Robot
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Disagreement-Guided Weak-to-Strong Routing
2026-10-15 17:19:57Sima Noorani, Shayan Kiyani, George Pappas, Hamed HassaniAbstract
Small language models are increasingly deployed on edge devices and robotic systems to meet cost and latency constraints, yet their limited capabilities can make reliable deployment challenging. Stronger models can provide assistance when needed, but deciding when to route a weak-model response to a stronger model often relies on signals of response correctness. In open-ended and agentic tasks, however, obtaining such signals can require costly ground-truth supervision that is difficult to obtain at scale. We revisit the foundations of weak-to-strong routing and ask whether routing decisions can instead be guided by signals that do not require ground-truth supervision. We first characterize the optimal weak-to-strong routing policy, while allowing for multiple weak-model responses generated through local inference. Building on this characterization, we derive a principled approximation to the optimal routing based on model-to-model comparison. In particular, we introduce a notion of model disagreement that can be measured directly from model-generated responses, without ground-truth supervision. Importantly, the approximation becomes increasingly accurate as the strong model becomes a better proxy for the ground-truth distribution. Across agentic and single-turn tasks, our approach effectively navigates the trade-off between routing cost and response accuracy without ground-truth supervision. Moreover, even when ground-truth correctness signals are available for training, disagreement-based routing can outperform methods trained directly to predict correctness
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22245
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Progress Reward Model for Reinforcement Learning via Large Language Models
2026-10-15 15:21:25Xiuhui Zhang, Ning Gao, Xingyu Jiang, Yihui Chen, Yuheng Pan, Mohan Zhang, Yue DengAbstract
Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms face significant limitations in handling long-term tasks with sparse rewards. Recent advancements have leveraged large language models (LLMs) to enhance RL by utilizing their world knowledge for task planning and reward generation. However, planning-based approaches often depend on pre-defined skill libraries and fail to optimize low-level control policies, while reward-based methods require extensive human feedback or exhaustive searching due to the complexity of tasks. In this paper, we propose the Progress Reward Model for RL (PRM4RL), a novel framework that integrates task planning and dense reward to enhance RL. For high-level planning, a complex task is decomposed into a series of simple manageable subtasks, with a subtask-oriented, fine-grained progress function designed to monitor task execution progress. For low-level reward generation, inspired by potential-based reward shaping, we use the progress function to construct a Progress Reward Model (PRM), providing theoretically grounded optimality and convergence guarantees, thereby enabling effective policy optimization. Experimental results on robotics control tasks demonstrate that our approach outperforms both LLM-based planning and reward methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22056
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Reinforcement Learning-driven Diffusion Models: Language, Vision, and Beyond
2026-10-15 09:05:38Zhiyuan Ma, Jiabao Wei, Tianyu Wang, Hanqing Wang, Jiadong Pan, Haowen Xu, Liangliang Zhao, Ruixun Liu, Yuhan Wang, Yuwei Zhang, Liang Feng, Junhao Xiao, Kaiyan Zhang, Xuekai Zhu, Daizong Liu, Biqing Qi, Yihao Liu, Ganqu Cui, Ning Ding, Linfeng Zhang, Jianjun Li, Kun He, Xiang Bai, Bowen ZhouAbstract
Diffusion models (DMs) have steadily demonstrated outstanding performance in high-fidelity, controllable generation across diverse scenarios, following the "pretraining-finetuning" paradigm established in LLMs. Despite these advances, conventional DMs still face critical limitations in sophisticated reasoning, autonomous exploration of generation pathways, and adaptability to complex, human-aligned objectives. Inspired by RLHF's success in LLMs, RL has recently emerged as a pivotal post-training mechanism to iteratively refine DMs through reward-driven trajectory optimization. This paper presents the first comprehensive review of RL-driven DMs and an empirical analysis of how RL reshapes the diffusion process towards experience-centric, goal-directed generation. We propose a novel technical panorama elucidating RL's multifaceted roles in diffusion-based language, multimodal, robotic, and scientific models, with a granular focus on diffusion trajectory optimization and reward engineering. Through extensive experiments on multiple task-specific benchmarks, we systematically evaluate representative methods to intuitively highlight the advantages of different RL post-training strategies. Furthermore, we reveal and dissect three crucial bottlenecks that currently hinder the real-world deployment of RL-driven DMs: reward design fragility, exploration-exploitation trade-off in high-dimensional generation spaces, and training instability under sparse rewards. Based on these perspectives, we provide a principled roadmap for the integration of RL into DMs and outline promising future research directions for robust, interpretable RL-diffusion systems. We also construct a public repository to continuously track the latest developments in this rapidly evolving field: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21539
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LTM: Latent Transition Based In-Context Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models
2026-10-15 06:41:20Qixin Sun, WenLong Gao, Xiansheng Chen, Zhongyuan Wang, Si Liu, Pengwei WangAbstract
Robotic manipulation often requires remembering interactions that are no longer visible. We introduce Latent Transition Memory (LTM), which stores history as compact latent transitions between consecutive observations. Instantiated on $\pi_{0.5}$ as LTM-$\pi$, our method uses a frozen latent action encoder, a lightweight adapter, and causal KV caching for incremental inference without memory-specific semantic annotations or external reasoning-model calls. With DreamDojo transitions, LTM-$\pi$ achieves 58.54% success on RoboMME and 80.5% on LIBERO-Mem, performing best among baselines without external reasoning models or memory-specific annotations. Ablations support the contribution of transition content beyond temporal cues and the efficiency of delayed memory admission. Scaling RoboMME demonstrations tenfold improves success from 57.67% to 87.50%, while a Cup Swap diagnostic highlights the role of process supervision in temporal composition. Under a 200-token memory budget, success remains 84.00%, versus 87.50% without compression. Finally, real-robot counting success improves from 11.25% to 82.50%. Together, these results demonstrate the effectiveness, scalability, and efficiency of latent transition memory, highlighting its capacity for complex temporal information, bounded-context operation, and real-world robotic control.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21362
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System1-Arena: Which Decisions Can Be Left to System 1?
2026-10-15 04:40:47Tianyu Chen, Xinyang Liu, Ruyi An, Zhendong Wang, Mingyuan ZhouAbstract
Large language models (LLMs) often make discrete decisions, such as flagging phishing or escalating to a human. System-1 models, such as Jev and the OpenAI Decisions API, return probabilities over options in a single forward pass, while System-2 approaches generate reasoning steps. Which decisions can System-1 models handle, and which require generative reasoning? We introduce System1-Arena, a benchmark that gives all models the same decision requests and scores their probabilities. It contains 92k questions across 105 tasks from 268 public sources, in four groups: text classification and knowledge, applied decisions, evaluation and control, and agent and action. It also includes 138 closed-loop environments, from web shopping and SWE-bench coding control to robotics, games, and driving; in real-time mode, the world evolves while a model decides. We evaluate 30 models: 7 closed LLMs, 13 open LLMs read at the answer token, and 10 System-1 models. The largest System-1 models match or exceed fast closed LLMs in non-agentic accuracy, with better-calibrated probabilities at one-quarter of the latency. A reasoning LLM is the most accurate, at about 70x the cost of a fast LLM. In closed loops, large open LLMs succeed most often (up to 32.9%); small System-1 models rarely succeed.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21244
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SOMA: Stack-of-Objects Manipulation using a Quadruped Robot
2026-10-14 21:43:14Stergios E. Bachoumas, Panagiotis ArtemiadisAbstract
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.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20968
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TGrasp6D: Task-Informed Vision-Language Priors and Pose Refinement enable Zero-Shot Task-Oriented 6DoF Grasping
2026-10-14 20:31:36Manav Kulshrestha, Apoorva Vashisth, Damon Conover, Aniket BeraAbstract
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
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20901
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Hierarchical Residual Policy Learning for Real-World Mobile Manipulation with Sparse Human Guidance
2026-10-14 17:59:52Zhefei Gong, Hefeifei Jiang, Zehao Wang, Jiachen LiAbstract
Mobile Manipulation (MoMa) is a cornerstone of autonomous robotic systems, yet real-world fine-tuning remains a formidable challenge because of high-dimensional action spaces and intricate coupling between heterogeneous modules. In this paper, we propose HiRe-MoMa (Hierarchical Residual Mobile Manipulation), a systematic framework for stable and sample-efficient real-world fine-tuning of complex MoMa systems. At its core, HiRe-MoMa adopts a Hierarchical Residual Architecture that fine-tunes a frozen base policy. A Policy-Agnostic Residual learns additive corrections atop the base policy, while Hierarchical Decoupling splits the residual into mobile-base and manipulator-arm heads with unidirectional conditioning, mitigating gradient interference and aligning corrections with the platform's physical hierarchy. To improve sample efficiency in data-expensive real-world settings, we propose Expert-Guided Value Alignment, which leverages sparse human interventions with under 20% training coverage to reshape the critic's value landscape, effectively guiding autonomous exploration through expert priors. Extensive real-world experiments on the TIAGo++ platform demonstrate that HiRe-MoMa consistently enhances task performance with only around 30 minutes of online interaction, regardless of the base policy architecture. To our knowledge, this is among the first frameworks to enable efficient on-robot fine-tuning for mobile manipulation in the real world, providing a practical paradigm for deploying complex robotic systems in dynamic, human-centric environments. Further details can be found on our project website: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20607
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Modeling and Understanding Neural Weights of Humanoid Policies with Diffusion
2026-10-14 17:59:52Huixuan Cheng, Bike Zhang, Shankar Sastry, Koushil SreenathAbstract
Recent advances in robot learning have driven rapid progress in humanoid control, enabling increasingly agile behaviors in the real world. However, humanoid control networks are typically obtained through conventional training procedures, while comparatively little attention has been given to directly modeling the distribution of their learned weights and generating functional networks in weight space. In this work, we investigate whether high-performing humanoid control networks can be generatively modeled directly through their weights. We adopt a latent diffusion framework that couples a linear autoencoder with a Diffusion Transformer. The autoencoder compresses actor network parameters into a compact latent space, and the Diffusion Transformer models the distribution of these latents. Trained on networks collected from reinforcement learning for the Unitree G1 robot, our approach generates deployable networks that perform various motions in the real world, including walking, dancing, and spin kick. Beyond generation, we further study the learned weight space to better understand the structure captured by these humanoid control networks. We identify a structural principle in the first-layer weights that consistently reflects the robot's kinematic prior. Notably, this kinematic prior emerges under both Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Imitation Learning (IL) training, suggesting that it is not specific to a particular optimization process but may instead reflect common knowledge associated with humanoid embodiment. Together, these results demonstrate the feasibility of generative modeling in humanoid network weight space, while providing initial insights into the information encoded by their learned weights. Additional results are available on our project website: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20606
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PingpongDuo: Agile Humanoid Table Tennis Doubles with Safe Team Coordination
2026-10-14 17:56:27Haoran Jiang, Yichao Zhong, Kai Zhang, Cheng Liu, Yixuan Pan, Zhenjie Yang, Jingbo Wang, Tianyu Li, Li ChenAbstract
Unlike singles, humanoid table tennis doubles requires teammates to strike in strict alternation while sharing a confined workspace. Rapid repositioning can compromise striking accuracy, while uncoordinated teammate movements introduce collision risks. We present PingpongDuo, a hierarchical framework for agile humanoid doubles with safe team coordination. At the team level, a planner jointly selects positioning targets and uses learned risk estimates to filter risky proposals, preferentially preserving the current striker's target. At the individual level, separate footwork and striking skills combine agile movement with precise racket control. The skills are guided by human motion references, including footwork collected from human doubles play, and trained from states produced by one another to support rapid transitions. A racket-arm residual further refines strikes after movement using return feedback from a simulator calibrated with real ball-flight and contact measurements. In simulation, PingpongDuo improves the ball-return success rate by 13.2% over the state-of-the-art baseline, while achieving approximately 2 cm positioning error during clearance. In real-world experiments, a robot completes a 2.15 m clearance-and-recovery cycle in 2.4 s with a peak speed of 2.23 m/s, while two robots sustain more than 10 consecutive strikes in strict alternation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20579
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PhySGA: A Physics-Space Grounded Agentic Framework for Generalizable and Interactive 3D Composition
2026-10-14 17:47:24Weichen Lyu, Chong Xia, Mingyu Dong, Long Xu, Shengjun Zhang, Yueqi DuanAbstract
3D object composition is pivotal to digital content creation and robot simulation, while also serving as a critical testbed for physical intelligence in foundation models. Previous methods either leverage large language models to directly predict object coordinates, or utilize generative diffusion priors to synthesize composite images for visual alignment, both of which rely on static priors in digital spaces. However, these methods consistently struggle with complex compositions such as precise hanging, gravity-driven settling and hidden containment, as these tasks require interactive construction processes involving global planning, fine-grained alignment, and physical simulation. To address these challenges, we propose PhySGA, a Physics-Space Grounded Agentic Framework for 3D composition via agent exploration and physical simulation, enabling the universal interactive assembly of rigid, articulated, and deformable objects. Directly applying vanilla LLMs or VLMs to this task proves insufficient, as current models inherently lack grounded physical understanding and interactive construction experience. To overcome this limitation, we design a collaborative feedforward-feedback architecture: an Assembly Agent focuses on geometric and kinematic reasoning for global step planning and coarse adjustment, while a Critic Agent reasons over contact dynamics for simulator state diagnosis and fine-grained closed-loop correction. Furthermore, Action Routers map semantic planning and analysis onto executable physical primitives within the simulator, while a task-specific Self-Evolving Skill Library distills historical trial-and-error feedback into reusable experiences, boosting success rates and minimizing exploration attempts. Extensive experiments within Isaac Sim demonstrate that PhySGA significantly surpasses existing methods in relation fidelity, physical plausibility, and visual quality.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20560
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EmbodiedEvo: Self-Evolving Coding Agent For Physical Intelligence
2026-10-14 17:45:55Wenyi Li, Yizhe Chi, Youjie Zheng, Chunyu Liu, Xiaoqiu Wang, Mingju Gao, Zheng Jiang, Deyao Hong, Calvin Xiao, Kaisen Yang, Qinhuai NaAbstract
Coding agents can construct executable programs and revise them through feedback, offering a foundation for embodied control without target-task fine-tuning. Through a programmatic robot interface, the agent observes the scene, executes control programs, and adapts them to the resulting physical state, serving as the closed-loop policy. However, this within-episode adaptation does not automatically preserve experience across scenes. Our trajectory analysis shows that agents spend interaction and inference budgets establishing effective operations and identifying their preconditions, while fresh agents cannot reuse these discoveries. This motivates EmbodiedEvo, a self-evolving coding agent that distills physical feedback into reusable code Skills and diagnostic Lessons. Experience is acquired on one Playground scene per task, then frozen for independent agents in unseen scenes, without updating model weights. On RoboDojo-Sim, EmbodiedEvo achieves an average score of 44.48 and a success rate of 37.82\%, surpassing all officially verified results. Paired tests show the largest gains on memory-dependent tasks and successful reuse of coordinated procedures, while fine contact control remains difficult. Experience from stronger models also improves weaker executors: Astra's experience raises Sol and Luna's success rates by 8.86 and 5.50 percentage points over no experience. Compared with raw interaction history, Skills and Lessons achieve comparable task performance at 53.0\% lower execution cost.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18867
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KinoGen: Customizable Humanoid Loco-Manipulation References via Kinematically Grounded Video Generation
2026-10-14 17:43:32Qi Wu, Lulu Zhao, Sanghyun Hahn, Rishi Yennu, Emmy Yang, Dingqi Zhang, Tao Pang, Jiuguang Wang, Kuan FangAbstract
We present KinoGen, a framework that synthesizes customizable humanoid loco-manipulation references through kinematically grounded video generation. KinoGen conditions a pretrained video generator on calibrated renders of the target robot and object in a simulated task instance and recovers the reference by fitting the same models to the generated two-view video, so that the reference lies in the robot configuration space by construction without a human body proxy or retargeting. Body, hand, and object priors initialize the reconstruction, and direct optimization against cross-view evidence refines it. Since an edited keyframe is simply another rendered state, a user can prescribe a goal object pose, regenerate the video around the edited keyframe, and obtain a reference that satisfies the pose exactly. Across eight loco-manipulation tasks, KinoGen yields lower penetration and foot skating than video-based baselines and preserves over 90% of annotated contacts, and its customized references satisfy every prescribed target with substantially less penetration than direct interpolation. Tracking policies trained on the synthesized references are deployed on a Unitree G1 humanoid with dexterous hands. Project webpage: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20552
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EarlyCommit: Calibrated Word-by-Word Commitment for Robots Acting Before You Finish Speaking
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Human listeners can often identify the intended object several words before an instruction ends. Robots, however, are typically designed to wait until the speaker has finished before deciding how to act. We present EarlyCommit, an open-source tool that lets a robot commit to the intended object while the instruction is being spoken. After every recognized word, a fine-tuned text encoder scores each object in the scene. The robot acts when the calibrated probability of the best object reaches a threshold tau set by the user, so 1 - tau is the accepted risk of choosing the wrong object. Otherwise, it waits or asks. The tool includes a streaming speech front end, a scene and instruction generator with exact word-by-word ground truth, and scripts to train, calibrate, and evaluate. On instructions containing words never seen in training, EarlyCommit commits correctly 1.6 to 2 times as often as keyword matching, is right at least 92 percent of the time when it commits at tau = 0.9, and needs 31 to 35 ms per word on consumer GPUs.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20531
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Physical Time as a Missing Dimension of Robot Policy Memory Dynamics
2026-10-14 17:24:13Yushen Liang, Yue Peng, Baosheng Jin, Tianluo Zhang, Xinyu Zhang, Shuyi Zhou, Zhuoran Chen, Xinqi Liu, Shenji WanAbstract
Existing robot policy memories typically evolve with observation sequences, implicitly treating each update as the same amount of physical time. Yet identical observation histories can span different durations and require different actions, exposing physical time as a missing dimension of policy memory. We introduce Temporal Flow Policy (TFP), which learns memory dynamics to retain past events and evolve the memory state over measured time intervals. Observations and prior memory determine the content and time scales of each transition; elapsed time determines how far the state advances. TFP conditions diffusion and flow-matching policies through this memory state and is trained with their native imitation objectives. We evaluate TFP with Diffusion Policy and $\pi_{0.5}$ through controlled comparisons of memory designs. These experiments show that successful timing depends on both measured intervals and retained history. TFP achieves higher average success than the recurrent and state-space memories we equip with the same intervals and than a variant that feeds the interval to a learned gate. Memory readouts recover the time since an event and motion information after occlusion. Changing the supplied intervals systematically delays or advances actions, linking time inputs to behavior. Real-robot tasks requiring timing or memory, together with LIBERO evaluations, demonstrate benefits in physical and general manipulation. These results suggest viewing robot memory not as stored observation history, but as a state that retains past events and evolves with physical time.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20524
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Graph-Reweighted Behavior Cloning with Human Interventions for Precise Robotic Manipulation
2026-10-14 17:09:36Xiaoman Li, Zhiqiang Yang, Jiayu Hu, Jipeng Kong, Yang Zhang, Jingwei Zhang, Fangzheng Yan, Chunhua Shen, Chenjia BaiAbstract
Long-horizon precise manipulation produces mixed-quality data for post-training vision-language-action (VLA) models: even successful demonstrations and intervention-assisted rollouts may contain detours, hesitations, failed attempts, and imperfect recoveries. The key challenge is to identify which action chunks actually advance the task, rather than uniformly cloning or discarding imperfect trajectories. We propose Graph-Reweighted Behavior Cloning (GR-BC), an offline iterative post-training framework that builds a task-conditioned goal-reachability graph over demonstrations and iteratively collected rollouts, including both successful and failed episodes with human interventions. Reverse graph search computes minimal remaining steps to task success within the dataset support, and each action chunk is weighted by how much its execution reduces this potential. This consequence-based weighting reuses recoverable segments from failed trajectories, leverages interventions as recovery paths, and down-weights locally regressive chunks even inside successful trajectories. New rollouts are incorporated by appending them to the graph and rerunning search, without training a reward model, action-conditioned critic, or progress predictor. Across four precise manipulation tasks and three VLA backbones, GR-BC improves single-round supervised fine-tuning and reaches 91% success after a few offline iterations, without trajectory comparisons or progress labels. More details and videos are available at: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20504
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Towards Certifiable State Estimation under Observability Degeneracy
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Certifiable optimization provides global optimality guarantees for non-convex state estimation in robotics. However, under severe physical sensing degeneracy, convex Semidefinite Programming relaxations solved via Interior-Point Methods suffer from rank expansion, rendering direct semidefinite solving and spectral rounding algebraically invalid. In this paper, we establish a universal candidate-driven dual certification framework that resolves this challenge without incurring rank expansion. First, from an epigraph perspective, we prove that while sensing degeneracy expands the primal optimal set into a flat equi-cost face, cost tightness and multiplier recovery remain strictly intact, enabling global verification without direct semidefinite solving. Second, we propose an observability-aware local search using solution remapping, coupled with a closed-form dual multiplier recovery scheme that executes in sub-microsecond latency. Third, we derive a model-specific adaptive dual safety threshold parameterized by the minimum non-zero eigenvalue of the observable Hessian and uneradicated residual leakage, preventing false rejections of optimal candidates under weak observability. We validate our universal framework with robust registration under degenerate measurements.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20490
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RoboSimStudio: An Interactive Toolkit for Human and Agent Rapid Real2Sim of Robot Manipulation Tasks
2026-10-14 17:02:18Kaiyuan Chen, Shuangyu Xie, Uksang Yoo, Xinyue Zhu, Cael Magner, Alvin Zhu, Daehwa Kim, Eric Heiden, Erwin Coumans, Miles Macklin, Spencer Huang, Ken GoldbergAbstract
It has been difficult to accurately model the physics of the interaction between a robot and the objects it manipulates, including contact mechanics, coupled contact dynamics, deformations, stiffness and friction. We present RoboSimStudio (RSS), an interactive toolkit that makes choices of solver, contact model, and physical parameters explicit and editable, allowing both humans and coding agents to quickly create and iteratively refine simulations based on observed physical behavior. We implement RSS with the open Newton physics simulation system and describe experiments with human-guided real2sim using (1) visual evaluation, (2) force-feedback and (3) agentic Real2Sim2Real. Code, video and additional information can be found on the project website: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18835
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Tiered-Resolution Volumetric Mapping for Real-Time Simultaneous Planning and Mapping on Natural Outdoor Environments
2026-10-14 16:51:35Afonso E. Carvalho, David Portugal, Paulo Peixoto, George KantorAbstract
Real-time volumetric mapping for a planning robot is dominated by the cost of integrating and storing information at the finest resolution, yet only a small fraction of any map ever lies on or near a path the planner actually considers. We exploit this with a tiered-resolution mapping mechanism that integrates LiDAR into a single map structure at two resolutions simultaneously: fine inside a corridor around the robot's current plan, and coarse everywhere else. As opposed to traditional navigation pipelines where path planning uses the mapping result and provides no feedback, we propose a feedback loop where planning also informs mapping to dynamically integrate information at different leaf resolutions. Across two real-world teleoperated datasets, replayed and scored offline against an independent full-resolution map, the tiered maps are 13-15x smaller and require 6-8x less integration CPU time than a uniform fine map, while producing paths at a similar cost per meter as the ones generated from fine resolution maps on both scenarios. A uniform coarse map reaches the same size savings but its path quality collapses (+210% cost per meter) on the harder scenario, because it over-discretizes terrain the robot must traverse. Tiering approximates the coarse map's cheapness without its failure mode.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20476
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DD-GBP: Anytime Multi-Arm Planning and Continuous Execution via Distributed Dynamic Gaussian Belief Propagation
2026-10-14 16:43:32Zhao Jin, Fengyi Dai, Yuetong Yin, Yunan Wang, Wenjie Chen, Chuxiong HuAbstract
Safely executing long-horizon multi-arm tasks online in complex dynamic environments remains challenging. We propose a new distributed dynamic Gaussian belief propagation (DD-GBP) method that directly plans joint-space trajectories through parallel local inference. A unified Gaussian-process (GP) parameterization connects adaptive planning horizons, interpolation-time factors, and continuous execution. Each robot maintains a local tree-structured factor graph and exchanges messages asynchronously over active inter-arm links. Dynamic subnet reconstruction and event-triggered updates reduce communication and inference costs while responding to moving obstacles. We also provide theoretical analyses of local inference accuracy, anytime early stopping, triggered-replanning consistency, and GP-consistent execution. In 50 long-horizon, multi-target four-arm scenes with moving obstacles, DD-GBP achieves $92.5\%$ collision-free all-target completion and the highest success rate among six representative baselines. Scenario ablations demonstrate long-horizon safety and robustness to communication impairment and extreme conditions; success remains $86.0\%$ under $90\%$ packet loss. Execution results further show substantially suppressed extreme velocity and acceleration peaks relative to Syn-GBP. On one workstation, obstacle-free tests with 30 coexisting arms retain $99.87\%$ success and a $15.80$ ms mean warm solve, exceeding 60 Hz and outperforming the compared methods in scalability. Dual-arm transport experiments under dynamic interference demonstrate online response and practical deployability. To the best of our knowledge, these results establish a new state of the art for online long-horizon multi-arm planning in dynamic scenes.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20460
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