The paper introduces SafeHarness, an obstacle‑aware framework that improves the safety of coding agents for robot manipulation. By decomposing tasks into route planning and contact execution, the harness enables the agent to prioritize collision avoidance, achieving 71.9% task success and 87.5% collision avoidance—significantly better than prior methods. The study demonstrates that safety constraints can be effectively integrated into language‑model‑driven robot controllers.
By Bingxin Xu, Yuzhang Shang, Zhen Dong, Emilio Ferrara
arXiv:2508. 19186v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reactive obstacle avoidance methods often cause agents to become trapped in local minima, because they can often only reason one step ahead (i.
By Christopher Chandler, Bernd Porr, Giulia Lafratta, Alice Miller
The paper introduces the Behavioral Constant-Time Motion Planner (B-CTMP), an extension of Constant-Time Motion Planning that handles two-step manipulation tasks in semi-structured environments. B-CTMP constructs neighborhoods in object-pose space and uses statistical certification to ensure a user-specified success rate, caching plans only when repeated rollouts meet this threshold. The method is evaluated on shelf picking, plug insertion, and wheel replacement, showing consistent success where baseline planners fail and rejecting infeasible poses in constant time.
By Nayesha Gandotra, Itamar Mishani, Lai Yuan, Oren Salzman, Maxim Likhachev
Physical Agentic AI proposes an architecture that links semantic planning with physical execution for robot crews. Each robot exposes a typed skill library, while a foundation model planner decomposes tasks into phases and assigns robot‑skill pairs. A Robot Orchestrator validates and authorizes one skill at a time, ensuring actions are grounded in robot capabilities, system state, and workflow constraints before actuation.
By Xinyuan Liu, Eren Sadikoglu, Riana Chatterjee, Ransalu Senanayake
arXiv:2607. 11119v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robot manipulation is a complex task that requires visual understanding, physical reasoning, planning, and closed-loop control.
By Hengyuan Hu, Priya Sundaresan, Jensen Gao, Dorsa Sadigh
The paper introduces URAI, a Universal Robot‑Agent Interface that separates robot control into two roles: a programming agent that writes reusable, task‑specific tools from intent, and an execution agent that calls these tools in a feedback loop. This design keeps high‑level decision making in the model while delegating low‑level motion to code, allowing tool revisions to persist across episodes without retraining the foundation model. Experiments on RoboDojo and AgileX tasks show significant gains in success rate, speed, and token efficiency compared to direct fingertip control and pre‑written programs.
By Shijia Ge, Alex Zhou, Jianshu Zeng, Yexing Wan, Di Wu, Zelin Zheng, Yazhe Wang, Zhiqi Jia, Xuan Shangguan, Jay Zhu, Yijun Liu, Lingyu He, Sihang Wu, Xiao He, Hongcheng Gao
arXiv:2606. 09749v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive end-to-end performance across a variety of robotic manipulation tasks.
By Seongbin Park, Fan Zhang, Baharan Mirzasoleiman, Shahriar Talebi, Nader Sehatbakhsh
CrossSafe proposes embodiment-conditioned safety filtering that uses a Hamilton‑Jacobi reachability value function shared across robots while conditioning on each robot’s morphology and kinematics via a morphology‑aware latent representation. The method performs reachability analysis directly in latent space, enabling a single policy trained on multiple bimanual robot embodiments and manipulation tasks to generalize zero‑shot to a held‑out embodiment and reduce collision rates. Experiments on five embodiments and five tasks demonstrate that training with more embodiments improves generalization.
By Ihab Tabbara, Yuxuan Yang, Hussein Sibai
arXiv:2608. 16889v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-horizon robot manipulation chains many contact-rich skills into one multi-stage task.
By Bingxin Xu, Yuzhang Shang, Emilio Ferrara
The paper introduces FailBank, a four‑stage self‑evolving framework that transforms runtime feedback from safety shields into lasting policy improvements for vision‑language‑action (VLA) models. By using a counterfactual correction teacher, outcome‑aware admission, and guarded LoRA updates, FailBank converts useful shield proposals into corrective targets while preserving successful actions as anchors. Experiments on the VLA‑Arena benchmark show that FailBank boosts task success rates by up to 8.5 percentage points and reduces cumulative policy cost by up to 35.6%, outperforming both base policies and traditional runtime shielding.
By Mingyue Cui, Zheyuan Liu, Yihan Zhu, Zheyuan Zhang, Meng Jiang
The paper introduces 2AM, a system that separates memory and action execution in long‑horizon robot manipulation. 2AM stores task memory exclusively in a multimodal Agent, while a single RGB‑based, stateless Action Model performs motion based on language and optional 2D hints. On the LIBERO‑Mem benchmark, 2AM achieves 76.3% average completion—over 61 points higher than the best baseline—demonstrating that agent‑side memory and precise steering of the Action Model can substantially improve performance.
By Yutong Hu, Fengjiao Chen, Xuezhi Cao, Renaud Detry
The paper introduces the Unified Path Planner (UPP), a graph‑search algorithm that balances safety and optimality by adaptively weighting heuristics and using a local inverse‑distance safety field. UPP auto‑tunes its parameters during search, guaranteeing suboptimality bounds while improving obstacle clearance. Evaluation on ten simulated environments shows UPP achieving a 0.94 OptiSafe score—significantly higher than existing methods—while adding only 0.5–1% to path length and maintaining a 100% success rate, with hardware validation on a TurtleBot confirming practical benefits.
By Jatin Kumar Arora, Soutrik Bandyopadhyay, Sunil Sulania, Shubhendu Bhasin