arXiv:2603.06719v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Dynamic Targeting (DT) mission concept is an approach to satellite observation in which a lookahead sensor gathers information about the upcoming environment and uses this information to intelligently plan observations. Previous work has shown that DT has the potential to increase the science return across applications. However, DT mission concepts must address challenges, such as the limited spatial extent of onboard lookahead data and instrument mobility, data throughput, and onboard computation constraints. In this work, we show how the performance of DT systems can be improved by using supplementary data streamed from geostationary satellites that provide lookahead information up to 35 minutes ahead of time rather than the 1 minute latency from an onboard lookahead sensor. While there is a greater volume of geostationary data, the search space for observation planning explodes exponentially with the size of the horizon. To address this, we introduce a hierarchical planning approach in which the geostationary data is used to plan a long-term observation blueprint in polynomial time, then the onboard lookahead data is leveraged to refine that plan over short-term horizons. We compare the performance of our approach to that of traditional DT planners relying on onboard lookahead data across four different problem instances: three cloud avoidance variations and a storm hunting scenario. We show that our hierarchical planner outperforms the traditional DT planners by up to 41% and examine the features of the scenarios that affect the performance of our approach. We demonstrate that incorporating geostationary satellite data is most effective for dynamic problem instances in which the targets of interest are sparsely distributed throughout the overflight.

arXiv:2603.06729v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Navigating safely through dense crowds requires collision avoidance that generalizes beyond the densities seen during training. Learning-based crowd navigation can break under out-of-distribution crowd sizes due to density-sensitive observation normalization and social-cost scaling, while analytical solvers often remain safe but freeze in tight interactions. We propose a reinforcement learning approach for dense, variable-density navigation that attains zero-shot density generalization using a density-invariant observation encoding with density-randomized training and physics-informed proxemic reward shaping with density-adaptive scaling. The encoding represents the distance-sorted $K$ nearest pedestrians plus bounded crowd summaries, keeping input statistics stable as crowd size grows. Trained with $N\!\in\![11,16]$ pedestrians in a $3\mathrm{m}\times3\mathrm{m}$ arena and evaluated up to $N\!=\!21$ pedestrians ($1.3\times$ denser), our policy reaches the goal in $>99\%$ of episodes and achieves $86\%$ collision-free success in random crowds, with markedly less freezing than analytical methods and a $>\!60$-point collision-free margin over learning-based benchmark methods. Codes are available at \href{https://github.com/jznmsl/PSS-Social}{https://github.com/jznmsl/PSS-Social}.

arXiv:2603.06742v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Constrained generative modeling is fundamental to applications such as robotic control and autonomous driving, where models must respect physical laws and safety-critical constraints. In real-world settings, these constraints rarely take the form of simple linear inequalities, but instead complex feasible regions that resemble road maps or other structured spatial domains. We propose a constrained generation framework that generates samples directly within such feasible regions while preserving realism. Our method fine-tunes a pretrained generative model to enforce constraints while maintaining generative fidelity. Experimentally, our method exhibits characteristics distinct from existing fine-tuning and training-free constrained baselines, revealing a new compromise between constraint satisfaction and sampling quality.

arXiv:2603.06749v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic foundation models (RFMs) are emerging as a promising route towards flexible, instruction- and demonstration-driven robot control, however, a critical investigation of their industrial applicability is still lacking. This survey gives an extensive overview over the RFM-landscape and analyses, driven by concrete implications, how industrial domains and use cases shape the requirements of RFMs, with particular focus on collaborative robot platforms, heterogeneous sensing and actuation, edge-computing constraints, and safety-critical operation. We synthesise industrial deployment perspectives into eleven interdependent implications and operationalise them into an assessment framework comprising a catalogue of 149 concrete criteria, spanning both model capabilities and ecosystem requirements. Using this framework, we evaluate 324 manipulation-capable RFMs via 48,276 criterion-level decisions obtained via a conservative LLM-assisted evaluation pipeline, validated against expert judgements. The results indicate that industrial maturity is limited and uneven: even the highest-rated models satisfy only a fraction of criteria and typically exhibit narrow implication-specific peaks rather than integrated coverage. We conclude that progress towards industry-grade RFMs depends less on isolated benchmark successes than on systematic incorporation of safety, real-time feasibility, robust perception, interaction, and cost-effective system integration into auditable deployment stacks.

arXiv:2603.06760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Designing aerial robots for specialized tasks, from perching to payload delivery, requires tailoring their aerodynamic shape to specific mission requirements. For tasks involving wide flight envelopes, the usual sequential process of first determining the shape and then the motion planner is likely to be suboptimal due to the inherent nonlinear interactions between them. This limitation has been motivating co-design research, which involves jointly optimizing the aerodynamic shape and the motion planner. In this paper, we present a general-purpose, gradient-based, nested co-design framework where the motion planner solves an optimal control problem and the aerodynamic forces used in the dynamics model are determined by a neural surrogate model. This enables us to model complex subsonic flow conditions encountered in aerial robotics and to overcome the limited applicability of existing co-design methods. These limitations stem from the simplifying assumptions they require for computational tractability to either the planner or the aerodynamics. We validate our method on two complex dynamic tasks for fixed-wing gliders: perching and a short landing. Our optimized designs improve task performance compared to an evolutionary baseline in a fraction of the computation time.

arXiv:2603.06987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying visuomotor robots at scale is challenging due to the potential for anomalous failures to degrade performance, cause damage, or endanger human life. Bimanual manipulators are no exception; these robots have vast state spaces comprised of high-dimensional images and proprioceptive signals. Explicitly defining failure modes within such state spaces is infeasible. In this work, we overcome these challenges by training a probabilistic, history informed, world model within the compressed latent space of a pretrained vision foundation model (NVIDIA's Cosmos Tokenizer). The model outputs uncertainty estimates alongside its predictions that serve as non-conformity scores within a conformal prediction framework. We use these scores to develop a runtime monitor, correlating periods of high uncertainty with anomalous failures. To test these methods, we use the simulated Push-T environment and the Bimanual Cable Manipulation dataset, the latter of which we introduce in this work. This new dataset features trajectories with multiple synchronized camera views, proprioceptive signals, and annotated failures from a challenging data center maintenance task. We benchmark our methods against baselines from the anomaly detection and out-of-distribution detection literature, and show that our approach considerably outperforms statistical techniques. Furthermore, we show that our approach requires approximately one twentieth of the trainable parameters as the next-best learning-based approach, yet outperforms it by 3.8% in terms of failure detection rate, paving the way toward safely deploying manipulator robots in real-world environments where reliability is non-negotiable.

arXiv:2603.07264v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data-efficient learning remains a central challenge in autonomous driving due to the high cost and safety risks of large-scale real-world interaction. Although world-model-based reinforcement learning enables policy optimization through latent imagination, existing approaches often lack explicit mechanisms to encode spatial and kinematic structure essential for driving tasks. In this work, we build upon the Recurrent State-Space Model (RSSM) and propose a kinematics-aware latent world model framework for autonomous driving. Vehicle kinematic information is incorporated into the observation encoder to ground latent transitions in physically meaningful motion dynamics, while geometry-aware supervision regularizes the RSSM latent state to capture task-relevant spatial structure beyond pixel reconstruction. The resulting structured latent dynamics improve long-horizon imagination fidelity and stabilize policy optimization. Experiments in a driving simulation benchmark demonstrate consistent gains over both model-free and pixel-based world-model baselines in terms of sample efficiency and driving performance. Ablation studies further verify that the proposed design enhances spatial representation quality within the latent space. These results suggest that integrating kinematic grounding into RSSM-based world models provides a scalable and physically grounded paradigm for autonomous driving policy learning.

arXiv:2603.07404v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision language action models (VLAs) are increasingly used for Physical AI, but deploying a pre-trained VLA model to unseen environments, embodiments, or tasks still requires adaptation. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), especially LoRA, is common for VLA policies, yet the exposed capacity knob, the rank, does not transfer uniformly: robotics transfer exhibits a higher and task-varying intrinsic rank than language fine-tuning. Small ranks suffice for LLMs (e.g., $r \in \{4, 8\}$), while spectral analyses indicate VLAs may require much larger ranks (e.g., $r \approx 128$) or near-full rank, a mismatch that worsens in multi-task settings. We present LoRA-SP (Select-Prune), a rank-adaptive fine-tuning method that replaces fixed-rank updates with input- and layer-wise capacity. LoRA-SP uses an SVD-style parameterization with a small router whose nonnegative scores act as singular values over a shared vector bank. The active set is chosen by an energy target on the cumulative squared scores $E(k) \ge \eta$, providing a direct link to approximation error via our spectral analysis. During training, $\eta$ concentrates energy on a few directions and teaches the router to rely on fewer vectors while preserving accuracy. This yields compact adapters that reduce cross-task interference and improve generalization. On four real-robot manipulation tasks collected on an unseen AgileX PiPER arm, across two VLA backbones ($\pi_0$ and SmolVLA), LoRA-SP matches or exceeds full fine-tuning with far fewer trainable parameters, and improves multi-task success by up to 31.6% over standard LoRA while remaining robust to rank choice.

arXiv:2603.07516v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interaction is one of the core abilities of humanoid robots. However, most existing frameworks focus on non-interactive whole-body control, which limits their practical applicability. In this work, we develop InterReal, a unified physics-based imitation learning framework for Real-world human-object Interaction (HOI) control. InterReal enables humanoid robots to track HOI reference motions, facilitating the learning of fine-grained interactive skills and their deployment in real-world settings. Within this framework, we first introduce a HOI motion data augmentation scheme with hand-object contact constraints, and utilize the augmented motions to improve policy stability under object perturbations. Second, we propose an automatic reward learner to address the challenge of large-scale reward shaping. A meta-policy guided by critical tracking error metrics explores and allocates reward signals to the low-level reinforcement learning objective, which enables more effective learning of interactive policies. Experiments on HOI tasks of box-picking and box-pushing demonstrate that InterReal achieves the best tracking accuracy and the highest task success rate compared to recent baselines. Furthermore, we validate the framework on the real-world robot Unitree G1, which demonstrates its practical effectiveness and robustness beyond simulation.

arXiv:2603.07618v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective exoskeleton assistance requires co-adaptation: as the device alters joint dynamics, the user reorganizes neuromuscular coordination, creating a non-stationary learning problem. Most learning-based approaches do not explicitly account for the sequential nature of human motor adaptation, leading to training instability and poorly timed assistance. We propose Staged Multi-Agent Training (SMAT), a four-stage curriculum designed to mirror how users naturally acclimate to a wearable device. In SMAT, a musculoskeletal human actor and a bilateral hip exoskeleton actor are trained progressively: the human first learns unassisted gait, then adapts to the added device mass; the exoskeleton subsequently learns a positive assistance pattern against a stabilized human policy, and finally both agents co-adapt with full torque capacity and bidirectional feedback. We implement SMAT in the MyoAssist simulation environment using a 26-muscle lower-limb model and an attached hip exoskeleton. Our musculoskeletal simulations demonstrate that the learned exoskeleton control policy produces an average 10.1% reduction in hip muscle activation relative to the no-assist condition. We validated the learned controller in an offline setting using open-source gait data, then deployed it to a physical hip exoskeleton for treadmill experiments with five subjects. The resulting policy delivers consistent assistance and predominantly positive mechanical power without the need for any explicitly imposed timing shift (mean positive power: 13.6 W at 6 Nm RMS torque to 23.8 W at 9.3 Nm RMS torque, with minimal negative power) consistently across all subjects without subject-specific retraining.

arXiv:2603.07648v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promising potential for robotic manipulation tasks. However, real-world robotic tasks often involve long-horizon, multi-step problem-solving and require generalization for continual skill acquisition, extending beyond single actions or skills. These challenges present significant barriers for existing VLA models, which use monolithic action decoders trained on aggregated data, resulting in poor scalability. To address these challenges, we propose AtomicVLA, a unified planning-and-execution framework that jointly generates task-level plans, atomic skill abstractions, and fine-grained actions. AtomicVLA constructs a scalable atomic skill library through a Skill-Guided Mixture-of-Experts (SG-MoE), where each expert specializes in mastering generic yet precise atomic skills. Furthermore, we introduce a flexible routing encoder that automatically assigns dedicated atomic experts to new skills, enabling continual learning. We validate our approach through extensive experiments. In simulation, AtomicVLA outperforms $\pi_{0}$ by 2.4\% on LIBERO, 10\% on LIBERO-LONG, and outperforms $\pi_{0}$ and $\pi_{0.5}$ by 0.22 and 0.25 in average task length on CALVIN. Additionally, our AtomicVLA consistently surpasses baselines by 18.3\% and 21\% in real-world long-horizon tasks and continual learning. These results highlight the effectiveness of atomic skill abstraction and dynamic expert composition for long-horizon and lifelong robotic tasks. The project page is \href{https://zhanglk9.github.io/atomicvla-web/}{here}.

arXiv:2603.07909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate intraoperative navigation is essential for robot-assisted endoluminal intervention, but remains difficult because of limited endoscopic field of view and dynamic artifacts. Existing navigation platforms often rely on external localization technologies, such as electromagnetic tracking or shape sensing, which increase hardware complexity and remain vulnerable to intraoperative anatomical mismatch. We present a vision-only autonomy framework that performs long-horizon bronchoscopic navigation using preoperative CT-derived virtual targets and live endoscopic video, without external tracking during navigation. The framework uses hierarchical long-short agents: a short-term reactive agent for continuous low-latency motion control, and a long-term strategic agent for decision support at anatomically ambiguous points. When their recommendations conflict, a world-model critic predicts future visual states for candidate actions and selects the action whose predicted state best matches the target view. We evaluated the system in a high-fidelity airway phantom, three ex vivo porcine lungs, and a live porcine model. The system reached all planned segmental targets in the phantom, maintained 80\% success to the eighth generation ex vivo, and achieved in vivo navigation performance comparable to the expert bronchoscopist. These results support the preclinical feasibility of sensor-free autonomous bronchoscopic navigation.

arXiv:2603.07973v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hierarchical multi-robot exploration commonly decouples frontier allocation from local navigation, which can make the system brittle in dense and dynamic environments. Because the allocator lacks direct awareness of execution difficulty, robots may cluster at bottlenecks, trigger oscillatory replanning, and generate redundant coverage. We propose VORL-EXPLORE, a hybrid learning and planning framework that addresses this limitation through execution fidelity, a shared estimate of local navigability that couples task allocation with motion execution. This fidelity signal is incorporated into a fidelity-coupled Voronoi objective with inter-robot repulsion to reduce contention before it emerges. It also drives a risk-aware adaptive arbitration mechanism between global A* guidance and a reactive reinforcement learning policy, balancing long-range efficiency with safe interaction in confined spaces. The framework further supports online self-supervised recalibration of the fidelity model using pseudo-labels derived from recent progress and safety outcomes, enabling adaptation to non-stationary obstacles without manual risk tuning. We evaluate this capability separately in a dedicated severe-traffic ablation. Extensive experiments in randomized grids and a Gazebo factory scenario show high success rates, shorter path length, lower overlap, and robust collision avoidance. The source code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

arXiv:2603.07998v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work introduces the Drag-Aware Aerodynamic Manipulability (DAAM), a geometric framework for control allocation in redundant multirotors. By equipping the propeller spin-rate space with a Riemannian metric based on the remaining symmetric acceleration capacity of each motor, the formulation explicitly accounts for motor torque limits and aerodynamic drag. Mapping this metric through the nonlinear thrust law to the generalized force space yields a state-dependent manipulability volume. The log-determinant of this volume acts as a natural barrier function, strictly penalizing drag-induced saturation and low-spin thrust loss. Optimizing this volume along the allocation fibers provides a redundancy resolution strategy inherently invariant to arbitrary coordinate scaling in the generalized-force space. Analytically, we prove that the resulting optimal allocations locally form smooth embedded manifolds, and we geometrically characterize the global jump discontinuities that inevitably arise from physical actuator limits and spin-rate sign transitions.

arXiv:2603.08124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We revisit Vision-Language-Action through a neuroscience-inspired triad. Biologically, the Cerebrum provides stable high-level multimodal priors and remains frozen; the Pons Adapter integrates these cortical features with real-time proprioceptive inputs and compiles intent into execution-ready tokens; and the Cerebellum (ParaCAT) performs fast, parallel categorical decoding for online control, with hysteresis/EMA/temperature/entropy for stability. A fixed-ratio schedule and two-stage feature caching make the system compute-aware and reproducible. Inspired by active, foveated vision, our wrist ROIs are geometrically tied to the end-effector via calibrated projection, providing a movement-stabilized, high-resolution view that is sensitive to fine-grained pose changes and complements the global context of the main view. The design is modular: upgrading the Cerebrum only retrains the Pons; changing robots only trains the Cerebellum; cerebellum-only RL can further refine control without touching high-level semantics. As a concept-and-protocol paper with preliminary evidence, we outline a timing protocol under matched conditions (GPU, resolution, batch) to verify anticipated efficiency gains. We also report preliminary LIBERO evidence showing that split feature caching reduces training time (7.5h to 4.5h) and improves average success (86.5% to 92.5%) under official N1.5 head-only training, and that SaiVLA0 reaches 99.0% mean success.

arXiv:2603.08269v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In-context imitation learning allows robots to acquire skills from demonstrations, yet one-shot trajectory generation remains fragile under environmental variation. We propose SAIL, a framework that reframes robot imitation as an iterative refinement problem capable of scaling with test-time compute. SAIL utilizes Monte Carlo Tree Search, where each node is a complete trajectory and edges correspond to trajectory refinements. The process is guided by three core components: an automated archive of successful trajectories for contextually relevant retrieval, a vision language model-based scoring mechanism for trajectory evaluation, and a step-level feedback that provides trajectory-aligned scores for iterative refinement. Experiments across six diverse manipulation tasks in simulation and real-world validation clearly demonstrate that increasing test-time compute consistently improves success rates, achieving up to 95% on complex tasks. Our results suggest that trajectory-level test-time scaling is a robust path toward more generalizable robotic agents.

arXiv:2603.08324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robot-assisted endoluminal procedures are increasingly used for early cancer intervention. However, the intricate, narrow and tortuous pathways within the luminal anatomy pose substantial difficulties for robot navigation. Vision-based navigation offers a promising solution, but existing localization approaches are error-prone due to tissue deformation, in vivo artifacts and a lack of distinctive landmarks for consistent localization. This paper presents a novel EndoSERV localization method to address these challenges. It includes two main parts, \textit{i.e.}, \textbf{SE}gment-to-structure and \textbf{R}eal-to-\textbf{V}irtual mapping, and hence the name. For long-range and complex luminal structures, we divide them into smaller sub-segments and estimate the odometry independently. To cater for label insufficiency, an efficient transfer technique maps real image features to the virtual domain to use virtual pose ground truth. The training phases of EndoSERV include an offline pretraining to extract texture-agnostic features, and an online phase that adapts to real-world conditions. Extensive experiments based on both public and clinical datasets have been performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method even without any real pose labels.

arXiv:2603.08399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite remarkable achievements in single-agent offline reinforcement learning (RL), multi-agent RL (MARL) has struggled to adopt this paradigm, largely persisting with on-policy training and self-play from scratch. One reason for this gap comes from the instability of non-linear value decomposition, leading prior works to avoid complex mixing networks in favor of linear value decomposition (e.g., VDN) with value regularization used in single-agent setups. In this work, we analyze the source of instability in non-linear value decomposition within the offline MARL setting. Our observations confirm that they induce value-scale amplification and unstable optimization. To alleviate this, we propose a simple technique, scale-invariant value normalization (SVN), that stabilizes actor-critic training without altering the Bellman fixed point. Empirically, we examine the interaction among key components of offline MARL (e.g., value decomposition, value learning, and policy extraction) and derive a practical recipe that unlocks its full potential.

arXiv:2603.08420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) are rapidly transforming research in chemistry and materials science to accelerate new discoveries. Mobile robot chemists (MRCs) play a pivotal role by autonomously navigating the lab to transport samples, effectively connecting synthesis, analysis, and characterisation equipment. The instruments within an SDL are typically designed or retrofitted to be accessed by both human and robotic chemists, ensuring operational flexibility and integration between manual and automated workflows. In many scenarios, human and robotic chemists may need to use the same equipment simultaneously. Currently, MRCs rely on simple LiDAR-based obstruction detection, which forces the robot to passively wait if a human is present. This lack of situational awareness leads to unnecessary delays and inefficient coordination in time-critical automated workflows in human-robot shared labs. To address this, we present an initial study of an embodied, AI-driven perception method that facilitates proactive human-robot interaction in shared-access scenarios. Our method features a hierarchical human intention prediction model that allows the robot to distinguish between preparatory actions (waiting) and transient interactions (accessing the instrument). Our results demonstrate that the proposed approach enhances efficiency by enabling proactive human-robot interaction, streamlining coordination, and potentially increasing the efficiency of autonomous scientific labs.

arXiv:2603.08475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zero-shot open-vocabulary object navigation has progressed rapidly with the emergence of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs), now widely used as high-level decision-makers instead of end-to-end policies. Although effective, such systems often rely on iterative large-model queries at inference time, introducing latency and computational overhead that limit real-time deployment. To address this problem, we repurpose ray frontiers (R2F), a recently proposed frontier-based exploration paradigm, to develop an LLM-free framework for indoor open-vocabulary object navigation. While ray frontiers were originally used to bias exploration using semantic cues carried along rays, we reinterpret frontier regions as explicit, direction-conditioned semantic hypotheses that serve as navigation goals. Language-aligned features accumulated along out-of-range rays are stored sparsely at frontiers, where each region maintains multiple directional embeddings encoding plausible unseen content. In this way, navigation then reduces to embedding-based frontier scoring and goal tracking within a classical mapping and planning pipeline, eliminating iterative large-model reasoning. We further introduce R2F-VLN, a lightweight extension for free-form language instructions using syntactic parsing and relational verification without additional VLM or LLM components. Experiments in Habitat-sim and on a real robotic platform demonstrate competitive state-of-the-art zero-shot performance with real-time execution, achieving up to 6 times faster runtime than VLM-based alternatives.