plan-to-observation contract unifying vehicle, sensing, and evaluator assumptions across manual routes, transparent built-in algorithms, and imported classical or learned-planner outputs, while exported artifacts form dataset-ready records. A controlled Observing System Simulation Experiment (OSSE) evaluates five classical planners in two episodes, three deterministic seeds, and a calibrated 60-hour horizon. All 54 missions completed and recovered without hard violations, while planner rankings and dive-policy effects revealed operational-scientific tradeoffs. An authentic public deployment supplied a field-referenced audit to scope current kinematic boundaries. Separately, source-locked GliderFlight 1.2.0 achieved native-to-browser parity through Pyodide/WebAssembly, establishing a pathway for high-fidelity multi-tier simulation. The resulting operational space is scientifically traceable and component-qualified for mission-scale pre-deployment experimentation.
Humanoid motion tracking is central to teleoperation and whole-body imitation, yet evaluation often disagrees with what people perceive in videos. Kinematic errors average per-frame pose differences but miss the physical artifacts that matter most, particularly unstable support and incorrect contacts such as foot skating and mistimed touch-downs. Meanwhile, widely used test suites are small and lack the diversity needed to stress contact-rich, long-horizon behaviors. We introduce HumanTracker to make humanoid tracking evaluation both perceptually aligned and scalable. The HumanTracker benchmark contains approximately 153 hours of optical motion trajectories from multiple professional performers, organized into four motion families with text labels for fine-grained diagnosis. We further propose HumanScore, a preference-aligned metric trained on 12K motion pairs containing 24K motions. Across representative state-of-the-art trackers, HumanScore better predicts human preferences and reveals contact and stability failures that kinematic metrics often miss.
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) for humanoid robots poses challenges existing benchmarks fail to address: bipedal locomotion imposes physical constraints absent from wheeled agents, humanoid morphologies vary across platforms, and egocentric observations are distorted by locomotion-induced camera dynamics. We present HumanoidVLN, a physics-grounded simulator and benchmark for VLN across diverse humanoid embodiments. Built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim, our platform supports an extensible set of humanoid configurations, demonstrated on four robots (Unitree G1, Unitree H1, Internal-A, Internal-B) spanning 10-12 lower-body DoF and heights from 1.17m to 1.80m, via a hierarchical control stack combining a reinforcement learning locomotion policy with interchangeable PD or MPC path trackers. New robots and VLN models integrate with minimal effort; we demonstrate compatibility with NaVILA, DualVLN, StreamVLN, and JanusVLN. Environments are drawn from artist-designed scenes and 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructions, filtered for navigable areas exceeding 100 square meters. Instructions are generated by a dual generator-reviewer plus paraphraser multi-agent pipeline with human-in-the-loop verification, yielding 933 collision-aware reference episodes, each paired with one fine-grained instruction and three coarse-grained stylistic variants (formal, natural, casual). Across four models and four embodiments, JanusVLN achieves the highest mean success rate of 43.55% and nDTW of 48.38. In a 20-episode sim-to-real pilot with DualVLN and the Unitree G1, navigation errors correlate strongly (r=0.935), with a mean absolute difference of 0.68m and mean trajectory similarity of 0.782 (+/-0.188) nDTW. These results highlight the interaction between VLN models, controllers, and humanoid embodiments under physical execution. Code, benchmark, and data will be released upon acceptance at https://humanoid-vln.github.io/.
In-space servicing has been receiving great attention to extend the operation of spacecraft with defective components. This requires rendezvous and proximity operations for a chaser to provide service to a target. This work constructs a fuzzy inference system-based controller for the chaser to reach the cooperative target on a circular orbit in the final approach phase while minimizing the energy consumption of the chaser. The offline training process performed by a genetic algorithm deals with multiple initial relative positions of the chaser, and the trained controller is validated using a testing environment with disturbances, which differs from the training scenarios.
This paper proposes a decentralized approach for a multi-robot system (MRS) using a genetic fuzzy system to perform a collaborative object transportation task that minimizes the total path length of the MRS in unstructured environment while avoiding obstacles. For an environment given by an elevation map, terrain traversability analysis with respect to the slope is performed to reduce the dimension and identify non-traversable areas that can be considered as obstacles, and the given map is converted into a traversability map in two dimensional space. In the training process, proposed fuzzy inference systems (FISs) to generate the MRS's velocity for transporting an object to a target position are optimized by a genetic algorithm with several scenarios, such as a local minima, a target that is close to an obstacle, and a cluttered environment. The trained FIS models are applied to the testing environment, which is the converted traversability map, and validated using multiple scenarios.
Reliable relative pose estimation between autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) is critical for cooperative ocean exploration, sampling, and multi-robot coordination. However, achieving robust vision-based relative localization in underwater environments remains challenging due to severe optical degradation, including turbidity, illumination variations, reflections, and intermittent feature occlusions. This paper presents AMR-Pose, an active LED marker-based relative pose estimation framework for cooperative AUVs. A compact marker module consisting of one red central LED and three blue peripheral LEDs is developed and integrated onto the leader AUV to provide distinctive visual features under complex underwater conditions. Building upon the detected marker observations, a probabilistic switching Perspective-n-Point estimator (PSwPnP) is developed by combining Lie-group pose propagation on $SE(3)$, probabilistic marker association, and visibility-adaptive measurement fusion for robust six-degree-of-freedom relative pose estimation. The proposed framework dynamically adapts the estimation process according to marker visibility, maintaining geometric consistency and temporal stability during partial observations and visibility transitions. Extensive water-tank experiments with motion-capture ground truth validate that AMR-Pose achieves accurate, smooth, and robust relative pose estimation under challenging underwater conditions. Closed-loop leader-follower experiments further demonstrate its feasibility for real-time relative pose feedback in cooperative underwater robotics.