2026-10-30

Catching arbitrary objects requires generalization to novel projectiles and real-time adaptation to unpredictable contact dynamics under noisy visual observations. This paper presents Catch It All!, a sim-to-real catching framework for humanoid robots that generalizes and adapts to unseen objects with variable physical properties for underhand and overhand catches, using only one egocentric camera. We learn policies which generalize to unseen objects with varying geometry, deformability, elasticity, and physical properties. Effective grasps which adapt real-time to object poses and shapes are learned through careful grasp reward design. We provide safety-aware curricula which enable safe, high-frequency action execution near hardware limits, including wrist torque limits as low as 5 Nm. We validate our system by deploying zero-shot on a Unitree G1. With only one egocentric camera, Catch It All! successfully performs underhand and overhand catches on 9 unseen objects not seen during training, including low-rebound plushes, semi-deformable toys and chip bags, and rigid-elastic objects with high rebound on contact.

We present DAWN (Diffusion-based Alignment and unfastening Workflow Network), a hierarchical robotic framework designed to perform real-world, unfastening tasks through multi-modal sensory integration. Autonomous robotic unfastening is crucial for improving recycling processes, enhancing safety, and reducing operational costs; yet, it remains predominantly manual due to inherent challenges in precise screwdriver engagement with fasteners, detailed force execution, and robustness to environmental variability. To address the complexity of learning long-horizon, contact-rich manipulation tasks, we subdivide the unfastening task procedure into two sequential stages: (1) alignment & insertion, and (2) unfastening. DAWN consists of three key components: AlignNet, a diffusion-based policy ensuring precise screwdriver tip engagement; LatchNet, a multi-modal classifier reliably detecting successful stage transitions; and UnfastNet, which achieves stable, force-controlled screw removal. Experimental validation on a Franka Emika robot demonstrates that DAWN achieves alignment & insertion success rates comparable to trained human operators, robustly transitions between stages, and attains an impressive success rate in unfastening across various unseen scenarios. Ablation studies further elucidate critical input modalities and effective training strategies, highlighting DAWN's scalability, robustness, and data efficiency.

We demonstrate the first zero-shot sim-to-real transfer for a surgeon-robot collaboration task in open surgery: retractor take-over. A robot arm takes a retractor from the surgeon's hand and preserves retraction at handoff, using a policy trained only on simulated demonstrations, without human demonstrations or real-world fine-tuning. Imitation learning from real demonstrations is limited by collection and labeling costs, and by performance degradation when the environment changes. Our framework, SimRetract, generates simulated demonstrations designed for transfer: the policy observes masked instrument images and grasp geometry, learns to recover from off-nominal states, and acts with margin for execution drift. Deployed zero-shot, it grasps the retractor in 90% of 50 surgeon-defined phantom presentations and preserves retraction at handoff in 78%. Results on unseen retractors suggest potential for generalization to instruments with similar grasp geometry. Across ten policy configurations and 1,200 simulated and real trials, we localize the sim-to-real gap to components: in simulation, grasp rates across ablations span 80-96%, while on the real robot removing the instrument mask alone drops performance to 22% grasped and 12% held. Transfer-oriented design thus makes zero-shot sim-to-real transfer feasible for a surgical assistance task without human demonstrations. Code is available here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/simretract-58D2.

The growing volume of end-of-life products has intensified the need for automated disassembly, yet hook-type connections remain challengin: their orientations vary, they deform under load, and their geometry is hidden, so vision alone cannot identify a feasible non-destructive disassembly direction. This work proposes a constraint-aware reinforcement learning framework that infers feasible extraction directions online from contact forces. The policy is trained in a robot-agnostic, object-centric simulation on a simplified peg-in-hole pair and deployed zero-shot on a physical robot, where it transfers to real connections with unseen, multi-stage constraint structures. Because instantaneous contact forces are noisy and locally ambiguous, the policy is coupled with a particle filter belief that provides the policy with temporally integrated directional information and reduces redundant exploratory motion. The approach is validated on four real-world tasks, from peg-in-hole pairs to the inner propeller and front cover of an end-of-life air-conditioning unit. The full method achieves success rates of 100%, 100%, 90%, and 75% with the highest path efficiency on every task, and raises the success rate on the air-conditioning cover from 45% to 75% relative to a policy trained without the belief. These results indicate that force-driven reinforcement learning can enable disassembly without product-specific models or demonstrations.

Human cognition flexibly draws on a shared perceptual foundation to understand environments, attend to referenced entities, reason about spatial relationships, and act. Endowing aerial robots with an analogous functional organization remains challenging, as existing systems are often specialized for individual capabilities, dependent on offboard computation, or unable to sustain closed-loop operation on resource-constrained platforms. We present OpenFlyV2, a unified onboard vision-language-action architecture that uses a shared vision-language representation to support semantic understanding, language-grounded perception, spatial reasoning, and continuous aerial control within a single model. A compact action expert converts the shared multimodal context into short-horizon flight waypoints, while motion-aware temporal memory and action priors reduce the computational cost of closed-loop execution. We construct \dataset{}, a simulation-based dataset comprising approximately 70,000 navigation trajectories and 60,000 vision-language instruction--response pairs. OpenFlyV2 generates action chunks, each comprising 12 waypoints, entirely onboard at 10 Hz using an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX. It transfers zero-shot from simulation to physical quadrotor flight, achieving a 48\% navigation success rate across four real-world environments without real-world aerial training data. Extensive results demonstrate that broad vision-language competence and continuous closed-loop flight can coexist within a single model on a resource-constrained aerial platform. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Ideal-ljl/AeroBrain.