This paper presents a novel framework integrating a robust wrench observer with a hybrid pose and force controller for physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI). In pHRI tasks, robots are expected to perform task-space motions robustly while remaining compliance with human disturbance, which proposes distinct control objectives. Most existing approaches focus mainly on either robustness or compliance and rely on force sensors for real-time tracking. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework with the following key contributions. Firstly, a neural network (NN) is trained to improve the observer performance by compensating for system friction and unmodeled dynamics. Secondly, a task-null-space decomposition is applied to separate the joint velocity and reduce the effect of the human disturbance on the observer. Finally, a hybrid pose and force controller is introduced to achieve the end-effector pose and force tracking. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework provides robust and accurate wrench estimation while maintaining reliable pose and force tracking performance. The proposed approach offers an effective solution and framework for pHRI without the need of force/torque sensor measurements which can be applied to many robotic manipulator platforms which do not have force/torque sensors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28769
In human-robot interaction (HRI) tasks, humans may interact with the robot in either an active guiding or passive following state, resulting in distinct control objectives for each interaction mode. Most existing approaches rely on predefined switching thresholds to distinguish interaction modes, but their performance can be sensitive to measurement noise. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework with the following key contributions. First, a neural network (NN) trained via meta-learning is developed to recognize human intention without manually defined thresholds. By successfully incorporating force-dependent parameters from the controller, the recognition rates are improved from 90.1\% to 99.1\% for the passive mode and from 79.8\% to 97.1\% for the active mode. Second, an adaptive meta-learning controller is introduced to compensate for human disturbances and enable online adaptation to varying interaction forces. Third, a multiple-trajectory meta-learning algorithm is designed to jointly learn an environment-basis representation and force-dependent parameters, allowing the controller to deal with unmodeled dynamics efficiently. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves robust and accurate control performance, while providing reliable mode recognition for safe and adaptive physical HRI.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28761
Video generation models can now depict remarkably realistic motion. Yet it is unclear how to use this motion beyond pixels: to animate a specific 3D asset and replay the animation in its 3D scene. For instance, a video model can show a monkey jumping over a crossbar, but it cannot return that jump as replayable 3D motion placed in the 3D scene. Here we present a model that directly co-generates the video and 3D motion for any supplied rig, along with a camera that registers this motion to the scene. Prior video-motion models either handle only human skeletons, often adding billions of parameters, or triangulate 3D motion from generated 2D pose maps. We instead keep 3D motion in a separate model that supports arbitrary skeletons, and connect it to a pretrained video model through a small set of cross-attention layers. This separation lets the motion model first learn how skeletons move from motion-only data, which is easier to obtain and augment than paired video. Additionally, our model learns to locate each joint in the video frames, which lets us recover the camera and place the 3D motion in the scene. To train across many skeletons, we use a generative video editor to place animated 3D assets in scenes suited to their actions, curating the edits so their known motion remains valid. Together with human and robot video, this yields nearly 200K training pairs. Our evaluations demonstrate that our model animates diverse rigs from text more faithfully than video-first pipelines, and its motion responds to the surrounding scene. It also turns video into rig motion, rig motion into video, and enables keyframe-based control of the 3D motion. Videos and additional results are available on our project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28632
Motivated by the human ability to integrate experience across language, perception, and action, we introduce UniWALM, a unified world-action-language model that learns video, action, and language in a single shared representation, where each modality is both a conditioning signal and a supervision target. We ask: can jointly generating language enrich this shared representation, improving manipulation and supporting memory-dependent behavior? Unlike prior approaches that attach a reasoning or vision-language model to a video-action backbone and run them as distinct stages, UniWALM unifies all three modalities inside a single mixture-of-transformers backbone whose per-modality diffusion heads co-denoise synchronously, decoding subtask and textual memory in the same pass as action with no separate planning stage; the generated language is re-consumed on the next step, closing a language-as-memory loop without an external planner or memory bank. To keep the action stream reliable under this richer objective, we further introduce Flow Matching with Correction (FMC), a training objective that teaches recovery from perturbed action trajectories at no inference-time cost. UniWALM consistently improves over same-backbone baselines (e.g., FastWAM) on compositional pick-and-place (MolmoSpaces) and across the memory-dependent subset of RMBench, where it reaches 34.5% without any pretrained language or reasoning model and exceeds Mem-0's keyframe-equipped setup (28.5%) using only a single anchor frame. On a real-world Find-the-Item task, generating textual memory lifts success from 11.1% to 61.1%, while state-of-the-art VLAs stay at or below chance (<=33.3%).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28626
Warehouse robot fleets continuously observe operational conditions, but preserving these observations as reusable semantic memory incurs substantial computation, communication, and storage costs. For example, explaining recurring aisle blockages can require reviewing video from multiple robots across several shifts. We present IndustrialRemembr, a shared spatiotemporal memory system that extends NVIDIA ReMEmbR to robot fleets and reduces server-side computation by generating scene descriptions only on demand. On each robot, an NVIDIA Jetson encodes video clips into retrieval embeddings with Cosmos-Embed1, vision tokens with Cosmos3-Edge, and reconstruction latents with the Wan2.2 VAE, without uploading raw camera frames. The encoding models are re-used to detect people in image patches, zeroing them out to support PII abstraction for GDPR-compliant deployments. We split Cosmos3-Edge at its vision-language boundary, placing the vision encoder on the robot and the language decoder on an on-premises server. A Nemotron agent retrieves memories by content, position, and time and queries the decoder using cached vision tokens. This design eliminates caption generation at write time, while cached-token decoding reproduces the unsplit model's output in all 450 tested decodes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28624
Evaluating and post-training robot policies through physical interaction is costly and difficult to scale, motivating action-conditioned world models as interactive simulators. However, visually plausible predictions can misrepresent contact dynamics, providing unreliable feedback for policy evaluation and learning. We introduce PhysCanvas, a state-consistent visuo-tactile world model for contact-rich robot manipulation. PhysCanvas unifies multi-view RGB, tactile images, marker displacement, task state, and actions within a unified vision space. All modalities share a video VAE and pretrained generative backbone, allowing optical touch to reuse visual and temporal priors. Motion images derived through forward kinematics and camera projection provide spatially aligned action conditioning, while an initial RGB anchor and updated reference observations guide sequential generation. Our consistency-aware post-training uses the frozen Scene Reward Model, Modality Reward Model, and State Reward Model to supervise scene preservation, visual-tactile compatibility, and agreement with real task outcomes. The resulting world model supports closed-loop policy rollouts for evaluation and provides imagined interactions and rewards for GRPO policy updates. Across four real-world manipulation tasks, when policies are rolled out in the world model, State Reward Model supervision increases the arithmetic mean of task-wise Pearson correlations between world-model and real-world success rates from 0.602 to 0.885. Policy post-training in the reward-guided world model further increases $\pi_{0.5}$'s mean real-world success rate from a 59.1% SFT baseline to 70.8%. These results demonstrate the value of unified multimodal modeling and consistency-aware post-training for robot policy evaluation and learning. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28613
Multimodal reasoning provides robotic foundation models with predictive context needed for reliable action generation. However, language-based reasoning captures task semantics but struggles to express fine-grained physical dynamics, while latent reasoning models future state evolution but offers limited structure for organizing these dynamics into reusable reasoning primitives. To bridge this gap, we introduce PhysWord, a reasoning-before-acting foundation model built on Physical Words, which use atomic action verbs as shared semantic anchors for continuous representations of physical dynamics. Specifically, PhysWord predicts upcoming atomic action words and directly aligns their contextual hidden states with latent targets derived from the corresponding future observations. Building on these primitives, we construct a temporally structured PhysWord space with visual and optional tactile variants of each action word. Autoregressively predicting Physical Words across future timesteps captures transitions between execution stages, providing structured multimodal context for action generation. PhysWord achieves state-of-the-art success rates of 90.3\% on visuotactile UniVTAC and 99.6\% on vision-based LIBERO-Long, and outperforms competing methods on real-world tasks using bimanual grippers and dexterous hands. Further evaluations demonstrate that our structured latent reasoning framework generalizes to unseen scenarios and enables long-horizon manipulation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26854
Reliable multi-view forecasting requires videos from different cameras to describe the same evolving 3D scene. To this end, we introduce Video-Point Model (VPM), a world model that conditions on multi-view video histories and a language instruction to jointly forecast future videos from arbitrary viewpoints and the 3D trajectories of persistent scene points. We extend a pretrained world model with camera-conditioned multi-view processing that integrates complementary observations across cameras, and add a trajectory head that predicts how physical points move through time. Each trajectory tracks a single point across all views, and supervising these trajectories alongside video generation therefore anchors appearance changes in every camera to a shared description of 3D motion. To support training and evaluation, we build VPM-Data, a simulation corpus pairing synchronized multi-view videos with persistent point trajectories, and VP-WorldBench, a forecasting benchmark spanning simulated and real environments. We further extend VPM to robot control by adding robot actions as a token modality in the generator. Action tokens share the point-supervised backbone and are denoised jointly with future videos, thereby grounding the policy in the same 3D-aware representation. On VP-WorldBench and existing 4D generation benchmarks, point supervision improves both video fidelity and 3D motion accuracy over a video-only counterpart, and in simulated and real-robot experiments, it also raises the manipulation success of the action-enabled model.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28594
Agentic robotics systems combine planners with robot harnesses to perform complex manipulation tasks. Recent work improves these systems through better harnesses and external memory, but relies on powerful closed-source models as planners and does not improve the planners' own capabilities. In contrast, coding agents have improved substantially by post-training the model itself. We therefore investigate whether post-training can also improve robot planners. However, applying it across robot harnesses requires accommodating different execution mechanisms, including VLA skill invocation and control-code generation. To this end, we introduce AgenticRoboRL, a framework for post-training robot planners across different harnesses. The training recipe combines supervised fine-tuning with multi-turn reinforcement learning. To accommodate different execution mechanisms, harness-specific adapters connect recorded planner interactions with task outcomes, enabling a common RL training pipeline while keeping execution components fixed. On LIBERO-PRO, AgenticRoboRL raises the success rate of a 9B-parameter planner from 18.1% to 71.0% without external memory, approaching the 72.1% achieved by Codex (GPT-5.5) with external memory. These results demonstrate post-training as an effective approach for improving robot planners. We will release the framework and trained planner checkpoints.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28589
Simulation is a powerful tool for robotics, but building diverse, simulation-ready scenes at scale remains difficult. Reconstructing scenes from single images is a promising alternative, but visual similarity alone is insufficient: objects must also be recovered, accurately placed, and physically grounded. Existing methods that rely on post-hoc physics settling often misplace objects, producing scenes that look correct but behave poorly under manipulation. We present SceneRig, an agentic system that turns a single image into an editable, simulation-ready scene. SceneRig combines geometric, visual, and physical tools to reconstruct a faithful 3D scene. An agent then performs edit-and-validate loops inside a physics simulator to achieve physical stability. Across diverse inputs, SceneRig improves instance segmentation, object-centric appearance, and 3D placement while keeping the reconstructed scenes physically stable. Furthermore, SceneRig is effective for downstream robotics: its scenes predict real-robot policy outcomes more accurately than the baseline method and more reliably support replay of recorded manipulations without trajectory adaptation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28585
Robots exploring unknown indoor environments must decide where to move while much of the environment remains unseen. Predicting the occupancy of unseen space beyond the current sensor range can improve these decisions, but recent approaches commonly rely on learned models that require offline training and repeated inference during exploration. We introduce the Mondrian-Anchored Prior for Learning-free Indoor Exploration (MAPLE), a training-free predictive approach that adapts the Mondrian process into an online generative prior conditioned on observed geometric cues in the current partial map. MAPLE generates multiple plausible map hypotheses and evaluates visibility separately within each to estimate frontier gain, preserving differences in predicted visibility across hypotheses. Across KTH floor-plans and real-SLAM environments at multiple sensor ranges, MAPLE consistently improves over non-predictive exploration and remains competitive with learned predictive approaches. Its lightweight procedural construction enables predictive exploration with limited computational resources. Experimental results further show that more accurate map prediction does not necessarily produce better exploration, highlighting the importance of how predictions are represented and used in exploration decisions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28566
Collaborative perception enables agents to retrieve the scene semantics and geometry beyond the field of view of any individual agent. This broader scene understanding enhances transportation safety and improves efficiency in multi-robot systems. However, existing collaborative semantic occupancy methods rely on dense 3D voxel annotations and are limited to recognizing objects within a predefined set of semantic classes. To overcome these limitations, we present CoGaussian, an open-vocabulary Gaussian-based collaborative semantic occupancy prediction framework. CoGaussian represents a scene as a set of foundation model-aligned sparse 3D Gaussians, which serve as a compact representation for communicating and fusing geometric and semantic information across multiple agents. On the Semantic-OPV2V benchmark, our method outperforms existing open-vocabulary single-agent approaches, highlighting the effectiveness of open-vocabulary collaborative scene understanding.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28530
Visual-inertial odometry systems are often constrained by the assumption that sensors are rigidly mounted, which limits their adaptability in practical scenarios involving structural motion. To address this limitation, this paper investigates time-varying camera-IMU extrinsic calibration. First, a dynamic camera-IMU extrinsic calibration method based on the Denavit-Hartenberg convention is proposed by incorporating the robot kinematic model. Second, a two-step initialization strategy is developed to efficiently estimate the initial joint angles, providing a reliable starting point for subsequent extrinsic parameter optimization and enabling online estimation of timevarying camera-IMU extrinsic parameters. Simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework can effectively accommodate variations in camera-IMU extrinsic parameters while maintaining competitive localization accuracy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25397
Humanoid-human interaction requires robots to operate under severe partial observability: during close physical contact, the human partner is occluded, truncated, or outside the robot's field of view, causing pose estimation to fail and often necessitating external tracking or privileged human state. At the same time, heavy mutual occlusions introduce errors into the human-human motion-capture data used for learning. We present REACT, a framework for learning deployable humanoid-human interaction policies from human-human demonstrations. REACT treats semantic contact structure as the key supervisory signal connecting demonstration processing, interaction learning, and onboard control. First, a VLM-guided contact modeling and retargeting pipeline identifies semantically meaningful contacts and transfers them onto humanoid-human geometry while preserving interaction structure. Using these annotations, privileged interaction policies learn physically grounded behaviors through interaction-aware contact rewards and are then distilled into deployable egocentric depth policies trained entirely from onboard sensing using photorealistic human depth rendering. To address severe partial observability, we introduce generative partner-state modeling objectives that predict partner motion from occluded egocentric views. We evaluate REACT in simulation and on a real Unitree G1 humanoid across five contact-rich interactions. Semantic contact modeling substantially improves preservation of demonstrated interactions, while generative partner-state modeling improves contact recall on four of five interactions, most under heavy occlusion. On real hardware, REACT performs all five interactions using onboard sensing alone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28523
Understanding contact and tactile magnitude in hand-object interaction is a key step toward physically intelligent systems, yet learning such representations is limited by the cost and restricted coverage of tactile measurements. We present Touch-JEPA, a framework for learning tactile representations from hand-object videos with limited tactile supervision. We first introduce a self-supervised pretraining objective that learns from video alone without tactile supervision. Using video-derived hand geometry, Touch-JEPA predicts masked visual features at corresponding hand-surface locations from spatial and temporal context, encouraging the representation to capture latent contact dynamics. We then extend this formulation to joint representation learning, where masked prediction is applied to all videos while tactile supervision is available only for a labeled subset, grounding the shared representation in measured contact and magnitude. With self-supervised pretraining alone, simple supervised readouts on frozen Touch-JEPA features outperform supervised baselines in contact discrimination and tactile magnitude estimation across three human-hand benchmarks, and transfer to robotic hands without robot tactile training data. Joint learning with limited tactile supervision further improves contact and magnitude estimation on the human-hand benchmarks. Together, these results show that hand-object video can provide scalable self-supervision for tactile representation learning, while limited tactile measurements provide complementary physical grounding.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28519
While large-scale human motion capture datasets provide a rich source of demonstrations for humanoid robot learning, retargeting the diverse motions to different humanoid robots remains a nontrivial challenge. Existing kinodynamic trajectory optimization pipelines are computationally expensive and often require manual adjustments per motion. We present FRDV (Fast Retargeting with Dynamics Validation), a scalable framework consisting of rapid constrained kinematic retargeting and an additional dynamics validation pipeline. Its kinematic stage integrates a custom Sequential Quadratic Programming solver, Real-Time Iteration, and parallel chunk-based processing, achieving up to 9,156 frames per second, approximately up to 136 times faster than GMR and ProtoMotions, while robot-specific constraints are incorporated into the optimization to reduce common retargeting artifacts, such as ground penetration and self-collision. For motions requiring additional verification, a contact implicit iLQR controller is utilized to test the retargeted reference under full rigid body dynamics. This dynamics-based validation identifies dynamically infeasible motions and refines contact-related artifacts such as foot floating and foot skating. We evaluate retargeting quality by training motion tracking reinforcement learning policies using several state-of-the-art pipelines and comparing their tracking fidelity and success rates. Furthermore, sim-to-real transfer is demonstrated on a Unitree G1 humanoid. Videos and code are available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28470
General-purpose multimodal models have shown promise as direct robot action policies, yet whether they grasp the physics underlying real-world interactions and can apply that understanding to guide action remains underexplored. We investigate this question using contact-rich manipulation as a representative testbed, examining tactile understanding as a concrete instance of this broader capability. Contact-rich manipulation requires interpreting tactile feedback and adjusting actions after obstruction. Existing learned tactile policies acquire these capabilities through specialized pretraining and per-task optimization, with substantial data and training costs. We present GPT-as-Tactile-Policy, which summarizes expert demonstrations into task guidance and tactile references for contact assessment and corrective action. GPT-6-Astra combines this context with multimodal observations and interaction history to generate control commands and adjust actions through contact feedback. Without additional robotics-specific pretraining or per-task policy fine-tuning, our method achieves 93.8\% mean success across five UniVTAC tasks. Overall performance is comparable to state-of-the-art policies, with higher success on selected tasks. On Insert Hole, tactile feedback improves success from 31\% to 99\%. Execution analysis further demonstrates contact-guided probing and correction, supporting manipulation progress through explicit expert experience and online feedback.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28457
Generalizing manipulation policies across robot embodiments remains difficult because standard policies tie the interactions needed for a task to the actions of a particular robot. We study zero-shot cross-embodiment manipulation, where a policy trained on source embodiments must be deployed on a structurally different target embodiment without additional task demonstrations. We introduce Kinematic Interaction Transfer across Embodiments (KITE), which decouples manipulation into embodiment-agnostic interaction prediction and embodiment-specific kinematic decoding, connected through a learned representation of interaction intent based on contact patterns. An interaction policy is trained to predict the intent using demonstration data only collected on a source robot, and shared across morphologically different target robots. A kinematic decoder realizes these intents by learning from synthetic data generated from each embodiment's kinematic model. Through such decoupling, KITE can robustly transfer learned skills to a new embodiment given only its kinematic model, without recollecting any task-specific demonstration data. We evaluate KITE on four manipulation tasks in simulation and the real world spanning transfer between parallel grippers, dexterous hands, and composite embodiments. KITE successfully achieves zero-shot transfer to structurally different target embodiments, and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Project website: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22113
Classical robot navigation stacks are reliable but often require re-engineering for each new robot type and site. Learning-based navigation shifts this effort from hand-tuned parameters to data generation and training, where a policy adapts to each new embodiment or facility by fine-tuning in simulation. Whether policies adapted this way stay reliable on real industrial robots has seen little systematic testing. We study this for NVIDIA's X-Mobility and COMPASS workflow for training learned navigation policies on Idealworks robots. In simulation, we extend the COMPASS benchmark with two embodiments, the differential-drive this http URL and an omnidirectional Humanoid Mobile Platform (HMP), and with a digital twin of the Idealworks R&D center. For the real world, we fine-tune X-Mobility on data from this digital twin, with and without sim-to-real variants generated by NVIDIA Cosmos, train COMPASS on top of it from scratch in the digital twin, deploy the resulting policies on the this http URL's onboard Jetson AGX Xavier, and benchmark them in the Idealworks R&D center against COMPASS trained only on NVIDIA's environments and the existing Idealworks navigation stack on task success, efficiency, safety, smoothness and onboard compute. Running every static scenario both in a digital-twin replica and in the real facility measures the sim-to-real gap and how far Cosmos-augmented data closes it. Training in the digital twin with Cosmos sim-to-real augmentation raises the real-world success rate of learned navigation from 65.3% to 91.7% across four scenarios and nearly halves its weighted travel time compared with simulation-only training, bringing it within 8.3 points of the production navigation stack, fully onboard; with an integrated global planner, it also reaches far, occluded goals in every trial.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28432
World-Action Models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for embodied generalist policies by jointly modeling future world evolution and robot actions across diverse manipulation tasks. However, representing diverse futures is only the first step: a capable WAM must also generate futures that match the requirements of the current task and execution progress. In long-horizon manipulation where similar observation-action segments occur across different tasks and stages, existing approaches may generate locally plausible yet misdirected rollouts to drift toward wrong task stage, i.e., a phenomenon we term Stage Confusion. To address this problem, we propose TaskWAM, a closed-loop, stage-aware framework that represents fine-grained task requirements with Mode Tokens and tracks execution progress with State Tokens, forming a structured task state to steer world--action generation toward intended future. We further introduce StageBench, a controlled multi-stage manipulation benchmark with parameterized stage variations and automated this http URL experiments on both simulation benchmarks and real-world tasks demonstrate that TaskWAM effectively reduces confusion and achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, TaskWAM provides strong plug-and-play transfer across heterogeneous WAM architectures and robot embodiments, including single-arm robots, dual-arm grippers, dexterous hands, and humanoid robots.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28431