Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) accelerate scientific discovery by automating experimental execution and optimization. AI agents can increasingly propose new experiments, but existing SDLs can only run the procedures they were built for. Adapting them to a new experiment still takes extensive manual engineering, which makes laboratory flexibility the bottleneck for scaling discovery. We introduce the self-building laboratory (SBL), which designs, configures, and operates its own laboratory setup given a high-level scientific goal. SBL starts from whatever already exists, from an empty room to a working SDL, and builds the missing capabilities: the lab layout, its digital twin, robot skills, and experimental workflows. We demonstrate the system working across different robots and setups, scaling from a single workstation to laboratories with several robots working together. We validate SBL's end-to-end capabilities through a real-world quantum-dot synthesis experiment. By shifting the role of human researchers from manually configuring and programming device automation to specifying scientific objectives, SBL makes scientific automation more accessible, flexible, and scalable. Project website: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23826
Robotic systems for environmental monitoring and ecological surveying in wetlands and swamps must operate across diverse terrestrial and aquatic conditions. Conventional fixed-geometry wheels cannot adapt their contact geometry to these varying conditions. This work presents MOSS (Multimodal Origami Swamp Robot System), a compact amphibious robotic platform with 3D-printed origami wheels. The compact crank mechanism switches the wheel between contracted and expanded configurations, changing its width, body diameter, and fin orientation simultaneously. The contracted configuration is better suited to efficient rolling on firmer ground, whereas the expanded configuration provides greater contact and terrain engagement on softer surfaces. MOSS was evaluated on soil, sand, mud with varying water content, and water, in addition to in-motion morphing and terrestrial-aquatic transition tests. The more energy-efficient wheel configuration depended on terrain. The contracted configuration achieved a lower cost of transport on firmer soil and mud, whereas the expanded configuration performed better on wetter mud, sand, and water, reducing the cost of transport by up to 29%. Expanded wheels also reduced slip in wet mud and reduced both slip and hub sinkage in sand. MOSS successfully completed configuration changes in $1.95 \pm 0.11$ s and demonstrated continuous locomotion across soil-mud-water transitions. Outdoor trials further demonstrated operation across natural deformable terrain and water. These results show that adaptive wheel geometry provides terrain-dependent locomotion benefits and enables a single compact platform to traverse substantially different terrestrial and aquatic conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23813
Progress estimators play an essential role in providing dense reward signals for reinforcement learning in robotic manipulation, but accurately assessing task progress can be much challenging. Existing methods heavily rely on expert data and naively assume that all actions within a demonstration contribute to task success. This assumption often breaks down in real-world scenarios, especially in high-precision manipulation, where subtle geometric errors can lead to task failure. Therefore, these methods can erroneously interpret human mistakes as meaningful progress, further corrupting progress learning. We argue that a key limitation is the lack of a global prior regarding task evaluation criteria, which is crucial for distinguishing meaningful progress from human mistakes. To this end, we propose PRIME, a novel progress estimator capable of learning precise progress estimation from imprecise demonstrations by aggregating experience across trajectories. PRIME constructs a weighted graph over observed states, connecting states across trajectories based on spatial proximity and visual consistency. Edge weights encode spatial distances as transition costs, and shortest-path search approximates the geodesic distance to success. Changes in this distance naturally distinguish advancement, stagnation, and setbacks without assuming monotonic progress over time. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real world on precise manipulation tasks show that PRIME is consistently effective across diverse tasks, and robust to data with varying degrees of suboptimality. Notably, the advantage of PRIME gets more pronounced in higher-precision scenarios, yielding up to a \(5\times\) improvement in policy success rate over the SFT baselines on charger insertion.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23769
Planning while moving faces an historical trade-off between deliberation and reactivity. A planner running concurrently with execution needs time to compute, so the robot must commit to an open-loop action chunk for that duration: a longer commitment buys a better plan at the cost of feedback frequency. Existing controllers fix this action commitment, and consequently the computation budget, before deployment. However, the optimal computation time is highly state-dependent (due to factors such as unmodeled dynamics, safety constraints, and marginal optimisation gains), i.e. dynamic, therefore offline static tuning risks leaving systems blind during critical maneuvers or unable to find global effective solutions. We cast the identification of the optimal computation budget as a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP) in which a single decision defines both the robot action commitments and the time allocated to the solver. To solve this, we train a reinforcement-learning policy conditioned on the current state, the executing plan, and inexpensive planner statistics. Across ground-robot navigation, agile quadrotor flight, and contact-rich manipulation, the learned policy changes its budget with the demands of the scenario, discovering efficient reasoning patterns that outperform fixed-budget baselines. this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23662
Geometric and Semantic Foundation models are becoming increasingly popular tools for generating spatial maps for robots. Recent work (e.g., FOUND-IT) has leveraged these tools to construct real-time, task-driven, and open-set 3D scene graphs from a single uncalibrated camera. However, while classical robot mapping techniques have undergone extensive system demonstrations, limited work has been done to develop both the fundamental and the systems wide advancements needed to integrate these new types of robot spatial memory into a full, useable autonomy pipeline. In this paper, we bridge this gap, and in doing so we also evaluate the effectiveness and limitations of this type of 3D memory. Towards this end, we integrate FOUND-IT into a mobile manipulator platform and demonstrate it is well-suited to support multiple objectives such as object change detection, support for multiple mapping sessions, determination of navigable paths, and directly support object grasping for the task of scene re-arrangement. Furthermore, we provide nuanced insights into the effectiveness and limitations of a monocular, foundation-model-driven 3D scene graph construction system using observations from rigorous on-robot experiments. Code is available at https://github. com/MIT-SPARK/FOUND-IT.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23622
Vision-language-action (VLA) models enable language-guided robot manipulation, but remain vulnerable to visual attacks that undermine user control over robot behavior. Prior studies optimize visual perturbations using fixed target supervision. However, the perturbation can change earlier actions and, in turn, the physical states reached later. As the attacked trajectory evolves, this supervision may no longer match the behavior needed at the states actually reached. Accurately matching these targets can therefore fail to advance the attacker-specified task. Even with suitable supervision, reducing average matching error does not ensure sustained task progress. The robot may still fail at a critical stage, and further updates can disrupt previously successful behavior. To address these limitations, we propose TRACO, a framework that enhances existing targeted visual attacks through closed-loop optimization. Its Execution-Driven Supervision rebuilds supervision for the states reached under attack to guide subsequent updates. Within this framework, Progress-Guided Selection focuses updates where progress stalls while maintaining supervision on the earlier behavior needed to reach that point. Experiments across VLA models and simulation environments show improved task-redirection success with TRACO, highlighting the security implications of closed-loop attack optimization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23566
Many manipulation tasks that are effortless for dexterous human hands remain challenging for robotic systems equipped with simple, task-specialized grippers. Industrial platforms commonly rely on end-effectors such as suction cups or parallel-jaw grippers, yet no single mode can reliably satisfy the diverse constraints encountered across different phases of complex manipulation tasks, including pickup, reorientation, insertion, and constrained placement. In this work, we investigate whether complementary simple grippers within a heterogeneous bimanual setup can collectively realize tasks that exceed the capability of any individual gripper alone. Given a single human demonstration specifying the desired object motion, we formulate embodiment-aware execution as a finite-horizon optimization over arm-trajectory assignments. At each segment, the planner determines whether single-arm manipulation or a coordinated dual arm handover is required, jointly reasoning over heterogeneous grasp feasibility, motion constraints, manipulability, and cross-gripper compatibility. Exploiting this formulation, we compute globally consistent assignments with explicit switching regularization. Experiments on a dual Franka FR3 platform equipped with suction and parallel-jaw grippers demonstrate improved feasibility and reliability in tasks that are infeasible under single-gripper execution.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23551
Legged robots equipped with manipulators offer promising capabilities for loco-manipulation tasks in unstructured environments. However, achieving task-consistent end-effector behavior during locomotion remains challenging due to terrain-induced disturbances and the strong coupling between locomotion and manipulation, particularly for small-scale quadruped platforms. A reinforcement-learning based whole-body control framework is proposed for quadruped loco-manipulation on complex terrain. The proposed framework combines a hybrid task representation with task-prioritized whole-body learning to coordinate locomotion and manipulation while preserving task-consistent end-effector behavior. A lightweight quadruped manipulator platform is further developed to validate the proposed framework on a small-scale quadruped system. Real-world experiments demonstrate successful deployment on complex terrains such as slopes up to 30 degrees, stairs, and deformable terrain. These results demonstrate the feasibility of deploying learned whole-body control policy for quadruped loco-manipulation in real-world environments and highlight the importance of task-consistent whole-body coordination for terrain-adaptive loco-manipulation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23548
Agents built on vision language models (VLMs) now compete with learned policies on robot manipulation leaderboards. We ask how far a coding agent can go when it controls a robot instead of a computer, and where it stops. Our system, HexaShell, keeps the harness thin: it only turns the agent's commands into robot motion. The agent drives a robot with two arms through one command line. It sees three RGB cameras and knows their calibration. After each failed attempt, the agent reads the log, finds the cause, and writes or fixes small programs called tools. In this way it keeps what it learns as code, as a coding agent does when it fixes a failing test. The tools may use only what the robot observes. They use triangulation to find where objects are, relative to each other and to the gripper. If two cameras see the same point, the point lies where the two camera rays meet. If a point lies on a known plane, such as the table or the top of a block, it lies where its ray meets that plane. When the head camera is not enough, the robot moves a wrist camera to get a second view. We build the tools on only ten layouts of one seed per task, then freeze them and test them on ten new layouts of the same seed. We use Codex with GPT-6-Astra at medium reasoning effort. On all 42 RoboDojo tasks, HexaShell reaches a success rate of 39.7% and a progress score of 48.0, averaged in the same way as the leaderboard. This is a new state of the art on RoboDojo. The limit is contact, not reasoning: pushing reaches 92.5% and memory tasks 65.0%, but tight insertion only 8.3%. When the agent fails, it usually sees the failure but cannot make the motion work. We open source the tools evolved so far at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23479
Humans manipulate objects within their hands through touch alone with remarkable ease, but for robots, achieving sustained real-world manipulation without vision remains an open challenge. Although reinforcement learning (RL) can generate sophisticated blind manipulation policies in simulation, transferring them to a real dexterous hand remains hindered by continuously changing contacts, motion-induced tactile information drift, and the gap between simulated and physical dynamics. We study this problem through Baoding ball rotation on the Shadow Dexterous Hand Lite, using only proprioception and binary tactile feedback as observations. We achieve successful zero-shot transfer through a combination of a sensor-aligned, coupling-aware embodiment in simulation, tactile calibration, and two novel episodic domain randomisations: slew-rate action limits and STuck-AT Taxels. On the physical hand, the policy achieves sustained blind Baoding rotation, completing 225 consecutive $\mathbf{180^\circ}$ rotations (112.5 full rotations) at $\sim0.36 \;\text{rot/s}$ in a single continuous trial without any vision or object-state information. Furthermore, we evaluate the contribution of tactile sensing relative to proprioception alone and identify the hand regions where tactile information is most important. This is the strongest reported hardware result for Baoding ball manipulation in both rotation count and speed, irrespective of the sensing modality used. By effectively bridging the sim-to-real gap, our framework sets a new benchmark for sustained tactile-driven dexterous manipulation on physical hardware.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23438
Rapid progress in embodied intelligence has enabled increasingly capable robots to follow language instructions and manipulate diverse objects. However, strong results in structured environments do not automatically transfer to open-world conditions, where clutter, occlusion, and changing viewpoints can obscure the spatial relationships required for action. To address this perceptual gap, a virtual active-perception paradigm is introduced. AWAM, an Active World-Action Model actively plans where to observe and imagines what will be seen along the planned trajectory before acting. Task-related virtual camera motion is predicted and used as a structured query into a geometry-conditioned world model, producing a reusable spatial prior for manipulation, which is later compressed into a fixed memory and fused with live observations through cross-attention for diffusion-based action prediction. AWAM achieves competitive success rates with 75.9% on LIBERO-Occ, 62.4% on LIBERO-Plus, 76.5% on RLBench-OG Occlusion1, and 94.4% in real-robot trials. These results support improved robustness to the evaluated occlusions and distribution shifts, addressing part of the gap between structured manipulation and less controlled environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23396
Robots manipulating objects in clutter must decide not only how to act, but also where to look. Although active camera motion can expose an occluded target, it may move the robot into an initial observation-state distribution that differs from the manipulation policy's training distribution. We identify this problem as first-frame distribution sensitivity: under perturbed starts in LIBERO, naively prepending camera repositioning to pi_0.5 reduces success from 46.3% to 11.5%. We introduce ActiveAlign, a data-adaptation framework that trains a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policy from the states at which active perception terminates. A learned viewpoint module first generates a camera trajectory. Offline, ActiveAlign uses closed-loop alignment to connect the trajectory endpoint to an existing demonstration, replays the remaining manipulation trajectory, and retains successful continuations for fine-tuning. At deployment, the same viewpoint module precedes the adapted VLA without modifying its architecture. Across 40 LIBERO tasks, ActiveAlign achieves 70.7% success with pi_0 and 72.7% with pi_0.5, outperforming their standard-training baselines by 40.0% and 26.4% respectively. Matched-state and data-matched controls support gains beyond prefix shortening and generic viewpoint augmentation; OpenVLA and GR00T N1 also show the same trend. Success rate under physical occlusion in real world increases from 35/90 to 83/90. These results show that active perception benefits manipulation when policy training is aligned with the observation and robot-state distribution induced by viewpoint selection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23378
When we say that a robot uses memory, does that memory actually play a role? Success-rate ablations alone cannot establish the use of task-relevant facts: they change information and computation together, while aggregate rates can hide offsetting gains and losses. We propose an Interventional Memory Evaluation Protocol (IMEP) for vision-language-action (VLA) systems to address four questions: (1) Does memory provide a net benefit? (2) Under what conditions does memory help? (3) Do changes to memory alter task outcomes? (4) Are these effects specific to task-relevant facts? At the retrieval interface, we compare target-fact substitutions with fact-preserving replacements, minimal numerical perturbations, and exact replicas, while assessing decision correctness separately from motor execution success. We evaluate within-episode, cross-episode, and agentic memory. In cross-episode learned-bank experiments, a one-unit-in-the-last-place (ULP) intervention, including its installation procedure, changes 11.9% of seed-paired outcomes, while changing key facts produces no clear additional effect over fact-preserving replacements. To examine when memory helps, we introduce ChainBench, where correct decisions require historical information unavailable in current observations. The full memory configuration raises task success from 39.1% to 74.3%, matching the oracle-decision condition under shared recorded executions. These results show that correct history can support robot decisions, but establishing whether a memory system realizes this benefit requires fact-specific evidence beyond aggregate success rates.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23372
Visual self-modelling lets robots learn body models from observations, but such models usually encode kinematics implicitly rather than exposing metric joint parameters for computation and control. Moreover, a good fit to images does not by itself establish accurate kinematics. Here we present an explicit analytic robot self-model that requires neither deformation networks nor URDF/CAD templates. Multi-view images and joint readings establish Gaussian appearance and provide motion evidence for rigid link assignments, whereas sparse end-effector poses independently identify metric screw axes. The resulting closed-form forward kinematics and analytic Jacobian can be evaluated beyond the fitting ranges. We validate the model on a simulated seven-axis arm, a simulated twelve-joint quadruped and a real six-axis arm. In simulation, it achieves millimetre-level reaching and pick-and-place, as well as closed-loop quadruped walking. On the real arm, it renders held-out configurations, predicts end-effector positions with a median error of 6.4 mm, compared with 11.7 mm for a calibrated nominal model, and supports reaching with external marker feedback. A controlled comparison shows that image fit alone is not enough: two Panda models differing only in their joint axes are 0.55 dB apart in PSNR, yet their end-effector prediction errors differ 13.7-fold.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15558
World-action models jointly predict actions and future world states, but long-horizon manipulation further requires language reasoning to plan subtask objectives, assess execution progress, and guide action selection. We present LAW, a closed-loop VLM--WAM framework that unifies language reasoning, action generation, and world modeling through semantic subtask progress. Within the LAW agent, a hybrid-expert vision-language model plans the remaining subtasks, estimates the values of and fuses actions proposed by a world-action model, and asynchronously assesses execution status to support continued execution and subtask transitions. Within the world-action model, Mixture-of-Transformer Experts integrates modality-specific and shared computation for joint video--action modeling. Dual-stream hierarchical visual memory maintains temporal context for both models, while subtask-local value learning aligns action evaluation with semantic objectives and preserves supervision from successful prefixes of failed trajectories. LAW achieves 94.21% average success across 50 RoboTwin tasks. Replacing the WAM backbone with OpenWAM-$alpha$ further raises the average success rate to 95.56%, establishing a new open-source state of the art on RoboTwin. Despite having only 2B parameters, our VLM also outperforms variants using Embodied-R1.5 and GPT-5.5 High. On three long-horizon real-robot tasks, LAW achieves 65% average success, compared with 28.33% for $pi_{0.5}$ and 25% for Fast-WAM.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23334
Long-horizon robotic tasks expose a fundamental limitation of current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models because their restricted temporal context pre-vents effective accumulation and reuse of past experiences. As a result, memory has become a fundamental component for enabling embodied agents to perform long-horizon reasoning and adaptive decision-making. This survey presents a systematic taxonomy of VLA memory mechanisms based on memory scope and persistence, categorizing existing approaches into five representative paradigms and one emerging frontier. Based on this taxonomy, we compare representative VLA memory systems in terms of memory characteristics, architectural com-plexity, and open-source maturity, revealing a clear trade-off in which increasing architectural complexity is generally accompanied by decreasing open-source ma-turity. Finally, we discuss the key challenges in building full-lifecycle memory systems, including efficient memory management and lifelong knowledge evolu-tion. Overall, this survey provides a unified perspective on memory architectures for VLA agents and offers insights into the development of lifelong embodied in-telligence.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23319
Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and World Action Models (WAMs) have expanded the manipulation and whole body capabilities of individual robots. Yet a single robot remains limited by its embodiment, and many real world tasks require capabilities that can only emerge through cooperation. Existing multi robot frameworks largely emphasize task decomposition, allocation, and replanning, while providing limited support for adapting executable coordination when physical execution deviates from the intended behavior. We present CoEvolve, a framework that represents team coordination as executable code over fixed robot motor skills. CoEvolve introduces Verifier Guided Coordination Evolution, where a multimodal foundation model instantiates coordination strategies through motion primitives, semantic objectives, temporary robot roles, and bounded execution parameters. Physical verification evaluates each executed transition, rejected behaviors trigger structured coordination revision from an accepted checkpoint, and verified experience is retained to guide subsequent decisions. We evaluate CoEvolve with two simulated Unitree G1 humanoids transporting a freely supported rigid payload through constrained corridors. Across 15 base task runs with three multimodal backbone families, CoEvolve completes 8 tasks, with every backbone achieving end to end success. Additional evaluations yield verified placement on two additional corridor layouts and after both same-backbone and cross-backbone experience initialization, while exposing persistent limitations in motion precision and contact stability. These results support executable coordination as a practical interface for adapting long horizon multi robot collaboration under shared physical constraints.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23288
We present LY-GWM-RoboCasa-Human300, a policy that combines a Human300-fine-tuned GR00T-N1.5 action generator, an action-conditioned graph dynamics model, and a learned binary state-reward scorer. At inference, the policy samples four action chunks, predicts the future latent features and robot state for each, and executes the candidate with the highest predicted-state reward logit. Predictions therefore influence the actions sent to the environment. The evaluated system uses a 16-step prediction horizon and keeps all three components frozen during evaluation. In the local evaluation on 50 RoboCasa 1.0.1 tasks in the pretrain kitchen split, with 50 episodes per task, the system records 207/2,500 successes (8.28%), compared with 181/2,500 (7.24%) in the historical self-trained GR00T-N1.5 baseline. The observed difference is 26 successes, or 1.04 percentage points. The atomic group improves from 141/900 to 150/900. Separately, the RoboCasa maintainers re-evaluated the submission and reported 354/1,500 successes (23.6%) across 50 tasks, with leaderboard rates of 48.3%, 16.3%, and 3.1% for Atomic-Seen, Composite-Seen, and Composite-Unseen. The local and official results are reported separately; their difference is not attributed to a model improvement. Recorded local audits identify 212,700 changed environment-input chunks, including 28,223 in atomic tasks. We describe the actual training stages, implemented inference mechanism, evaluation provenance, and public reproduction entrypoints. These results document an active prediction-and-selection system and a positive historical difference.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23274
Vision--Language--Action (VLA) models promise generalist robotic agents, yet consolidating skills learned across heterogeneous tasks and environments remains difficult: training data is fragmented across platforms, joint multi-task training suffers from interference, and model merging tends to introduce parameter conflicts or require architectural changes. We instead advocate a paradigm in which skills are first learned independently and then consolidated post hoc. To this end, we propose NestedVLA, which replaces parameter aggregation with parameter generation: a nested hypernetwork, conditioned on the target task, synthesizes task-adaptive action-expert parameters that compose with a frozen base VLA. Task-specific compressed VLM residuals are retained separately. This formulation enables flexible task-conditioned skill reuse while mitigating interference. Across three RL benchmarks (MetaWorld, ManiSkill, CALVIN), NestedVLA outperforms the strongest model-merging baseline by 41 pp on average, matches per-task fine-tuning within 1 pp on ManiSkill, and substantially closes the gap on CALVIN, pointing toward a storage-efficient route to skill consolidation. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23271
Reconstructing high-quality, renderable 3D scenes from long videos is essential for robotic perception and embodied intelligence. Many feed-forward Gaussian reconstruction methods rapidly predict 3D scenes from a small set of images, but extending them to longer sequences presents two bottlenecks: jointly processing all views increases GPU memory requirements, while accumulating pixel-aligned predictions redundantly represents the same surfaces and increases storage and rendering costs. We present LonGaussian, a streaming feed-forward framework that reconstructs compact, globally renderable Gaussian scenes from long image sequences with known intrinsics and unknown camera poses. Built on a pretrained streaming 3D reconstruction backbone, LonGaussian decodes long-context geometric features into dense Gaussians. Within each chunk, multi-frame point tracks link repeated observations of the same surface and guide a learned merger to consolidate the corresponding Gaussian predictions. Rendered-depth consistency filtering further suppresses Gaussians from other chunks that incorrectly occlude locally reconstructed surfaces. On DL3DV and RealEstate10K benchmarks, LonGaussian improves novel-view rendering quality while using substantially fewer Gaussians than the evaluated feed-forward baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23250