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Computer Science Robotics

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Monday 1 June

Robotics

Fixed-Time Dynamic Landing of Quadrotors using Adaptive Unscented Kalman Filtering and Nonlinear Model Predictive Control

Mohammadreza Izadi, Zeinab Shayan, Steven Waslander et al. (+1 more)

This paper introduces an estimation and control framework for dynamic landing of multi-rotor uncrewed aerial vehicles on moving platforms. The proposed method integrates nonlinear model predictive control with a real-time minimum-jerk trajectory planner that enforces a prescribed touchdown time, enabling consistent timing during the terminal descent. To enhance robustness in the presence of time-varying sensing quality, we utilize an adaptive unscented kalman filter that updates the process and measurement noise statistics online. In addition, we provide a reference feasibility analysis showing that minimum-jerk references induce bounded thrust and torque commands under standard tracking hypotheses. The proposed framework is evaluated in simulation and hardware experiments, and it is shown to achieve repeatable landings and improved platform velocity prediction accuracy relative to EKF/UKF-based methods.
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All authors Mohammadreza Izadi, Zeinab Shayan, Steven Waslander, Reza Faieghi

Robotics

RoboDream: Compositional World Models for Scalable Robot Data Synthesis

Junjie Ye, Rong Xue, Basile Van Hoorick et al. (+6 more)

Scaling robot learning requires large-scale, diverse demonstrations, yet real-world data collection via teleoperation remains prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. While video diffusion models offer a promising avenue for data scaling, existing generative approaches are often limited to superficial visual augmentation, or suffer from embodiment hallucinations that yield physically infeasible motions. We present a generalizable embodiment-centric world model that achieves scalable data generation by synthesizing photorealistic demonstrations with novel objects, in novel scenes, and from novel viewpoints. Our approach anchors generation to rendered robot motion while conditioning on explicit scene and object priors, effectively decoupling trajectory execution from environment synthesis. This formulation has the potential to unlock two powerful data scaling capabilities: (1) retrieval and rebirth, which repurposes existing trajectories into entirely new contexts without new motion data; and (2) prop-free teleoperation, where operators manipulate empty air and the model hallucinates the target objects and scene afterwards, eliminating reset time. We demonstrate with real-world experiments that our generated data consistently improves downstream policy performance and significantly reduces real-world data requirements across diverse manipulation tasks.
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All authors Junjie Ye, Rong Xue, Basile Van Hoorick, Runhao Li, Harshitha Rajaprakash, Pavel Tokmakov, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Vitor Guizilini, Yue Wang

Robotics

Permissive Safety Through Trusted Inference: Verifiable Belief-Space Neural Safety Filters for Assured Interactive Robotics

Haimin Hu

Autonomous robots that interact with people must make safe and efficient decisions under human-induced uncertainty, such as their preferences, goals, competency, and willingness to cooperate. Safety filters are a popular approach for ensuring safety in interactive robotics, since their modular design separates safety from performance, allowing robots to operate safely around people with minimal impact on task efficiency. While traditional safety filters typically operate only in the physical space, neglecting the robot's ability to learn and adapt online, the recently proposed belief-space safety filter (BeliefSF) reasons about robot safety in closed-loop with runtime inference that actively reduces the robot's uncertainty online, thereby reducing conservativeness in filtering. However, providing formal safety guarantees for robots deploying BeliefSF remains a significant challenge due to errors in runtime inference and neural approximation of safety filters required to handle the high dimensionality of belief spaces. In this paper, we propose an algorithmic approach to certify high-probability safety of BeliefSF using conformal prediction, while explicitly accounting for the reliability of the robot's runtime inference module. Our method leverages the structure of belief-space safety filtering by focusing verification on a region where inference is expected to be reliable. It preserves the simplicity and sample complexity of standard conformal prediction, yet can certify a substantially less conservative safety filter. Through a simulated human-vehicle interaction benchmark, we show that our approach verifies a significantly more permissive belief-space safety filter than a standard conformal prediction baseline.
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Robotics

AFUN: Towards an Affordance Foundation Model for Functionality Understanding

Zhaoning Wang, Yi Zhong, Jiawei Fu et al. (+2 more)

Affordance understanding bridges visual perception and physical action, serving as an explainable interface for robot manipulation in open and unstructured real-world environments. Yet, building an affordance foundation model that not only understands where and how the interaction should happen, but also generalizes across diverse environments, objects, and tasks, remains a long-standing research challenge. Existing methods typically address only part of this challenge, either localizing task-relevant regions without specifying executable motion, or predicting motion but with limited scalability. In this paper, we present ourmodel, a step towards an affordance foundation model for functionality understanding. From a single RGB-D observation and a language task description, ourmodel predicts a task-conditional functional mask (where to interact) and a 3D post-contact motion curve (how to interact). To support open-world generalization, we build a large-scale standardized data pipeline that converts heterogeneous robot, human, simulation, and real-world scan data into a shared affordance schema with language, masks, and object-centric 3D motion labels. We evaluate ourmodel from three aspects: for affordance segmentation, ourmodel outperforms all baselines by a large margin across 8 test sets from 4 benchmarks, improving mean gIoU/cIoU by +23.9/+26.3; for contact-point prediction, it predicts substantially more accurate points, with a 12.7–61.3% hit-rate gain over the best baseline; and for 3D motion, it achieves the best performance on all three test sets. ourmodel can be deployed for real-world robot manipulation without finetuning for robot embodiment or using task-specific heuristics, demonstrating the ability to adapt to open-world affordance tasks. Project page: https://www.zhaoningwang.com/AFUN
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All authors Zhaoning Wang, Yi Zhong, Jiawei Fu, Henrik I. Christensen, Jun Gao

Robotics

IMAC-AgriVLN: Can Agricultural Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents be Aware of Instruction Mistakes?

Xiaobei Zhao, Xingqi Lyu, Xin Chen et al. (+1 more)

Agricultural robots are playing as important roles across a wide range of tasks, nevertheless, they are still mainly depending on manual operations or fixed railways for moving. The A2A benchmark and the AgriVLN method pioneeringly extended Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) to the agricultural domain, successfully navigating agricultural robots from starting points to target positions following natural language instructions. However, we observed that almost all the prior VLN methods adopted an ideal assumption: The given instructions themselves were correct. This assumption did not align with the realistic scenarios, because anybody might say an instruction with mistakes, which raised us a question: If an instruction had a mistake, could an agricultural VLN agent be aware of it? To answer this question, we propose the A2A-MI benchmark, in which we follow A2A as the foundation benchmark and insert three classes of instruction mistakes. We use it to evaluate several state-of-the-art agricultural VLN agents, then observe sufficient drops across all of them, such as AgriVLN decreases SR by 57% in average and increases NE by 9% in average, from which we suggest the lacking awareness on instruction mistakes. To address this problem, we propose the IMAC module analyzing the instruction and image, to reason whether the instruction has mistakes and attempt to correct them when needed. We integrate it into the AgriVLN backbone to build our IMAC-AgriVLN method, successfully saving SR from 0.10 to 0.14 and NE from 4.81 m to 4.79 m, which demonstrates the effectiveness of IMAC on strengthening the robustness against instruction mistakes. Project: https://github.com/AlexTraveling/IMAC-AgriVLN.
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All authors Xiaobei Zhao, Xingqi Lyu, Xin Chen, Xiang Li

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Not All Points Are Equal: Uncertainty-Aware 4D LiDAR Scene Synthesis

Xiang Xu, Alan Liang, Youquan Liu et al. (+5 more)

Constructing faithful 4D worlds from LiDAR-acquired sequences is crucial for embodied AI, yet current generative frameworks apply uniform modeling capacity across all spatial regions. This ignores that perceptual difficulty varies dramatically within a single scan: distant surfaces, occluded boundaries, and small-scale objects carry far higher uncertainty than well-observed structures. We present U4D, a new framework that explicitly leverages spatial uncertainty to guide LiDAR scene generation in a "hard-to-easy" schedule. U4D derives per-point uncertainty maps via Shannon Entropy from a pretrained segmentor, then applies an unconditional diffusion stage to synthesize high-entropy areas with precise geometry, followed by a conditional completion stage that fills in the remaining regions using these structures as priors. A MoST (Mixture of Spatio-Temporal) block further maintains cross-frame coherence by dynamically balancing spatial detail and temporal continuity. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and SemanticKITTI demonstrate state-of-the-art scene fidelity, temporal consistency, and downstream performance.
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All authors Xiang Xu, Alan Liang, Youquan Liu, Xian Sun, Linfeng Li, Lingdong Kong, Ziwei Liu, Qingshan Liu

Robotics

Intercepting the Future: Latent-Space Predictive World Model for Dynamic VLA Manipulation

Shahram Najam Syed, Arthur Jakobsson, Haoran Hao et al. (+1 more)

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize across static manipulation but fail when objects move during task execution. They map the current observation to an action and assume the scene is stationary between observation and execution, so at any non-trivial object speed the resulting latency exceeds the time available to grasp. We close this gap with AHEAD (Anticipatory Horizon Extrapolation with Adaptive Dynamics), a predict-then-act wrapper that augments a frozen VLA with a motion-aware latent world model. A small world model trained on manipulation video forecasts future patch tokens in the VLA's feature space, conditioned on per-token velocity and acceleration from optical flow. A language-and-motion saliency mask concentrates prediction on task-relevant patches, and the model rolls forward for an adaptive horizon, halting when prediction uncertainty crosses a threshold. The frozen action decoder then receives the predicted future tokens in place of the current ones. AHEAD adds 4.9M parameters to a frozen 7B OpenVLA and reaches 79 to 97% success across 20 dynamic simulation scenarios where the strongest baseline reaches 31 to 58%. On a physical UFactory xArm 7, AHEAD succeeds on 29/30 to 30/30 on three conveyor and rolling-ball tasks, 23/30 on paddle interception, and 19/30 on projectile catching where every baseline scores 0/30.
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All authors Shahram Najam Syed, Arthur Jakobsson, Haoran Hao, Jeffrey Ichnowski

Robotics

NDPP-Grasp: Non-Differentiable Physical Plausibility Constraint-Guided Task-Oriented Dexterous Grasp Generation

Qiuchi Xiang, Haoxuan Qu, Hossein Rahmani et al. (+1 more)

Task-oriented dexterous grasp generation aims to produce dexterous grasp poses that are both physically plausible and functionally suitable for specified manipulation tasks. Existing diffusion-based methods often address these two requirements in a decoupled manner: they first train a grasp diffusion model for task alignment and then rely on post-generation refinement to improve physical plausibility. However, this after-the-fact correction strategy applies physical plausibility guidance only once the grasp has already been generated, leaving the generation trajectory itself unguided by physical constraints and potentially leading to suboptimal grasps. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework that directly injects physical plausibility guidance into the denoising process of a task-aligned grasp diffusion model in a practical and effective manner, even when physical plausibility constraints are non-differentiable. This allows physical plausibility to shape grasp generation throughout denoising while preserving task alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our framework.
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All authors Qiuchi Xiang, Haoxuan Qu, Hossein Rahmani, Jun Liu

Robotics

A Simulation Platform for Flapping-Wing Vehicles

Haichuan Li and Tomi Westerlund

Flapping-wing aerial vehicles (FWAVs) demonstrate remarkable agility but face substantial autonomy challenges due to their high sensitivity to aerodynamic disturbances and limited sensor payload capacity. Current simulation platforms typically rely on oversimplified laminar flow assumptions and idealized sensor models, failing to capture the complex turbulence patterns and perceptual limitations encountered in real-world operation. This simulation-to-reality discrepancy significantly impedes the development of robust autonomy systems for FWAVs. We introduce FWAV-Sim, a high-fidelity Unity-based simulation framework that integrates: (1) a composite aerodynamic model combining quasi-steady blade-element theory with bluff-body drag effects, (2) spatiotemporally correlated turbulence generation through fractal noise synthesis, and (3) realistic sensor simulation including noisy IMU measurements, LiDAR point clouds, and RGB camera feeds. Our platform enables scalable generation of synchronized datasets containing ground-truth vehicle states, aerodynamic forces, turbulent wind fields, and multi-modal sensor streams. Experimental validation demonstrates that autonomy pipelines (including both controllers and perception systems) developed in FWAV-Sim exhibit significantly improved simulation capability, thereby advancing the outstanding performance in simulation-based development for flapping-wing aerial systems.
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Robotics

Towards Precise Intent-Aligned VLA Aerial Navigation via Expert-Guided GRPO

Tianyang Chen, Wenjun Li, Xin zhou et al. (+2 more)

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a promising end-to-end paradigm for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to accomplish complex tasks specified by fine-grained instructions. However, standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) suffers from data scarcity, limited generalization, and weak supervision for nuanced and complicated human intents. Reinforcement fine-tuning offers a natural way to mitigate these challenges and align policy behaviors with human intents through designable feedback, but applying it to aerial navigation remains challenging due to inefficient exploration in expansive continuous spaces. To address these challenges, we introduce an efficient reinforcement learning (RL) framework for VLA-based aerial navigation. At its core, we propose EG-GRPO (Expert-Guided Group Relative Policy Optimization) to augment online rollouts with few-shot expert data. Additionally, we design a heterogeneous pipeline enabling parallel simulation and inference, which reduces rollout time by 43.5%. Across multiple tasks specified by complex human intents, EG-GRPO improves the success rate to 2.13x that of the SFT baseline, while improving intent alignment performance by 60.9%. These results demonstrate that our framework can move aerial navigation toward precise intent-aligned flight.
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All authors Tianyang Chen, Wenjun Li, Xin zhou, Yuze Wu, Fei Gao

Robotics

FATE-VLA:Failue-aware test generation for vision-language-action models

Arusa Kanwal, Pablo Valle, Shaukat Ali et al. (+1 more)

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly used as generalist robot policies, yet their evaluation still relies largely on static benchmarks that randomly sample task scenes. In high-dimensional embodied spaces, failures are sparse and clustered, so static benchmarking can underestimate robustness risks. We reframe VLA evaluation as an active failure-discovery problem and propose a failure-aware test-generation approach that combines diversity-driven exploration with surrogate models learned from observed executions. The method steers testing toward high-risk yet diverse scene regions. Across four state-of-the-art VLA models, it uncovers substantially more failures (up to +29.7 % over selected baselines) while revealing more diverse failure modes. This mean that, for instance, in the case of GR00T-N1.6, success rate dropped from 64.4% to 34.7%. More broadly, our findings call for a shift in VLA evaluation: from passive measurement on fixed task suites to adaptive, failure-seeking test generation that exposes the structure of model weaknesses before deployment.
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All authors Arusa Kanwal, Pablo Valle, Shaukat Ali, Aitor Arrieta

Robotics

A Kinetic Theory of Encounter-Based Information Propagation in Multi-Robot Systems

Alkesh K. Srivastava and Philip Dames

Multi-robot systems cannot assume persistent network connectivity. We study this problem through target tracking, where performance depends on how quickly target information is sensed, transported through the team, and used before it becomes stale. When robots exchange information only through physical encounters, tracking becomes a kinetic information-transport problem: robot motion induces encounters, encounters carry target-state estimates, information age determines staleness, and stale information produces tracking error. This paper develops a kinetic theory of encounter-based information propagation and identifies three limits. The first is an access limit – information cannot support team-level coordination unless it spreads beyond the robots that sensed it. The second is a staleness limit – even propagated information loses value as the target moves. The third is a geometry limit – when target motion outpaces information transport, tracking error approaches a saturation regime where communication improvements alone have diminishing returns. We evaluate the theory through large-scale simulations varying team size, operating area, communication range, and target speed. Results support the proposed access-staleness-geometry decomposition: communication coverage governs the access transition; once information is accessible, tracking error is shaped by target displacement; and this response is locally linear in restricted regimes but nonlinear over broader ranges because of sensing refreshes and bounded geometry. Across controlled sweeps and joint variation, the derived access and staleness coordinates reliably describe tracking performance. Together, these results establish a kinetic-theoretic framework for predicting and designing encounter-based multi-robot systems.
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Robotics

Dynamics Are Learned, Not Told: Semi-Supervised Discovery of Latent Dynamics Geometries For Zero-Shot Policy Adaptation

Zhiming Xu, Weitao Zhou, Xianghui Pan et al. (+4 more)

Real-world dynamics shifts pose a critical challenge for reinforcement learning in robotics, as policies tightly coupled to nominal environments often fail catastrophically when physical conditions change. Most existing methods rely on encoding explicitly identified physical parameters into a latent context, a parameter-centric paradigm that depends on pre-specified axes of variation and becomes brittle under unmodeled or compound dynamics changes. We revisit dynamics adaptation from an outcome-centric perspective: rather than telling policies what the dynamics are, we enable them to learn how dynamics affect interaction outcomes. Theoretically, this is grounded in a monotonic relationship between target-domain regret and the Lipschitz constant of a trajectory dynamics encoder. Practically, this constant can be upper-bounded through contrastive learning, yielding a smooth, task-relevant latent topology without privileged dynamics information. On MuJoCo benchmarks, our method consistently outperforms parameter-centric baselines under severe dynamics shifts, including unmodeled and time-varying parameters, while also improving in-distribution stability and latent interpretability. Overall, these results validate that controlling latent geometry is a principled mechanism for robust adaptation.
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All authors Zhiming Xu, Weitao Zhou, Xianghui Pan, Nanshan Deng, Chengju Liu, Qijun Chen, Chenpeng Yao

Robotics

RoboSemanticBench: Diagnosing Semantic Grounding in Action Prediction for VLA Models

Bin Yu, Yao Zhang, Haishan Liu et al. (+9 more)

Vision-language-action (VLA) models are built on the premise that semantic understanding from pretrained language or vision-language backbones should guide robot action prediction. Yet robot fine-tuning is optimized as imitation over task-specific action distributions, and many evaluations can be solved through visual or instruction-action shortcuts. We introduce RoboSemanticBench (RSB), an embodied benchmark for diagnosing semantic grounding in action prediction: whether post-trained VLA models can use complex instruction semantics to select and manipulate the correct physical target. In each episode, a robot receives a multiple-choice math or general-knowledge question, observes candidate answer blocks, and must grasp the block corresponding to the correct answer. RSB covers controlled arithmetic, grade-school mathematical understanding, and commonsense or factual understanding under four-choice and ten-choice suites. Across representative VLA models, we find that many policies learn to grasp candidate blocks but select the semantically correct block at near-random or below-random rates after controlling for grasp success, revealing a persistent gap between backbone-level semantic competence and action prediction.
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All authors Bin Yu, Yao Zhang, Haishan Liu, Shijie Lian, Yuliang Wei, Xiaopeng Lin, Zhaolong Shen, Changti Wu, Ruina Hu, Bailing Wang, Cong Huang, Kai Chen

Robotics

Dexterity-BEV: Aligning 3D World and Actions for Generalizable Robot Policies Learning

Huayi Zhou, Wei Gao, Dekun Lu et al. (+12 more)

End-to-end manipulation policies, combined with web-scale pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), show the promise for generalizable and dexterous robotic manipulation. However, they inherit two key limitations from 2D foundation models: 1) the reliance on 2D RGB inputs that ignores the intrinsically 3D nature of manipulation; and 2) the lack of spatial 3D alignment between input-output spaces as well as across diverse robot embodiments, camera setups, and trajectory datasets. In this paper, we present a series of contributions to address these issues. First, we introduce aligned vertex map and vertex spectrum – a pixel-wise 3D representation that elevates 2D visual inputs to 3D, using camera calibration and optional depth. This novel input representation marries 3D awareness with the generalization of 2D large VLMs. Then, we propose to align the inputs and outputs of manipulation policies by expressing per-pixel 3D information of each camera view and robot actions to a shared coordinate. Based on this, we designate a canonical Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) alignment frame and innovatively propose to construct BEV images, producing a view-invariant representation robust to camera pose variations. To enable training and evaluation at scale, we develop a comprehensive data processing pipeline to perform such alignments; we also introduce a novel temporal alignment scheme for trajectories across diverse robots, human operators, and datasets. These contributions collectively mitigate input and output spatial-temporal misalignments, improving the consistency and generalization for real-world manipulation. Pretrained checkpoint, source code and data processing pipeline are available in https://hnuzhy.github.io/projects/Dex-BEV.
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All authors Huayi Zhou, Wei Gao, Dekun Lu, Ruiji Liu, Zhanqi Zhang, Ziyang Zhang, Jian Chen, Wenlve Zhou, Sheng Xu, Shumin Li, Kangyi Guo, Shichen Xu, Zixin Huang, Yongyi Su, Kui Jia

Robotics

FW-NKF: Frequency-Weighted Neural Kalman Filters

Adnan Harun Dogan, Berken Utku Demirel and Christian Holz

Robust state estimation is central to robotic autonomy, yet classical Kalman filters struggle with frequency-dependent disturbances and model mismatch such as sensor vibrations, electromagnetic interference, and periodic noise. Although Deep Kalman Filter (DKF) variants extend the Extended Kalman Filtering (EKF) framework by learning latent transitions, they lack explicit mechanisms to suppress band-limited noise components that typically corrupt sensor measurements in real-world scenarios. We introduce the Frequency-Weighted Neural Kalman Filter (FW-NKF), a unified hybrid approach that embeds a causal spectral-shaping operator into the Kalman measurement residual and jointly learns observation, and transition networks. By adapting both the filter spectrum and the latent state representation, FW-NKF attenuates the noise-dominated frequency bands while capturing complex residual structures. We conduct extensive experiments on four heterogeneous benchmarks, including chaotic systems such as multi-dimensional Lorenz systems and full-body inertial pose estimation, and find a reduction in localization error of up to 10% as well as marked improvements in orientation accuracy. Our ablation studies confirm that frequency weighting and deep latent-state modeling contribute to overall performance.
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Robotics

Network Distributed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Consensus Control of Quadcopters

Youssef Mahran, Zeyad Gamal, Aamir Ahmad et al. (+1 more)

This paper proposes a Network Distributed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (ND-MARL) framework for quadcopter consensus control. Compared to conventional multi-agent MARL formulations that rely on centralized planning or fully decentralized execution, ND-MARL incorporates the swarm communication graph into the decision process. Under a 2-Neighbor communication topology, each agent observes information of only two neighbors and outputs an action through a distributed policy. A high-level distributed consensus planner is trained using Multi-Agent Soft Actor-Critic (MASAC) and embedded in a hierarchical stack to generate reference target positions tracked by a low-level quadcopter controller. Results demonstrate smooth consensus trajectories and planner-tracker integration when compared to a centralized MARL controller. Most notably, the learned controller exhibits zero-shot scalability, as policies trained on a three-agent system are deployed to swarms of up to 250 agents under the same 2-Neighbor communication topology without retraining or fine-tuning, achieving consistent convergence with increasing steady-state spread at large team sizes due to sparse information propagation. These findings highlight ND-MARL as a stable framework for distributed, communication-aware quadcopter consensus control.
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All authors Youssef Mahran, Zeyad Gamal, Aamir Ahmad, Ayman El-Badawy

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.CV

TIDES: Time-Derivative Event Simulation via Deformable Reconstruction

Christopher Thirgood, Dipon Kumar Ghosh and Simon Hadfield

Event cameras emit asynchronous events in response to environmental appearance changes. The scarcity of real-world event datasets makes simulation essential. However, most simulators infer event timestamps from frame sequences, forcing many threshold crossings to share a small set of discrete times; a failure mode we term timestamp batching that worsens under fast motion and occlusion. We present TIDES, a continuous-time event simulator built on dynamic Gaussian splatting. Because TIDES operates on an explicit 3D scene representation with learnt geometry and motion, it can derive per-pixel intensity dynamics directly from the scene, rather than by differencing rendered frames. This enables accurate threshold-crossing prediction, including multiple crossings per rendering step, without temporal upsampling or frame interpolation. The same 3D scene model reveals where objects partially occlude one another; TIDES uses this to guide adaptive time stepping, concentrating computation only in regions where occlusion dynamics make simple models of brightness change unreliable. Finally, we model finite sensor bandwidth using a tile-level arbiter whose throughput, jitter, and event drops reproduce realistic sensor artifacts. Across paired RGB-event benchmarks, TIDES attains state-of-the-art event-stream fidelity. We also show that events simulated by TIDES transfer more effectively to real downstream tasks than competitors'.
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Robotics

World-Task Factorization for Robot Learning

Eduardo Sebastián, Adrian Pfisterer, Vito Mengers et al. (+2 more)

Robot learning must produce policies that generalize to new combinations of constraints, teammates, and environments. To achieve this, we must structurally factor the policy, which is a choice that dictates what generalizes, what requires retraining, and what remains entangled. Existing methods span a wide spectrum, from expecting structure to emerge from data scaling, to hand-designing it via hierarchies, skill libraries or learned specializations. In this paper, we study what we argue is the most fundamental factorization in robotics: separating the world from the task. We investigate the conditions under which this factorization is principled. World factors are properties of the embodied system and the environment; they exist independently of intent. Task factors are defined by the task's logic over what the world admits. We formalize this asymmetry through Bayesian model evidence: it aligns with the data-generating process, maintains high likelihood through an analytical world model, and reduces the Occam razor's penalty on task parameters. We instantiate this factorization by pairing AICON, a differentiable graph of recursive estimators and interconnections that is compositional, operates without task-specific data, and propagates cost gradients to actuators, with a compact, learned policy that modulates gradient paths. Gradients serve as the interface between the two factors: they carry world structure through the graph and task structure through costs, enabling low-dimensional learning while preserving structural generalization. We test the world/task factorization across three problems that encompass heterogeneous robots, environments, task logic and sensorimotor modalities. Our framework outperforms end-to-end baselines and analytical heuristics in all settings, generalizes zero-shot to out-of-distribution configurations, and transfers to real hardware without retraining.
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All authors Eduardo Sebastián, Adrian Pfisterer, Vito Mengers, Oliver Brock, Amanda Prorok

Robotics

Market-Based Replanning for Safety-Critical UAV Swarms in Search and Rescue Missions

Luiz Giacomossi, Andrea Haglund, Claire Namatovu et al. (+6 more)

Reliable autonomous UAV swarms in Search and Rescue (SAR) missions require fault-tolerant coordination capable of sustaining operations despite agent degradation. This paper introduces the Intelligent Replanning Drone Swarm (IRDS), a distributed coordination architecture designed for resource-constrained environments. The proposed framework employs a Reverse-Auction market mechanism where agents bid to service search sectors based on a distance-weighted cost function, coupled with a geometric consensus protocol for target verification. We evaluate the approach through physics-based simulations (N=8 agents, 8x8 grid) subjected to stochastic fault injection. Results indicate that the swarm autonomously reallocates tasks from failed agents with low latency relative to the total mission duration, maintaining a mission success rate of 93% under 25% workforce degradation. The proposed framework demonstrates a robust, empirically tested method for self-healing aerial robotic coordination.
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All authors Luiz Giacomossi, Andrea Haglund, Claire Namatovu, Emily Zainali, Esaias Målqvist, Yonatan M. Beyene, Ivan Tomasic, Baran Çürüklü, Håkan Forsberg

Robotics

WALL-WM: Carving World Action Modeling at the Event Joints

Shalfun Li, Victor Yao, Charles Yang et al. (+29 more)

WALL-WM is a World Action Model that shifts video-action learning from chunk-centric optimization to event-grounded Vision-Language-Action pretraining, using semantically coherent action events as the atomic unit of learning. Existing WAMs commonly initialize from multimodal or video foundation models and then optimize fixed-length action chunks conditioned directly on the current observation and instruction. Although convenient, this chunk-centric formulation creates a fundamental granularity mismatch. Language describes semantic goals and events, vision evolves through continuous scene dynamics, and actions operate at control-level timescales; forcing all three into the same fixed-length prediction window turns VLA training into short-horizon correlation fitting. WALL-WM addresses this mismatch by organizing both supervision and data around semantic events. Specifically, it pairs event-grounded VLA pretraining with a data ecosystem built from event-level captions and cluster-balanced sampling, enabling scalable learning over diverse behaviors, scenes, and task structures. From the same event-pretrained backbone, WALL-WM supports two complementary inference modes. The event mode consumes next-event descriptions and enables variable-length execution chunks, while the unified mode uses a VLM with Staircase Decoding to condition conventional fixed-length chunk inference while preserving a gradient-continuous VLA path. Together with Muon-optimizer-based large-scale pretraining infrastructure, WALL-WM provides a practical scale-up recipe for general-purpose WAMs. Experiments show that WALL-WM generalizes broadly across language, scenes, and tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance in large-scale real-world generalization evaluation.
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All authors Shalfun Li, Victor Yao, Charles Yang, Truth Qu, Regis Cheng, Ryan Yu, Howard Lu, Newton Von, Vincent Chen, Yohann Tang, Maeve Zhang, Ellie Ma, Gody Li, Starrick Liu, Sage Yang, Lorien Shu, J.W. Gao, Ethan Chen, Colin Ye, Yu Sun, Elise Mon, PS Zhang, Neo Li, Lily Li, James Wang, Ping Yang, Chris Pan, Lucy Liang, Hang Su, Roy Gan, Hao Wang, Qian Wang

Robotics

Co-training with Ego-centric Video and Demonstration for Robot Navigation Task

Shoya Kuno, Yumo Ouchi and Kanata Suzuki

Vision-language-action (VLA) models are promising for diverse robotic tasks, but their performance heavily depends on large-scale high-quality training data, whose collection on real robots is costly and time-consuming. While prior work has explored augmenting manipulation datasets with egocentric human videos, applying such approaches to mobile robot navigation remains challenging due to viewpoint changes during locomotion. In this paper, we propose a framework that converts egocentric walking videos into datasets for mobile robot imitation learning. The proposed method estimates camera motion from human videos and transforms it into action representations compatible with ground mobile robots. By jointly training a VLA model on human-derived and robot-collected datasets, the model achieves improved language understanding and more robust action generation than training with either data source alone. Experiments on a fruit-search navigation task demonstrate that human egocentric videos provide an effective and scalable data source for mobile robot learning.
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Robotics

Learning Action-Conditional and Object-Centric Gaussian Splatting World Models for Rigid Objects

Jens U. Kreber, Lukas Mack and Joerg Stueckler

World models enable intelligent agents to predict the consequences of their actions on the environment. In this paper, we propose Multi Rigid Object Gaussian World Model (MRO-GWM), a novel model that learns action-conditional dynamics of rigid objects in 3D. By representing the scene by object-centric Gaussians, we can represent arbitrary object shapes and multi-object scenes. We develop a novel spatio-temporal transformer architecture that predicts future rigid body motion from a history of object Gaussians and future actions. Objects are represented by their Gaussians in a canonical frame, which allows for describing object motion as rigid body transformation. Our model is trained on reconstructions from multiple viewpoints, which requires the model to handle partial observations of objects due to occlusions. We analyze prediction performance of our approach on synthetic datasets composed of typical household objects with multi-object dynamics and interactions by a robot end effector. We also evaluate our model in model-predictive control for non-prehensile manipulation in simulation.
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Robotics

Closed-Form Pose Estimation of Endoluminal Medical Devices via Gradiometer-Based Electromagnetic Localization System

Zhiwei Wu, Jiahao Luo, Yubo Pu et al. (+3 more)

Embedded magnetic tracking holds highly attractive prospects for remote navigation of endoluminal medical devices. However, existing six-degree-of-freedom pose recovery approaches often require pre-calibrated workspace field maps or iterative nonlinear optimization. This letter presents a Gradiometer-Based Electromagnetic Localization System (GELS), a closed-form tracking framework that uses a compact magnetometer array as an embedded quasi-gradiometer to estimate local magnetic fields and gradient tensors. These quantities are mapped by the Euler homogeneous relation to displacements between source and array, from which multi-source Procrustes registration recovers the array orientation and position using at least three non-collinear sources. The algorithm requires known source positions and array geometry, but no pre-calibrated workspace field maps, initial pose guesses, or calibrated excitation-source moments. The recovered pose also enables a proof-of-concept sub-level dipole localization task by serving as a mobile magnetic reference frame. Benchtop experiments across sensor-array configurations and excitation modes demonstrate sequence-averaged position errors of \SI{10.80}{\milli\meter}–\SI{15.57}{\milli\meter}, a fastest update rate of \SI{14.49}{\hertz}, and a median solver runtime of \SI{172.00}{\micro\second}. A perturbation-based error propagation analysis further identifies inter-sensor inconsistency and dipole-model mismatch as the dominant accuracy limits, thereby informing future sensor array and magnetic source design for further reducing pose-estimation error.
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All authors Zhiwei Wu, Jiahao Luo, Yubo Pu, Siyi Wei, Yuankai Chen, Jinhui Zhang

Robotics

Set-Supervised Diffusion Policy: Learning Action-Chunking Diffusion through Corrections

Zhaoting Li, Gang Chen, Javier Alonso-Mora et al. (+2 more)

Diffusion policies have recently emerged as a powerful framework for robotic manipulation. However, like other behavior cloning methods, they remain vulnerable to distributional shift, often requiring human-in-the-loop interventions to correct failures during deployment. These interactions naturally provide paired supervision in the form of the robot's undesired actions and the human teacher's corrective actions. Yet existing data aggregation pipelines and standard behavior cloning losses largely ignore this negative signal from undesired actions, leading to overfitting to teacher's actions and an increasing reliance on costly expert data. To address this limitation, we propose Set-Supervised Diffusion Policy (SDP), a novel learning framework that utilizes contrastive action-chunk data to train diffusion policies from human corrections. From paired positive and negative action-chunks, SDP constructs a set of desired action-chunks and designs a training pipeline that encourages the diffusion policy to align with the set. Through extensive experiments across multiple robotic manipulation tasks, we demonstrate that SDP consistently improves policy performance, with particularly strong gains in robustness to noisy data. Moreover, SDP induces high-quality aggregated datasets, enabling more efficient and reliable policy learning from human-in-the-loop corrections. Our code is available at https://set-supervised-diffusion-policy.github.io/.
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All authors Zhaoting Li, Gang Chen, Javier Alonso-Mora, Cosimo Della Santina, Jens Kober

Robotics

PHASOR: Phase-Anchored Universal Action Representations for Humanoid Embodiments

Kihyun Kim, Chaeyun Kim, Jongho Shin et al. (+4 more)

Learning a good action embedding space is fundamental to scalable robot policy learning, yet existing methods treat action latents as task-specific intermediates rather than first-class representations. The resulting latents are unstructured, embodiment-specific, and weakly tied to motion semantics, limiting interpretability, controllability, and transferability across robots. We position the action embedding space itself as a first-class design target, with downstream policy quality emerging from representation quality. Exploiting motion's intrinsic periodicity, we factorize it into a phase manifold that captures cyclic structure via FFT-parametric coefficients, together with a pose branch that conditions the manifold on non-periodic configuration detail. Combined with motion-semantic distillation, this factorized structure yields a cross-embodiment motion manifold that is interpretable and embodiment-agnostic by design. Anchoring multiple humanoid robots to a shared human-pretrained manifold then produces a unified action embedding space across diverse platforms, achieving strong cross-embodiment retrieval and consistent gains on downstream robot tasks.
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All authors Kihyun Kim, Chaeyun Kim, Jongho Shin, Taeyoun Kwon, Junghyun Kim, Mijin Koo, Haon Park

Robotics

The Lie We Tell: Correcting the Euclidean Fallacy in Vision Language Action Policies via Score Matching on Tangent Space

Bing-Cheng Chuang, I-Hsuan Chu, Bor-Jiun Lin et al. (+3 more)

Diffusion-based Vision-Language-Action policies achieve remarkable success in robotic manipulation, yet commit a fundamental geometric error we term the $\textbf{Euclidean Fallacy}$: representing SE(3) poses as flat $\mathbb{R}^{12}$ vectors. This approximation induces (1) manifold drift violating SO(3) constraints, (2) broken equivariance under coordinate transformations, and (3) non-geodesic trajectories with excessive kinematic cost. We introduce $\textbf{Lie Diffuser Actor (LDA)}$, a diffusion framework operating intrinsically on SE(3). Our method injects noise through left-invariant SDEs, predicts scores in the tangent space, and retracts samples via the exponential map. This formulation eliminates manifold drift by construction while guaranteeing coordinate-frame equivariance and geodesic optimality. On CALVIN ABC$\rightarrow$D, LDA improves average task length from $3.27$ to $3.51$ ($+7.3\%$). We further validate our method on real robot and the results show that our methodology outperforms the baseline on majority tasks.
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All authors Bing-Cheng Chuang, I-Hsuan Chu, Bor-Jiun Lin, YuanFu Yang, Min Sun, Chun-Yi Lee

Robotics

DisFlow: Scene Flow from Distance Field for Object Pose, Velocity Tracking, and Dynamic Object Reconstruction

Lan Wu, Sheila Sutjipto, Jennifer Wakulicz et al. (+1 more)

We present DisFlow, a novel framework for online scene flow estimation from distance field that enables 6DoF dynamic object pose estimation, motion tracking, and surface reconstruction. The scene is represented by Gaussian Process Implicit Surfaces (GPIS), with surface normals serving as derivative constraints, enabling accurate signed distance computations near the surface and gradient queries with uncertainty. With this representation as a foundation, we compute a scene flow from the distance field that describes how surface points are transported over time in consecutive frames. Through our flow, we can estimate an object's pose and motion by incrementally registering a new observed point cloud via an elegant closed-form optimisation. Unlike prior methods that operate in the camera or world frame, our approach performs probabilistic fusion directly in the object frame, where the object remains geometrically consistent over time. The tight coupling of the DisFlow method in space and time yields dense geometry, surface normals, object pose trajectories, velocities, and uncertainty, all at real-time rates. We evaluate DisFlow on dynamic object sequences and demonstrate that it achieves accurate pose and motion tracking while simultaneously reconstructing high-quality object surfaces. Code publicly available at \href{https://github.com/LanWu076/disflow_ros2}{https://github.com/LanWu076/disflow\_ros2}
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All authors Lan Wu, Sheila Sutjipto, Jennifer Wakulicz, Teresa Vidal-Calleja

Robotics

Trans2Occ: Voxel Occupancy Estimation and Grasp for Transparent Objects from Simulation to Reality

Yixuan Yang, Sha Zhang, Rui Li et al. (+12 more)

Transparent objects remain challenging for robotic perception due to unreliable depth sensing caused by refraction and reflection. While prior approaches rely on multi-view reconstruction or depth completion, they are often difficult to scale or deploy in real-world robotic systems. In this paper, we present a practical framework for transparent object perception and manipulation based on single-view RGB input. Our approach predicts voxel-space occupancy directly from a single image, providing a geometry-aware representation that supports downstream robotic grasping. To enable large-scale training, we construct a simulation pipeline that generates paired RGB images and voxel occupancy annotations under diverse materials and lighting conditions. We demonstrate that the predicted occupancy representation is robust to domain shifts and transfers effectively from simulation to real-world robotic setups without fine-tuning. A simple rule-based grasping strategy built on top of the occupancy further achieves reliable grasp performance on transparent objects. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments show that our framework provides accurate 3D understanding and enables practical manipulation of transparent objects. These results suggest that single-view occupancy prediction offers a scalable and effective solution for transparent object perception in robotics.
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All authors Yixuan Yang, Sha Zhang, Rui Li, Zhenfei Yin, Xinzhu Ma, Yiran Qin, Lei Bai, Xudong Xu, Shilin Shan, Wangmeng Zuo, Yanyong Zhang, Wanli Ouyang, Feng Zheng, Shixiang Tang, Dongzhan Zhou

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.CV

FlatVPR: Plug-and-play Geo-linear Residual Adapter for Geometric Rectification of Foundation Model Feature Manifolds

Rai Hisada and Kanji Tanaka

This paper proposes “FlatVPR,” a novel geometric rectification paradigm that effectively bridges the trade-off between map lightweightness and localization accuracy in visual place recognition (VPR) by enforcing a feature manifold structure where any descriptor between two adjacent anchors $\mathbf{z}_A$ and $\mathbf{z}_B$ can be accurately reconstructed via linear interpolation $\hat{\mathbf{z}}_{pseudo} = (1-t)\mathbf{z}_A + t\mathbf{z}_B$, where $t \in [0,1]$ denotes the relative position. While state-of-the-art foundation models such as DINOv2-ViT-S/14 provide robust semantic features, their latent manifolds exhibit prominent curvature, projecting uniform linear motion in physical space onto highly non-linear trajectories in the feature space, which hinders reliable reconstruction under sparse anchor conditions. To enable the aforementioned interpolation-based reconstruction, we introduce a residual transformation $\hat{\mathbf{z}} = \mathbf{z} + \text{Res}(\mathbf{z})$ to the raw foundation features $\mathbf{z}$, where $\text{Res}(\cdot)$ represents a learnable adapter. Our method explicitly suppresses manifold curvature using a mathematically grounded Pullback Flatness Loss that minimizes the deviation of intermediate features from the linear segment connecting adjacent anchors, thereby minimizing the intrinsic curvature of the manifold. Through this spatial flattening, map construction is formulated within an Expectation-Maximization (EM) framework, decoupled into a continuous M-step for manifold adaptation and a conceptual E-step for optimal anchor selection guidelines. Experiments on the NCLT dataset demonstrate that the application of our adapter leads to significant performance improvements even under extremely sparse anchor conditions with 100m intervals and extreme seasonal changes.
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