ObstaDiff is a diffusion-policy framework that introduces a lightweight obstacle-aware visual encoder to generate structured representations of targets, obstacles, and background. By aligning these representations, the policy produces end-effector trajectories that focus on a target-centered bottleneck pose while accounting for surrounding obstacles. In real-robot greenhouse trials, ObstaDiff achieved a 75.41% task success rate and an 8.20% obstacle collision rate, outperforming existing imitation-learning baselines in cluttered agricultural settings.
By Jiawen Wang, Kevin Yao, Khalid Jawed
arXiv:2510. 06277v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) offers a unified way to pursue diverse tasks, yet most existing methods rely on state- or position-based goal representations that are unavailable in real-world robotics.
By Fahim Shahriar, Cheryl Wang, Alireza Azimi, Gautham Vasan, Hany Hamed, Abhishek Naik, A. Rupam Mahmood, Colin Bellinger
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:2505. 03296v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Mixture of Discrete-time Gaussian Processes (MiDiGap), a novel approach for flexible policy representation and imitation learning in robot manipulation.
By Jan Ole von Hartz, Adrian R\"ofer, Joschka Boedecker, Abhinav Valada
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
EXPO-FT is a system that enables stable, sample‑efficient reinforcement learning fine‑tuning of pretrained Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) policies. It achieves perfect success on a range of manipulation tasks—such as routing string lights, striking a pool ball, and inserting a flower into a wine bottle—using only about 19.1 minutes of online robot data. The approach outperforms both RL-from-scratch and existing VLA fine‑tuning methods, and the authors provide an open‑source codebase to support wider adoption.
By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Tian Gao, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
arXiv:2606. 18634v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To locate a target object while exploring the unknown environment is a fundamental capability for autonomous agents, with applications ranging from search-and-rescue to field robots.
By Zecheng Yin, Benedict Jun Ma
arXiv:2603. 03953v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe visual navigation is critical for indoor mobile robots operating in cluttered environments.
By Jaewon Lee, Jaeseok Heo, Gunmin Lee, Howoong Jun, Jeongwoo Oh, Songhwai Oh
The paper presents Real‑Time EXPO‑FT, a reinforcement learning framework that fine‑tunes large Vision‑Language‑Action models for real‑time robotic control. It separates slow, expressive action generation from fast, reactive edits, allowing a lightweight policy to adjust actions based on the latest observation. Experiments on the Kinetix benchmark and four dynamic real‑world tasks show that Real‑Time EXPO‑FT achieves superior performance, improving policy success rates from 42% to 97% with only ten minutes of online data and no human intervention.
By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
arXiv:2606. 31377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning for long-horizon robotic manipulation is often limited by sparse and delayed rewards, while manually designing dense shaping signals is costly and brittle to changes in environments and object configurations.
By Yang Yang, Bingjie Chen, Zihan Wang, Yizhe Li, Guoping Pan, Yi Cheng, Houde Liu
arXiv:2607. 17574v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement-learning navigation policies for legged robots select actions reactively from current observations and short-term memory, with limited capacity to anticipate how moving obstacles will evolve in the near future.
By Yancheng Zhu, Wanli Ma, Chen Han, Irvin Haozhe Zhan, Bingfeng Qin, Yixin Xu
RoboCousin is an extensible simulation platform that transforms user-provided observations into reusable assets, scenes, and expert trajectories for bimanual robotic manipulation. It converts object images into simulation-ready models with visual, collision, semantic, and physical metadata, automatically generates grasp candidates, and builds digital cousins that vary objects, backgrounds, layouts, and language instructions while preserving task-relevant affordances. The platform supports both tabletop and room-level scene construction, and the authors release RoboCousin-OBD with over 3,000 annotated objects and 50 backgrounds, generating more than one million expert trajectories across 50 tasks, with simulation and real-robot experiments demonstrating comparable annotation quality and effective sim-to-real transfer.
By Jingxuan Zhu, Jingyi Li, LiangLiang Chen, Zhiyuan Jing, Jidong Zhang, Hongming Li