A robot searching for the source of an odor must eventually answer a notably hard question: have I arrived? Near the source, concentration gradients homogenize, turbulence corrupts the signal, and a small robot often lacks the positional accuracy to map the plume. Here, we describe a lightweight remedy inspired by a World War II statistics conundrum: the German tank problem. To approximate German armament production, Allied analysts developed an estimator based on serial numbers from captured tanks. Analogously, we use the same procedure over sampled chemical sensor readings from a robot to create estimates for the peak concentration of an odor plume, and therefore the odor's source. Treating each sensor reading as an observation, our unbiased estimator needs only a running maximum and a sample counter. A confidence bound turns both numbers into a principled rule that the robot or UAV can use to determine whether it should keep searching for the odor source. We derive the estimator and its bound, demonstrate its sample efficiency, and examine its robustness even when its assumptions fail. Finally, we summarize the estimator's role as the termination criterion for olfactory navigation.
Bimanual dexterous manipulation requires continuous coordination of wrist motion, finger contact, and object motion. Human videos provide rich manipulation experience. Using this experience for robot control requires aligning human poses with robot commands and accounting for embodiment-specific kinematics and contact dynamics. We present AcrossDEX 1.0, a learning system that connects human motion pretraining, simulation-based expert learning, robot demonstration collection, and visual closed-loop execution. Pretraining on HOT3D Aria predicts one second of bimanual motion from five images and thirty annotated hand states over the preceding second. Robot adaptation preserves the visual encoder, temporal backbone, and wrist parameters. Shared wrist representations, separate finger fields, and validity masks support both six-channel Inspire hands and sixteen-joint Allegro hands. The robot policy predicts sixty control targets from frontal images, command history, and task conditions. It executes a prefix and replans from updated observations. We compare direct regression, diffusion, and flow matching on lid opening and return and closed-lid object reorientation. Direct regression achieves success rates of 40.6\% for opening and return, 100.0\% for Inspire reorientation, and 93.3\% for Allegro reorientation. Flow matching achieves 90.0\% on Allegro reorientation. Paired comparisons further show that constraining replanning with the previous plan improves the continuous execution of generative policies. These results demonstrate a common adaptation pipeline for two hand embodiments and highlight the roles of contact coordination and action-chunk continuity.
Fine-grained action annotations can support skill reuse and compositional generalization in robot policies. However, robot datasets typically provide task-level instructions without subtask annotations. Although some include subtask labels, inconsistent formats and conventions hinder cross-source joint training. We propose RoboAtom-Data, which adds unified, time-aligned atomic-action annotations to existing data from multiple sources, covering 1.45 million trajectories, 6.88 million skill-labeled segments, and 16,882.1 hours. Our pipeline combines a unified protocol, large-scale manual annotation, propagation across repeated executions with the same ordered skill sequence, and multi-stage quality control. We evaluate the dataset through automatic atomic-action annotation and robot control. We construct RoboAtom-Bench to standardize evaluation of skill recognition and temporal boundary localization. Trained on the annotated data, RoboAtom-Anno achieves better automatic annotation performance than all evaluated open- and closed-source models on both RoboAtom-Bench and the external WGO-Bench. For robot control, atomic-action supervision paired with hierarchical execution improves task success over task-level baselines on LIBERO-Long, LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin. We will release the data, benchmark, model, and construction pipeline to support further research on skill-level robot learning.
Monocular RGB tracking is useful for robots operating near people, but perception errors affect binary stop/proceed decisions in ways that geometric accuracy metrics do not capture. We examine how much decision error arises from the safety rule versus perception. We prove that lateral-only distance is a lower bound on planar distance: with accurate positions, it cannot miss dangers identified by the planar rule, but it produces unnecessary stops. We introduce a two-factor Shapley attribution separating rule and perception contributions, and further distinguish missed detections from localization errors. Experiments use ETH and UCY pedestrian videos with simulated stationary robots, disjoint calibration and evaluation pedestrians, and time-block bootstrap intervals. Across 898 pedestrians in three scenes, the lateral rule missed no dangers on annotated positions but achieved only 5.6-31.9% stop precision. In two scenes with RGB perception, calibrated ground-plane localization achieved 0.59 m and 0.51 m planar RMSE, compared with 1.72 m and 1.39 m for a geometric baseline and 0.81 m and 0.68 m for calibrated Depth Anything V2. Detection recall of 0.43 and 0.26 made missed detections the leading source of missed danger. A two-standard-deviation safety margin with ground-plane localization matched or improved on the lateral rule's missed-danger rate in all eight scene-threshold settings and reduced unnecessary stops in seven. All robot interactions are simulated, and outcomes are offline decision classifications, not demonstrations of collision avoidance.
Nghia Le, Khang Nguyen, Ba Long Tran, Thi Quynh Nhu Pham, Binh Nguyen, Tuong Do, Erman Tjiputra, Hoan Nguyen 等 12 位作者
Enabling a humanoid to interact naturally with human partners requires preserving not only individual motions but also the spatial, semantic, and contact relationships underlying the interaction (i.e., hugging, dancing, hand-shaking, etc.). Furthermore, a practical solution should generalize across various humanoid embodiments with distinct morphologies and kinematic constraints. To tackle this challenge, we propose HumiTransfer, a mimetic embodiment transfer framework that converts in-the-wild human-human interaction videos into physically plausible human-humanoid interactions. HumiTransfer first reconstructs 3D human motion with consistent foot-ground contact, then transfers one participant to a target humanoid embodiment via interaction modeling, using weighted joint-relative directions and anatomical offsets to prioritize interaction-critical inter-body relationships, while post-retargeting optimization enforces balance, contact, and collision avoidance. Subsequently, we apply HumiTransfer to 1,200 in-the-wild videos, producing approximately 500,000 frames of diverse interactions for the 26-DoF Unitree R1 Edu and the 23-DoF HighTorque Mini-hi humanoid robot, resulting in our HumiMimic dataset. Across both robots, HumiTransfer achieves superior motion fidelity, preserves inter-body relationships, and maintains contact accuracy compared with existing baselines. Moreover, we demonstrate that HumiMimic supports motion generation methods for synthesizing interactive humanoid motions following a human partner. Finally, our real robot deployments confirm the physical executability of the transferred motions in real-world settings. Our project is available at https://aioznetwork.github.io/HumiMimic/
Robot swarm co-design requires optimizing not only individual robot designs and behaviors, but also the heterogeneous swarm structure: how many robot types should exist, how they specialize and cooperate, and in what proportions they are deployed. However, these structural choices are often specified in advance rather than optimized. We present SwarmCoDe, a Cooperative Co-Evolutionary Algorithm (CCEA) that incorporates swarm decomposition into the optimization process without requiring the number of species to be specified in advance. SwarmCoDe combines dynamic speciation with evolved genetic tags, partner selectivity, and relative dominance to jointly optimize robot hardware, task-planning behavior, cooperative relationships, and deployed swarm composition. Across replicated simulated foraging experiments, SwarmCoDe discovers task-dependent swarm decompositions and adapts them when task requirements change, in contrast to fixed-K CCEAs which are sensitive to their pre-defined decomposition. We further show that fabrication budgets can change the preferred swarm composition and robot designs, and that SwarmCoDe can adapt its co-design under these resource constraints. Finally, SwarmCoDe co-designs 200-agent swarms using only 50 evolutionary individuals, demonstrating deployment at four times the evolutionary population size. Together, these results demonstrate that the heterogeneous structure of a robot swarm can be incorporated as a design variable and optimized alongside the robots themselves.
Mateo Clémente, Léo Maxime Brunswic, Rui Heng Yang, Amir Rasouli
Guidance methods are essential tools for steering the generation process in diffusion models, improving the generalizability of stochastic robotic controllers and enabling high-quality controlled image synthesis. Despite strong parallels between flow-matching and diffusion, integrating guidance into flow-matching models remains quite challenging. Recent work has proposed general guidance frameworks for flow-matching, however, they are direct adaptations of diffusion guidance methods and can prove unstable. In this work, we conduct a theoretical analysis of guidance in flow-matching and show that a naive translation of diffusion-based guidance to flow-matching breaks the coupling distribution used during training, resulting in weaker control over sampling accuracy. Building on this insight, we propose Coupled Guidance, a flow-matching-specific guidance mechanism derived from a geometric perspective that leverages the coupling structure inherent to flow-matching training. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct extensive experimentation on a custom robotic collision avoidance task using ManiSkill3, four robotic dexterous manipulation tasks from the Adroit benchmark, and three image generation tasks, namely inpainting, super-resolution, and deblurring, using the ImageNet-128 and CelebA-HQ-256 datasets. Our findings show that our framework improves sample quality and guidance stability across all tasks, without imposing any additional overhead.
Robot foundation models increasingly rely on flow-based action generation for general-purpose manipulation, yet the generated actions are not guaranteed to satisfy physical constraints such as joint limits and collision avoidance. This problem is especially challenging when the feasible set cannot be described analytically and is accessible only through black-box feasibility oracles. We study this practical oracle-only setting and propose an oracle-guided differentiable safeguard for safe flow-matching robot policies. The safeguard uses binary feasibility queries to correct unsafe updates in the forward pass, while extracting local boundary information to provide constraint-aware learning signals in the backward pass. Combined with discrete-time flow matching, the same safeguard is used during training and inference, enabling forward--backward aligned policy learning without explicit or differentiable constraint models. Experiments on obstacle-aware robotic manipulation demonstrate 100% constraint satisfaction while preserving task performance.
Efficient crowd navigation requires anticipating dynamic collision-free space without relying on fragile object tracking. We propose the Don't Risk It Planner (DRIP), an end-to-end LiDAR-only planning framework that couples occupancy forecasting with trajectory-conditioned clearance and uncertainty estimation. Operating directly on LiDAR-derived occupancy grid histories, DRIP predicts a distribution over minimum robot-obstacle clearance for candidate control sequences to evaluate collision risk. The model is trained using a risk cost that grounds predictive uncertainty directly in empirical collision outcomes rather than geometric regression alone. In closed-loop experiments with up to 45 pedestrians, DRIP achieves higher success rates with fewer collisions and reduced freezing behavior compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Accurate, robust, and adaptive localization is essential for various robotic operations. This paper proposes a parametric message passing (MP) algorithm for distributed collaborative localization, unifying Gaussian belief propagation (GBP) for robot state estimation and mean-field (MF) approximation for noise inference. Unlike conventional MP algorithms, the proposed formulation directly optimizes the natural parameters of beliefs, establishing a principled connection between MP and gradient estimators for handling non-conjugate terms arising from nonlinear measurement models. Beyond linearization and sampling, we further design a normalizing flow (NF)-based gradient estimator, enabling learnable sampling. End-to-end training tunes NF parameters according to the behavior of MP, improving estimation accuracy while reducing the required number of iterations. To support robot states involving rotations, the method is extended to Lie group spaces. Finally, the method is applied to a multirobot localization task fusing odometry, global navigation satellite system (GNSS) measurements, and inter-robot ultra wideband (UWB) ranging. Extensive simulations and experiments on autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) demonstrate superior state estimation accuracy, enhanced robustness and adaptability under ranging outliers and varying noise statistics, as well as good generalization across different operating conditions.
Choosing a robot action model requires evidence about task capability, adaptation cost, deployment requirements, and the reliability of reported conclusions. Success rates alone offer limited guidance to researchers with different computing budgets and goals. We propose RoboSeed, a multidimensional evaluation framework for vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models (WAM), within a continuing program to train, evaluate, and openly release robot models with verifiable evidence for model selection. The framework defines five dimensions: capability, downstream training affordability, deployment affordability, locally verified research value, and reproduction evidence. It maps empirical measurements and audit criteria to 0-100 profiles using fixed normalization anchors, with balanced, training-constrained, and deployment-constrained preference settings. Interface and protocol checks establish when comparisons are appropriate. Missing measurements remain explicit, incomplete aggregate scores are withheld, and weighted input coverage identifies evidence gaps. We apply the framework to representative VLA and WAM models, drawing on local training, released-weight evaluation, task-level audits, and an evaluation-system study. The results reveal budget-dependent backbone choices, sensitivity to adaptation recipes, and differences between language and visual task interfaces. Reproducible scoring code and machine-readable evidence support extension to additional models. The study provides dimension-level assessments and priorities for further measurement, while incomplete serving traces and heterogeneous protocols preclude overall numerical rankings.
Agentic robots must turn a high-level goal into actions while keeping the physical conditions needed for future steps valid. A completed action does not ensure that its effects will persist: a later disturbance can invalidate support that the remaining plan still assumes. We present LOGIV, a graph engineering framework for agentic robot execution that uses an explicit task graph to connect symbolic planning, observation-based verification, and embodied action. LOGIV compiles a validated plan into condition-support and resource-ordering edges, checks their physical validity during execution, and uses dependency tracing to determine what must be restored after a failure. Repair is constrained by retained unfinished actions, and the combined continuation is symbolically validated before execution resumes. The framework operates above existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) and World Action Model (WAM) policies without adding trainable components. Across 20 dual-arm tasks from RoboTwin~V2 and BiCoord with three execution backbones, LOGIV improves mean task success without injected disturbances by 10.67 and 15.33 percentage points, respectively. Under predefined perturbations, it achieves higher task completion and condition restoration than three adapted recovery baselines for every backbone on both benchmarks. On three real-robot tasks, successful trials increase from 12/30 to 17/30. These results support explicit, continuously checked task dependencies as a practical interface for reliable agentic robot execution.
Aoqian Zhang, Chunzheng Wang, Haoran Chen, Annan Tang, Cheng Xiang, Fan Shi, Shuzhi Sam Ge
Humanoids have become increasingly agile and capable in real-world environments. To operate safely in dynamic scenarios, they must rapidly evade fast-moving obstacles while maintaining stability and physically feasible whole-body motion. Learning such behaviors remains challenging due to the high-dimensional dynamics of humanoid systems and the need to jointly balance reactive obstacle avoidance, motion naturalness, and control robustness. In this work, we present Humanoid Dodgeball, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for agile dynamic obstacle avoidance in humanoids. Our method enables highly dynamic whole-body evasive maneuvers against incoming projectiles through threat-aware reward shaping, while multiple direction-specific adversarial motion priors regularize the learned behaviors toward stable and diverse human-like motions. Extensive simulation and hardware experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework substantially improves dynamic obstacle avoidance performance across diverse obstacle speeds and launch distances, while preserving robust and physically plausible humanoid motions.
Reasoning vision-language-action (VLA) policies write a reasoning trace and then decode the action from it. A wrong trace yields a wrong action, and even a correct-looking trace can mislead the plan. Existing remedies ask whether the reasoning is right. We ask how strongly it should steer. CoC-CFG applies classifier-free guidance between the policy's context and the same context without the reasoning span. One weight per Euler step attenuates or amplifies the reasoning, and w=1 recovers the original policy. We treat the choice of this weight as a Markov decision process whose action values are measured, not bootstrapped. With the expert frozen and the noise fixed, applying a weight for one step and finishing the plan under the current controller returns that weight's value exactly. Q-adaptive guidance fits these values with small critics and improves the controller conservatively. In the Alpasim driving simulator it outperforms every fixed weight and online RL (SAC, GRPO) in open loop, and in closed loop it passes 262 of 300 scenes, against 252 for the original policy. On held-out frames of the Waymo end-to-end driving benchmark, its first three stages outperform every fixed weight, four adaptive-guidance methods, SAC and GRPO. On the hidden test set, a frozen Alpamayo 1.5 with rule-based camera and vehicle conversions and Q-adaptive guidance sets a new state of the art among published methods: 8.135159 rater feedback score, against 8.079 for the best published method.
Jiayu He, Yifan Li, Oliver R. Runswick, Ernest N. Kamavuako, Yunjie Jia, Peter D. Hodkinson, Yang Gao
Rover-mounted robotic arms can extend human reach during lunar sample handling, but continuous joystick teleoperation requires repeated visual-motor alignment while operators may also need to monitor system states. This paper presents a gaze-assisted supervisory control framework in which gaze nominates a rock or placement target, explicit confirmation authorizes the action, and the robot performs bounded autonomous grasp-and-place execution. The framework was evaluated against manual joystick teleoperation in a mission-analog virtual reality study with 16 participants. The study used a 2 x 2 x 3 within-subject design varying control mode, placement difficulty, and concurrent monitoring load. Mean recorded task completion time decreased from 47.65 to 18.43 s per rock, with 72.5% of this difference arising during grasping. Under the tested auditory monitoring conditions, gaze-assisted supervisory control showed less average proportional slowing, with no detected control-mode difference in monitoring-response accuracy or speed. The rate of gaze shifts between core areas of interest decreased from 49.98 to 27.73 shifts/min, while the raw NASA Task Load Index score decreased from 32.54 to 18.26. However, the benefit was task dependent. In precision placement, manual control yielded lower mean placement error and a higher placement success rate. These findings support a mixed-initiative allocation in which gaze enables rapid task-level intention specification and autonomous execution, while precision-critical stages retain manual refinement.
Yuanzhi He, Victor Romero-Cano, Jiayu Xu, Juan David Hernández, Gualtiero Colombo
Obstacle-aware robotic manipulation can require substantial interaction data when deep reinforcement learning policies are trained from scratch. We study a task decomposition framework combining first-layer critic transfer with staged reward redesign (RR) on a Truncated Quantile Critics (TQC) backbone. Transfer reuses an input representation across tasks, while RR supplies intermediate feedback for Pick-and-Place. Experiments cover Push, Pick-and-Place, and Slide in obstacle-free and single-obstacle PyBullet environments, with three random seeds per setting. On obstacle-aware Push, transfer achieves $0.83\pm0.05$ success against $0.77\pm0.06$ for TQC. On obstacle-aware Slide, it achieves $0.95\pm0.02$ against $0.84\pm0.06$ for SAC, the strongest baseline in that setting. These are gains of $6$ and $11$ percentage points, respectively. RR reduces the target-training steps needed for obstacle-free Pick-and-Place from roughly $0.75$M to $0.20$M. Transfer benefits depend on the route: obstacle-aware Pick-and-Place shows a lower mean than training from scratch. A selected simulated trajectory is executed open-loop on a Franka Emika FR3 as a feasibility demonstration. The study characterizes when a lightweight combination of established transfer and reward-design components helps learning.
Prabhu Nithin Gollapudi, Andreas Maier, Franziska Mathis-Ullrich, Water Zhao, Jia Wang, Siming Bayer
In the context of multi-stage trajectory planning for robotic percutaneous liver interventions, identifying a kinematically feasible entry point remains a critical computational bottleneck. Existing methods rely on exhaustive inverse kinematics or randomized searches, incurring delays of 13 to 27 seconds per target and limiting real-time intraoperative adaptation. This paper introduces an Orientation-Based Reachability Map (ORM) that precomputes the kinematic feasibility of a 6 Degrees of Freedom (DoF) serial manipulator across 188,873 workspace positions and encodes orientation feasibility into a compact, indexed 83 MB map. A Just-In-Time (JIT) compiled runtime pipeline replaces live optimization with near-instantaneous array lookups. Experimental evaluation demonstrates a reduction in planning latency from 13.5-26.9 s to 0.289-0.349 s per target while maintaining high geometric fidelity, achieving a mean convex hull volume overlap ratio of 0.933 and a mean alpha-shape volume ratio of 0.976 relative to the baseline reachable point cloud. The proposed ORM framework enables sub-second entry point planning and provides an efficient computational framework for robotic needle insertion in percutaneous liver ablation.
World action models (WAMs) increasingly couple internal visual or world representations with action generation, making their world-to-action pathways a critical yet poorly understood source of robustness. We investigate when perturbations to these internal representations actually become behaviorally consequential, and uncover a pronounced mismatch between representation perturbability and closed-loop vulnerability: attack effectiveness varies sharply across visual K/V routes, while larger representation displacement does not reliably imply stronger control failure. Our analysis attributes this mismatch to the action-conditioned readout, where keys determine where action queries read and values determine what content they receive. This motivates an action-facing view of vulnerability, in which the effect of a perturbation depends on how it is routed into action generation rather than on representation-space magnitude alone. We instantiate this view with Tail-AV, a short-probe signal for identifying vulnerable routes, and operationalize it in PASA-KV, which selects action-facing K/V targets before training a fresh task-shared attack. Experiments across multiple WAM systems and a physical robot validate readout-informed target selection, demonstrate strong closed-loop attacks, and reveal substantial system-level differences in resistance.
Hanbo Zhang, Tianrun Hu, Cedar Site Bai, Anxing Xiao, David Hsu
Visual grounding is crucial for robots to understand language instructions with visual observations. This paper addresses the problem of visual grounding uncertainties, where a robot uses a black-box vision-language model (VLM) to ground free-form natural-language instructions to target objects. Prevailing methods derive uncertainty from the VLM itself. Yet, outputs of the VLM, e.g., generated uncertainties, are from the same parameters and structures producing the predictions, and inherit the bias. We give a formal Bayesian definition of the problem that treats the VLM prediction as an observation. An external surrogate Bayesian model then quantifies per-query uncertainty over a local neighborhood of a held-out calibration set, decomposed into aleatoric and epistemic components. A hierarchical retrieval across input modalities realizes a compact joint-space neighborhood, mitigating the curse of dimensionality. The estimator further integrates with conformal prediction or model-based planning for active visual grounding, where robots are allowed to take verbal or physical actions to ground targets. Across grounding benchmarks and state-of-the-art VLMs, it consistently improves both calibration and task performance. On a real Fetch robot under open-world instructions, it enables principled trade-offs between confident action and information gathering, substantially improving robustness.
Dominik Aigner, Thomas Wiedemann, Javier Monroy, Achim J. Lilienthal
Airflow-driven advection is the primary mechanism for gas and aerosol dispersion in real-world scenarios, making accurate airflow estimation essential for ventilation monitoring, gas source localization, and contaminant spread analysis. Since obtaining airflow maps via high-resolution spatial sensing is usually infeasible in practice, flow field estimation methods must cope with sparse measurements by introducing statistical or physical priors to compensate for limited data. Existing approaches mainly differ in how they incorporate fluid-flow constraints and environmental geometry. However, due to the lack of systematic comparisons across this spectrum of methods, the potential benefits of physics-based priors for airflow estimation under sparse sensing remain underexplored. To address this question, we quantitatively evaluate four airflow estimators across three simulated 2D scenarios under steady-state conditions and varying sampling densities. The methods range from Gaussian Process Regression and graph-based Gaussian Markov Random Fields to two Navier-Stokes-based approaches, including a novel strong-form residual minimization variant. Our results show that physical priors provide the greatest benefit at low sampling densities by compensating for missing spatial information. Although data-driven Gaussian Process Regression becomes increasingly competitive as sensor coverage increases, model-based estimators retain an accuracy advantage across the evaluated scenarios.
Autonomous mobile robots commonly pair a global planner with a local model predictive controller (MPC), but nonconvex obstacle avoidance and a limited horizon can make the robot freeze in complex layouts. Deciding whether to replan, wait, or call for help is a supervisory decision. Recent work queries a large language model (LLM) supervisor on every anomaly, which is slow and costly. We instead distill the LLM online into a decision tree. After each training episode, counterfactual replay labels recoveries as needed, unnecessary, or harmful. These labels retire unhelpful rules. In simulation, on 20 unseen layouts where the MPC alone freezes, the tree handles at least 18 correctly across all seeds, either by reaching the goal or by calling for help when no feasible path exists. The tree matches both an always-query LLM supervisor and expert-designed rules, while issuing no LLM queries at test time. Handwritten rules cannot anticipate the long tail of situations a physical robot will encounter. Online distillation is a promising remedy: the tree handles familiar cases, and the LLM is consulted only for new ones, whose validated recoveries become new rules. Language models can thus also serve as designers of supervisors rather than only as runtime supervisors.
Closed-loop robot policies require observation processing, state management, and situation-dependent branching, making them costly to design and tune manually. Although coding agents increasingly support control-code generation and optimization, it remains unclear whether implementations improved on source tasks also support policy acquisition for new tasks. We study this question by treating complete closed-loop implementations as reusable execution experience. To learn each source policy, a coding agent generates policy code from a few successful demonstrations and iteratively improves it using simulation feedback. The validation-selected implementations are retained in a software archive. To transfer the acquired software to new tasks, the agent generates and improves policies using archived implementations, target demonstrations, and execution feedback. We evaluate policy learning and its relationship to cross-task transfer. For learning, across four source tasks in RoboCasa, iterative optimization increases the success rate from 28.3% with initially generated policy code to 64.2% with validation-selected policy code. We further validate this learning approach on a physical Unitree G1. For transfer, across nine additional target tasks in RoboCasa, success rates are 45.2% without references, 41.5% using initially generated policy code from source tasks, and 57.0% using their validation-selected policy code. These results show that improving source-task code also improves learning on new tasks.
Marc Toussaint, Cornelius V. Braun, Armand Jordana, Sayantan Auddy, Eckart Cobo-Briesewitz, Denis Shcherba, Tilman Burghoff, Justin Carpentier
Training manipulation policies in contact-rich settings is a core challenge in robotics. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated its strength in such settings, it may struggle to sufficiently explore and discover complex manipulation strategies. To address this, we combine two basic ideas: First, designing appropriate reset strategies (the start state distribution of episodes) has shown promise in improving RL exploration and effectiveness. Second, while model-based approaches to finding trajectories through manipulation are hard, recent work showed that model-based approaches to sampling states on constrained manifolds can be highly efficient. Based on these observations, we propose a novel state sampler that enables efficient goal-conditioned RL in complex contact-rich manipulation tasks. Our sampler explicitly takes into account the structure of contact in order to provide a rich covering of diverse contact modes. By combining constrained sampling resets with projected interpolation and curriculum learning, our novel approach outperforms RL without constrained sampling and alternative reset methods, and effectively trains universal, prehensile and non-prehensile manipulation policies in contact-rich whole-body and in-hand settings. See the project page https://www.user.tu-berlin.de/mtoussai/26-CSRL/ for videos and full source code access.
Minwoo Park, Junwoo Chang, Jongeun Choi, Roberto Horowitz
Equivariant diffusion policies (EDPs) combine the expressivity of diffusion models with the generalization and sample efficiency afforded by geometric symmetries. While steering these policies with reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising fine-tuning mechanism beyond demonstration data, directly applying standard (non-equivariant) RL ignores the symmetries that EDPs are designed to exploit, leading to sample inefficiency and instability. We theoretically establish that the diffusion process of an EDP is equivariant, inducing a group-invariant latent-noise MDP which is well-suited for equivariant diffusion steering. Building on this, we introduce a principled symmetry-aware steering framework and compare standard, equivariant, and approximately equivariant RL strategies across tasks with varying degrees of symmetry. While we identify the practical boundaries of strict equivariance under symmetry breaking, exploiting symmetry during the steering yields substantial benefits---enhancing sample efficiency, preventing value divergence, and achieving strong policy improvements even when EDPs are trained from extremely limited demonstrations.
Georgios Floros, Evangelos Sartinas, Orestis Vaggelis, Maria Pateraki
6D pose estimation of novel objects without CAD models remains an open challenge: model-free methods must build the object representation from scratch during onboarding and have long trailed their model-based counterparts. We present NovaSplat, a model-free pipeline that closes this gap. From a short smartphone video captured at onboarding, we train a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model that serves both as a template source for detection and coarse pose estimation and as a differentiable backbone for pose refinement. Our refiner optimizes the object-to-camera pose with combined photometric and geometric losses under a continuous rotation parametrization free of gradient singularities. On a household-object benchmark, NovaSplat surpasses all model-based methods. On a challenging industrial benchmark with textureless and specular surfaces, it outperforms all model-free competitors while substantially narrowing the gap to model-based ones. We further introduce NovaSplat-Lite, an inference variant that is $3.1\times$ faster at negligible accuracy cost. Code will be made available at https://github.com/POSE-Lab/novasplat .
Localization is an essential capability of intelligent robots. However, in real-world constrained environments, robots often cannot rely on external localization systems. Therefore, this paper proposes an online particle-filter localization method based on Monte Carlo sampling. The method is applied to the localization of a mobile robot in a maze environment and requires only four range sensors mounted on the front, rear, left, and right sides of the vehicle, without the need for any heading information. Simulation experiments demonstrate that even in a maze where local regions are highly similar, the vehicle can still achieve relatively accurate localization, thereby providing a fast and effective approach for robot localization in complex environments.
Smartphone indoor localization requires low-cost, robust positioning across scene transitions and phone-use variations. Pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) enables infrastructure-free deployment but accumulates errors from heading drift, structural transitions, and carrying-mode changes. Existing methods often treat contextual cues as a single event stream or local correction signal, limiting their ability to address distinct localization errors. This paper presents a framework enhanced by hierarchical multi-sensor context recognition. A jointly data- and model-driven recognition model predicts environment, scene, and activity probabilities, which are converted into scene-event and action-context segments. Scene-event segments guide scene-constrained PDR correction through corridor heading constraints, landmark attraction, fixed-lag backtracking, and vertical-transition handling. Action-context segments drive action-aware RoNIN-based position compensation for carrying-mode-dependent drift. Experiments on cross-floor and multi-action trajectories against LiDAR-SLAM references show that the proposed framework outperforms PDR and representative learned inertial odometry baselines, demonstrating that hierarchical semantics provide reliable, localization-specific correction cues.
Zizhe Wang, Jia Deng, Xin Lu, Zehao Jia, Yi Huang, Yao Zhu, Jianing Li
Artificial intelligence for science (AI4S) is extending from interpretation of existing data to the design and execution of experiments. Space offers distinctive scientific opportunities while restricting physical support. Microgravity and extraterrestrial environments expose phenomena that terrestrial experiments cannot fully reproduce; finite samples, constrained resources, and limited opportunities for intervention complicate sustained investigation. This critical review examines orbital laboratories and planetary in situ science across biology, materials, fluid and thermal physics, and adaptive exploration. We distinguish learning from space-derived data, selecting scientific actions, executing them, and preserving experimental validity. Terrestrial self-driving laboratories provide complementary evidence on optimization, dedicated automation, robotic manipulation, and the support needed for unattended operation. The synthesis connects scientific gains already demonstrated by bounded AI systems to gaps in observation, executable actions, and continuity of valid evidence. Space robots can expand the attainable scope of autonomous science when necessary interventions exceed validated instrument capabilities and timely human support is unavailable. Their value must be established against dedicated mechanisms, redundancy, and human-supported operation. We develop a framework connecting sample history, scientific decisions, physical execution, and claim-specific validity. A worked orbital design, a planetary extension, and matched evaluation schemes separate the contributions of sensing, decision policies, and physical actions. The resulting agenda measures autonomy through valid scientific return, task coverage, intervention costs, and evidence integrity across complete campaigns.
Yueqi Zhu, Yan Pan, Chufan Rui, Jiasheng Luo, Bo Zhou
In safety-critical scenarios, the protection level of the autonomous navigation system is crucial for enabling mobile robots to perform safe tasks. However, existing studies on probabilistic navigation systems for robots usually perform offline accuracy evaluations using limited datasets and assume that the results can be applied to unknown real-world environments. As a result, current autonomous mobile robots often lack protection levels for online safety assessment. To fill this gap, we propose a safety-critical LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO) that provides deterministic protection levels based on a novel on-manifold set-membership filter. By adopting the unknown but bounded assumption, we derive a neat closed-form relationship between point cloud noise and the uncertainty of the estimation from the iterative closest point algorithm. Using this relationship, we design an on-manifold ellipsoidal set-membership filter (OM-ESMF) and implement it within the LIO system. Leveraging the properties of the set-membership filter, our system offers the feasible sets of the estimated locations as the deterministic protection levels, serving as safety references for the robots' downstream autonomous operations. The experimental results show that our system can provide effective deterministic online safety references for diverse robots in various environments.
Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control relies on stochastic trajectory sampling, and its performance under limited rollout budgets depends strongly on the structure of the proposal distribution. Conventional Gaussian perturbations, even when temporally correlated, transmit high-frequency jitter to the executed commands when only a few rollouts are available. We introduce Spike-MPPI, a motoneuron-inspired proposal in which a common stochastic drive recruits pools of motor units whose discharges are filtered by twitch kernels, yielding sparse, temporally coherent perturbations. We evaluate Spike-MPPI on legged locomotion and manipulation tasks with a Franka FR3 arm in simulation, as well as on a physical robot. Spike consistently produces the smoothest executed commands across all tasks, including against spectrum-matched Gaussian proposals, and a planar ablation identifies the common drive as the largest contributor to this smoothness among the tested motor-pool mechanisms. In manipulation, this smoothness is also accompanied by improved task performance and success, such as in ball balancing, where Gaussian, pink-noise, and spectrum-matched proposals largely fail. On hardware, Spike also yields the shortest task completion times and the smoothest commands. These results show that, beyond its power spectrum, the statistical structure of the sampling is a key design factor for finite-budget MPPI control.