arXiv:2511. 06667v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: With the explosive growth of rigid-body simulators, policy learning in simulation has become the de facto standard for most rigid morphologies.
arXiv:2608. 00484v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Soft robotic substrates are promising for Physical Reservoir Computing (PRC) because their compliant nonlinear dynamics can provide temporal memory, high-dimensional state transformations, and efficient inference.
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.
arXiv:2510. 09497v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In endovascular surgery, endovascular interventionists push a thin tube called a catheter, guided by a thin wire to a treatment site inside the patient's blood vessels to treat various conditions such as blood clots, aneurysms, and malformations.
arXiv:2410. 24035v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generating robust and reactive manipulation strategies that can adapt to changing context information is a challenging task in robotics.
The paper presents a Bayesian deep learning approach for active exploration in model-based reinforcement learning applied to robot manipulation. By improving model calibration and actively selecting transitions that maximize information gain, the method enhances data efficiency during a preliminary exploration phase. Experiments on a realistic robotic arm simulator demonstrate that the approach achieves comparable performance to existing methods while requiring significantly fewer robot executions.
arXiv:2609.21138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Octopus crawling motivates soft robots that exploit redundancy, yet discovering and organizing diverse coordination modes for adaptation remains chal...
The paper introduces TacEx, a tactile‑curiosity framework that guides reinforcement learning agents to explore contact dynamics by focusing epistemic uncertainty on the tactile channel. By anchoring curiosity to touch, robots learn to manipulate and grasp objects without task rewards or demonstrations, generating an interaction‑dense dataset that supports offline pick‑and‑place policy learning. TacEx also enhances vision‑language‑action models through post‑training, improving downstream performance while remaining sample‑efficient.
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.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong capabilities in robotic manipulation by integrating visual perception, language understanding, and robot action generation. Existing research has primarily focused on improving model architectures, training strategies, and dataset scale, while little attention has been paid to how demonstrations are collected and organized.
Shape-Aware Neural Time Fields is a physics‑informed neural motion planning framework that learns a reusable travel‑time (cost‑to‑go) representation for rigid‑body motion, explicitly accounting for distinct geometric restrictions on translation and rotation. The learned field captures local motion difficulty and is combined with a sampling‑based planner that balances progress toward the goal with the cost of reaching nearby poses. Experiments on 2D and 3D planning tasks and non‑prehensile manipulation show substantial improvements in planning success and inference efficiency over neural baselines, while remaining competitive with classical planners at lower planning times, and closed‑loop pushing tests demonstrate fast replanning for reactive execution.
arXiv:2608. 12063v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Integrating locomotion and manipulation is essential for robot autonomy, but scaling standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) to complex tasks is severely bottlenecked by the slow, manual process of dense reward shaping.