Robot Learning Radar

An Empirical Study of Reinforcement Learning for Keypoint Positioning of Deformable Linear Objects

Vinay Rodrigues, Sara Zeynalpour, Gokhan Solak, Sebastian Hjorth, Arash Ajoudani — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

92% · Manipulation 92%, Sim-to-real 46%

Deformable linear object (DLO) manipulation is challenging because high-dimensional configurations, nonlinear contact dynamics, and diverse material and geometric properties produce a broad range of object responses that are both difficult to model and data-intensive to learn. This work studies reinforcement learning for planar manipulation of a one-end-grasped DLO, focusing on training efficiency, observation design, robustness, and zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. We compare three Proximal Policy Optimization training stacks and find that the GPU-parallel MuJoCo Playground stack enables faster convergence and more consistent performance than CPU-based alternatives under the same wall-clock budget. Relative keypoint observations and an asymmetric actor-critic formulation further improve learning efficiency. Policies trained with observation noise, delay, domain randomization, and disturbances achieve simulation success rates of 96.4% for single-point tracking, 98.0% for disturbance recovery, and 88.8% for two-point tracking. Using markerless RGB-D keypoint estimation, the policies transfer without real-world fine-tuning, succeeding in 9/10, 10/10, and 8/10 physical trials, respectively.

Latent RL Priors for Data-Efficient Dexterous Manipulation

Fri, 06 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

91% · Manipulation 91%

Learning dexterous manipulation from limited visual demonstrations is challenging because policies must acquire both perceptual grounding and precise control, while reinforcement learning (RL) in simulation can acquire rich control behaviors from large-scale interaction with privileged information. We introduce \textbf{Latent RL Prior}, a two-stage framework that reuses this control knowledge for data-efficient visual policy learning. During privileged pretraining, we distill large-scale RL rollouts into a flow-matching action decoder conditioned on proprioception and latent task context. During visual adaptation, we freeze the decoder and learn a visual interface that maps images to its latent context using action supervision alone, without privileged labels or latent targets. The same decoder can further be shared across arms by learning coordinated visual contexts for bimanual manipulation. Across three simulated tasks, our method outperforms full-parameter fine-tuning of $\pi_{0.5}$ and GR00T N1.7 in the low-data regime; on door lifting and bimanual assembly, it surpasses full-data baselines using $10\times$ and $5\times$ fewer demonstrations, respectively. Further analysis shows that direct visual-to-latent conditioning improves adaptation performance and training stability over routing visual predictions through the pretrained state encoder. Robustness to unseen mass variation and greater linear accessibility of contact-force information in decoder representations further provide evidence of retained RL-acquired control knowledge. Project website: https://yixiaowang7.github.io/latent-rl-prior-page/.

Spatial-UMI-Dream: Scaling World Action Models with Metric Geometry for UMI Manipulation

Weiduo Yuan, Ze Yuan, Sihan Liu, Jionghao Wang, Liang Heng, Zhenyu Zhao — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

90% · Manipulation 90%, Vision-language-action 30%

The Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) enables scalable demonstration collection independently of a specific robot. However, its moving, close-range gripper cameras entangle camera and object motion without a stable external view, leaving the metric geometry needed for precise manipulation implicit in RGB. We introduce Spatial-UMI-Dream, a 5B spatial World Action Model (WAM) pretrained on 605 hours of RGB-D UMI data through two-stage training -- world-only adaptation followed by joint world-action learning -- to jointly predict future RGB, fisheye-aligned metric depth, and actions. Stereo-derived depth makes scene scale and spatial relationships explicit within a unified dual-gripper RGB-D representation. Furthermore, evaluating UMI policies requires testing whether UMI's robot-independent demonstration collection translates into policy generalization across robot embodiments, alongside robustness to environmental changes. We introduce RoboTwin-UMI, a twenty-task simulation benchmark built on RoboTwin with UMI wrist-mounted fisheye observations, enabling controlled, repeatable evaluation of UMI policies under environment and embodiment changes separately and jointly without additional fine-tuning. On RoboTwin-UMI, Spatial-UMI-Dream achieves 79.10% in-domain success and 72.15% under combined embodiment and environment shifts, exceeding the strongest evaluated baseline in each setting by 4.65 and 10.30 percentage points, respectively. It also exhibits the smallest success-rate drop under embodiment transfer among the evaluated policies. In a matched pretraining ablation, RGB-only pretraining leads to a 5.75-percentage-point decrease in in-domain success compared with RGB-D pretraining. Across six real-world tasks, Spatial-UMI-Dream achieves 85.0% average success, exceeding the strongest baseline by 24.2 percentage points. Project page: https://weiduoyuan.com/spatial-umi-dream/

Semantics-to-Contact: A Stagewise Framework for Robust Contact-Rich Manipulation

Guanren Qiao, Ruixiang Ouyang, Sheng Xu, Yueci Deng, Yunxin Tai, Kui Jia — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

90% · Manipulation 90%, Vision-language-action 39%

Contact-rich manipulation requires precise control under complex contact dynamics while remaining robust to diverse visual conditions. However, real-world reinforcement learning often overfits to the visual appearance of training scenes. We propose Semantics-to-Contact (S2C), a stagewise framework for visually robust contact-rich manipulation. The insight is to decompose the problem into two stages: semantic focusing and contact refinement. In the first stage, a vision-language model localizes task-relevant regions across visually diverse scenes, providing coarse spatial guidance and reducing the burden of exploration. In the second stage, a real-world human-in-the-loop residual reinforcement learning policy learns fine-grained contact behaviors within the localized region using force feedback. To further improve visual robustness, we introduce an object-centric visual augmentation strategy that randomizes background appearance while preserving the robot and task-relevant objects. Experiments on six contact-rich real-world manipulation tasks exhibit that S2C consistently improves success rates over strong baselines and maintains reliable performance under significant visual and positional variations. These results demonstrate that stagewise semantic focusing and contact refinement provide a practical path toward visually robust real-world contact-rich manipulation. Our demos can be seen in https://edem-ai.github.io/S2C/.

Learning Object-Centric Motion Priors from Human for Robotic Dexterous Manipulation

Zhengdong Hong, Guofeng Zhang — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

94% · Manipulation 94%

Manipulating diverse objects with multi-fingered dexterous hands is challenging due to the high dimensionality and complex dynamics. Human-Object Interaction (HOI) datasets provide rich knowledge about task information and embodied interactions. Instead of solely imitating the human demonstrations, our method learns to holistically predict future hand-object states by leveraging these datasets. The predicted future states of the object can serve as a general-purpose reward term for reinforcement learning, reducing reliance on task-specific reward engineering and enhancing generalization across tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on three manipulation tasks in simulation and the real world. Our approach outperforms existing SOTA methods in both success rate and generalizability on novel objects. Furthermore, we validate the cross-embodiment compatibility of our methods by successfully deploying the skills on different robot hands.

Online Adaptation to Latent Physical Properties for Learning from Demonstration

Kotaro Kajitsuka, Masaki Murooka, Fumio Kanehiro — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

90% · Manipulation 90%

Manipulating visually identical objects with different physical properties requires adapting actions based on information acquired through interaction. We address the problem of learning from demonstrations how to adapt manipulation actions, such as regrasping and changing contact locations, based on physical-property information acquired during interaction. To this end, we propose a learning-from-demonstration method that learns latent representations of physical properties needed to predict object responses and conditions a policy on online estimates of these representations. A dynamics model and object-specific latent representations are jointly learned from demonstrations that include behaviors adapting to the objects' physical properties, and the learned representations are then used to condition an imitation policy. During execution, the dynamics model and policy weights remain fixed, while the latent representation is updated based on the discrepancy between predicted and actual observations, allowing interaction with the object to inform action generation. Real-world and simulation experiments with objects whose centers of mass differ suggest that online adaptation through latent representations of physical properties can improve task success rates. However, in simulation, success rates on center-of-mass locations absent from the demonstrations remained around 30%, indicating limited adaptation to unseen physical properties. Project page: https://isri-aist.github.io/latent-dynamics-project-page/

★ DexHOT: Learning Hand-Object Configuration Transfer for Dexterous Manipulation

Zhewei Gui, Anthony Bolton, Jiyao Zhang, Zeyuan Chen, Qiyang Yan, Tianyu Wang — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

95% · Manipulation 95%

Dexterous manipulation involves not only moving objects, but also arranging the hand around them to maintain useful contacts and enable subsequent actions. Yet many learning-based systems specify goals primarily through object poses or trajectories, leaving hand-object configurations to emerge implicitly. We introduce DexHOT, which formulates dexterous manipulation as hand-object configuration transfer: moving between feasible configurations that jointly specify hand articulation and object pose relative to the wrist. DexHOT learns a reusable relation-conditioned transfer primitive from synthetic feasible configuration pairs, without human reference motions, and composes long-horizon behaviors through closed-loop tracking of configuration subgoals. On DexHOTBench with 120 objects, a single policy achieves 80.5% transfer success on seen objects and 69.4% on unseen objects; on a real dexterous hand, it achieves 61.5% success over 200 real-robot transfers and 90% task success across six demonstration-guided tasks. These results show that explicit hand-object goals provide an expressive and composable interface for dexterous manipulation. More details and videos are available at https://dex-hot.github.io/.

AIRoA-0: Long-Horizon, Precise, Cross-Embodiment Manipulation from Handheld Data

Yueh-Hua Wu, Kei Ota, Hanlong Li, Hayata Yuasa, Jason Wang, Kengo Ikeuchi — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

94% · Manipulation 94%, Vision-language-action 86%

AIRoA-0 (A-0) is a bimanual manipulation system learned from 16,151 hours of handheld demonstrations, with no robot data collected at any stage. The demonstrations are recorded with YUBI, our open-source handheld gripper, which lets people record manipulation data anywhere with no robot present. From a single instruction, A-0 sorts more than a dozen small parts into their numbered cells and changes the mop pads and brush of a robot vacuum; among other tasks, it unzips a pencil case and folds a towel. It performs these tasks using only a camera on each wrist, with no head or scene camera, at a site where none of its training data was recorded. Across the ten tasks of our evaluation, it averages a success rate of 78%, against 27% for the strongest of four other vision-language-action models post-trained on the same task demonstrations. We collect no teleoperation data and use no reinforcement learning or on-robot corrections, and the robot appears only at test time. The system learns which regions of each wrist view matter for the task, predicts the stage the task has reached, and decodes actions as a continuous stream. A-0 is embodiment-agnostic: it runs on robots that mount the YUBI gripper, such as a bimanual Franka, TX-G2, OpenArm and UR. We are releasing the dataset, to our knowledge the largest open dataset of handheld-gripper demonstrations with task and subtask instructions, together with the pre-trained weights and the post-training recipe. Videos of A-0 on every task are on the project page, https://a-0.airoa.io. Anyone can build the gripper, record a task of their own and post-train the model on it in under four hours on a single node of eight H200 GPUs.

Physical Diffusion Policy via MPM-Guided 3D Gaussian Simulation

Can Wang, Qiyuan Qiao, Lei Liu, Ge Yuan, Xinhui Liu, Dong Xu — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

93% · Manipulation 93%

Learning robust manipulation policies for diverse everyday objects remains challenging because objects with different materials exhibit distinct deformation and contact dynamics. While diffusion policies provide a powerful framework for modeling multimodal manipulation behaviors, they typically lack explicit physical reasoning and may produce averaged actions when facing heterogeneous objects. We present a physics-aware diffusion policy that augments visual imitation learning with object physical understanding. Our framework recovers material properties from visual demonstrations by coupling 3D Gaussian Splatting with differentiable Material Point Method simulation, where video guidance and particle-level constraints enable accurate physical parameter estimation. The estimated physics conditions are further integrated into a material-aware Mixture-of-Experts diffusion policy, allowing adaptive behavior generation across different physical regimes. For practical deployment, we introduce a physics memory bank that provides efficient physical retrieval without requiring online simulation optimization. Experiments on a wide range of simulated and real-world objects demonstrate improved manipulation success and generalization over existing diffusion-based approaches. These results show that incorporating physical knowledge is critical for scalable robot manipulation in diverse environments.

Spectrally Routed Diffusion Policy for Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation

Mingcong Li, Yihan Zhou, Jiayu Qu, Xueyang Guo, Yilin Mo — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

90% · Manipulation 90%, Vision-language-action 31%

Diffusion-based policies have achieved strong performance on single-task robotic manipulation. However, a single model trained jointly on multiple tasks consistently underperforms the per-task specialists trained on the same demonstrations. We focus on two challenges. First, the convolutional encoders commonly used in diffusion-based policies produce visual conditions that are not discriminative enough. Second, gradients from incompatible action modes update the shared denoiser's dense parameters along the same directions, causing destructive interference during joint training. To address both, we propose SR-DP (Spectrally Routed Diffusion Policy). A frozen VGGT encoder with a spatial-compression adapter produces compact multi-scale semantic-geometric tokens, a task-discriminative visual condition for tasks that share a workspace. We first train the denoiser as a standard diffusion policy, then decompose selected linear layers by SVD into a frozen basis of orthogonal rank-one experts, adapted through spectral routing and Householder input rotations. On six RoboTwin tasks, SR-DP averages a 68.4% success rate, surpassing multi-task VO-DP by 21.8 points and the strongest per-task baseline by 3.8 points. On four real-world bimanual tasks, Stage 2 reaches a 43.0% average success rate and improves over Stage 1 by 19.0 points.

★ HandMimicX: Learning Human-Like Dexterous Manipulation via an Object-Centric Policy from Egocentric Videos

Zihan Gao, Yufei Liu, Yuhong Zhang, Zhen Yu, Xinhao Huang, Zhinan You — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

95% · Manipulation 95%

Learning dexterous manipulation from human videos remains an open challenge, particularly in the context of transferring a single demonstration into a spatially generalizable robotic skill and maintaining physically plausible human-like interactions. Unlike prior works that emphasize hand-motion imitation, we introduce an object-centric framework for acquiring dexterous skills from egocentric human RGB-D videos. Within our framework, we formulate the reinforcement learning (RL) objective in terms of object motion to decouple the underlying skill from the specific hand trajectory and impose constraints on hand-object interaction states to promote more anatomically natural hand configurations. Extensive experiments in simulation and on real robots demonstrate that our method enables efficient learning from human videos and generalizable skill transfer across novel spatial configurations.

★ RTPolicy: Real-Time (32.9 Hz) Multi-View Visuomotor Policy for Robotic Manipulation on Edge Devices

Xianbao Hou, Zehao Ni, Yonghao He, Lingfeng Qian, Xin Shi, Hu Su — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

95% · Manipulation 95%

Low inference latency is critical for closed-loop robotic manipulation, especially under asynchronous inference, where action chunks must be updated promptly to correct accumulated deviations. However, existing visuomotor policies rely on computationally expensive visual backbones, resulting in high inference latency and deployment overhead. In this paper, we propose RTPolicy, a multi-view visuomotor policy that attains accurate manipulation with high inference efficiency. Its core design combines view-aware feature fusion with visual compression to aggregate complementary information across camera views into a compact token representation. The representation conditions a flow-matching action generator with the robot state and flow time, reducing the cost of action generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this design reduces the computational cost of visual representation and action generation while preserving visual information required for manipulation. On the RoboTwin~2.0 single-task clean evaluation across 50 tasks, RTPolicy attains a mean success rate of 52.26\%, outperforming the strongest leaderboard baseline $\pi_0$ (46.4\%). We further evaluate RTPolicy under asynchronous streaming inference on a real bimanual platform, where RTPolicy attains a mean success rate of 72.0\% and sustains real-time inference at 30.35 ms (32.9 Hz) on the RDK S600 and 149.72 ms (6.7 Hz) on the RDK S100, both in INT16. Project Page: https://d-robotics-ai-lab.github.io/RTPolicy.project.

★ Direct Action-Manifold Modeling for Efficient and Robust Bimanual Manipulation

Hongren Wang, Mingyu You, Zihan Li, Zhipeng Wang, Shuo Jiang, Bin He — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

95% · Manipulation 95%

Diffusion and flow matching visuomotor policies require iterative denoising or numerical integration for multimodal action generation, introducing latency and execution mismatch. We instead consider a different formulation: conditioned on vision and proprioception, demonstrated bimanual action chunks concentrate in a structured observation-dependent region of joint-action space, making the action target more direct to model than the generative process. Based on this view, we propose the Direct Manifold Action Transformer (DMAT), which reformulates action generation as the direct modeling of clean, observation-conditioned joint-space action chunks from stochastic interpolants, thereby enabling single-step inference without relying on iterative generative inference or auxiliary trajectory-straightening procedures. Within DMAT, local 3D geometry anchors predictions to spatial structure, while State-Consistent Spectral-Time Refinement (STR) reconciles predicted chunks with proprioception and suppresses high-frequency residuals. Across 567 standard and out-of-distribution (OOD) trials per method, DMAT outperformed Improved 3D Diffusion Policy (IDP3) and DiTFlow3D in aggregate success rate, achieving relative improvements of 129.1% and 95.7%, respectively, while generating action chunks 2.06x and 1.34x faster and remaining robust under repeated 50 N interventions. These results pave the way for a novel generative paradigm for efficient and robust bimanual manipulation.

Language-Conditioned Behavioral Cloning for Autonomous Endoscope Guidance

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

94% · Vision-language-action 94%

Automated endoscope guidance reduces the need for continuous manual camera control during minimally invasive surgery. However, the desired camera motion depends on the surgeon's immediate intentions and cannot always be inferred from the visual operative scene alone. We propose to automate the task using language-conditioned behavioral cloning; we define 6 clinically relevant guidance behaviors and collect 235 subtask demonstrations. In preliminary phantom experiments, our policy achieves 100% success on focus, overview, and stop, 80% on search-tip and follow-tip behaviors, and 50% on horizon leveling. These results demonstrate the feasibility of learning heterogeneous surgeon-requested camera behaviors with a single visuomotor policy, while the observed failure modes motivate future work on adding temporal context for more demanding guidance tasks.

★ AcrossDEX 1.0: From Human Motion Pretraining to Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation across Hand Embodiments

Xiaoyu Yang, Nan Wu — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

95% · Manipulation 95%

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.

Catch It All!: Generalizable Dynamic Catching with a Dexterous Hand

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

94% · Manipulation 94%, Sim-to-real 66%

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.

DAWN: Diffusion-based Alignment and unfastening Workflow Network

Hemant Kumar, Piyush Goenka, Nikhil Chopra — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

94% · Manipulation 94%

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.

SimRetract: Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Robotic Assistance for Retractor Take-Over in Open Surgery

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

93% · Manipulation 93%, Sim-to-real 93%

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.

Force-Driven Hook Disassembly via Constraint-Aware Object-Centric Reinforcement Learning

Nadeen Elhadad, Takuya Kiyokawa, Kensuke Harada — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

90% · Manipulation 90%, Sim-to-real 51%

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.

OpenFlyV2: An onboard vision-language-action model for aerial perception and navigation

Junli Liu, Zhongrui You, Chenhui Li, Zhen Li, Yuyang Tian, Qizhen Chen — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

90% · Vision-language-action 90%, Sim-to-real 40%

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.

★ Pushing Dexterity and Safety for In-Hand Object Pose Reaching That Works Remarkably Well

Ian Chuang, Hiya Shah, Vamsi Chilamkur, Iman Soltani, Claire Tomlin — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

95% · Manipulation 95%, Sim-to-real 49%

Dexterous manipulation with multi-fingered hands is the next frontier of robotics, yet learned hand skills remain limited to simple grasps or basic repeated motions, such as rotating an object. As robots attempt more demanding in-hand maneuvers, safety, such as not dropping the object, becomes critical, yet it is rarely measured. We study in-hand object pose reaching, a task that demands diverse and difficult grasps: moving an object to almost any position and orientation within reach of the fingers, at any wrist orientation, through long sequences of consecutive goals. We present a recipe for training such policies for a LEAP hand in simulation without human data, built on a range of insights, from diverse resets and goals via generated grasp datasets to an adaptive friction curriculum. With careful system identification, the policies transfer zero-shot to the real hand, using either motion capture or a single wrist-mounted depth camera, and prove remarkably capable and robust. On top of the task policy, we add a learned residual safety filter with adjustable conservativeness, letting us tune the balance between performance and safety and greatly reduce object drops. In 13.3 hours of real-robot evaluation over 4,800 unseen goals across 4 objects and diverse wrist orientations, the state-based policy reaches 95.2% of goals within 2 cm and 0.4 rad, and the filter cuts its drops by 75% while still reaching 91.5% of goals. The policies can also spin a lightbulb held in an arbitrary pose, reach out-of-distribution goals, withstand fast arm motion and perturbations, and, needing only a wrist camera, serve as portable skills such as screwing in a lightbulb. We release the full recipe as a platform for studying performance, reliability, and safety in high-dimensional dexterous systems. Videos and more are available at https://ian-chuang.github.io/dexsafe/.

★ MMGNet: Multi-Modal 6-DoF Grasp Synthesis for Cluttered Scenes

Rui Cao, Jia-Hui Pan, Yichuan Li, Yunfan Yu, Chi-Wing Fu, Jiangliu Wang — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

97% · Manipulation 97%

Grasping is a foundational capability in robotic manipulation. Scene-level 6-DoF grasp synthesis relies on point clouds for metric geometry, yet real-world point observations are often noisy, incomplete, and over-smoothed. RGB images provide object-region, boundary, and appearance cues, yet two bottlenecks limit their effective use in scene representation and local grasp reasoning. We present MMGNet, a Multi-Modal Grasp Synthesis Network that addresses these bottlenecks through hierarchical image-to-3D feature injection and rotational graspness modeling. Hierarchical injection integrates multi-scale image features throughout 3D representation formation, while the rotational graspness jointly predicts the grasp approach direction and in-plane rotation before organizing local image-informed features through grasp-shaded grouping. Ablation studies show that these two modules provide complementary gains. MMGNet achieves a mean AP of 60.34 on GraspNet-1Billion with RealSense, surpassing all compared methods. In real-world experiments with adversarial grasp objects, MMGNet improves the grasp success rate over AnyGrasp by 8.46 percentage points. \emph{Code, models, and data will be released upon publication.}

★ PS-DLO: Property- and Spatially Aware Deformable Linear Object Manipulation Policy

Mengdi Li, Boxian Yao, Xiyu Zhu, Yifan Yang, Yunfan Lou, Xuan Han — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

95% · Manipulation 95%, Vision-language-action 80%

Deformable linear objects (DLO) pose a coupled perception and control challenge: their slender geometry makes precise localization difficult, while their deformations depend on object-specific physical properties. To address this challenge, we propose PS-DLO, a property- and spatially aware DLO manipulation policy. First, contrastive image-text learning maps the initial observation to categorical descriptions of DLO properties, providing explicit physical and structural priors for action generation. Second, SAM3 extracts mask-guided features from future observations, which are distilled into the policy's action expert to encode task-relevant DLO regions and their subsequent configurations. We evaluate PS-DLO on nine real-world tasks across single-arm and bimanual platforms, training a shared multi-task policy for each embodiment. PS-DLO achieves an average success rate of 68.9%, exceeding the strongest baseline by 20.0 percentage points. In generalization experiments, PS-DLO achieves higher success rates than the baseline in six of seven visual-shift conditions on butterfly-knot untying. These results demonstrate that combining object-property priors with future spatial supervision improves multi-task DLO manipulation and robustness to visual variation.

AdaDexTrack: Dynamic Modulation for Adaptive and Generalizable Dexterous Manipulation Tracking

Jianibieke Adalibieke, Qianwei Han, Xueyi Liu, Yuzhe Qin, Li Yi — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

93% · Manipulation 93%, Vision-language-action 45%

Language is a natural way to command robots, but converting a single instruction into a long-horizon, contact-rich hand-object interaction remains challenging: synthesized references are noisy, human-to-robot retargeting introduces embodiment bias, and fixed-reference tracking lets small errors snowball. We address this with AdaDexTrack, a modulator-in-the-loop framework for language-conditioned manipulation tracking. A distilled generalist tracker serves as the skill carrier, while a tightly aligned modulator performs three feedback corrections: reference modulation (continual adjustment of what to track), object-latent modulation (online adaptation of the object representation to recruit suitable skills), and positional-target modulation (small state-dependent refinements for execution). The tracker is learned via large-scale specialist to generalist distillation on a corpus of language-conditioned hand-object trajectories; the modulator is trained with RL under the same task objective, ensuring tight coupling. Across large-scale evaluations, AdaDexTrack consistently outperforms prior SOTA on unseen-trajectory and unseen-object sets in both average tracking error and success rate, demonstrating robustness and generalization. We further show zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on real hardware, where adding the modulator yields substantial gains over a tracker-only variant. AdaDexTrack reframes language-conditioned dexterous manipulation as modulated tracking, replacing the open-loop, fixed-reference tracking with in-loop modulation that adjusts the reference, object latent, and positional target, yielding drift-resistant execution from noisy text references.

Scaling Dexterous Manipulation via Action Representation Pretraining

Yanjinghao Xu, Jiexin Zhang, Huan Zhao, Jianjia Mo, Zhenghao Yin, Dingkang Liang — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

90% · Manipulation 90%, Vision-language-action 46%

Large-scale vision, language, and video pretraining has substantially improved the perception and generalization capabilities of robotic manipulation models, but action generation for complex dexterous manipulation remains constrained by the scarcity of robot demonstrations. Limited robot demonstrations must be used to learn both action representations and task-conditioned action distributions, making it difficult to adequately learn action representations and, in turn, limiting the ability of downstream generative models to generate complex dexterous actions. To address this limitation, we propose ARPG (Action Representation Pretraining and Generation), which explicitly separates action representation learning from action generation: we first pretrain an action representation encoder on large-scale human manipulation data. We then freeze the encoder and train a compact generative backbone (130M parameters) to learn task-conditioned action distributions in the encoder's representation space. Experimental results show that ARPG achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DexJoCo benchmark and improves the average success rate on bimanual dexterous manipulation from 10.1% for $\pi_{0.5}$ to 44.7%. Scaling experiments further show that broader coverage of human manipulation behaviors effectively improves downstream performance. These results indicate that action representation pretraining provides an independent scaling dimension for improving complex dexterous manipulation capabilities.

Pretraining Knows What, Simulation Teaches How: Compositional Generalization in a Sim-Trained Robot Agent

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

90% · Vision-language-action 90%, Manipulation 76%, Sim-to-real 61%

A robot policy needs to understand what a task is asking for in a scene, and how to move the robot to accomplish that task. To achieve these two skills, we introduce Zero-real Agent Policy (ZAP), a recipe that teaches a small off-the-shelf vision-language model to control a robot via a simple tool harness. We use a pretrained 27B parameter model to bootstrap world understanding and reasoning, followed by supervised fine-tuning and GRPO on simple simulated tasks to teach it how to move the robot. Without any real-world robot data during training, ZAP reaches 96.7% success on real-world tasks, matching GPT-6 Astra in our harness and outperforming the MolmoAct2 VLA (33.3%), while running 3x faster and 17x cheaper than GPT-6 Astra. We demonstrate that ZAP also generalizes to completely new objects, goals, strategies, and language by seating a test tube in a rack (and choosing a different hole in the rack when prompted), handing a test tube between arms mid-air, drawing an X on a tic-tac-toe board, and playing chess. These goals and types of manipulation don't appear in our training data. Furthermore, ZAP also transfers to an unseen embodiment. On a single-arm Franka, ZAP reaches 55.9% on RoboLab-120, 4.9 percentage points ahead of the leading VLA/WAM baseline.

MAST-VLA: Skill-Conditioned Adaptation with Trajectory-Affordance Priors for Multi-Skill Robot Manipulation

Jiachi Yang, Zhiyi Xu, Hongquan Zhang, Xin Tan, Zhizhong Zhang, Jingyu Gong — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

93% · Manipulation 93%, Vision-language-action 85%

Generalist robot manipulation requires a single vision-language-action (VLA) policy to execute diverse skills across scenes and instructions. However, current multi-skill VLA policies often leave two aspects of an instruction insufficiently modeled: which primitive skill to execute and where/how to contact and move objects. We propose MAST-VLA (Multi-skill Adaptation with Skill-conditioned experts and Trajectory-affordance priors), a dual-conditioning framework for robot manipulation. MAST-VLA introduces skill-conditioned LoRA Mixture-of-Experts (LoRA-MoE) adapters in the LLM backbone, where skill-query tokens and routing biases guide low-rank expert specialization, and converts a predicted affordance heatmap into a patch-level trajectory-affordance spatial prior for the action head. On the CALVIN ABC$\rightarrow$D long-horizon multi-skill cross-scene generalization setting, MAST-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching an Avg. Len of 4.65 over five-subtask evaluation sequences. Real-robot multi-skill sequence experiments further validate its deployability under real perception and control noise.

Geometry-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Close-Fitting Wearable Insertion

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

90% · Manipulation 90%

Robot-assisted dressing is particularly challenging due to narrow openings and articulated body parts. Even small errors in the relative pose between the body part and garment opening can cause snagging, missed insertion, or incomplete dressing. To address these challenges, we formulate dressing as a geometry-aware insertion problem that represents task-relevant spatial relationships between the body part and object opening, rather than relying on the full deformable-object state. Based on this formulation, we propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework combining a staged curriculum, which progressively guides the policy from coarse alignment to insertion and final placement, with a finger-wise insertion soft gate that provides continuous feedback on individual finger insertion progress and helps suppress premature insertion. We evaluate the framework on rigid and deformable bracelet dressing tasks through component ablations, systematic variations in the initial hand pose, and closed-loop execution of the learned policies on a real robotic system. On the post-training deformable evaluation, the full method reaches 84.7 +- 1.2% success. The insertion gate accounts for the largest gain, and adding the curriculum on top of that gate reaches the top score. On a mannequin hand the same full policy succeeds on 15/20 real-robot trials.

RoboCode: Learning Reusable Action Primitives for Robot Manipulation

Xianyue Peng, Devi Amarsaikhan, Iman Soltani — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

90% · Manipulation 90%

Recent robot manipulation policies commonly predict continuous action chunks directly from observations, without explicitly modeling reusable structure in the action space. However, manipulation demonstrations often contain recurring short-horizon motion patterns that are shared across tasks. We introduce \textsc{RoboCode}, which learns these patterns through a shared soft-gated primitive action interface. Rather than assigning each action chunk to a single discrete code, \textsc{RoboCode} represents it as a soft composition of multiple learned primitives, providing a flexible intermediate representation of short-horizon actions. The primitive interface is learned from action chunks pooled across multiple tasks and then frozen while task-specific state encoders are trained to map current state inputs into the shared latent space. Experiments on five ManiSkill manipulation tasks address three questions. First, the learned primitive interface reconstructs action chunks with an average reconstruction MSE of 0.0187. Second, analysis of code activations reveals structured code reuse across tasks. Third, \textsc{RoboCode} achieves the highest or tied closed-loop success rate on all evaluated tasks, with an average success rate of 75.6%, compared with 68.8% for ACT and 41.6% for the larger Diffusion Policy baseline. These results suggest that soft-gated primitive codebooks provide an effective and interpretable intermediate action representation for robot manipulation.

EBV-CAN: Vision--Language Grounding for Contact-Aided Endoscope Navigation

Chi Kit Ng, Shuchang Liu, Jinsong Lin, Yidong Zhang, Xizi Wang, Ho Yin Chim — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

91% · Vision-language-action 91%

Flexible endoscopes exploit structural compliance to traverse narrow lumens, pipes, and cavities, where navigation involves distributed environmental contact. This compliance makes tip motion depend on the evolving support configuration. We present external bird's-eye-view contact-aided navigation (EBV-CAN), a vision-language policy that combines one initial global static bird's-eye image with evolving endoscopic observations and motor state. Three supervised semantic queries locate the tip, next waypoint, and instructed target on the cached global image; their residual representations predict bending and insertion commands. We introduce the Vision-Language Contact-Aided (VLCA) dataset, linking 517 demonstrations and 75k action samples to 958k spatial entries and 93k remaining-route records. On 50 held-out episodes, tip-coordinate and waypoint localization reach 97.5% and 94.8%. Swapping the target instruction under identical observations changes target attention and motor output across 17 dual-target episodes. Across 1,920 physical trials of eight policies trained under a shared protocol, EBV-CAN achieves 183/240 successes (76.25%) under automatic blue-area scoring. Gated recurrent unit behavior cloning (GRU-BC) achieves the lowest matched-task offline mean absolute error (MAE), 0.056, and 1/240 physical successes, establishing distinct rankings for action imitation and task completion. Successful multi-guide executions and representative failures connect spatial progress, steering transitions, and visibility to physical navigation.

★ COWBOY: A Scalable Sim-to-Real Framework for Learning Contextual Whole-Body Manipulation

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

95% · Manipulation 95%, Sim-to-real 64%

Mobile manipulators must adapt not only to objects, but also to the spatial context in which they appear: where to position the base, how to manipulate, and where to look while navigating surrounding scene geometry. To address this, we present COWBOY, a scalable sim-to-real framework for learning such contextual whole-body manipulation. On whole-body dexterous grasping, COWBOY transfers zero-shot to hundreds of objects and diverse in-the-wild scenes, spanning cluttered tabletops, shelves, drawers, and other unstructured settings. Rather than learning scene adaptation directly with RL in simulation, a vectorized environment-aware whole-body controller (WBC) handles reaching in thousands of scenes by coordinating base-arm motion, collision avoidance, and active vision. Then, local RL experts are trained in local scenes for object interaction and can be reused across thousands of full-scene layouts. We distill these composed WBC-RL teachers into a single vision policy that controls the mobile base, arm, dexterous hand, and actuated camera from point-cloud observations. The resulting policy exhibits contextual whole-body behavior, automatically adapting base placement, camera viewpoint, arm trajectory, and grasp strategy to observed scene and object geometry. Videos are available at https://cowboy-manip.com

DONIC: Generalist Dexterous Bimanual Tracking Control from Human Demonstrations

Mingze Sun, Ziang Cao, Yuan Fei, Qiankuan Tao, Zihan Wang, Tianqi Liu — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

94% · Manipulation 94%

Despite recent progress in dexterous reference tracking, existing models focus primarily on single-hand manipulation and a limited range of interactions, leaving the bimanual dexterous behaviors common in real life unaddressed. The scarcity of contact-rich bimanual manipulation data and the increased complexity of coordinating contacts make developing a generalist bimanual tracker particularly challenging. Therefore, we present 1) DONIC, the first generalist bimanual tracker jointly trained across operation categories and human-motion sources, together with 2) BiHOI, a multi-view dataset of 1,575 sequences spanning 229 objects and emphasizing sustained bimanual interaction, where reconstructed interactions are retargeted into robot references. DONIC combines proximal policy optimization with behavioral cloning in a feedback loop that recycles verified successful executions into training demonstrations. An object-centered per-hand reward maintains object-motion feedback while supervising each hand according to its reference contact role. Clip-Centered Advantages remove reference-dependent advantage offsets while preserving within-trajectory differences. Together, these designs enable one single policy to learn coordinated manipulation across heterogeneous references. Without finetuning, a single checkpoint achieves 86.79% success on unseen trajectories of training objects and 57.32% on held-out objects, surpassing the state-of-the-art bimanual tracking baselines by 77.36 and 45.73 percentage points.

T-WLA: Bridging Slow Vision and Fast Touch

Kaichen Zhou, Yuzhen Chen, Hannah Yao, Chonghe Jiang, Rao Fu, Xihang Yu — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

92% · Manipulation 92%, Vision-language-action 49%

In contact-rich manipulation, contact conditions can change before a visual policy updates its action plan. Recomputing the plan through the visual policy adds latency, while tactile feedback alone does not specify how the ongoing motion should be revised for the task. We introduce T-WLA, a world-language-action architecture that uses shared visual memory to guide both action generation and tactile correction. At each visual update, the visual branch integrates the current image, task instruction, and retrieved history into a visual memory that conditions base-action generation. The same memory is cached for a lightweight tactile editor, which combines it with the active action chunk and incoming touch to predict residual corrections to unexecuted actions without rerunning the visual branch. Future-image and future-pressure prediction provide training-only supervision, encouraging the visual memory and tactile features to capture interaction dynamics relevant to action generation and correction. We evaluate T-WLA on tactile-conditioned hand-motion prediction using EgoTouch and Tachin, and on four real-world dexterous manipulation tasks. T-WLA reduces finger-joint MPJPE by 30% relative to the strongest reported baseline and achieves an average success rate of approximately 50.0% across real-robot manipulation tasks. Videos and code are available at https://anonymous-submission-20.github.io/T-WLA.github.io/.

Reconstruction-Augmented Visuomotor Pre-Training of 3D-Grounded Bimanual Dexterity from RGB-Only Human Videos

Xingyi He, Zhiwen Qiu, Adhitya Polavaram, Yunhao Cao, Cory Fan, Julius Samwer — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

92% · Manipulation 92%, Vision-language-action 60%

We present SpatialDex, a framework that learns 3D-grounded bimanual dexterity from RGB-only human videos through reconstruction-augmented visuomotor pre-training. The central idea is to learn human behavior together with its spatial context. From each video, we reconstruct the scene geometry and estimate the hand motion, align them at a shared video-level scale using the hand-size prior of 3D hand estimates. We retain the reconstructed geometry as both a policy input and a prediction target. The policy grounds the token grid of a pre-trained vision-language model in this geometry through gated residual fusion, is trained to predict future scene geometry alongside wrist and finger actions, and generates finger motion conditioned on the predicted trajectories of both wrists. Pre-trained on 1M human-video clips and fine-tuned with a small number of robot demonstrations, SpatialDex outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 16.5 points on nine simulated dexterous tasks across two embodiments and by 38.3 points on six real-world bimanual dexterous tasks. Under a matched comparison, pre-training with reconstructed geometry improves success by 14.2 points over pre-training on hand motion alone.

CW-WAM: A Structured Contact-Wrench World Action Model for Force-Sensitive Manipulation

Houzhu Ding, Xinda Qi, Luqi Wang, Ming Yang — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

92% · Manipulation 92%

Force-sensitive manipulation requires contact and load information that is not provided explicitly by visual observations. We present CW-WAM, a world action model that jointly predicts video, motion, and contact wrench. Inspired by hybrid motion-force control, it contains a unified interaction module that treats both motion and contact wrench as modeling targets and predicts time-aligned motion-wrench chunks as control references. A pair-causal attention mechanism structures the motion-wrench dependencies, while a long fixed-length wrench memory retains past interaction information. The predicted wrench chunk acts as a force reference for a 20-Hz outer-loop admittance controller within a slow-fast control system that maintains force feedback and smooth motion between model queries. CW-WAM improves contact prediction and increases the insertion success rate from 25% to 70% for square pegs with 1-mm clearance per side and from 40% to 95% for power adapters, compared with WAM without wrench input. It also improves lifting-height accuracy across different loads. Our framework with an admittance controller reduces force-reference RMSE from 4.8 to 2.7 N for peg insertion and from 2.0 to 1.3 N for wiping, respectively, with smaller force fluctuations during successful execution. Project website: https://cw-wam-project.github.io/

Learning to Absorb Corrections: Critic-Weighted Residual Flow for Vision-Based Insertion

Yiqing Yuan, Zhi Li, Jinrong Yang, Mingshan Sun, Mei Yu Zhi, Yong Zhao — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

90% · Manipulation 90%

Vision-based insertion requires correcting alignment errors while retaining useful behavior learned from demonstrations. We present ACT--Flow, an online learning framework that couples an adaptive Action Chunking Transformer (ACT) with a conditional residual flow policy. Following anchor-guided warmup, ACT absorbs successful executed actions through behavioral cloning, while residual targets are recomputed relative to the updated prior. A chunk-level critic learns from successful and failed interactions and evaluates final composed actions. Its estimates weight generated residual candidates for flow matching, complemented by supervision from successful real executions. Candidate scoring is confined to training; deployment uses RGB observations and samples one residual per action chunk. We evaluate the framework on power-plug, USB, and key insertion, together with cable routing and needle threading. Results show a five-task mean success rate of 66% at 20,000 post-initialization interaction steps, exceeding the strongest baseline by 18 percentage points at this checkpoint. Evaluations at matched checkpoints with the residual disabled show ACT's mean success increasing from 16% to 76%. Component ablations further support the complementary roles of behavior absorption, value weighting, and successful-action supervision.

★ DexGraspFlow: Topology-Aware SE(3) Flow Matching for Cross-Embodiment Dexterous Grasp Generation

Bin Zhou, Boyu Ma, Xinyu Zhou, Jiahua Dong, Chuhao Zhou, Yizhou Liu — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

97% · Manipulation 97%

Differences in hand geometry, joint parameterization, and kinematic topology pose challenges for cross-embodiment dexterous grasp generation. However, spatial relations among links alone are insufficient to fully capture the hand's kinematic topology. We propose DexGraspFlow, a conditional link-level $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ flow-matching framework integrating geometric relations and kinematic topology. The framework encodes local object geometry, link geometry, and current poses. A dual-stream DiT models link--link coordination and link--object interaction, while attention biases derived from kinematic-tree distances provide explicit structural information for modeling evolving geometric interactions. The model jointly learns translational and rotational velocity fields, integrates them to generate link poses, and recovers joint configurations through inverse kinematics. Additionally, inference-time palm-orientation guidance enables controllable grasp generation without retraining. Across three robotic hands and 30 object--hand pairs, DexGraspFlow achieves a 95.33\% average simulation success rate, with an average generation latency, including inverse kinematics, approximately 49\% lower than that of a state-of-the-art baseline. Further experiments demonstrate zero-shot adaptability to seven finger-removal variants and palm-orientation control. A model trained on demonstrations for the deployed hand achieves a 91\% success rate over 100 real-robot grasping trials, supporting the framework's applicability to physical grasp execution.

★ Learning Adaptable Dexterous Skills via Hybrid Dexterous Mimicking

Yuxuan Kuang, Jiashun Wang, Yixuan Sun, Yufei Ye, Sungjae Park, Umar Iqbal — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

96% · Manipulation 96%

Dexterous multi-finger hands hold promise to unlock diverse skills like functional grasps, in-hand reorientation, and dynamic handover that the human-designed world assumes, yet existing learning recipes force a trade-off. Goal-reaching reinforcement learning generalizes to arbitrary object poses but, lacking any human prior, converges to unnatural and unreliable finger strategies; motion tracking reproduces human-like behavior from a single clip but cannot deviate from it. We present AdaDex, a goal-conditioned RL framework that turns a single hand-object trajectory of a few seconds---from mocap data or HOI reconstruction from in-the-wild RGB(D) video---into an adaptable dexterous skill. At the core of AdaDex is Hybrid Dexterous Mimicking: a shared policy is trained on two populations of massively parallel environments: motion tracking environments trained with dense motion tracking objective, which instill the human prior from human motion; and generalization environments with noised initial states and goals and a sparse object-success reward, which force the skill to work far off the reference. From seconds of human motion per skill, the resulting policies can learn diverse adaptable dexterous skills, such as functional grasping, object reposing, in-hand reorientation with finger gaiting, and dynamic behaviors like throw-and-catch. Our method outperforms baselines in terms of generalization and functionality, and we demonstrate transfer across simulators and to the real world. Project page: https://yuxuank.com/AdaDex/.

★ MoDex: Towards Universal Multi-Object Dexterous Grasping

Jing Xiong, Jiale Xie, Haoqi Yuan, Chaoyi Xu, Zongqing Lu — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

97% · Manipulation 97%

Multi-object grasping is a fundamental yet challenging problem, constrained by data collection costs, varying spatial layouts, and the need for broad generalization. To address these challenges, we propose MoDex, a data-efficient framework that provides the first unified solution for universal multi-object dexterous grasping across diverse spatial layouts. MoDex accomplishes this by formulating the task as a single-step decision problem of learning residual corrections to a reference trajectory, and introducing a spatially adaptive dual-strategy that performs single-shot grasping for proximal objects and sequential interaction for separated objects. Extensive evaluations show that MoDex significantly outperforms baselines in proximal configurations, achieving 61.24% success on unseen objects, and achieves high success rates in separated layouts. Further experiments demonstrate its generalization across robot embodiments, scalability and zero-shot sim-to-real deployment through a vision-based policy trained solely on simulation data. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/Aurora-Xiong/MoDex.

★ T(R,O) Grasp++: Cross-Embodiment Dexterous Grasping in Cluttered Environments at Scale

Xin Fei, Zhixuan Xu, Huaicong Fang, Fangjun Chen, Zhaoyu Mu, Rui Yang — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

96% · Manipulation 96%

Dexterous grasping in cluttered scenes remains a central challenge in robotic manipulation, as it requires high-dimensional hand coordination under complex object-environment constraints. To address this problem, we introduce one of the largest simulation benchmarks to date, comprising around 0.5B grasp annotations across eight dexterous hands and approximately 50K objects. Furthermore, we propose T(R,O) Grasp++, a scalable diffusion-based framework for cross-embodiment dexterous grasp synthesis in cluttered environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving an average success rate of 88% across eight dexterous embodiments. Meanwhile, our pipeline achieves only 0.3s inference latency while improving inference sample efficiency by over 10 times.

★ Touch Where It Matters: Learning Local Tactile Policies for Fine-Grained Gripper Control

Mingyuan Ba, Yanan Zhou, James Zhao, Weiming Zhi — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

95% · Manipulation 95%

Visual imitation policies can organise task motion, yet contact-rich object use demands gripper adjustments beyond coarse opening and closing. We study fine-grained gripper control as a local feedback problem within ongoing task execution. Our approach assigns tactile feedback a dedicated control role during contact-rich task stages. We introduce ContactPolicy, a learned local controller that takes over the gripper while a visual base policy continues to control the arm. ContactPolicy combines tactile and force histories with current robot state to jointly predict gripper increments and their modulation, updating the gripper target from each new observation. An Intent policy manages control handover between the visual base policy and ContactPolicy. Real-world experiments on container opening, object handling, and tool operation show improved task success over both the Visuomotor Policy and Tactile-Force Policy baselines. Execution analysis illustrates how the gripper adjusts contact within an ongoing task, including periods of target retention and fine-grained changes as interaction conditions evolve. Arm-state ablations and failure analysis further examine how execution context supports local regulation. These results support task-local tactile policies for fine-grained gripper control within visual manipulation.

EndoVLA-OOV: Language-Conditioned Out-of-View Target Acquisition in Robotic Endoscopy

Chi Kit Ng, Yidong Zhang, Tianchun Wu, Zhiqing Tang, Hanlin Zhao, Siu Hing Lui — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

94% · Vision-language-action 94%

The scan-then-revisit workflow of upper gastrointestinal endoscopy requires bringing a previously observed suspicious region back into view for closer inspection. Acquiring such targets requires translating anatomical and appearance descriptions into camera motions from partial observations of a confined, deformable environment. We present EndoVLA-OOV, a language-conditioned vision-language-action policy for out-of-view target acquisition in robotic endoscopy. The policy adapts a pretrained backbone to continuous two-degree-of-freedom distal bending commands and combines initial, intermediate, and current images to guide search. To support policy learning, we provide an open-source VLA dataset containing 1,050 episodes across six tasks and approximately 262k observation-action pairs. Physical evaluation spans wet-lens and low-light conditions, two unseen stomach phantoms, and cross-embodiment transfer to an unseen ex-vivo environment. In the cross-embodiment evaluation, the full-data policy achieves 93.3% target acquisition success (28/30). In a controlled training-data comparison, expanding the corpus from 312 to 1,050 episodes increases acquisition success from 40.0% to 90.0% under the same model, training, and test configuration. Instruction and observation interventions further support the use of language and temporal context in the evaluated acquisition tasks. These results support language-guided endoscopic revisitation across the evaluated environments and robot embodiments and demonstrate the benefit of expanded task-specific demonstrations.

Energy-Score Stabilized Attentive Mixture-Density Policy: A Lightweight Approach to Multimodal Robot Motion

Sachiya Fujita, Hideyuki Ichiwara, Shigeki Sugano, Tetsuya Ogata — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

94% · Manipulation 94%

For practical motion generation, it is essential to handle multimodality (multiple actions can be correct for the same observation) while maintaining low inference cost and strong generalization from limited demonstrations. We introduce an attentive mixture-density policy trained with the Energy Score that represents future visuomotor trajectories as explicit probability distributions with a single forward pass. Concretely, we output Gaussian mixture parameters for joint commands (and optionally attention points) and optimize them with the Energy Score (computed as a sum of 1D CRPS under a diagonal covariance assumption) instead of the negative log-likelihood (NLL) to avoid MDN singularities and gradient-scale instabilities. Our architecture couples explicit spatial attention with mixture-density outputs, enabling robust multimodal behavior selection under visual noise and small-data regimes. On an 8-DOF manipulator, the method generates distinct avoidance trajectories and stabilizes learning in obstacle avoidance. Moreover, in a randomized moving-object grasping task, where spatiotemporal multimodality and fast timing decisions are required, the proposed model outperforms Diffusion Policy by 15-25% under several unseen conditions, demonstrating superior generalization and real-time feasibility.

ReDOA: Real-World Distillation via Observation Alignment for Image-Based Manipulation Policy Learning

Kotaro Kajitsuka, Masaki Murooka, Fumio Kanehiro — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

91% · Manipulation 91%, Sim-to-real 74%

Data-driven learning for general-purpose robotic manipulation presents a fundamental trade-off between data-collection cost and adaptability to real-world environments. Imitation learning (IL) requires costly human demonstrations, whereas simulation-based learning is vulnerable to sim-to-real gaps in dynamics and sensor observations. We propose ReDOA (Real-World Distillation via Observation Alignment), a framework that decouples control learning from perception learning to learn image-based policies in the real world. A state-based teacher policy trained in simulation is executed on a real robot, and its control knowledge is distilled into an image-based student policy using the collected trajectories. Observation Alignment resolves observation mismatches between data collection and deployment. This framework collects successful, efficiently executed trajectories paired with real-world visual observations, without requiring demonstrations from human experts. In real-robot experiments on three non-prehensile manipulation tasks, including bimanual manipulation, our method achieves better overall performance when jointly considering task success and execution efficiency than both IL based on human demonstrations and policy distillation in simulation. https://isri-aist.github.io/redoa-project-page/

TrajWAM: An Efficient Trajectory-Guided World Action Model for Dynamic Robotic Manipulation

Haohan Geng, Sha Zhang, Weishuo Sun, Guanting Ye, Wenhao Yu, Yuang Xie — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

90% · Manipulation 90%

Dynamic object manipulation requires robots to anticipate target motion while replanning fast enough to avoid executing outdated actions. Existing approaches either rely on fast reactive control without an explicit future target state or encode anticipated motion only implicitly. World Action Models (WAMs) offer a promising alternative by coupling future visual prediction with action generation, but scene-level video objectives may underrepresent target dynamics that are critical for manipulation, while iterative video-action denoising introduces substantial latency. We present TrajWAM, a trajectory-guided world action model for efficient dynamic robotic manipulation. Our key insight is to explicitly ground future visual imagination in predicted target-object motion and use the resulting future representation to condition action generation, while preserving this anticipation pathway after acceleration. Given a short history of object masks, a history-conditioned motion predictor forecasts future masks encoding the target object's trajectory. A lightweight Trajectory ControlNet then steers a pretrained video model toward trajectory-consistent futures. The resulting future representation conditions an action expert to predict executable action chunks. To enable one-step inference without breaking this interface, we introduce a decoupled distillation scheme that combines distribution matching for the video backbone, Trajectory ControlNet realignment, and action rollout distillation to support accurate one-step action prediction conditioned on the compressed future representation. Comprehensive evaluations in simulation and the real world show that TrajWAM achieves state-of-the-art performance on dynamic object manipulation tasks while enabling efficient one-step video-action inference. Project page: https://kevingeng3.github.io/TrajWAM/.

★ Pedicel-Targeted Strawberry Harvesting via Imitation Learning on a Low-Cost Teleoperated Robotic Arm

Nitin Rai, Won Suk Lee, Hongyoung Leon, Heping Zhu — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

97% · Manipulation 97%

Precise pedicel-targeted grasping in strawberry harvesting remains a critical bottleneck due to the pedicel's small diameter (1.3-3 mm), color similarity with surrounding foliage, and precise force control required for clean abscission zone detachment. As a market-grade crop, strawberry aesthetic value makes bruise-free pedicel detachment essential over direct fruit grasping. Classical approaches struggle to unify vision models, motion planning, and contact manipulation into a robust framework, particularly in occluded canopy environments. Therefore, this work presents a visuomotor imitation learning pipeline for pedicel-targeted strawberry harvesting that unifies perception, motion planning, and contact manipulation from collecting human teleoperation demonstrations, training an Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT) policy with a ResNet-50 visual backbone, and deploying the learned policy autonomously on a Jetson AGX Orin edge platform at 15 Hz. The trained policy achieved consistent loss convergence from 2.84 to 0.091 over 100K gradient steps on 130 demonstrations. We have also established a reproducible open-source pipeline with publicly released dataset and model weights for the agricultural robotics community. Full dataset is available at, https://huggingface.co/datasets/nitindominicrai/strawberry_pedicel_grasp_teleoperation and trained policy at, https://huggingface.co/nitindominicrai/act_strawberry_pedicel. To replicate this work, all code, configurations, and deployment instructions are publicly available at, https://github.com/nitin-dominic/autonomous_strawberry_pedicel_harvesting.

★ DefFlow: Goal-Conditioned Deformable Object Manipulation using 3D Point Flows

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

95% · Manipulation 95%

Manipulating deformable objects toward desired 3D configurations is a fundamental capability for robots operating in unstructured physical environments. However, as the range of possible initial and target configurations grows, goal-conditioned deformable manipulation requires a robot to infer increasingly diverse manipulation behaviors in addition to precise continuous actions. We introduce DefFlow, a framework for goal-conditioned manipulation of deformable objects toward a broad range of 3D configurations. DefFlow learns from demonstrations by jointly predicting the goal-conditioned 3D point flow of the robot and deformable object. We show that this formulation better captures both the manipulation decisions, such as when and where to grasp, release, or re-grasp, and the precise continuous motions required for goal reaching, rather than predicting only the robot flow. Across rope, granular-media, and cloth manipulation settings with diverse initial and target configurations, DefFlow substantially outperforms goal-conditioned action-prediction and robot-flow-only baselines on success rates and goal-distance metrics. We further demonstrate deployment of our framework on a real robot using real point-cloud observations and unseen goal configurations.

No Eyes, No Problem: What Does Touch Contribute to Blind Baoding Ball Manipulation?

Ayush Deshmukh, Nalin Agarwal, Elle Miller, Sethu Vijayakumar — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

92% · Manipulation 92%, Sim-to-real 80%

Humans manipulate objects within their hands through touch alone with remarkable ease, but for robots, achieving sustained real-world manipulation without vision remains an open challenge. Although reinforcement learning (RL) can generate sophisticated blind manipulation policies in simulation, transferring them to a real dexterous hand remains hindered by continuously changing contacts, motion-induced tactile information drift, and the gap between simulated and physical dynamics. We study this problem through Baoding ball rotation on the Shadow Dexterous Hand Lite, using only proprioception and binary tactile feedback as observations. We achieve successful zero-shot transfer through a combination of a sensor-aligned, coupling-aware embodiment in simulation, tactile calibration, and two novel episodic domain randomisations: slew-rate action limits and STuck-AT Taxels. On the physical hand, the policy achieves sustained blind Baoding rotation, completing 225 consecutive $\mathbf{180^\circ}$ rotations (112.5 full rotations) at $\sim0.36 \;\text{rot/s}$ in a single continuous trial without any vision or object-state information. Furthermore, we evaluate the contribution of tactile sensing relative to proprioception alone and identify the hand regions where tactile information is most important. This is the strongest reported hardware result for Baoding ball manipulation in both rotation count and speed, irrespective of the sensing modality used. By effectively bridging the sim-to-real gap, our framework sets a new benchmark for sustained tactile-driven dexterous manipulation on physical hardware.

Blind Precise Assembly: Proprioceptive Sim-to-Real Peg-in-Hole for Diverse Parts

Antonia Bronars, Younghyo Park, Kushal Kedia, Pulkit Agrawal — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

91% · Manipulation 91%, Sim-to-real 49%

Every robot already carries high-resolution contact sensors: its own joints. Legged robots and humanoids exploit them to walk, run, and track whole-body motions without vision, but there the contacts are large and forceful. Is joint sensing also enough for precise, contact-rich assembly, where the robot must find a millimeter-scale opening, mesh gear teeth, or catch a thread through light contact? We study this question by training blind assembly policies that observe only a short history of joint positions, velocities, and their own actions, without visual, force, torque, or tactile sensing. The poses of both the fixture and the part are unknown to the policy, and the grasp is randomized substantially. The policy must therefore assemble the parts through contact, sensed exclusively through its own proprioception. Trained with reinforcement learning entirely in simulation over randomized parts, grasps, and contacts, such policies learn peg insertion, gear meshing, and nut threading. The peg insertion policy transfers zero-shot to the real world and inserts pegs of different shapes and sizes in 73% of trials. Controlled comparisons with matched visual policies in simulation show that blind policies generalize far better to unseen part shapes and sizes, though they can be slower. Training such policies needs thousands of different assemblies, each simulated with its clearance intact, so we also release an open-source generator that builds them procedurally from exact convex pieces for MuJoCo; it is more accurate and faster than convex decomposition or MuJoCo's signed-distance collision. Videos and interactive simulations are at https://younghyopark.me/blind-proprioceptive-assembly/.

GRASP: Global-Local Representation Alignment and Spatial-Physical Grounding for Bimanual Robotic Manipulation

Zeyuan Ren, Guanxun Zhao, Qi Li, Hao Wang, Wenlong Liao, Keyi Luo — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

90% · Manipulation 90%, Vision-language-action 73%

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models that directly regress joint-space actions avoid the deployment-time cost of inverse kinematics. However, their training objectives remain misaligned with task success, as joint-space losses ignore the unequal physical consequences of joint errors and visual conditioning lacks explicit focus on hand-object interaction regions. To address these issues, we propose a training-phase prior injection framework for fine-grained bimanual manipulation. First, a physics-grounded flow-matching loss maps the implicit clean-action estimate at every noise level through differentiable forward kinematics (FK) and supervises the resulting Tool Center Point (TCP) pose and inter-arm relative pose, with a bounded noise-level weighting that compensates gradient decay. Second, we introduce a global prediction query group distilled from a frozen DINOv3 teacher through future-frame feature prediction, together with a local interaction query supervised by Grounding DINO at the attention level. Both teachers are removed at inference, and the deployment pipeline is that of a standard joint-space flow policy, adding only the learned query pathway. Simulation and real-robot experiments on long-horizon bimanual tasks show that the two priors are complementary across different deployment settings. The full model excels in in-distribution deployment, while the distilled query branch is preferable under strong visual randomization.

★ Uni-PNP: Unified Prehensile and Non-prehensile Policy Learning for Generalizable Object Pose Reaching

Wenxuan Zhu, Yuze Wang, Jiangran Lyu, Jiayi Chen, Yixin Zheng, Mi Yan — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

97% · Manipulation 97%

Object manipulation often requires combining non-prehensile actions with grasping. However, existing approaches typically develop these capabilities separately and integrate them by sequencing distinct primitives through prescribed intermediate objectives, limiting the coordination of contact motions and grasping. Their integration also remains sensitive to object and gripper geometry and depends on particular environmental supports, complicating real-world deployment. We present Uni-PNP, a unified policy that jointly learns prehensile and non-prehensile manipulation for object pose reaching across diverse objects and grippers. To achieve this, we first pretrain a geometry encoder to predict contact-induced object motion using a contact-dynamics dataset constructed from simulated interactions between diverse objects and grippers. We then train the policy in a two-stage reinforcement learning curriculum from graspable objects to ungraspable peers, encouraging the discovery of non-prehensile interactions and their integration with grasping. Experiments show 76.39% success on hundreds of seen objects with grippers, and 57.91% on unseen peers, outperforming the strongest pose-reaching baseline by 20.52 and 17.79 percentage points, respectively. We also analyze emergent behaviors, including nonprehensile and prehensile repositioning, grasp acquisition that requires grasping after tipping, and table-assisted reorientation while grasping, and transfer to the real-world scenario. Project page available at lgswdn.github.io/Uni-PNP.

★ Whole-Body Dexterity

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

96% · Manipulation 96%, Sim-to-real 51%

Current humanoid dexterous manipulation remains largely confined to end-effectors and simple grasps, falling short of humans' ability to engage the entire body by bracing and sliding bulky objects against the arms and torso. We introduce Whole-Body Dexterity (WBD), a general framework that uses the robot's body and appendages as contact surfaces to grasp and manipulate objects. Our sim-to-real pipeline first generates a dataset of feasible whole-body grasps, then trains reinforcement-learning experts on a general any-to-any repositioning objective by sampling initial and goal grasps from the dataset, and distills these experts into a single policy that uses proprioception and object geometry. We show that the distilled policy transfers zero-shot to a real Unitree G1, where it repositions a basketball and a cardboard box to regions around the torso and completes a long-horizon task that stows a box under one arm, carries it from a shelf to a table, and places it. The controller operates interactively, steered by coarse motion references from a human teleoperator. Across real-world whole-body manipulation tasks, the distilled controller completes 90% of trials, compared with 18% for direct retargeting and 4% for a generalist whole-body controller.

★ TGrasp6D: Task-Informed Vision-Language Priors and Pose Refinement enable Zero-Shot Task-Oriented 6DoF Grasping

Manav Kulshrestha, Apoorva Vashisth, Damon Conover, Aniket Bera — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

95% · Manipulation 95%, Vision-language-action 66%

Task-Oriented Grasping (TOG) has emerged as an important skill for purposeful robotic manipulation. Given the task of using a knife to "slice bread," a robot must choose to grasp from the handle, whereas for "hand[ing] the knife over," it is preferable for the handle to remain unobstructed for safe handoff. Current approaches for TOG either focus on 2D planar grasping, remain limited by their reliance on task-agnostic grasp generators, or are constrained by reliance on finite, manually-annotated, task-specific grasp datasets that cannot cover all possible grasp-task pairs. To that end, we present TGrasp6D, a vision-language based approach for generating task-oriented 6DoF grasps in a zero-shot manner. Given a task and a single RGB-D image of an associated object, TGrasp6D reasons about the appropriate semantic affordance for the given task and object geometry to produce an initial task- informed prior. This generated prior is further refined via 6DoF pose optimization for collision avoidance while preserving task consistency. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art success rate of 94% on the TaskGrasp dataset, with the best baseline at 74%. We also deploy our approach on a Franka Research 3 robot to demonstrate zero-shot generalization to real world objects

SOMA: Stack-of-Objects Manipulation using a Quadruped Robot

Stergios E. Bachoumas, Panagiotis Artemiadis — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

93% · Manipulation 93%

Executing heavy-duty physical manipulation in unpredictable environments remains a major challenge for quadrupedal robots lacking dedicated manipulators. This paper presents SOMA, a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for whole-body non-prehensile manipulation of multi-object stacks using a quadruped robot. Unlike traditional methods restricted to two-dimensional planar pushing, SOMA integrates explicit robot base-height control, unlocking full three-dimensional pushing strategies. This capability enables the quadruped to manipulate complex payload stacks as a unified system while preventing relative sliding or tipping of upper layers. The architecture factorizes control into a high-level manipulation policy using a Simplified Structured State Space Sequence (S5) encoder to reason over long-horizon temporal history and predict bounded target tracking commands via Beta distributions, and a low-level locomotion policy that dynamically adapts leg stance configurations. In extensive simulation benchmarks, SOMA achieves a $90.3\%$ success rate for single-object reposing and up to $90.1\%$ for dynamic two-box stacks under stringent error margins ($0.05\text{ m}$ position error, $1^\circ$ orientation error). Finally, we validate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on a Unitree Go1 quadruped robot across diverse payload masses and geometries, demonstrating active base-height adjustments to maintain traction and balance during heavy pushing tasks.

Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Path-Safe Target Reaching in Robotic Harvesting of Hydroponic Lettuce

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

93% · Manipulation 93%, Sim-to-real 31%

Robotic harvesting requires precise manipulation to ensure accurate positioning of the end-effector, especially in a constraint workspace. This study introduces the Path-Safe Approach Proximal Policy Optimization (PSA-PPO), a target-conditioned local reaching framework designed for robotic harvesting of nutrient film technique (NFT)-hydroponic lettuce in greenhouses. The proposed PSA-PPO preserves the standard clipped PPO objective while introducing a harvesting-oriented policy formulation that integrates target-conditioned observations, corridor-aware spatial constraints, trajectory-history-based safety encoding, and task-specific success criteria for constrained robotic manipulation. PSAPPO was trained entirely in Isaac Lab and successfully transferred to a physical UR10e robotic arm without any real-world policy fine-tuning. In a controlled physical benchmark against 150 scheduled targets, PSA-PPO achieved the highest reaching rate of 94.7%, outperforming Cartesian+TOTG (86.0%), RRTConnect (88.0%), and RRT* (80.0%), while reducing median RMS jerk by 39.8 to 73.0% relative to the classical planners during the final approach segment. A formulation ablation evaluated over 200 simulation targets demonstrates that path-safety and side-corridor shaping are the principal drivers of harvesting-compatible performance: removing either term substantially degrades strict success even when terminal endpoint accuracy is preserved or improved, confirming that optimization toward the endpoint alone is an insufficient objective for constrained crop-proximal manipulation. Finally, PSA-PPO was integrated with an RGB-D vision module and an end-effector and evaluated as a complete greenhouse harvesting system across 144 lettuce harvesting attempts, achieving 94.4% vision-guided target reaching and 86.1% complete harvesting success.

EgoJEPA: Beyond Retargeting for Dexterous Manipulation from Egocentric Videos

Meng Cao, Can Zhao, Jinjie Wei, Haonan Zhao, Yulong Zhang, Duo Han — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

92% · Manipulation 92%

Egocentric human videos offer a scalable alternative to costly robot demonstra- tions, yet transferring their manipulation priors to robot control remains chal- lenging. The commonly adopted retargeting-based approaches convert human wrist and finger poses into embodiment-specific action commands through hand- crafted geometric mappings. However, such mappings require meticulous recal- ibration across different embodiments and risk propagating hand-tracking errors into downstream robot control pipelines. To this end, we propose EgoJEPA, a three-stage framework that learns embodiment-agnostic representations from ego- centric human videos without rule-based human-to-robot retargeting: 1) Human- action pre-training learns effect-aware latent actions through JEPA-style visual prediction conditioned on hand-motion differences; 2) Latent-action-based world modeling jointly predicts future visual dynamics and latent actions, which decou- ples human prior pre-training from robot-specific control parameterizations; 3) Embodiment-specific tuning adapts the pretrained model to diverse robots through lightweight action adapters. Experiments on five real-world manipulation tasks across three robot embodiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of EgoJEPA. It achieves a 74% average success rate under the out-of-domain evalu- ation, compared with 65% for the retargeting baseline, while reducing cumulative cross-embodiment wall-clock cost by 47.2%, from 743.2 to 392.7 hours.