arXiv:2602. 02402v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simulating deformable objects under rich interactions remains a fundamental challenge for real-to-sim robot manipulation, with dynamics jointly driven by environmental effects and robot actions.
By Mu Huang, Hui Wang, Kerui Ren, Linning Xu, Yunsong Zhou, Mulin Yu, Bo Dai, Jiangmiao Pang
arXiv:2608. 06650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reduced-order models based on Cosserat-rod theory are now well established, and modeling theory is no longer the primary bottleneck in soft-robot control.
By Maximilian St\"olzle, Solange Gribonval, Daniel Feliu-Talegon, Vito Daniele Perfetta, Michele Martini, Chuhan Zhang, Kiwan Wong, Mohammed Tarnini, Anup Teejo Mathew, Federico Renda, Daniela Rus, Cosimo Della Santina
arXiv:2607. 06740v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Soft robots have attracted significant attention in applications such as medical intervention, rehabilitation, and robotic manipulation due to their inherent compliance, flexibility, and high degrees of freedom.
By Nilay Kushawaha, Muhammad Sunny Nazeer, Baljinder Singh Bal, Cecilia Laschi, Egidio Falotico
arXiv:2607. 09218v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Whole-arm manipulation involves direct contact with the environment while the robot completes a task by distributing contact across multiple links as contacts form, slide, and break.
By Rishabh Madan, Angchen Xie, Samantha Saak, Andres Blanco, Dohyeok Lee, Sarah Grace Brown, Yunting Yan, Mark Zolotas, Jose Barreiros, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee
arXiv:2606. 27475v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots trained on real world data tend to be imprecise, slow, and brittle to perturbations.
By Raymond Yu, William Huey, Mustafa Mukadam, Anusha Nagabandi, Abhishek Gupta
arXiv:2606. 13886v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel at mapping visual inputs and natural language instructions directly to robotic control policies.
By Namai Chandra, Shriram Damodaran, Lin Wang
arXiv:2607. 09218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Whole-arm manipulation involves direct contact with the environment while the robot completes a task by distributing contact across multiple links as contacts form, slide, and break.
By Rishabh Madan, Angchen Xie, Samantha Saak, Andres Blanco, Dohyeok Lee, Sarah Grace Brown, Yunting Yan, Mark Zolotas, Jose Barreiros, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee
arXiv:2609.08800v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Three properties determine whether a differentiable simulator can drive gradient-based optimization through contact: simulation accuracy, gradient re...
By Ale\v{s} Ku\v{c}era, Karel Zimmermann
arXiv:2604. 13733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables high-frequency, closed-loop control for robotic manipulation, but scaling to long-horizon tasks with sparse or imperfect rewards remains difficult due to inefficient exploration and poor credit assignment.
By Angelo Moroncelli, Roberto Zanetti, Marco Maccarini, Loris Roveda
arXiv:2506. 04147v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Building capable household and industrial robots requires mastering the control of versatile, high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) systems such as mobile manipulators.
By Jiaheng Hu, Peter Stone, Roberto Mart\'in-Mart\'in
arXiv:2606. 11525v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contrastive Reinforcement Learning (CRL) has seen recent success in a wide variety of goal-conditioned robotics tasks by learning structured representations of the dynamics.
By Tongle Shen, Caleb Chuck, Fan Feng, Biwei Huang
ULTRA is a unified framework for autonomous humanoid whole-body locomotion and manipulation that overcomes limitations of prior methods by combining a physics-driven neural retargeting algorithm with a multimodal controller. The retargeting algorithm translates large-scale motion capture data into physically plausible humanoid motions, while the controller learns to handle both dense motion references and sparse task specifications using a range of sensory inputs, from accurate motion-capture states to noisy egocentric vision. In simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid, ULTRA demonstrates improved generalization and robustness, enabling coordinated whole-body behavior from sparse intent without relying on test-time reference motions.
By Xialin He, Sirui Xu, Xinyao Li, Runpei Dong, Liuyu Bian, Yu-Xiong Wang, Liang-Yan Gui