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Computer Science Robotics

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Friday 5 June

Robotics

Extending Responsibility-Sensitive Safety for the Assessment of Offloaded Autonomous Driving Services

Robin Dehler, Aryan Thakur and Michael Buchholz

Safety is a fundamental requirement in the development of autonomous driving (AD) systems. While function offloading has demonstrated significant benefits in terms of computational efficiency and energy consumption, its application to safety-critical AD functionality introduces new challenges. In particular, offloaded service compositions incur increased and variable response times due to wireless vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, which directly affects the vehicle's reaction time and thus its safety guarantees. In this paper, we address this challenge by extending the definitions of Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) to explicitly account for different response times of local and offloaded AD service compositions. Based on this extension, we propose an integration into function offloading, using the RSS safety constraints for offloading decision-making and fallback mechanisms. Offloaded service compositions are only permitted if the current traffic situation remains safe under the corresponding end-to-end response time. If this condition is violated, the system performs a controlled fallback to local execution. Furthermore, we introduce an enhanced fallback strategy that includes a warm-standby phase for offloaded services, enabling faster and safer transitions from offloaded to local services. The proposed approach is integrated into our AD stack and evaluated in both simulation and the real world. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves safety compared to state-of-the-art function offloading and safety frameworks, while preserving the benefits of distributed computation when safety conditions allow.
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Robotics

A Multi-Operator Mixed-Reality Interface for Multi-Robot Control and Coordination: Co-Located and Private Workspace Collaboration

Omotoye Shamsudeen Adekoya, Antonio Sgorbissa and Carmine Tommaso Recchiuto

Multi-operator control of robot teams requires not only access to the same mission information, but also mechanisms for maintaining shared awareness and preventing conflicting interventions. Building on our previous HORUS interface (Holistic Operational Reality for Unified Systems) we present a mixed-reality interface that extends single-operator multi-robot supervision to collaborative multi-operator use. The system supports two complementary modes: a co-located shared workspace, in which operators observe and manipulate the same mini-map in the same physical location, and a private-workspace mode, in which operators work on the same mission through independently placed local workspaces. The architecture combines registration-driven scene construction, lightweight shared-session synchronization, and per-robot control leases to support collaborative monitoring, tasking, and teleoperation while preventing conflicting commands. We evaluated the approach in a human-subject study with 36 participants (18 pairs) controlling three Nova Carter mobile robots in two search environments. The performance of the objective task was comparable across the two modes, indicating that both modes supported effective mission execution. However, the co-located shared workspace significantly improved perceived collaboration, shared understanding, and handoff clarity, and was the preferred collaborative mode. These results indicate that physically co-locating the MR workspace improves how operators coordinate even when the underlying robot-control tools remain unchanged.
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Robotics

Task Editing for Generalizable 3D Visuomotor Policy Learning

Jian-Jian Jiang, YiHan Yang, Lan Wei et al. (+6 more)

3D visuomotor policies offer a promising direction for complex robotic manipulation, as depth maps and point clouds provide rich geometric information for spatial reasoning. However, their success often depends on large-scale real-world demonstrations, which are costly and time-consuming to collect. To this end, existing methods commonly use demonstration generation strategies to improve data efficiency by applying object-centric transformations to human-collected demonstrations, such as varying object poses or scales. While effective for local variation, these transformations largely preserve the original scene structure and skill sequence, limiting their ability to synthesize diverse scene-skill-object combinations for complex tasks. In this paper, we propose Task-Edit, a novel demonstration generation framework that generates diverse trajectories from a task-centric editing perspective. The key insight of Task-Edit is to decompose a task into scene, skill and object components, and flexibly recombine them. In this way, Task-Edit enables scalable demonstration generation and significantly improves generalization for long-horizon manipulation tasks. We evaluate Task-Edit through extensive real-world experiments and demonstrate three advantages: (1) Effectiveness: Task-Edit significantly improves 3D visuomotor policies across various real-world tasks and robot embodiments. (2) Generalizability: Task-Edit improves model generalization across different scenario setups. (3) Applicability: Task-Edit enables models to handle scenarios that are difficult to collect in the real world, including disturbance resistance, obstacle avoidance and unseen cluttered scenes.
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All authors Jian-Jian Jiang, YiHan Yang, Lan Wei, Yuming Luo, Xiao-Ming Wu, Xuhang Chen, Bin Fan, Dandan Zhang, Wei-Shi Zheng

Robotics

Mission-Level Runtime Assurance Framework for Autonomous Driving

Chieh Tsai and Salim Hariri

This paper studies runtime safety for autonomous driving when high-level driving commands become faulty or unreliable. Unlike conventional runtime-safety approaches that mainly focus on immediate vehicle safety, the proposed framework evaluates both driving safety and whether the vehicle can still successfully complete its mission before a command is executed. The framework extends highway-env with mission-level fault scenarios such as skipping required checkpoints, entering restricted areas, and generating future routes that can no longer complete the mission successfully. A runtime monitoring system is introduced to detect and reject unsafe or mission-infeasible commands before execution. For comparison, an adapted Simplex-Drive runtime-safety baseline with learning-based driving control, safety fallback control, and runtime controller switching is implemented using the public Simplex-Drive framework. Experimental results show that platform-level runtime safety alone cannot detect mission-level planning faults, while the proposed framework successfully rejects mission-infeasible commands and improves mission success under randomized fault conditions.
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Robotics

Compliance-Based Sensor Placement for Force Sensing on a Sensorized Prostate Phantom

Sizhe Tian, Yinoussa Adagolodjo and Jeremie Dequidt

This work presents a compliance-based sensor placement method for force sensing on a sensorized prostate phantom designed for Digital Rectal Examination training. The phantom combines three internal pneumatic chambers, used as intrinsic pressure sensors, with ten surface displacement markers. A finite-element simulation dataset is generated by applying external forces at sampled surface locations, from which a compliance matrix relating force inputs to pressure and displacement responses is constructed. Based on this matrix, we propose a weighted greedy selection strategy that maximizes local force reconstructability while prioritizing the clinically relevant posterior contact region and avoiding marker placement directly within the Region of Interest. Compared with a global QR-based placement strategy, the proposed method increases the mean reconstructability score in the target region by 22.5%. These results suggest that region-aware sparse sensor placement can improve force observability in soft robotic medical phantoms while maintaining a limited and practical sensing configuration.
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Robotics

LIMMT: Less is More for Motion Tracking

Yu Guan, Zekun Qi, Chenghuai Lin et al. (+7 more)

We argue that high-quality motion data can steer tracking policies toward better optimization trajectories early in training. In this work, we introduce LIMMT (Less Is More for Motion Tracking). To our knowledge, this is the first data-centric study for physics-based humanoid motion tracking. We go beyond simply removing low-quality and erroneous clips, but define motion data quality through three dimensions: physics feasibility, diversity, and complexity. We show that even training with under 3% of AMASS yields better tracking performance than training with the full dataset. We further conduct data cleaning on the estimated web-sourced mocap data. Extensive experiments and analyses validate the effectiveness of our framework.
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All authors Yu Guan, Zekun Qi, Chenghuai Lin, Xuchuan Chen, Dairu Liu, Wenyao Zhang, Jilong Wang, Xinqiang Yu, He Wang, Li Yi

Robotics

T-GMP: Terrain-conditioned Generative Motion Priors for Versatile and Natural Humanoid Locomotion

Junhong Guo, Hao Hu, Chen Chen et al. (+6 more)

Achieving both anthropomorphic naturalness and rich motion diversity during terrain traversal remains a fundamental challenge in humanoid locomotion. Existing reinforcement learning approaches typically rely on fixed motion priors, limiting their adaptability to varying environments. We propose Terrain-conditioned Generative Motion Priors (T-GMP), a module that captures a terrain-conditioned latent motion manifold from a few expert state-terrain demonstrations. The learned priors enable smooth style transitions, facilitating a unified policy that adapts to terrain variations. We integrate T-GMP into an adversarial learning pipeline, where a discriminator dynamically modulates naturalness constraints conditioned on local terrain features, guiding the generation of versatile and human-like motions. We further introduce a Foothold Penalty to promote safe foot placement on challenging terrains. Experimental results demonstrate that T-GMP outperforms existing baselines in motion naturalness, motion diversity, and traversal success rates, while preserving physically coordinated motions.
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All authors Junhong Guo, Hao Hu, Chen Chen, Haoxuan Han, Linao Gong, Xin Yang, Zhicheng He, Yao Su, Fenghua He

Robotics

ActionMap: Robot Policy Learning via Voxel Action Heatmap

Pei Yang, Hai Ci, Yanzhe Chen et al. (+3 more)

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced rapidly across backbones, training recipes, and data scale, yet the action decoder, which converts the backbone's hidden state into a continuous control signal, has barely changed and remains a single-point predictor across the majority of current VLAs. Whether implemented via autoregressive token bins, L1 regression, or flow-matching denoising, the resulting decoder treats the action space as unstructured, leaving the geometric proximity of neighboring actions unexploited during training. To advance this, we introduce ActionMap, a voxel heatmap action head that drops into an existing VLA in place of its native action decoder. For each new action, the head predicts a voxel heatmap over the action space, where each voxel directly stores the probability of the corresponding action. Across LIBERO simulation and real-world Franka manipulation, our heatmap head surpasses two architecturally distinct backbones at matched training steps (e.g., +8.2% over OpenVLA-OFT's L1 regression head on the LIBERO four-suite average), converges at comparable or faster rates on both backbones, and remains markedly more data-efficient at low training data. The cross-backbone consistency indicates that action representation is a real lever for VLA performance, distinct from further backbone or recipe scaling. Project Page: https://showlab.github.io/ActionMap/.
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All authors Pei Yang, Hai Ci, Yanzhe Chen, Qi Lv, Han Cai, Mike Zheng Shou

Robotics

A Cross-view Fusion Framework for Robust 6-DoF Grasp Pose Estimation

Kangjian Zhu, Haobo Jiang, Jianjun Qian et al. (+1 more)

In this paper, we propose a cross-view fusion framework that enhances the robustness of 6-DoF grasp pose estimation in corner views. Our framework alleviates occlusion by incorporating an auxiliary view and avoids the time-consuming, task-agnostic multi-view reconstruction through a post-fusion strategy. To enhance cross-view fusion, we propose a self-supervised contrastive learning strategy that leverages cross-view associations to regularize point cloud features. In brief, a cross-view point pair is considered a match if the two points correspond to the same 3D location, and a non-match if they represent distinct grasp directions. The learning strategy significantly enhances the spatial consistency and direction distinctiveness of point features, thereby facilitating cross-view fusion and improving estimation robustness. Furthermore, we propose a cross-view-aligned cylinder integration module to fuse grasp-relevant geometry into a comprehensive representation. Specifically, the module first aligns the cross-view points and features according to their similarity to enhance the robustness against noise. Subsequently, these points are registered into the cylindrical coordinate frame, emphasizing the rotation-symmetric geometry which is important for grasping. Finally, local self-attention and seed cross-attention layers are alternately employed, respectively enabling interactions within single views and across views, which supports fine-grained representation of grasp-relevant geometry. Our framework achieves strong performance on the GraspNet-1Billion benchmark and in real-world applications. Code is available at https://github.com/KJZhuAutomatic/Cross-view-Grasp.
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All authors Kangjian Zhu, Haobo Jiang, Jianjun Qian, Jin Xie

Robotics

Neuro-Symbolic Learning for Long-Horizon Task Planning Under Complex Logical Constraints

Qiwei Du, Zitong Zhan, Shaoshu Su et al. (+7 more)

Task planning often suffers from severe efficiency bottlenecks when robots must reason over long-horizon action sequences under complex logical constraints, including object affordances, spatial relationships, and sequential action dependencies. Recent neuro-symbolic methods improve planning efficiency by learning object-importance scores to prune task-irrelevant objects, but they typically rely on fixed offline supervision generated from full search spaces. This creates a train-test mismatch: at deployment, the planner operates in pruned search spaces induced by the model's own imperfect predictions, leading to exposure bias and degraded planning performance. To address this challenge, we formulate object-importance learning for task planning as an imperative learning-based bilevel optimization problem. The upper level optimizes a neural scorer, while the lower level solves a symbolic planning problem in the score-pruned search space. To stabilize this learning process, we introduce a 3R strategy into the lower-level planning, using parallel Repair, Restart, and Rollback recovery to provide reliable and adaptive feedback for upper-level learning. Experiments on three challenging benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, including an 80.04% reduction in failure rate and a 57.14% reduction in planning time. We further validate the framework on a quadruped-based mobile manipulator in simulation and the real world, demonstrating its potential for efficient and deployable neuro-symbolic task planning.
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All authors Qiwei Du, Zitong Zhan, Shaoshu Su, Bowen Li, Yi Du, Zhipeng Zhao, Taimeng Fu, Sebastian Scherer, Jiaoyang Li, Chen Wang

Robotics

What Is My Robot Thinking? Design Considerations for Transparent and Trustworthy Shared Autonomy

Atharv Belsare, Zohre Karimi, Connor Mattson et al. (+2 more)

Assistive robots operating under shared autonomy must balance user control with autonomous assistance. Because robot actions depend on internal intent inference that is not directly observable, mismatches between inferred and intended goals can undermine coordination and trust. We investigate how interface-level transparency, including feedback modality (visual vs. auditory) and information richness (sparse vs. rich), shapes interaction in a vision-based shared autonomy system. In a user study with N=25 participants across two assistive manipulation tasks, we evaluate how these designs influence coordination and trust. Providing feedback significantly improves intent alignment and reduces corrective intervention, indicating that making the inferred goal legible accelerates convergence in shared control. Participants preferred visual over auditory feedback, while preferences for sparse versus rich information depended on task complexity. We also found that revealing the full belief distribution did not consistently improve alignment or trust. Together, these findings indicate that effective transparency enhances coordination primarily through goal legibility, while trust depends on task-appropriate information exposure rather than maximal disclosure. Based on these results, we outline guidelines for designing transparent shared autonomy systems.
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All authors Atharv Belsare, Zohre Karimi, Connor Mattson, Rushiil Nakka, Daniel S. Brown

Robotics

Think Like a Pilot: Fine-Grained Long-Horizon UAV Navigation

Xiangyi Zheng, Xiangyu Wang, Qinan Liao et al. (+6 more)

Language-guided UAV agents must execute long-horizon semantic instructions while producing smooth, physically feasible continuous flight commands, yet existing Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) benchmarks typically use discrete or coarse actions and existing UAV Vision-Language-Action (VLA) tasks focus on short, atomic maneuvers. To address this gap in UAV task settings, we introduce FLIGHT, a Fine-grained Long-horizon Instruction-Guided benchmark for Hybrid UAV navigation and reasoning Tasks, which combines multi-stage instructions with dense 6-DoF trajectory annotations across two dataset splits: Fine-grained VLN and Long-horizon Flow. To endow the UAV agent with the capability of real-time in-flight reasoning over task execution status and mission planning, while simultaneously accommodating high-frequency, real-time precise control, we further propose FLIGHT VLA, an asynchronous architecture that decouples a low-frequency Streaming Pilot Vision-Language Model (VLM) for task-state reasoning from a high-frequency diffusion action model for continuous control, supervised by explicit Pilot Reasoning texts that summarize the current flight state and anticipate the next subgoal. In closed-loop evaluation, FLIGHT VLA consistently surpasses representative VLN and VLA baselines on our FLIGHT benchmarks, achieving stronger multi-stage completion, subgoal adherence, and terminal control. Its trained Streaming Pilot Reasoning VLM further improves UAV video reasoning, validating the effectiveness of our design.
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All authors Xiangyi Zheng, Xiangyu Wang, Qinan Liao, Zimu Tang, Yue Liao, Dongyue Lyu, Guodong Wang, Junjie Liu, Si Liu

Robotics

STRIPS-WM: Learning Grounded Propositional STRIPS-style World Models from Images

Abhiroop Ajith and Constantinos Chamzas

Robots performing long-horizon visual manipulation observe high-dimensional images, but successful plans depend on action-relevant facts: what can be done now and what changes afterward. A useful planning representation should discard irrelevant visual details while preserving action applicability and effects. Classical task planners exploit this structure through symbolic operators with preconditions and effects, but obtaining such representations from raw visual experience remains challenging. We study a visual task-planning setting in which a robot receives only image transitions: the current image, executed high-level action, and the resulting image. At test time, given a start image and a goal image, the robot must produce a sequence of high-level actions that reaches the goal. To address this problem, we introduce STRIPS-WM, a framework for learning image-grounded STRIPS-style world models directly from visual transitions. STRIPS-WM first induces a finite abstract transition graph from images, then learns latent binary predicates and one grounded propositional operator per action label. The learned operators form a symbolic action model with sparse preconditions and add/delete effects. Finally, the learned predicates are distilled into a visual encoder, enabling classical planning directly from novel start and goal images. Experiments on visual rearrangement tasks show that STRIPS-WM improves image-to-plan success over the tested visual rollout, latent graph-search and latent-symbolic baselines.
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Robotics

Three-dimensional hydro-cluttered locomotion by an undulatory robot

Tianyu Wang, Matthew Fernandez, Galen Tunnicliffe et al. (+10 more)

Aquatic robots have expanded human access to underwater environments, yet many underwater spaces contain obstacles that can disrupt open-water locomotion. In "hydro-cluttered" environments, water is interspersed with rigid and flexible clutter, making body-obstacle contact unavoidable. Operating in these spaces requires robots that can regulate and exploit contact, but this regime remains difficult to model or simulate. Building on recent advances in mechanical intelligence in terradynamically capable limbless robotics, we develop principles for 3D aquatic locomotion using AquaMILR, an elongate limbless robot that combines bilateral cable-driven actuation, programmable body compliance, distributed depth regulation, corrosion-resistant enclosures, and onboard power and electronics for untethered field operation. Systematic robophysical experiments reveal that programmable body compliance regulates body deformation and converts body-environment interactions into fast, robust, forward progression across increasing hydro-clutter constraint strength. Depth regulation provides three-dimensional access, allowing the robot to bypass clutter, recover from obstruction, and continue through otherwise inaccessible routes. In potential jamming scenarios, emergent inertia-induced rolling acts as a spontaneous recovery mechanism, freeing the robot from clutter that would otherwise lead to failure and allowing locomotion to continue without additional control. Tests of the robot in an aquatic mangrove field demonstrate that these principles transfer to practical operation, enabling navigation and onboard visual inspection of inaccessible root zones. These results establish principles for hydro-cluttered locomotion and a design paradigm in which aquatic robots exploit environmental complexity as a locomotor resource.
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All authors Tianyu Wang, Matthew Fernandez, Galen Tunnicliffe, Nikolas Cornell, Justin Duong, Donoven Dortilus, Zhaochen J. Xu, Patricia Meza, Sean Lublinsky, Darsh Parikh, Jianfeng Lin, Emily Grace, Daniel I. Goldman

Robotics

Lane Change Trajectory Planning for Personalized Driving Comfort and Mobility Efficiency

Haoxuan Dong, Dongjun Li and Ziyou Song

Lane changing entails simultaneous longitudinal and lateral motions that affect driving comfort and mobility efficiency. Because these motions are tightly coupled and subject to substantial inter-vehicle variability, trajectory planning for lane-change maneuvers is characterized by a highly personalized nature. This study proposes a neural network-driven planner that integrates a third-order polynomial trajectory generator with a learning module that infers optimal trajectory parameters across diverse driving conditions. Using a shared backbone with dual heads, one head ensures all-condition operational guarantees, while the other captures driver-specific preferences for comfort or mobility efficiency. A head-gated switching mechanism, realized through a statistical gate based on error-winner logistic regression, adaptively selects the appropriate head under varying driving conditions, which enables context-aware lane-change trajectory planning. Representative cases and Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed planner achieves personalized comfort and mobility during lane changes, while the baseline ensures feasible trajectories under driving conditions where personalized data are insufficient or inaccessible.
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Robotics

Learning All-Terrain Locomotion for a Planetary Rover with Actively Articulated Suspension

Arthur Bouton, Tristan D. Hasseler, Michael Paton et al. (+5 more)

This paper presents ERNEST, a four-wheeled planetary rover concept equipped with a two-degree-of-freedom Active Gimbal Suspension that combines yaw and roll actuation to enable wheel reconfiguration, steering, and active load redistribution. A single neural network controller, trained to track a desired path across challenging terrain, fully unlocks the capabilities of this actuated suspension system for autonomous obstacle negotiation. A reinforcement learning framework is developed using the high-fidelity DARTS simulation engine, which combines rigid-contact dynamics and Bekker-Wong terramechanics, enabling the emergence of locomotion strategies adapted to loose-soil conditions. To obtain a single unified controller across heterogeneous terrains, a policy consolidation strategy merges the experience of terrain-specialized agents into one neural network, eliminating the need for explicit terrain classification and controller switching. The resulting controller operates on a combination of proprioceptive and exteroceptive feedback, including sparse stereo-derived terrain elevation, chassis attitude, joint states, and force-torque measurements. Zero-shot transfer to the physical rover is achieved through domain randomization, sensor noise injection, and model-to-real system identification. Experimental results demonstrate autonomous traversal of rock fields, a Bickler trap (bump obstacle), a wheel-high step, sand ripples, and sandy slopes. On a 20{\deg} sandy slope, the learned controller reduces the cost of transport by 37% on dry sand despite the additional actuation, and achieves superior performance on wet sand where the passive suspension becomes completely immobilized. A video accompanying this paper is available at https://youtu.be/d684P5a3xMc
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All authors Arthur Bouton, Tristan D. Hasseler, Michael Paton, Travis Brown, Jacob Levy, William Reid, Joshua Martin, Hari Nayar

Thursday 4 June

Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.LG

DiDrive: A Risk-Aware Hierarchical Diffusion Framework for Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning in Autonomous Driving

Qisong Guo, Jingtang Chen, Zhilin Chen et al. (+4 more)

While diffusion models effectively capture multimodal behavioral priors for autonomous driving, offline reinforcement learning (RL) policies remain susceptible to distribution shift, heavy-tailed risk signals, out-of-distribution (OOD) action generation, and high-dimensional state redundancy. To address these challenges, we propose DiDrive, a distribution-guided offline diffusion framework featuring two synergistic components: the Risk-Aware Hierarchical Diffusion (RHDif) architecture and the 3DICE policy optimization paradigm. In the state space, RHDif utilizes a low-level risk-gated encoder and a high-level contextual modulator to filter environmental redundancy and focus on safety-critical threats. In the action space, 3DICE mitigates OOD overestimation and gradient oscillation through in-sample calibrated guidance, spatiotemporal optimization, and ensemble-based candidate ranking. Evaluations on the CARLA benchmark demonstrate DiDrive's superiority over baselines like IQL, CQL, and Diffusion-QL, particularly in complex, high-density traffic scenarios with 60 vehicles, where it achieves an 85% success rate and a 4295.68 average reward, providing a robust pathway for safe autonomous driving decision-making.
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All authors Qisong Guo, Jingtang Chen, Zhilin Chen, Pei Xu, Mingjian Fu, Wenxi Liu, Yuanlong Yu

Robotics

Multi-Robot Planning and Control from CCTV Camera Networks in a Real Warehouse

Luke Robinson, Benjamin Ramtoula, Anas Izaaryene et al. (+2 more)

Off-board control of mobile robots from cameras embedded in the environment offers a practical path to scalable autonomy, moving sensing and compute off the robots. We extend this idea from the single-robot case to coordinated fleets in a real warehouse, driving multiple robots with only a distributed CCTV network and edge compute. The system operates entirely in image space over an uncalibrated, pixel-wise topological camera graph, enabling wide-area operation with flexible camera placement. A hierarchical planner selects a camera sequence per robot and plans its image-space motion through each view, coordinating robots with a prioritised-then-joint strategy and treating overlapping camera regions as shared resources held by one robot at a time to prevent collisions and deadlocks. We validate the approach in a real warehouse with four robots and 30 cameras across six 27 m aisles, reporting mission times and coordination statistics. To our knowledge, this is the first field demonstration of multi-robot planning and coordination using only an external camera network and off-board compute, with robots carrying no task-specific navigation hardware.
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All authors Luke Robinson, Benjamin Ramtoula, Anas Izaaryene, Paul Newman, Daniele De Martini

Robotics

AxisGuide: Grounding Robot Action Coordinate System in RGB Observations for Robust Visuomotor Manipulation

Jiyun Jang, Yujin Sung, Woosung Joung et al. (+5 more)

Visuomotor manipulation policies trained via large-scale behavior cloning have achieved strong semantic scene understanding, yet often fail to reliably execute correct low-level actions under distribution shifts. For example, even in a simple pickup task with identical scene layouts, camera viewpoints, and illumination, performance can degrade substantially when the object is placed at unseen locations. We argue that this gap arises from insufficient action understanding, namely the inability to interpret the robot's base-frame action coordinate system in image space. To address this issue, we introduce AxisGuide, a lightweight guidance method that bridges semantic scene understanding and action-coordinate interpretation. Using camera parameters and end-effector poses, AxisGuide renders the robot base-frame axes in each camera view and augments RGB observations with a small set of cue channels that explicitly visualize the meaning of the +x, +y, and +z motions in image space. Extensive evaluations in both the LIBERO simulation and real-world environments demonstrate that AxisGuide yields substantial performance gains and improved generalization, highlighting the effectiveness of explicit action-coordinate cues for learning reliable and transferable generalist visuomotor policies.
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All authors Jiyun Jang, Yujin Sung, Woosung Joung, Daewon Chae, Sangwon Lee, Sohwi Kim, Jinkyu Kim, Jungbeom Lee

Robotics

IDDMBSE: Integrating Data-Driven and Model-Based Systems Engineering for Trusted Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems

John S. Baras, Sai Sandeep Damera, Ryan Matheu et al. (+2 more)

Autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS) sit at the intersection of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and data-driven Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (ML/AI), yet no integrated Systems Engineering (SE) methodology natively spans both. We address this gap with IDDMBSE, an Integrated Data-Driven and Model-Based Systems Engineering methodology that extends the rigorous MBSE V-process with a data-driven loop at every step, anchored in SysML, the autonomy stack, and a hybrid model-based plus data-driven trade-off architecture. We instantiate IDDMBSE as an interoperable, open-source tool chain: PERFECT, which maps SysML system architectures to executable ROS autonomy stacks for scalable performance evaluation; TRADES-X, which decomposes design-space exploration into a model-based optimization stage followed by a data-driven evaluation stage; and VERITAS, which combines formal, data-driven, and runtime verification into a single assurance workflow. We demonstrate IDDMBSE on a Trusted Autonomous Ground Robot across its development lifecycle, spanning sensor-suite selection, risk-sensitive path planning, behavior-tree task verification, conformal-prediction-based robust perception, and assured multi-robot coordination, all exercised in a contested-terrain Isaac Sim test range that we release with the tool chain. We close by sketching how IDDMBSE is being re-formulated on SysML v2 / KerML foundations to enable language-native composability and tighter ML/AI integration.
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All authors John S. Baras, Sai Sandeep Damera, Ryan Matheu, Clinton Enwerem, Praveen M.S. Kumar

Robotics

SCOUT: Semantic scene COverage via Uncertainty-guided Traversal

Junyu Mao, Sara Ayoubi, Vishnu D. Sharma et al. (+2 more)

Robots that operate over extended periods should not merely visit space; they should progressively understand it. Yet most 3D scene graph pipelines treat perception as a post-processing stage over a fixed dataset, decoupling scene representation from the decisions that determine what is observed in the first place. We present SCOUT, an online semantic exploration framework that closes this loop by coupling active traversal with probabilistic scene graph construction. Given a prior 2D occupancy map and posed RGB-D observations, SCOUT incrementally builds an uncertainty-aware 3D scene graph whose nodes maintain fused geometry and posterior beliefs over open-vocabulary object labels, while edges encode structural relations such as on, inside, belong, and next to. These beliefs are fed back to an uncertainty-guided traversal planner, which selects viewpoints by balancing expected semantic certainty gain, geometric coverage gain, and travel cost. In this way, the robot revisits ambiguous objects when additional evidence matters and expands into unseen free space when the scene remains incomplete. The resulting system treats semantic scene completeness as an operational objective rather than a passive by-product of semantic mapping, moving toward autonomous agents that can patrol, update, and reason about evolving indoor environments with minimal human intervention.
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All authors Junyu Mao, Sara Ayoubi, Vishnu D. Sharma, Ilija Hadžić, Matthew Andrews

Robotics

Optimal Control Approach for Non-prehensile Ball Juggling Using a 7-DoF Manipulator

Joel Ramadani, Vasilije Rakčević, Riddhiman Laha et al. (+4 more)

Non-prehensile object manipulation skills are important for real-world robot interactions, enabling highly dynamic tasks such as balancing a glass on a tray or the controlled sliding of items on a table. Among such tasks, those characterised by high-speed manipulation requirements and general sensitivity of the resulting hybrid dynamics are particularly hard to accomplish. Within these, juggling can be seen as a highly challenging maneuver to be solved. The key to robotic juggling is achieving dynamic stabilisation of an underactuated object. Since the object does not possess the ability of self-correction, its stability is entirely dependent on the forces applied to it. This creates a system that is sensitive to control inputs, where timing is critical to continuously counteract deviations and maintain the desired behavior. We develop a systematic method to control a 7-degree-of-freedom manipulator performing non-prehensile ball juggling with a tool. Our primary contribution is a model-based framework for generating juggling trajectories and stabilizing a periodic juggling motion for this hybrid system. The framework incorporates a two-stage optimal control approach to compute the underlying feasible motion patterns required for stable juggling. Offline-computed trajectories are then organised to enable real-time error correction without solving optimal control problems online. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the resulting controller by first evaluating its performance in a simulation environment and performing an experiment using a Franka Emika Panda robot.
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All authors Joel Ramadani, Vasilije Rakčević, Riddhiman Laha, Arne Sachtler, Valentin Le Mesle, Achim J. Lilienthal, Sami Haddadin

Robotics

Hardness of Multi-Agent Path Finding on Trees: A Unified Approach

Tzvika Geft

This paper presents a simple framework that settles the complexity of Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) on trees across standard objectives - distance, makespan, and flowtime - for both labeled and colored variants. In MAPF, agents occupy the vertices of a graph and must move to target vertices without collisions while optimizing a given objective. In the labeled case, the agents are distinct and have respective targets; in the colored case, agents of the same color are interchangeable. While many MAPF variants are known to be intractable, several basic cases on trees have remained open. We prove NP-hardness on trees for both labeled and 2-colored MAPF under all three objectives. In particular, we resolve the classical Pebble Motion problem, where one pebble moves at a time to an adjacent empty vertex and the goal is to minimize the total number of moves. Despite being one of the most basic discrete motion models, its complexity on trees had remained open for several decades. Moreover, for colored Pebble Motion, we give the first hardness result on any graph class, already with two colors, which is tight. All of these results are established through the hardness of Stack Rearrangement, itself posed as an open problem, which asks to optimally rearrange items stored in stacks, and which we also prove to be NP-hard. Notably, the connection to stacks yields hardness already on very simple trees - subdivided stars - across all problems. Together, these results reveal a common tractability barrier that permeates several fundamental motion models, thereby unifying and strengthening prior hardness results.
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Robotics · Cross-listed from cs.AI

AEGIS: A Backup Reflex for Physical AI

Josef Chen

Long-horizon robot manipulation tends to fail gradually: one bad step degrades the state, and the policy spirals into a basin from which it cannot recover. The failure is often visible before it happens. We introduce AEGIS (Activation-probe Early-warning, Gated Inference Switching), a selective escalation method that uses a lightweight probe on a weak policy's frozen activations to detect high-risk steps while there is still time to act. When the probe flags a step, control switches to a stronger separate policy, but only for the steps that need it. On LIBERO-Spatial, AEGIS recovers 10.1% of the trajectories the weak policy alone loses, versus 4.6% for budget-matched blind escalation and 5.1% for a random-trigger placebo. These gains are significant under one-sided exact paired McNemar tests with Holm-Bonferroni adjustment over three pre-registered contrasts: +5.4pp over blind escalation, p=8.5e-6; +5.0pp over random triggering, p=1.0e-4; paired-trajectory bootstrap CIs exclude zero. AEGIS activates the stronger policy on only 38% of steps, so the lever is timing rather than compute. The probe clears its precondition with an early-window AUROC of 0.764, 95% CI [0.70, 0.84], read from the weak-policy path over the first 30% of trajectory steps before any handoff. We pre-register the full analysis plan, including a conditional recovered-task-rate estimand and explicit kill criteria, and confirm the result on 700 common-random-number episodes per arm, with nA-fail=646.
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Robotics

What Matters When Cotraining Robot Manipulation Policies on Everyday Human Videos?

Richard Li, Aditya Prakash, Andrew Wen et al. (+3 more)

Human video datasets used for cotraining robot manipulation policies largely consist of curated demonstrations where motions are orchestrated to resemble robot behavior and 3D hand poses are captured with specialized hardware. A more plentiful source of data is everyday Internet video, but it is an open question what factors enable transfer from such videos to robots. We investigate this using a new dataset of 532 human videos with 28 hours of high-quality triangulated hand labels and natural motions. We find that hand pose quality affects transfer, but even with accurate hands, the inherent motion gap hinders transfer unless the vision and policy networks specialize to each embodiment. Our cotraining recipe yields consistent improvements, with an absolute success rate gain of $29.7\%$ in the low-robot-data regime across six manipulation tasks.
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All authors Richard Li, Aditya Prakash, Andrew Wen, Saurabh Gupta, Yilun Du, Pulkit Agrawal

Robotics

ChronoForest: Closed-Loop Multi-Tree Diffusion Planning for Efficient Bridge Search and Route Composition

Jungmin Seo and Jaesik Park

How can we plan long-horizon routes that reach designated goals, visit required waypoints, and remain short when only short-horizon offline trajectories are available? This problem matters in offline navigation because collecting sufficiently rich long-horizon data is difficult, yet real agents must still solve long-range tasks with route-level efficiency rather than mere feasibility. The difficulty is twofold: at the microscopic level, composing many short-horizon segments creates a trade-off between search cost and path quality, while at the macroscopic level, waypoint ordering requires comparing pairwise travel costs among start, goal, and waypoint anchors that are unknown before planning and increasingly unreliable when estimated only from long-range temporal distance. In this paper, we propose ChronoForest, a closed-loop planning system that couples local bridge search and online route re-solving through an anchor-chaining tree diffusion planner and an online multi-tree orchestrator. ChronoForest uses temporal distance for short-range guidance and node evaluation, while using search-time bridge evidence to validate long-range anchor connectivity and repeatedly re-solve the route. On OGBench AntMaze-Stitch, ChronoForest achieves 99.8%, 99.3%, and 99.5% success on the medium, large, and giant splits and improves giant-stitch success by up to 34.5 points over prior reported diffusion-based results. On Hamiltonian route-composition benchmarks, online re-solving corrects poor temporal orderings and improves route quality while remaining substantially cheaper than exhaustive planning.
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Robotics

PhyRoGen: Synthetic Generation of Physical Robot Manipulation Puzzles Using Procedural Content Generation

Lennart Julian Droß, Andreas Orthey and Marc Toussaint

Robot manipulation of physical puzzles is important for automatic assembly and disassembly tasks. However, to enable robots to solve physical puzzles, manipulation skills need to be learned, which requires large training datasets, the generation of which is often time consuming and tedious. To overcome this problem, we propose the Physical Robot Manipulation Puzzle Generation framework (PhyRoGen), which leverages procedural content generation (PCG) for automated generation of synthetic datasets of manipulation puzzles. PhyRoGen is a general-purpose puzzle generator, which can generate physical puzzles with interlocking object dependencies, where one articulated object must be manipulated before another can be moved. Based upon PhyRoGen, we define six concrete generators which we use to generate 24 physical puzzles. By using a benchmarking framework, we are able to solve all puzzles in 1 to 300 seconds using sampling-based planning algorithms. Finally, we demonstrate that every generated puzzle is manipulatable by using a KUKA LBR iiwa robot in a physical simulation. This shows that our framework is able to procedurally generate unique, solvable robot manipulation puzzles, which is a crucial ingredient to benchmark manipulation algorithms and to develop robust foundation models.
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Robotics

Robots Need More than VLA and World Models

Elis Karcini, Faisal Mehrban, Quang Nguyen et al. (+6 more)

Generalist robot intelligence is often framed as a policy-scaling problem: collect more robot demonstrations, train larger Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, and expect broader generalisation. In this position paper, we argue that this framing is incomplete. The central bottleneck is not only policy learning, but the absence of mechanisms that convert the world's abundant unstructured behavioural data into grounded robot supervision. Human motion, internet video, simulation rollouts, and interactive demonstrations contain rich information about tasks, goals, contacts, failures, and physical constraints, yet most of this information is not directly usable by robot policies because it lacks embodiment-specific action labels, task semantics, and reward structure. We identify four missing components for the next generation of robotics: data interfaces for autolabelling unstructured behaviour, embodiment interfaces for retargeting human motion to robot actions, world-model interfaces for physics-grounded 3D reasoning, and reward interfaces for inferring task progress and success from video and language. We survey recent progress in robot foundation models, cross-embodiment datasets, learning from video, world models, and reward modelling, and propose a research agenda for building robotics systems that can learn not only from robot demonstrations, but from the broader physical world.
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All authors Elis Karcini, Faisal Mehrban, Quang Nguyen, Mac Schwager, Arash Ajoudani, Cesar Cadena, Jan Peters, Marco Hutter, Haitham Bou-Ammar

Robotics

HANDOFF: Humanoid Agentic Task-Space Whole-Body Control via Distilled Complementary Teachers

Lizhi Yang, Junheng Li, Nehar Poddar et al. (+5 more)

Humanoid loco-manipulation benefits from one controller to coordinate locomotion, arm movements, and fall recovery. These behaviors are difficult to learn together from scratch because they require different skills and objectives. We present HANDOFF, a training architecture that distills motion-tracking, locomotion, and recovery teachers into one 29-DoF policy, using context-conditioned KL losses over separate action slices and a soft mixture of experts. Commanded velocity continuously blends body supervision, while a binary recovery flag assigns the full action to the recovery teacher. The resulting controller takes a compact 10-D task-space command rather than a dense kinematic stream and does not switch policies at runtime. On the Unitree G1, HANDOFF matches state-of-the-art velocity tracking and obtains the largest robust manipulation workspace in a matched adapted-interface benchmark. The same controller executes natural-language-driven, multi-stage loco-manipulation tasks in simulation and hardware experiments without further data collection or fine-tuning.
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All authors Lizhi Yang, Junheng Li, Nehar Poddar, Yiling Hou, Gio Huh, Robert Griffin, Georgia Gkioxari, Aaron Ames

Robotics

TempoVLA: Learning Speed-Controllable Vision-Language-Action Policies

Dong Jing, Jingchen Nie, Tianqi Zhang et al. (+4 more)

Robot manipulation alternates between low-risk transit phases that call for fast execution and high-risk contact stages that demand slow, precise motion. Yet existing Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) only inherit a single fixed speed from training demonstrations. Prior efforts to accelerate VLAs through model compression, KV-cache reuse, or reinforcement learning only shift the policy from one fixed speed to another, and leave deceleration almost unexplored. We observe that the magnitude of each predicted action already governs how fast the robot moves, opening a direct route to controllable execution speed. We turn this observation into TempoVLA, a single VLA whose execution speed is controlled by an explicit condition. TempoVLA combines two coupled components. (1) A data-side Variable-Speed Trajectory Augmentation (VSTA) that re-times demonstration to any target speed by merging or splitting actions while preserving its motion semantics. (2) A model-side conditioning mechanism that feeds the speed to the policy. Statistics show that VSTA reaches the requested speed with negligible motion error. Experiments in simulation and on real-world tasks demonstrate that TempoVLA achieves flexible speed control in both directions, while VSTA additionally boosts the default $1\times$ performance via better data utilization. Furthermore, by cooperating with a large multimodal model, TempoVLA realizes dynamic speed control, accelerating through low-risk phases and decelerating for high-risk ones.
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All authors Dong Jing, Jingchen Nie, Tianqi Zhang, Jiaqi Liu, Huaxiu Yao, Zhiwu Lu, Mingyu Ding