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Vision language navigation (VLN) is very challenging for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) since small errors in 3D motion prediction can lead to navigation errors and collisions. Unable to fathom execution outcomes in 3D environments, existing methods often struggle to predict accurate navigation waypoints from language instructions. To solve this, we introduce the Prototypical Visual Imagination framework, shortened as ProtoVis-Nav, which forces the model to imagine an outcome-associated local visual representation for the intended next UAV movement. Specifically, we predict feature prototypes and use their linear combination to estimate the visual feature of the target region. In this manner, the VLN model first imagines the local visual representation of the next intended location, and then uses predicted prototypes as context for generating the final action, promoting alignment between visual context and waypoint outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the ProtoVis-Nav framework and show substantial improvements over existing baselines.

For robots to assist, serve, and collaborate with humans, they must not only interpret human requests conveyed through language and multimodal intentional cues, but also execute long-horizon tasks that interleave navigation and manipulation. In this paper, we introduce HEIR, a resource for studying how to Harness Egocentric Intent for Human-Robot Interaction. HEIR pairs human speech, measured gaze, and egocentric video with robot observations and teleoperated navigation-manipulation trajectories, while each session preserves successive episodes, with each request fulfilled through multiple execution subtasks. The captured data, together with human-authored annotations, support the study of intent grounding, execution planning, and task completion within a unified interaction setting. To demonstrate the value of HEIR, we conduct extensive offline experiments to evaluate how models benefit from additional human-centric context across these tasks, together with real-robot experiments that assess execution task completion. HEIR thus provides a valuable resource for studying user-centric robot interaction in naturalistic household environments. Our demo and dataset are available online.

Multi-robot systems face the challenge of efficiently allocating teams of heterogeneous robots to tasks. The task allocation problem is complicated by collaborative interactions between robots where teams of robots develop emergent capabilities that enable them to complete tasks that would be inefficient or impossible for individual robots. To address these challenges, we present an iterative clustering algorithm for collaborative task allocation in heterogeneous multi-robot systems. This approach partitions the computationally intractable global optimization problem into smaller, tractable subproblems by iteratively forming clusters of robots and tasks, then optimizing assignments within each cluster. By ensuring robots remain clustered with their currently assigned tasks, we guarantee monotonic improvement in overall utility with each iteration. We analyze the convergence of the algorithm and characterize how cluster size constraints determine which suboptimal assignments could trap the algorithm. In simulation, iterative clustering consistently outperforms simulated annealing, and a group-based auction in both computation time and solution quality, and outperforms a hedonic game approach in solution quality.

This tutorial provides an accessible and implementation-oriented introduction to Gaussian process learning-based model predictive control (GP-MPC), which combines probabilistic residual modeling with receding-horizon control. Its central tutorial contribution is a detailed, step-by-step derivation of multi-step mean and covariance propagation for GP-augmented prediction models. The derivation shows how commonly used propagation formulas follow from the laws of total expectation and total covariance, and clarifies the roles of the GP posterior mean, GP posterior covariance, uncertain inputs, and query-output cross-covariances. Building on this foundation, the article distinguishes mean-only unconstrained GP predictive control from uncertainty-aware constrained GP-MPC, clarifies regulation and output-tracking formulations, and provides concise implementation and computational-complexity guidance, including practical software-tool references and discussion of the scope of closed-loop guarantees. Mobile-robot path-following examples illustrate mean-only unconstrained implementations, whereas mixed-vehicle platooning illustrates uncertainty-aware constrained GP-MPC with uncertainty-dependent safety-distance tightening. The tutorial is intended to help researchers and practitioners understand, implement, and critically evaluate GP-MPC designs for robotic and autonomous systems operating under modeling uncertainty.

Language-guided UAV navigation has largely focused on long-horizon route planning, leaving short-range, object-relative flight maneuvers underexplored. To address this gap, we formulate Flying-on-a-Word (Flow), a task requiring a UAV to convert concise natural-language instruction, egocentric visual observation, and current state dynamics into continuous flight actions. Flow encompasses both primitive motion commands and complex object-interactive behaviors, assessing motion intent comprehension and spatial context grounding. To enable policy learning and closed-loop evaluation, we introduce UAV-Flow, a comprehensive dataset comprising 30,692 expert-piloted real-world trajectories across eight distinct motion categories, alongside 10,109 simulation trajectories in the UAV-Flow-Sim environment equipped with task-specific completion criteria. Furthermore, we develop FlowVLA, which undergoes imitation pretraining on mixed real-sim demonstrations and online post-training via Tail-Aware GRPO (TGRPO). By leveraging group reward distributions, TGRPO effectively reinforces high-reward action sequences. Evaluated on 273 held-out UAV-Flow-Sim episodes, pretrained FlowVLA achieves a mean success rate of 75.58%, outperforming the strongest baseline by 6.72 percentage points, which TGRPO post-training further elevates to 93.16% with superior sample efficiency. Physical UAV experiments demonstrate robust execution of object-relative commands in both indoor and outdoor real-world scenes. Together, Flow establishes a novel benchmark and learning framework for language-conditioned flight maneuvers.

Embodied interaction requires an agent to integrate multimodal perception with verbal and nonverbal behaviors to effectively communicate its intentions, including speech, body motion, and facial expressions. We present XBot-Omni, a Thinker--Talker--Actor architecture that extends the Omni paradigm to robotic modalities, including body motion and facial expressions, with ``X'' representing the extensibility to robotic-specific modalities. The Thinker processes text, images, audio, and video to formulate contextually appropriate responses, which are then realized by the Talker and Actor through speech and coordinated bodily expressions, respectively. In this report, we innovatively introduce the concept of ``Actor'' as a dedicated component for embodied agents: a coordinated, streaming module that leverages the native representations of the Thinker and Talker within an end-to-end pipeline, introducing only modest latency overhead. This unified architecture enables multimodal generation conditioned on omni-modal inputs directly to prevent information loss in staged designs. We comprehensively evaluate XBot-Omni across seven benchmarks, demonstrating strong multimodal understanding capabilities on both general-domain and robot-centric videos, as well as high-quality, natural, and well-coordinated motion generation. Furthermore, our results validate its capability to generate embodied multimodal responses directly from omni inputs, meeting the diverse requirements of embodied interaction. XBot-Omni enables robots not only to perceive the omni world but also to express themselves through speech and bodily behaviors, extending Omni models from conversational interaction to embodied communication in physical environments.

Robots that learn from demonstrations should extrapolate their policy despite state perturbations such as sensor noise, scene variation, and compounding errors. One approach to this robustness is regularization. Prior regularizers consider each state on its own and limit how sensitive the policy is to any perturbation at that state. By contrast, we explore how the policy's output shifts when given the same perturbation at different states. Our insight is that, locally, the robot should respond to state perturbations in a consistent manner: e.g., if changing an irrelevant object position does not impact the policy at one state, that same change should not shift the policy output at a nearby state. Applying this insight, we develop inner product regularization (InneR). We show that the inner product on action space induces an inner product on state space through the policy Jacobian (the Fisher information for stochastic policies), and that the null space of this inner product governs which state perturbations have a first-order effect on the policy. By clustering states whose inner products are aligned, averaging the inner products within each cluster, and minimizing the smallest eigenvalues of that average, InneR shapes the learned policy so that nearby states share a common null space. InneR enforces consistent responses to perturbations without limiting policy expressiveness, and can be appended to existing imitation learning pipelines for deterministic or stochastic policies. In simulated experiments, InneR makes learned policies more robust to irrelevant state dimensions and shifts between training and test distributions, whereas norm penalties often perform worse than behavior cloning. On a real robot arm performing three manipulation tasks, InneR raises the average success rate of a diffusion policy from 18% to 57% without additional data.

Humanoid loco-manipulation requires coordinated locomotion, balance regulation, and manipulation under frequent contacts, making teleoperated demonstration collection difficult: a practical controller must simultaneously provide precision, stability, and contact awareness. We propose FORGE, a force-aware multi-granularity control system with a coarse-to-fine command space spanning velocity navigation, planar foot placement, wrist-pose tracking, and optional force-conditioning inputs. Policy training requires no full-body human motion trajectories or joint-angle references; deployment consumes only sparse bilateral wrist poses relative to the pelvis, coarse motion commands, and optional desired wrist-load inputs. For sustained contact, FORGE combines a momentum observer with a learned correction trained using simulator contact-force supervision. At deployment, it estimates low-frequency, wrist-equivalent interaction forces from proprioception and reconstructed low-level arm PD torques, without wrist force/torque sensors. A quasi-static virtual-target loop uses this estimate and an optional desired applied-force input to adapt the wrist target. A frozen locomotion prior and asymmetric residual actions stabilize manipulation-induced whole-body corrections. Experiments evaluate unified-control stability, task-space tracking, quasi-static wrist-equivalent force estimation, squeezing forces during sustained contact with a rigid box, and downstream diffusion-policy execution of a squat-and-lift task across payload conditions. Website: https://bb0928.github.io/forge/.