Related papers: OmniVIC: A Self-Improving Variable Impedance Contr…

We propose a CompliantVLA-adaptor that augments the state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models with vision-language model (VLM)-informed context-aware variable impedance control (VIC) to improve the safety and effectiveness of…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm in complex and continuous robotic tasks, however, safe exploration has been one of the main challenges, especially in contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured…

Humanoid robots must adapt their contact behavior to diverse objects and tasks, yet most controllers rely on fixed, hand-tuned impedance gains and gripper settings. This paper introduces HumanoidVLM, a vision-language driven retrieval…

Contact-rich manipulation tasks, such as wiping and assembly, require accurate perception of contact forces, friction changes, and state transitions that cannot be reliably inferred from vision alone. Despite growing interest in…

Safe and trustworthy Human Robot Interaction (HRI) requires robots not only to complete tasks but also to regulate impedance and speed according to scene context and human proximity. We present SafeHumanoid, an egocentric vision pipeline…

Bimanual mobile manipulation requires a seamless integration between high-level semantic reasoning and safe, compliant physical interaction - a challenge that end-to-end models approach opaquely and classical controllers lack the context to…

In human-robot systems, ensuring safety during force control in the presence of both internal and external disturbances is crucial. As a typical loosely coupled floating-base robot system, the supernumerary robotic leg (SRL) system is…

Smooth behaviors are preferable for many contact-rich manipulation tasks. Impedance control arises as an effective way to regulate robot movements by mimicking a mass-spring-damping system. Consequently, the robot behavior can be determined…

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models build upon vision-language foundations, and have achieved promising results and exhibit the possibility of task generalization in robot manipulation. However, due to the heterogeneity of tactile…

Robotic real-world reinforcement learning (RL) with vision-language-action (VLA) models is bottlenecked by sparse, handcrafted rewards and inefficient exploration. We introduce VLAC, a general process reward model built upon InternVL and…

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong generalization for robotic action prediction through large-scale vision-language pretraining. However, most existing models rely solely on RGB cameras, limiting their perception and,…

In intelligent manufacturing, robots are asked to dynamically adapt their behaviours without reducing productivity. Human teaching, where an operator physically interacts with the robot to demonstrate a new task, is a promising strategy to…

Robots that physically interact with their surroundings, in order to accomplish some tasks or assist humans in their activities, require to exploit contact forces in a safe and proficient manner. Impedance control is considered as a…

Multi-task ``vision-language-action'' (VLA) models have recently demonstrated increasing promise as generalist foundation models for robotics, achieving non-trivial performance out of the box on new tasks in new environments. However, for…

Utilizing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for robotic manipulation represents a novel paradigm, aiming to enhance the model's ability to generalize to new objects and instructions. However, due to variations in camera specifications and…

The ability to flexibly leverage limbs for loco-manipulation is essential for enabling autonomous robots to operate in unstructured environments. Yet, prior work on loco-manipulation is often constrained to specific tasks or predetermined…

Robotic manipulation has seen rapid progress with vision-language-action (VLA) policies. However, visuo-tactile perception is critical for contact-rich manipulation, as tasks such as insertion are difficult to complete robustly using vision…

Although Model Predictive Control (MPC) can effectively predict the future states of a system and thus is widely used in robotic manipulation tasks, it does not have the capability of environmental perception, leading to the failure in some…

This paper presents OmniVL, a new foundation model to support both image-language and video-language tasks using one universal architecture. It adopts a unified transformer-based visual encoder for both image and video inputs, and thus can…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) of contact-rich manipulation tasks has yielded impressive results in recent years. While many studies in RL focus on varying the observation space or reward model, few efforts focused on the choice of action…