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Friday 7 November

Robotics

EveryDayVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable Robotic Manipulation

Samarth Chopra, Alex McMoil, Ben Carnovale et al. (+3 more)

While Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models map visual inputs and language instructions directly to robot actions, they often rely on costly hardware and struggle in novel or cluttered scenes. We introduce EverydayVLA, a 6-DOF manipulator that can be assembled for under $300, capable of modest payloads and workspace. A single unified model jointly outputs discrete and continuous actions, and our adaptive-horizon ensemble monitors motion uncertainty to trigger on-the-fly re-planning for safe, reliable operation. On LIBERO, EverydayVLA matches state-of-the-art success rates, and in real-world tests it outperforms prior methods by 49% in-distribution and 34.9% out-of-distribution. By combining a state-of-the-art VLA with cost-effective hardware, EverydayVLA democratizes access to a robotic foundation model and paves the way for economical use in homes and research labs alike. Experiment videos and details: https://everydayvla.github.io/
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All authors Samarth Chopra, Alex McMoil, Ben Carnovale, Evan Sokolson, Rajkumar Kubendran, Samuel Dickerson

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Sample Complexity of Distributionally Robust Off-Dynamics Reinforcement Learning with Online Interaction

Yiting He, Zhishuai Liu, Weixin Wang et al. (+1 more)

Off-dynamics reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment transition dynamics are different, can be formulated as learning in a robust Markov decision process (RMDP) where uncertainties in transition dynamics are imposed. Existing literature mostly assumes access to generative models allowing arbitrary state-action queries or pre-collected datasets with a good state coverage of the deployment environment, bypassing the challenge of exploration. In this work, we study a more realistic and challenging setting where the agent is limited to online interaction with the training environment. To capture the intrinsic difficulty of exploration in online RMDPs, we introduce the supremal visitation ratio, a novel quantity that measures the mismatch between the training dynamics and the deployment dynamics. We show that if this ratio is unbounded, online learning becomes exponentially hard. We propose the first computationally efficient algorithm that achieves sublinear regret in online RMDPs with $f$-divergence based transition uncertainties. We also establish matching regret lower bounds, demonstrating that our algorithm achieves optimal dependence on both the supremal visitation ratio and the number of interaction episodes. Finally, we validate our theoretical results through comprehensive numerical experiments.
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All authors Yiting He, Zhishuai Liu, Weixin Wang, Pan Xu

Robotics

ETHOS: A Robotic Encountered-Type Haptic Display for Social Interaction in Virtual Reality

Eric Godden, Jacquie Groenewegen and Matthew K.X.J. Pan

We present ETHOS (Encountered-Type Haptics for On-demand Social Interaction), a dynamic encountered-type haptic display (ETHD) that enables natural physical contact in virtual reality (VR) during social interactions such as handovers, fist bumps, and high-fives. The system integrates a torque-controlled robotic manipulator with interchangeable passive props (silicone hand replicas and a baton), marker-based physical-virtual registration via a ChArUco board, and a safety monitor that gates motion based on the user's head and hand pose. We introduce two control strategies: (i) a static mode that presents a stationary prop aligned with its virtual counterpart, consistent with prior ETHD baselines, and (ii) a dynamic mode that continuously updates prop position by exponentially blending an initial mid-point trajectory with real-time hand tracking, generating a unique contact point for each interaction. Bench tests show static colocation accuracy of 5.09 +/- 0.94 mm, while user interactions achieved temporal alignment with an average contact latency of 28.53 +/- 31.21 ms across all interaction and control conditions. These results demonstrate the feasibility of recreating socially meaningful haptics in VR. By incorporating essential safety and control mechanisms, ETHOS establishes a practical foundation for high-fidelity, dynamic interpersonal interactions in virtual environments.
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2511.05379 · 7 Nov · This work was combined with another paper that extends the technical characterization of our system to include an experiential evaluation through a user study. The combined work creates a unified representation of our contributions. With the combined paper to be published, this work is not longer needed

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Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.LG

SAD-Flower: Flow Matching for Safe, Admissible, and Dynamically Consistent Planning

Tzu-Yuan Huang, Armin Lederer, Dai-Jie Wu et al. (+6 more)

Flow matching (FM) has shown promising results in data-driven planning. However, it inherently lacks formal guarantees for ensuring state and action constraints, whose satisfaction is a fundamental and crucial requirement for the safety and admissibility of planned trajectories on various systems. Moreover, existing FM planners do not ensure the dynamical consistency, which potentially renders trajectories inexecutable. We address these shortcomings by proposing SAD-Flower, a novel framework for generating Safe, Admissible, and Dynamically consistent trajectories. Our approach relies on an augmentation of the flow with a virtual control input. Thereby, principled guidance can be derived using techniques from nonlinear control theory, providing formal guarantees for state constraints, action constraints, and dynamic consistency. Crucially, SAD-Flower operates without retraining, enabling test-time satisfaction of unseen constraints. Through extensive experiments across several tasks, we demonstrate that SAD-Flower outperforms various generative-model-based baselines in ensuring constraint satisfaction.
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All authors Tzu-Yuan Huang, Armin Lederer, Dai-Jie Wu, Xiaobing Dai, Sihua Zhang, Hsiu-Chin Lin, Shao-Hua Sun, Stefan Sosnowski, Sandra Hirche

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Cleaning Maintenance Logs with LLM Agents for Improved Predictive Maintenance

Valeriu Dimidov, Faisal Hawlader, Sasan Jafarnejad et al. (+1 more)

Economic constraints, limited availability of datasets for reproducibility and shortages of specialized expertise have long been recognized as key challenges to the adoption and advancement of predictive maintenance (PdM) in the automotive sector. Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) presents an opportunity to overcome these barriers and speed up the transition of PdM from research to industrial practice. Under these conditions, we explore the potential of LLM-based agents to support PdM cleaning pipelines. Specifically, we focus on maintenance logs, a critical data source for training well-performing machine learning (ML) models, but one often affected by errors such as typos, missing fields, near-duplicate entries, and incorrect dates. We evaluate LLM agents on cleaning tasks involving six distinct types of noise. Our findings show that LLMs are effective at handling generic cleaning tasks and offer a promising foundation for future industrial applications. While domain-specific errors remain challenging, these results highlight the potential for further improvements through specialized training and enhanced agentic capabilities.
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All authors Valeriu Dimidov, Faisal Hawlader, Sasan Jafarnejad, Raphaël Frank

Robotics

Force-Safe Environment Maps and Real-Time Detection for Soft Robot Manipulators

Akua K. Dickson, Juan C. Pacheco Garcia and Andrew P. Sabelhaus

Soft robot manipulators have the potential for deployment in delicate environments to perform complex manipulation tasks. However, existing obstacle detection and avoidance methods do not consider limits on the forces that manipulators may exert upon contact with delicate obstacles. This work introduces a framework that maps force safety criteria from task space (i.e. positions along the robot's body) to configuration space (i.e. the robot's joint angles) and enables real-time force safety detection. We incorporate limits on allowable environmental contact forces for given task-space obstacles, and map them into configuration space (C-space) through the manipulator's forward kinematics. This formulation ensures that configurations classified as safe are provably below the maximum force thresholds, thereby allowing us to determine force-safe configurations of the soft robot manipulator in real-time. We validate our approach in simulation and hardware experiments on a two-segment pneumatic soft robot manipulator. Results demonstrate that the proposed method accurately detects force safety during interactions with deformable obstacles, thereby laying the foundation for real-time safe planning of soft manipulators in delicate, cluttered environments.
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Robotics

TwinVLA: Data-Efficient Bimanual Manipulation with Twin Single-Arm Vision-Language-Action Models

Hokyun Im, Euijin Jeong, Andrey Kolobov et al. (+2 more)

Vision-language-action models (VLAs) trained on large-scale robotic datasets have demonstrated strong performance on manipulation tasks, including bimanual tasks. However, because most public datasets focus on single-arm demonstrations, adapting VLAs for bimanual tasks typically requires substantial additional bimanual data and fine-tuning. To address this challenge, we introduce TwinVLA, a modular framework that composes two copies of a pretrained single-arm VLA into a coordinated bimanual VLA. Unlike monolithic cross-embodiment models trained on mixtures of single-arm and bimanual data, TwinVLA improves both data efficiency and performance by composing pretrained single-arm policies. Across diverse bimanual tasks in real-world and simulation settings, TwinVLA outperforms a comparably-sized monolithic RDT-1B model without requiring any bimanual pretraining. Furthermore, it narrows the gap to state-of-the-art model $\pi_0$, which relies on extensive proprietary bimanual data and compute cost. These results establish our modular composition approach as a data-efficient and scalable path toward high-performance bimanual manipulation, leveraging public single-arm data.
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All authors Hokyun Im, Euijin Jeong, Andrey Kolobov, Jianlong Fu, Youngwoon Lee

Robotics

Context-aware Learned Mesh-based Simulation via Trajectory-Level Meta-Learning

Philipp Dahlinger, Niklas Freymuth, Tai Hoang et al. (+4 more)

Simulating object deformations is a critical challenge across many scientific domains, including robotics, manufacturing, and structural mechanics. Learned Graph Network Simulators (GNSs) offer a promising alternative to traditional mesh-based physics simulators. Their speed and inherent differentiability make them particularly well suited for applications that require fast and accurate simulations, such as robotic manipulation or manufacturing optimization. However, existing learned simulators typically rely on single-step observations, which limits their ability to exploit temporal context. Without this information, these models fail to infer, e.g., material properties. Further, they rely on auto-regressive rollouts, which quickly accumulate error for long trajectories. We instead frame mesh-based simulation as a trajectory-level meta-learning problem. Using Conditional Neural Processes, our method enables rapid adaptation to new simulation scenarios from limited initial data while capturing their latent simulation properties. We utilize movement primitives to directly predict fast, stable and accurate simulations from a single model call. The resulting approach, Movement-primitive Meta-MeshGraphNet (M3GN), provides higher simulation accuracy at a fraction of the runtime cost compared to state-of-the-art GNSs across several tasks.
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All authors Philipp Dahlinger, Niklas Freymuth, Tai Hoang, Tobias Würth, Michael Volpp, Luise Kärger, Gerhard Neumann

Robotics

SIL: Symbiotic Interactive Learning for Language-Conditioned Human-Agent Co-Adaptation

Linus Nwankwo, Bjoern Ellensohn, Christian Rauch et al. (+1 more)

Today's autonomous agents, largely driven by foundation models (FMs), can understand natural language instructions and solve long-horizon tasks with human-like reasoning. However, current human-robot interaction frameworks largely follow a one-way master-apprentice technique where the embodied agent passively executes commands without reciprocal learning. This neglects the co-adaptive, multi-turn nature of everyday human-to-human interactions. We introduce symbiotic interactive learning (SIL), a bidirectional co-adaptation framework in a shared latent task space, where both the human and the agent maintain joint belief states that evolve with the interaction history. This enables proactive clarification, adaptive suggestions, and shared plan refinement. SIL leverages FMs for spatial perception and reasoning, together with a triplet-loss-trained neural encoder that grounds the FMs' outputs into task-specific latent representations. To support long-term stability as tasks evolve, SIL utilises episodic and semantic memory architectures, regularised via elastic weight consolidation to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. We evaluate SIL on simulated and real-world embodied tasks, including instruction following, information retrieval, query-oriented reasoning, and interactive dialogue, achieving a $90.4\%$ task completion rate and a belief alignment score of $\rho \approx 0.83$, an absolute improvement of about $20$ percentage points over the best ablations. Demos and resources: https://linusnep.github.io/SIL/.
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All authors Linus Nwankwo, Bjoern Ellensohn, Christian Rauch, Elmar Rueckert

Robotics

Let Me Show You: Learning by Retrieving from Egocentric Video for Robotic Manipulation

Yichen Zhu and Feifei Feng

Robots operating in complex and uncertain environments face considerable challenges. Advanced robotic systems often rely on extensive datasets to learn manipulation tasks. In contrast, when humans are faced with unfamiliar tasks, such as assembling a chair, a common approach is to learn by watching video demonstrations. In this paper, we propose a novel method for learning robot policies by Retrieving-from-Video (RfV), using analogies from human demonstrations to address manipulation tasks. Our system constructs a video bank comprising recordings of humans performing diverse daily tasks. To enrich the knowledge from these videos, we extract mid-level information, such as object affordance masks and hand motion trajectories, which serve as additional inputs to enhance the robot model's learning and generalization capabilities. We further feature a dual-component system: a video retriever that taps into an external video bank to fetch task-relevant video based on task specification, and a policy generator that integrates this retrieved knowledge into the learning cycle. This approach enables robots to craft adaptive responses to various scenarios and generalize to tasks beyond those in the training data. Through rigorous testing in multiple simulated and real-world settings, our system demonstrates a marked improvement in performance over conventional robotic systems, showcasing a significant breakthrough in the field of robotics.
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Robotics

Procedimiento de auditoría de ciberseguridad para sistemas autónomos: metodología, amenazas y mitigaciones

Adrián Campazas-Vega, Claudia Álvarez-Aparicio, David Sobrín-Hidalgo et al. (+4 more)

The deployment of autonomous systems has experienced remarkable growth in recent years, driven by their integration into sectors such as industry, medicine, logistics, and domestic environments. This expansion is accompanied by a series of security issues that entail significant risks due to the critical nature of autonomous systems, especially those operating in human-interaction environments. Furthermore, technological advancement and the high operational and architectural complexity of autonomous systems have resulted in an increased attack surface. This article presents a specific security auditing procedure for autonomous systems, based on a layer-structured methodology, a threat taxonomy adapted to the robotic context, and a set of concrete mitigation measures. The validity of the proposed approach is demonstrated through four practical case studies applied to representative robotic platforms: the Vision 60 military quadruped from Ghost Robotics, the A1 robot from Unitree Robotics, the UR3 collaborative arm from Universal Robots, and the Pepper social robot from Aldebaran Robotics.
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All authors Adrián Campazas-Vega, Claudia Álvarez-Aparicio, David Sobrín-Hidalgo, Laura Inyesto-Alonso, Francisco Javier Rodríguez-Lera, Vicente Matellán-Olivera, Ángel Manuel Guerrero-Higueras

Robotics

Follow-Me in Micro-Mobility with End-to-End Imitation Learning

Sahar Salimpour, Iacopo Catalano, Tomi Westerlund et al. (+2 more)

Autonomous micro-mobility platforms face challenges from the perspective of the typical deployment environment: large indoor spaces or urban areas that are potentially crowded and highly dynamic. While social navigation algorithms have progressed significantly, optimizing user comfort and overall user experience over other typical metrics in robotics (e.g., time or distance traveled) is understudied. Specifically, these metrics are critical in commercial applications. In this paper, we show how imitation learning delivers smoother and overall better controllers, versus previously used manually-tuned controllers. We demonstrate how DAAV's autonomous wheelchair achieves state-of-the-art comfort in follow-me mode, in which it follows a human operator assisting persons with reduced mobility (PRM). This paper analyzes different neural network architectures for end-to-end control and demonstrates their usability in real-world production-level deployments.
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All authors Sahar Salimpour, Iacopo Catalano, Tomi Westerlund, Mohsen Falahi, Jorge Peña Queralta

Robotics

Decomposed Object Manipulation via Dual-Actor Policy

Bin Fan, Jian-Jian Jiang, Zhuohao Li et al. (+5 more)

Object manipulation, which focuses on learning to perform tasks on similar parts across different types of objects, can be divided into an approaching stage and a manipulation stage. However, previous works often ignore this characteristic of the task and rely on a single policy to directly learn the whole process of object manipulation. To address this problem, we propose a novel Dual-Actor Policy, termed DAP, which explicitly considers different stages and leverages heterogeneous visual priors to enhance each stage. Specifically, we introduce an affordance-based actor to locate the functional part in the manipulation task, thereby improving the approaching process. Following this, we propose a motion flow-based actor to capture the movement of the component, facilitating the manipulation process. Finally, we introduce a decision maker to determine the current stage of DAP and select the corresponding actor. Moreover, existing object manipulation datasets contain few objects and lack the visual priors needed to support training. To address this, we construct a simulated dataset, the Dual-Prior Object Manipulation Dataset, which combines the two visual priors and includes seven tasks, including two challenging long-term, multi-stage tasks. Experimental results on our dataset, the RoboTwin benchmark and real-world scenarios illustrate that our method consistently outperforms the SOTA method by 5.55%, 14.7% and 10.4% on average respectively.
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All authors Bin Fan, Jian-Jian Jiang, Zhuohao Li, Xiao-Ming Wu, Yi-Xiang He, YiHan Yang, Shengbang Liu, Wei-Shi Zheng

Robotics

TAPOM: Task-Space Topology-Guided Motion Planning for Manipulating Elongated Object in Cluttered Environments

Zihao Li, Yiming Zhu, Zhe Zhong et al. (+2 more)

Robotic manipulation in complex, constrained spaces is vital for widespread applications but challenging, particularly when navigating narrow passages with elongated objects. Existing planning methods often fail in these low-clearance scenarios due to the sampling difficulties or the local minima. This work proposes Topology-Aware Planning for Object Manipulation (TAPOM), which explicitly incorporates task-space topological analysis to enable efficient planning. TAPOM uses a high-level analysis to identify critical pathways and generate guiding keyframes, which are utilized in a low-level planner to find feasible configuration space trajectories. Experimental validation demonstrates significantly high success rates and improved efficiency over state-of-the-art methods on low-clearance manipulation tasks. This approach offers broad implications for enhancing manipulation capabilities of robots in complex real-world environments.
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All authors Zihao Li, Yiming Zhu, Zhe Zhong, Qinyuan Ren, Yijiang Huang

Robotics

Epically Powerful: An open-source software and mechatronics infrastructure for wearable robotic systems

Jennifer K. Leestma, Siddharth R. Nathella, Christoph P. O. Nuesslein et al. (+3 more)

Epically Powerful is an open-source robotics infrastructure that streamlines the underlying framework of wearable robotic systems - managing communication protocols, clocking, actuator commands, visualization, sensor data acquisition, data logging, and more - while also providing comprehensive guides for hardware selection, system assembly, and controller implementation. Epically Powerful contains a code base enabling simplified user implementation via Python that seamlessly interfaces with various commercial state-of-the-art quasi-direct drive (QDD) actuators, single-board computers, and common sensors, provides example controllers, and enables real-time visualization. To further support device development, the package also includes a recommended parts list and compatibility guide and detailed documentation on hardware and software implementation. The goal of Epically Powerful is to lower the barrier to developing and deploying custom wearable robotic systems without a pre-specified form factor, enabling researchers to go from raw hardware to modular, robust devices quickly and effectively. Though originally designed with wearable robotics in mind, Epically Powerful is broadly applicable to other robotic domains that utilize QDD actuators, single-board computers, and sensors for closed-loop control.
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All authors Jennifer K. Leestma, Siddharth R. Nathella, Christoph P. O. Nuesslein, Snehil Mathur, Gregory S. Sawicki, Aaron J. Young

Robotics

Tunable Passivity Control for Centralized Multiport Networked Systems

Xingyuan Zhou, Peter Paik and S. Farokh Atashzar

Centralized Multiport Networked Dynamic (CMND) systems have emerged as a key architecture with applications in several complex network systems, such as multilateral telerobotics and multi-agent control. These systems consist of a hub node/subsystem connecting with multiple remote nodes/subsystems via a networked architecture. One challenge for this system is stability, which can be affected by non-ideal network artifacts. Conventional passivity-based approaches can stabilize the system under specialized applications like small-scale networked systems. However, those conventional passive stabilizers have several restrictions, such as distributing compensation across subsystems in a decentralized manner, limiting flexibility, and, at the same time, relying on the restrictive assumptions of node passivity. This paper synthesizes a centralized optimal passivity-based stabilization framework for CMND systems. It consists of a centralized passivity observer monitoring overall energy flow and an optimal passivity controller that distributes the just-needed dissipation among various nodes, guaranteeing strict passivity and, thus, L2 stability. The proposed data-driven model-free approach, i.e., Tunable Centralized Optimal Passivity Control (TCoPC), optimizes total performance based on the prescribed dissipation distribution strategy while ensuring stability. The controller can put high dissipation loads on some sub-networks while relaxing the dissipation on other nodes. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed frameworks performance in a complex task under different time-varying delay scenarios while relaxing the remote nodes minimum phase and passivity assumption, enhancing the scalability and generalizability.
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Robotics

MoE-DP: An MoE-Enhanced Diffusion Policy for Robust Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation with Skill Decomposition and Failure Recovery

Baiye Cheng, Tianhai Liang, Suning Huang et al. (+5 more)

Diffusion policies have emerged as a powerful framework for robotic visuomotor control, yet they often lack the robustness to recover from subtask failures in long-horizon, multi-stage tasks and their learned representations of observations are often difficult to interpret. In this work, we propose the Mixture of Experts-Enhanced Diffusion Policy (MoE-DP), where the core idea is to insert a Mixture of Experts (MoE) layer between the visual encoder and the diffusion model. This layer decomposes the policy's knowledge into a set of specialized experts, which are dynamically activated to handle different phases of a task. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that MoE-DP exhibits a strong capability to recover from disturbances, significantly outperforming standard baselines in robustness. On a suite of 6 long-horizon simulation tasks, this leads to a 36% average relative improvement in success rate under disturbed conditions. This enhanced robustness is further validated in the real world, where MoE-DP also shows significant performance gains. We further show that MoE-DP learns an interpretable skill decomposition, where distinct experts correspond to semantic task primitives (e.g., approaching, grasping). This learned structure can be leveraged for inference-time control, allowing for the rearrangement of subtasks without any re-training.Our video and code are available at the https://moe-dp-website.github.io/MoE-DP-Website/.
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All authors Baiye Cheng, Tianhai Liang, Suning Huang, Maanping Shao, Feihong Zhang, Botian Xu, Zhengrong Xue, Huazhe Xu

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Multi-agent Coordination via Flow Matching

Dongsu Lee, Daehee Lee and Amy Zhang

This work presents MAC-Flow, a simple yet expressive framework for multi-agent coordination. We argue that requirements of effective coordination are twofold: (i) a rich representation of the diverse joint behaviors present in offline data and (ii) the ability to act efficiently in real time. However, prior approaches often sacrifice one for the other, i.e., denoising diffusion-based solutions capture complex coordination but are computationally slow, while Gaussian policy-based solutions are fast but brittle in handling multi-agent interaction. MAC-Flow addresses this trade-off by first learning a flow-based representation of joint behaviors, and then distilling it into decentralized one-step policies that preserve coordination while enabling fast execution. Across four different benchmarks, including $12$ environments and $34$ datasets, MAC-Flow alleviates the trade-off between performance and computational cost, specifically achieving about $\boldsymbol{\times14.5}$ faster inference compared to diffusion-based MARL methods, while maintaining good performance. At the same time, its inference speed is similar to that of prior Gaussian policy-based offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods.
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Robotics

Encoding Biomechanical Energy Margin into Passivity-based Synchronization for Networked Telerobotic Systems

Xingyuan Zhou, Peter Paik and S. Farokh Atashzar

Maintaining system stability and accurate position tracking is imperative in networked robotic systems, particularly for haptics-enabled human-robot interaction. Recent literature has integrated human biomechanics into the stabilizers implemented for teleoperation, enhancing force preservation while guaranteeing convergence and safety. However, position desynchronization due to imperfect communication and non-passive behaviors remains a challenge. This paper proposes a two-port biomechanics-aware passivity-based synchronizer and stabilizer, referred to as TBPS2. This stabilizer optimizes position synchronization by leveraging human biomechanics while reducing the stabilizer's conservatism in its activation. We provide the mathematical design synthesis of the stabilizer and the proof of stability. We also conducted a series of grid simulations and systematic experiments, comparing their performance with that of state-of-the-art solutions under varying time delays and environmental conditions.
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Robotics

A semi-analytical approach for computing the largest singularity-free spheres of a class of 6-6 Stewart-Gough platforms for specified orientation workspaces

Bibekananda Patra and Sandipan Bandyopadhyay

This article presents a method for computing the largest singularity-free sphere (SFS) of a 6-6 Stewart-Gough platform manipulator (SGPM) over a specified orientation workspace. For a fixed orientation of the moving platform, the SFS is computed analytically. This process is repeated over a set of samples generated within the orientation workspace, and the smallest among them is designated as the desired SFS for the given orientation workspace. Numerical experiments are performed on four distinct architectures of the SGPM to understand their relative performances w.r.t. SFS volumes over the same orientation workspace. This study demonstrates the potential utility of the proposed computational method both in analysis and design of SGPMs.
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Robotics

iFlyBot-VLM Technical Report

Xin Nie, Zhiyuan Cheng, Yuan Zhang et al. (+4 more)

We introduce iFlyBot-VLM, a general-purpose Vision-Language Model (VLM) used to improve the domain of Embodied Intelligence. The central objective of iFlyBot-VLM is to bridge the cross-modal semantic gap between high-dimensional environmental perception and low-level robotic motion control. To this end, the model abstracts complex visual and spatial information into a body-agnostic and transferable Operational Language, thereby enabling seamless perception-action closed-loop coordination across diverse robotic platforms. The architecture of iFlyBot-VLM is systematically designed to realize four key functional capabilities essential for embodied intelligence: 1) Spatial Understanding and Metric Reasoning; 2) Interactive Target Grounding; 3) Action Abstraction and Control Parameter Generation; 4) Task Planning and Skill Sequencing. We envision iFlyBot-VLM as a scalable and generalizable foundation model for embodied AI, facilitating the progression from specialized task-oriented systems toward generalist, cognitively capable agents. We conducted evaluations on 10 current mainstream embodied intelligence-related VLM benchmark datasets, such as Blink and Where2Place, and achieved optimal performance while preserving the model's general capabilities. We will publicly release both the training data and model weights to foster further research and development in the field of Embodied Intelligence.
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All authors Xin Nie, Zhiyuan Cheng, Yuan Zhang, Chao Ji, Jiajia Wu, Yuhan Zhang, Jia Pan

Thursday 6 November

Robotics

A Survey on Improving Human Robot Collaboration through Vision-and-Language Navigation

Nivedan Yakolli, Avinash Gautam, Abhijit Das et al. (+2 more)

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a multi-modal, cooperative task requiring agents to interpret human instructions, navigate 3D environments, and communicate effectively under ambiguity. This paper presents a comprehensive review of recent VLN advancements in robotics and outlines promising directions to improve multi-robot coordination. Despite progress, current models struggle with bidirectional communication, ambiguity resolution, and collaborative decision-making in the multi-agent systems. We review approximately 200 relevant articles to provide an in-depth understanding of the current landscape. Through this survey, we aim to provide a thorough resource that inspires further research at the intersection of VLN and robotics. We advocate that the future VLN systems should support proactive clarification, real-time feedback, and contextual reasoning through advanced natural language understanding (NLU) techniques. Additionally, decentralized decision-making frameworks with dynamic role assignment are essential for scalable, efficient multi-robot collaboration. These innovations can significantly enhance human-robot interaction (HRI) and enable real-world deployment in domains such as healthcare, logistics, and disaster response.
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All authors Nivedan Yakolli, Avinash Gautam, Abhijit Das, Yuankai Qi, Virendra Singh Shekhawat

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.CV

A Multi-Drone Multi-View Dataset and Deep Learning Framework for Pedestrian Detection and Tracking

Kosta Dakic, Kanchana Thilakarathna, Rodrigo N. Calheiros et al. (+1 more)

Multi-drone surveillance systems offer enhanced coverage and robustness for pedestrian tracking, yet existing approaches struggle with dynamic camera positions and complex occlusions. This paper introduces MATRIX (Multi-Aerial TRacking In compleX environments), a comprehensive dataset featuring synchronized footage from eight drones with continuously changing positions, and a novel deep learning framework for multi-view detection and tracking. Unlike existing datasets that rely on static cameras or limited drone coverage, MATRIX provides a challenging scenario with 40 pedestrians and a significant architectural obstruction in an urban environment. Our framework addresses the unique challenges of dynamic drone-based surveillance through real-time camera calibration, feature-based image registration, and multi-view feature fusion in bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation. Experimental results demonstrate that while static camera methods maintain over 90% detection and tracking precision and accuracy metrics in a simplified MATRIX environment without an obstruction, 10 pedestrians and a much smaller observational area, their performance significantly degrades in the complex environment. Our proposed approach maintains robust performance with $\sim$90% detection and tracking accuracy, as well as successfully tracks $\sim$80% of trajectories under challenging conditions. Transfer learning experiments reveal strong generalization capabilities, with the pretrained model achieving much higher detection and tracking accuracy performance compared to training the model from scratch. Additionally, systematic camera dropout experiments reveal graceful performance degradation, demonstrating practical robustness for real-world deployments where camera failures may occur. The MATRIX dataset and framework provide essential benchmarks for advancing dynamic multi-view surveillance systems.
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All authors Kosta Dakic, Kanchana Thilakarathna, Rodrigo N. Calheiros, Teng Joon Lim

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Grounding Foundational Vision Models with 3D Human Poses for Robust Action Recognition

Nicholas Babey, Tiffany Gu, Yiheng Li et al. (+2 more)

For embodied agents to effectively understand and interact within the world around them, they require a nuanced comprehension of human actions grounded in physical space. Current action recognition models, often relying on RGB video, learn superficial correlations between patterns and action labels, so they struggle to capture underlying physical interaction dynamics and human poses in complex scenes. We propose a model architecture that grounds action recognition in physical space by fusing two powerful, complementary representations: V-JEPA 2's contextual, predictive world dynamics and CoMotion's explicit, occlusion-tolerant human pose data. Our model is validated on both the InHARD and UCF-19-Y-OCC benchmarks for general action recognition and high-occlusion action recognition, respectively. Our model outperforms three other baselines, especially within complex, occlusive scenes. Our findings emphasize a need for action recognition to be supported by spatial understanding instead of statistical pattern recognition.
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All authors Nicholas Babey, Tiffany Gu, Yiheng Li, Cristian Meo, Kevin Zhu

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.CV

In-process 3D Deviation Mapping and Defect Monitoring (3D-DM2) in High Production-rate Robotic Additive Manufacturing

Subash Gautam, Alejandro Vargas-Uscategui, Peter King et al. (+4 more)

Additive manufacturing (AM) is an emerging digital manufacturing technology to produce complex and freeform objects through a layer-wise deposition. High deposition rate robotic AM (HDRRAM) processes, such as cold spray additive manufacturing (CSAM), offer significantly increased build speeds by delivering large volumes of material per unit time. However, maintaining shape accuracy remains a critical challenge, particularly due to process instabilities in current open-loop systems. Detecting these deviations as they occur is essential to prevent error propagation, ensure part quality, and minimize post-processing requirements. This study presents a real-time monitoring system to acquire and reconstruct the growing part and directly compares it with a near-net reference model to detect the shape deviation during the manufacturing process. The early identification of shape inconsistencies, followed by segmenting and tracking each deviation region, paves the way for timely intervention and compensation to achieve consistent part quality.
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All authors Subash Gautam, Alejandro Vargas-Uscategui, Peter King, Hans Lohr, Alireza Bab-Hadiashar, Ivan Cole, Ehsan Asadi

Robotics

Design Exploration for Protection and Cleaning of Solar Panels with Case Studies for Space Missions

Cameron Robinson and Ganghee Jang

Solar energy is used for many mission-critical applications including space exploration, sensor systems to monitor wildfires, etc. Their operation can be limited or even terminated if solar panels are covered with dust or hit by space debris. To address this issue, we designed panel cleaning mechanisms and tested protective materials. For cleaning mechanisms, we designed and compared a wiper system and a rail system. For protective materials, we found through collision tests that polycarbonate was very promising, though the most important factor was layering a soft material between the panel's surface and a hard material. In the cleaning system comparisons, the wiper-based system was more efficient than the rail-based system in terms of cost, cleaning speed, and total power consumption.
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Robotics

Conformalized Non-uniform Sampling Strategies for Accelerated Sampling-based Motion Planning

Shubham Natraj, Bruno Sinopoli and Yiannis Kantaros

Sampling-based motion planners (SBMPs) are widely used to compute dynamically feasible robot paths. However, their reliance on uniform sampling often leads to poor efficiency and slow planning in complex environments. We introduce a novel non-uniform sampling strategy that integrates into existing SBMPs by biasing sampling toward `certified' regions. These regions are constructed by (i) generating an initial, possibly infeasible, path using any heuristic path predictor (e.g., A* or vision-language models) and (ii) applying conformal prediction to quantify the predictor's uncertainty. This process yields prediction sets around the initial-guess path that are guaranteed, with user-specified probability, to contain the optimal solution. To our knowledge, this is the first non-uniform sampling approach for SBMPs that provides such probabilistically correct guarantees on the sampling regions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method consistently finds feasible paths faster and generalizes better to unseen environments than existing baselines.
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Robotics

Isaac Lab: A GPU-Accelerated Simulation Framework for Multi-Modal Robot Learning

NVIDIA: Mayank Mittal, Pascal Roth, James Tigue et al. (+102 more)

We present Isaac Lab, the natural successor to Isaac Gym, which extends the paradigm of GPU-native robotics simulation into the era of large-scale multi-modal learning. Isaac Lab combines high-fidelity GPU parallel physics, photorealistic rendering, and a modular, composable architecture for designing environments and training robot policies. Beyond physics and rendering, the framework integrates actuator models, multi-frequency sensor simulation, data collection pipelines, and domain randomization tools, unifying best practices for reinforcement and imitation learning at scale within a single extensible platform. We highlight its application to a diverse set of challenges, including whole-body control, cross-embodiment mobility, contact-rich and dexterous manipulation, and the integration of human demonstrations for skill acquisition. Finally, we discuss upcoming integration with the differentiable, GPU-accelerated Newton physics engine, which promises new opportunities for scalable, data-efficient, and gradient-based approaches to robot learning. We believe Isaac Lab's combination of advanced simulation capabilities, rich sensing, and data-center scale execution will help unlock the next generation of breakthroughs in robotics research.
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All authors NVIDIA: Mayank Mittal, Pascal Roth, James Tigue, Antoine Richard, Octi Zhang, Peter Du, Antonio Serrano-Muñoz, Xinjie Yao, René Zurbrügg, Nikita Rudin, Lukasz Wawrzyniak, Milad Rakhsha, Alain Denzler, Eric Heiden, Ales Borovicka, Ossama Ahmed, Iretiayo Akinola, Abrar Anwar, Mark T. Carlson, Ji Yuan Feng, Animesh Garg, Renato Gasoto, Lionel Gulich, Yijie Guo, M. Gussert, Alex Hansen, Mihir Kulkarni, Chenran Li, Wei Liu, Viktor Makoviychuk, Grzegorz Malczyk, Hammad Mazhar, Masoud Moghani, Adithyavairavan Murali, Michael Noseworthy, Alexander Poddubny, Nathan Ratliff, Welf Rehberg, Clemens Schwarke, Ritvik Singh, James Latham Smith, Bingjie Tang, Ruchik Thaker, Matthew Trepte, Karl Van Wyk, Fangzhou Yu, Alex Millane, Vikram Ramasamy, Remo Steiner, Sangeeta Subramanian, Clemens Volk, CY Chen, Neel Jawale, Ashwin Varghese Kuruttukulam, Michael A. Lin, Ajay Mandlekar, Karsten Patzwaldt, John Welsh, Huihua Zhao, Fatima Anes, Jean-Francois Lafleche, Nicolas Moënne-Loccoz, Soowan Park, Rob Stepinski, Dirk Van Gelder, Chris Amevor, Jan Carius, Jumyung Chang, Anka He Chen, Pablo de Heras Ciechomski, Gilles Daviet, Mohammad Mohajerani, Julia von Muralt, Viktor Reutskyy, Michael Sauter, Simon Schirm, Eric L. Shi, Pierre Terdiman, Kenny Vilella, Tobias Widmer, Gordon Yeoman, Tiffany Chen, Sergey Grizan, Cathy Li, Lotus Li, Connor Smith, Rafael Wiltz, Kostas Alexis, Yan Chang, David Chu, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Farbod Farshidian, Ankur Handa, Spencer Huang, Marco Hutter, Yashraj Narang, Soha Pouya, Shiwei Sheng, Yuke Zhu, Miles Macklin, Adam Moravanszky, Philipp Reist, Yunrong Guo, David Hoeller, Gavriel State

Robotics

Pixi: Unified Software Development and Distribution for Robotics and AI

Tobias Fischer, Wolf Vollprecht, Bas Zalmstra et al. (+8 more)

The reproducibility crisis in scientific computing constrains robotics research. Existing studies reveal that up to 70% of robotics algorithms cannot be reproduced by independent teams, while many others fail to reach deployment because creating shareable software environments remains prohibitively complex. These challenges stem from fragmented, multi-language, and hardware-software toolchains that lead to dependency hell. We present Pixi, a unified package-management framework that addresses these issues by capturing exact dependency states in project-level lockfiles, ensuring bit-for-bit reproducibility across platforms. Its high-performance SAT solver achieves up to 10x faster dependency resolution than comparable tools, while integration of the conda-forge and PyPI ecosystems removes the need for multiple managers. Adopted in over 5,300 projects since 2023, Pixi reduces setup times from hours to minutes and lowers technical barriers for researchers worldwide. By enabling scalable, reproducible, collaborative research infrastructure, Pixi accelerates progress in robotics and AI.
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All authors Tobias Fischer, Wolf Vollprecht, Bas Zalmstra, Ruben Arts, Tim de Jager, Alejandro Fontan, Adam D Hines, Michael Milford, Silvio Traversaro, Daniel Claes, Scarlett Raine

Robotics

Multimodal Diffusion Forcing for Forceful Manipulation

Zixuan Huang, Huaidian Hou and Dmitry Berenson

Given a dataset of expert trajectories, standard imitation learning approaches typically learn a direct mapping from observations (e.g., RGB images) to actions. However, such methods often overlook the rich interplay between different modalities, i.e., sensory inputs, actions, and rewards, which is crucial for modeling robot behavior and understanding task outcomes. In this work, we propose Multimodal Diffusion Forcing, a unified framework for learning from multimodal robot trajectories that extends beyond action generation. Rather than modeling a fixed distribution, MDF applies random partial masking and trains a diffusion model to reconstruct the trajectory. This training objective encourages the model to learn temporal and cross-modal dependencies, such as predicting the effects of actions on force signals or inferring states from partial observations. We evaluate MDF on contact-rich, forceful manipulation tasks in simulated and real-world environments. Our results show that MDF not only delivers versatile functionalities, but also achieves strong performance, and robustness under noisy observations. More visualizations can be found on our $\href{https://unified-df.github.io}{website}$.
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