arXiv AI

AeroManip-VLA: Scalable Vision-Language-Action Learning for Aerial Manipulation with RL-Generated Demonstrations

arXiv AI
Jul 9

Vision Language Action (VLA) Models for Unmanned Aerial Robotics and Bimanual Manipulation: A Review

arXiv:2607. 06706v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Language Action (VLA) models unify visual perception, natural-language understanding, and action generation within a single foundation model, allowing a robot to follow instructions such as fold the towel or fly to the red building directly from camera images.

By Inkyu Sa, Chanoh Park, Hea-Min Lee, Donghee Noh, Ho Seok Ahn
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

arXiv:2606. 08881v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored.

By Yi Yu, Xinchuan Qiu
arXiv AI
Jun 4

VISTA: Vision-Grounded and Physics-Validated Adaptation of UMI data for VLA Training

arXiv:2606. 04708v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) enables scalable real-world robot data collection without hardware-specific teleoperation, yet leveraging UMI data to train large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remains fundamentally challenging.

By Siyuan Yang, Linzheng Guo, Ouyang Lu, Zhaxizhuoma, Daoran Zhang, Xinmiao Wang, Ting Xiao, Fangzheng Yan, Zhijun Chen, Yan Ding, Chao Yu, Chenjia Bai, Xuelong Li
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 3

VISTA: Vision-Grounded and Physics-Validated Adaptation of UMI data for VLA Training

Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) enables scalable real-world robot data collection without hardware-specific teleoperation, yet leveraging UMI data to train large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remains fundamentally challenging. We identify two critical mismatches: wrist-mounted fisheye views, with severe radial distortion and local gripper-centric perspectives, are out-of-distribution for pretrained VLMs; and human-collected trajectories frequently violate kinematic limits, incur collisions, or exceed controller bandwidth, teaching VLA policies physically infeasible actions.

arXiv AI
Sep 18

VLN on the Fly: An Onboard Vision-Language Navigation Stack for Aerial Robots

The paper introduces VLN on the Fly, an onboard vision‑language navigation stack for aerial robots that separates grounding, planning, and control into inspectable stages. A quantized vision‑language model grounds instructions to a coarse image cell, depth estimation lifts this to a 3D goal, a fast B‑spline planner generates a feasible trajectory, and a pretrained reinforcement learning policy translates the trajectory into motor commands. In controlled indoor flights, the stack achieved the target in 13 of 15 trials with a mean goal error of 5.72 cm and 39.3% GPU utilization, and successfully tracked collision‑free trajectories in cluttered environments.

By Marco S. Tayar, Felipe Tommaselli, Gianluca Capezutto, Pedro Antonio Rabelo Saraiva, Pedro H. V. de Freitas, Lucas Kido, Guilherme Sonego, Ricardo V. Godoy, Marcelo Becker
arXiv AI
Sep 21

KnowDemo: Knowledge-Guided Robot Demonstration Generation from Human Videos

KnowDemo is a framework that generates diverse robot demonstrations from human videos by leveraging structured manipulation knowledge. It uses a vision‑language model to extract task requirements and permissible execution variations, then resolves these against target‑scene entities to guide candidate generation and screening before motion planning. The resulting demonstrations feature multimodal behavior, alternative contact strategies, and valid subtask orders, and have been shown to improve planning success and enable sim‑to‑real policy transfer across three tasks.

By Zhiyuan Gao, Yanxiang Zhan, Mohammad Khoshnazar, Jeroen Sch\"afer, Michael Beetz
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 19

Pose6DAug: Physically Plausible Multi-view Object Swapping for Robot Data Augmentation

arXiv:2606. 20118v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have shown strong potential for general-purpose manipulation, yet they often fail on novel, out-of-distribution objects whose appearance or geometry deviates from the training distribution.

By Jonghoon Lee, Seong Hyeon Park, Byungwoo Jeon, Minha Lee, Jinwoo Shin
arXiv AI
Aug 11

RecoverFly: A Failure-Aware Reinforcement Learning Post-Training Framework for Aerial Vision-Language Navigation

arXiv:2608. 09467v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicle vision-language navigation (UAV-VLN) requires agents to translate visual observations and language instructions into reliable flight actions in complex environments.

By Boxiong Wang, Hui Kang, Geng Sun, Jiahui Li, Chao Yu, Daxin Tian
arXiv AI
Sep 18

HIL-UMI: Bringing Human-in-the-Loop Post-Training of Vision-Language-Action Models to Universal Manipulation Interface

HIL-UMI is a policy-guided Universal Manipulation Interface that enables robot‑free, human‑in‑the‑loop post‑training of vision‑language‑action models. By querying the current policy during handheld demonstrations and using an Energy Score to detect out‑of‑distribution states, it selectively collects new data and refines a progress‑based advantage estimator. The updated estimator then drives advantage‑conditioned behavioral cloning, improving performance on long‑horizon and precise manipulation tasks while reducing per‑frame collection time compared to HG‑DAgger.

By Zimu Han, Yiming Zeng, Jiyao Zhang, Zihao Zhao, Yuanfei Wang, Yixiang Jin, Shiqi Li, Shuangben Chen, Wei Huang, Ruodai Li, Hui Shen, Hao Dong
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 6

Simple-to-Complex Structured Demonstrations for Vision-Language-Action Learning

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.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 10

RecoverFly: A Failure-Aware Reinforcement Learning Post-Training Framework for Aerial Vision-Language Navigation

Unmanned aerial vehicle vision-language navigation (UAV-VLN) requires agents to translate visual observations and language instructions into reliable flight actions in complex environments. Although recent end-to-end UAV vision-language-action (UAV-VLA) policies reduce reliance on separately designed perception, planning, and control modules, their behavior-cloning objectives provide limited corrective supervision for interactive closed-loop execution.