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: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
arXiv:2605. 13548v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing robotic foundation models, while powerful, are predicated on an implicit assumption of temporal homogeneity: treating all actions as equally informative during optimization.
By Daojie Peng, Fulong Ma, Jiahang Cao, Qiang Zhang, Xupeng Xie, Jian Guo, Ping Luo, Andrew F. Luo, Boyu Zhou, Jun Ma
Planning contact-rich whole-arm manipulation is challenging because interactions that involve extended robot geometry give rise to complex contact dynamics that are difficult to model accurately. This creates a need for planning principles that do not rely heavily on precise contact models.