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Active perception enables robots to dynamically gather information by adjusting their viewpoints, a crucial capability for interacting with complex, partially observable environments. In this paper, we present AP-VLM, a novel framework that…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems have shown strong potential for language-driven robotic manipulation. However, scaling them to long-horizon tasks remains challenging. Existing pipelines typically separate data collection, policy…
We present a novel approach for generating plausible verbal interactions between virtual human-like agents and user avatars in shared virtual environments. Sense-Plan-Ask, or SPA, extends prior work in propositional planning and natural…
Robot learning approaches such as behavior cloning and reinforcement learning have shown great promise in synthesizing robot skills from human demonstrations in specific environments. However, these approaches often require task-specific…
The development of embodied agents that can communicate with humans in natural language has gained increasing interest over the last years, as it facilitates the diffusion of robotic platforms in human-populated environments. As a step…
Grounded understanding of natural language in physical scenes can greatly benefit robots that follow human instructions. In object manipulation scenarios, existing end-to-end models are proficient at understanding semantic concepts, but…
What is a good visual representation for autonomous agents? We address this question in the context of semantic visual navigation, which is the problem of a robot finding its way through a complex environment to a target object, e.g. go to…
Traditional AI reasoning techniques have been used successfully in many domains, including logistics, scheduling and game playing. This paper is part of a project aimed at investigating how such techniques can be extended to coordinate…
Affordances describe the possibilities for an agent to perform actions with an object. While the significance of the affordance concept has been previously studied from varied perspectives, such as psychology and cognitive science, these…
Traditional AI reasoning techniques have been used successfully in many domains, including logistics, scheduling and game playing. This paper is part of a project aimed at investigating how such techniques can be extended to coordinate…
Embodied agents operating in open environments must translate high-level instructions into grounded, executable behaviors, often requiring coordinated use of both hands. While recent foundation models offer strong semantic reasoning,…
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for generalist robot manipulation, yet they remain limited by insufficient spatial reasoning, particularly in determining where to interact in complex visual scenes. While…
The global rise in the number of people with physical disabilities, in part due to improvements in post-trauma survivorship and longevity, has amplified the demand for advanced assistive technologies to improve mobility and independence.…
Interactions with articulated objects are a challenging but important task for mobile robots. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel closed-loop control pipeline, which integrates manipulation priors from affordance estimation with…
Autonomous agentic AI systems powered by vision-language models (VLMs) are rapidly advancing toward real-world deployment, yet their cross-modal reasoning capabilities introduce new attack surfaces for adversarial manipulation that exploit…
Natural language provides an accessible and expressive interface to specify long-term tasks for robotic agents. However, non-experts are likely to specify such tasks with high-level instructions, which abstract over specific robot actions…
Representing a scene and its constituent objects from raw sensory data is a core ability for enabling robots to interact with their environment. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for scene understanding, leveraging a hierarchical…
Foundation models, including large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), have recently enabled novel approaches to robot autonomy and human-robot interfaces. In parallel, vision-language-action models (VLAs) or large…
Affordances have been introduced in literature as action opportunities that objects offer, and used in robotics to semantically represent their interconnection. However, when considering an environment instead of an object, the problem…
Long-horizon robotic manipulation poses significant challenges for autonomous systems, requiring extended reasoning, precise execution, and robust error recovery across complex sequential tasks. Current approaches, whether based on static…