arXiv_RO
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PneuGen: Task-Driven Agentic Co-Design of Soft Pneumatic Robots
2026-11-09 23:13:59Shaohong Zhong, Marco Pontin, Perla MaiolinoAbstract
Task-driven design of soft robots requires the consideration of factors such as geometry, morphology, material properties, and actuation, resulting in a large and complex design space that is challenging to explore. Computational optimisation methods leverage signals from simulation to iteratively improve designs to achieve task objectives. However, these methods typically demand high computational load for both optimisation and simulation. We present PneuGen, an agentic co-design framework for soft robots that leverages Large Language Model (LLM) agents to search over the soft robot design space efficiently. A designer agent proposes design programs from a parametric component library, and a separate critic agent analyses simulation diagnostics and recommends targeted revisions. Fitted module response models provide reusable physical priors relating geometry and pressure to deformation. Design programs are automatically validated and converted into finite-element simulations, enabling iterative evaluation. Across grasping tasks on primitive shapes and challenging objects, as well as shape-matching tasks that require multi-directional planar and 3D deformation, the proposed framework significantly outperforms prior computational optimisation baselines. Ablation experiments also highlight the utility of the critic agent and the module response model in facilitating efficient design. We additionally demonstrate the agent-generated soft robot designs in real-world shape-matching and grasping tasks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13344
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One Trajectory, Two Requirements: Accuracy and Local Stability in Euler Sampling for Flow Matching Policies
Abstract
Flow matching robot policies commonly use a fixed Euler step count selected from offline accuracy sweeps. At inference time, however, each policy input (visual observation, robot state, and language instruction) together with a source-noise draw defines a different ODE trajectory and sequence of local Jacobians. We ask whether a step count that accurately follows the nominal noise-to-action trajectory can still be too coarse for strongly contracting directions around it. An exact two-coordinate system and a controlled augmentation of six trained flow models show that trajectory accuracy and local Euler stability can impose different step requirements even when the original learned transport is unchanged. We then study a frozen $\pi_{0.5}$-LIBERO checkpoint without modifying its weights or action dynamics. Across 30 policy inputs from 10 LIBERO-10 tasks, the Jacobian exhibits strong contracting directions near the action endpoint, yet no sampled mode violates the Euler non-expansion condition. On five of those inputs, accuracy sweeps require 4--9 Euler steps at 5% terminal error and 87--112 at 1%. These five paired cases are therefore consistent with accuracy-limited rather than stability-limited sampling under this local criterion, while the controlled experiments show why endpoint accuracy alone cannot rule out a separate stability requirement.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13311
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Does Haptic Connection to a Healthy Partner Improve Motor Learning in Chronic Stroke? A Pilot Study of Robot-Based Dyadic Training
2026-11-09 22:20:25Erica L. Waters, Natalia Stroutinsky-Sobotka, Reem M. Azar, Frances S. Shofer, Pamela Z. Cacchione, Rochelle J. Mendonca, Michelle J. JohnsonAbstract
Purpose: Robot-based haptic dyads, where two users exchange forces through robots, have been proposed for robot-assisted neurorehabilitation. This intervention could increase motor learning by promoting motor variability, providing an implicit communication channel, and facilitating social interaction. Despite the potential benefits, few studies have investigated robot-based haptic dyads for neurological populations, and none have included a comprehensive clinical assessment. Design/Methodology/Approach: We present a pilot study investigation of individuals with chronic stroke learning a complex tracking task in solo and dyad conditions. Prior to training, participants completed a battery of cognitive, motor, and sensory assessments. We assessed changes in key kinematic outcomes including tracking error, distance traveled, mean absolute power, and sample entropy. We also performed a correlation analysis of clinical scores with baseline tracking errors. Findings: Baseline tracking error was strongly correlated (r > 0.6) with lower cognitive scores and higher motor scores. Only the solo group demonstrated lower tracking error at assessment ({\Delta} = -5.33, 95%CI [-10.25, -0.40], p = 0.027), but this result was tempered by the removal of an outlier participant. Neither group demonstrated clear retention. The dyad group showed significantly elevated performance, effort, and movement complexity during training. Research Limitations/Implications: The selected task was too difficult to reveal learning for either group, which may be related to its high cognitive demand. Sample size and stroke heterogeneity were also limitation. Originality/Value: Dyadic training increased movement complexity and effort, which are associated with better motor learning. Clinical characteristics such as lesion location, cognition, sensation, and chronicity may influence potential benefits of dyadic training.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13307
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Large Language Model Explainability for Planning Lunar Rover Trajectories under Uncertainty
2026-11-09 22:01:15Michelle Ho, Maximilian Adang, Zachary Booth, David E. Astle, Margaret Hansen, Edward Balaban, Mykel J. KochenderferAbstract
Planning planetary rover trajectories under probabilistic uncertainty is a multi-objective optimization problem that science teams currently iteratively solve and verify by hand. This process becomes impractical when timelines and constraints frequently shift throughout the mission planning phase. Sampling-based planners such as Monte Carlo tree search can speed up this process, but their outputs do not preserve traceability to the science objectives that justify each plan, which the science team needs to verify. We propose an interactive assistant based on a large language model (LLM) that can explain planner trajectories using domain vocabulary and re-run the planner under user-specified conditions to compare alternatives. Previous work has used LLMs inside planner decision-making loops, but we explore using them for post-planning explanation, where they are more likely to be trusted since they do not directly influence planner decisions. Our framework pairs a simulator inspired by the NASA Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission with a ReAct queryable interface that calls curated action tools and retrieval functions. We evaluate the assistant on a query bank consisting of plan comparisons, feasibility, and lookup queries. Experiments show that 90.9% of the assistant's responses are faithful to the planner's outputs, a nearly 65% improvement over zero-shot prompting of the same LLM without tool access, demonstrating the potential for trustworthy explainability of uncertainty-aware traverses with an LLM-based system.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13292
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Force-Closure Condition for Cooperative Multi-robot Pushing of Rectangular Objects
Abstract
In cooperative object manipulation, the placement of pushing contacts determines whether force closure can be achieved and agents can generate arbitrary forces and torques on the object correspondingly. This study derives a necessary and sufficient closed-form condition for the planar force closure of a rectangular object, a common object shape in everyday settings, under four frictionless pushing contacts. For a rectangle of length $b$ and width $a$, force closure holds if and only if $(l_1+l_3-b)(l_2+l_4-a)<0$, where $l_1,l_2,l_3,l_4$ are the four edge contact locations. This condition is independent of the object's center of mass and is used to verify contact configurations before contact force allocation. When the condition is not satisfied, the signs of the two factors indicate which opposing contact pair should be adjusted. The condition and adjustment rule are then integrated into a full-pose trajectory-tracking framework as a geometric feasibility layer to demonstrate their use in control. Static wrench feasibility tests validate the proposed condition, while narrow-passage floating-body simulations show that maintaining a force-closure configuration reduces the RMS tracking errors in $x$, $y$, and unwrapped yaw from $12.05$ m, $18.11$ m, and $535.96^\circ$ to $2.24$ m, $2.66$ m, and $2.69^\circ$, respectively.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13268
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Incorporating World Models in Decision Making for Next Best View Selection in Active Sensing
2026-11-09 20:56:59Nikita Sarawgi, Omey M. Manyar, Satyandra K. GuptaAbstract
Efficient robotic 3D reconstruction requires selecting views that contribute new surface measurements with few physical captures. Pretrained world models can guide this choice, but a predicted surface may not produce valid depth measurements under the operating conditions of the deployed sensor. We present a deployment adaptation methodology for next-best-view selection that learns a sensor-return adapter from limited local calibration data while keeping the pretrained predictor fixed. The adapter estimates measurement dropout over each predicted surface, allowing the selection method to favor views likely to fill gaps in the measured reconstruction. In a real-robot experiment with a structured-light sensor, the adapted method achieves higher measured surface coverage with 60% fewer captures than nominal selection. The adapted method recovers a surface region that the nominal method repeatedly targets but fails to measure. These results suggest that robots can reuse pretrained predictive models while adapting their decisions to local operating conditions in data-scarce environments.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13229
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Latent Barrier Steering: Hierarchical Safety for Generative Planning
2026-11-09 20:56:25Renhao Zhang, Mingzhe Li, Bruno Castro da SilvaAbstract
We introduce Latent Barrier Steering (LBS), a hierarchical semantic-to-path framework for safe flow-matching-based generative planning. Existing control-barrier-function (CBF) safety filters for diffusion and flow-matching planners act locally on generated samples, either during sampling or after prediction. Such repair is effective for small violations, but can struggle when a new constraint blocks the whole selected behavior mode rather than merely perturbing it locally. LBS decouples behavior selection from path certification through two coordinated interventions: it first steers the generator's behavior latent toward rollouts with larger safety margin, then decodes the steered latent and applies a path-space CBF quadratic program (QP) only for residual violations. We show that latent steering increases the margin available to the path-space corrector, yielding finite-time recovery guarantees and reduced correction burden. Experiments across navigation and robot end-effector planning tasks show that LBS preserves safety while improving goal reaching and reducing correction burden compared with path-level safety filters.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13227
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Evaluating Long-Horizon Robot Planning under Uncertainty
2026-11-09 20:46:30Harsh Muriki, Gayathri Aravindan, Yuchen Zheng, Sonia ChernovaAbstract
Household robots must successfully navigate im-perfect circumstances, both in their internal models and the external world. We introduce a benchmark of seven long-horizon household tasks in Habitat that vary initial robot memory and environment configurations. We evaluate adaptations of ReAct, VLM-TAMP, and Tru-POMDP within a shared execution framework across 90 tasks-environment-memory combinations, totaling 1,350 episodes. Our evaluation measures task success, partial completion, and action efficiency, along with rule-based analysis of execution traces. ReAct achieves the highest overall task success (45.3%) and completion (71.7%), while having accurate initial memory does not consistently yield the highest performance for every planner. We identify recurring placement errors, precondition errors, and redundant actions through trace analysis. These findings highlight differences in how the evaluated planners use initial knowledge and respond to uncertainty.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17326
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An Integrated Open-Source Stack for Vision-Based Autonomous Navigation of Wheeled Rovers
2026-11-09 20:38:25Iaroslav Kolomiets, Iaroslav Sheipak, Mikhail Reppo, Vsevolod Egorov, Viktor Chertopolokhov, Isaac ChairezAbstract
Vision-based rover autonomy requires integrating perception, localization, planning and platform-specific control under limited sensing and computing resources. We present an open-source ROS 2 stack for following directional arrows, reaching a terminal cone and returning autonomously to the start. It connects YOLOv8n detection and geometric direction, range and bearing estimation with RGB-D SLAM, wheel-inertial state estimation, kinematics-aware planning, behavior-tree mission management and STM32 actuation. Standard interfaces separate reusable autonomy from the hardware layer; a proportional path-following plugin supports low-speed rover motion. Public resources include software, configuration, a labeled dataset, trained weights and evaluation logs. On 478 held-out images, the detector achieves mAP@0.5 of 0.720 under the Ultralytics evaluator and outperforms a classical OpenCV baseline under a shared evaluation protocol. The reported perception latency is 25 ms on a Jetson Orin NX. Three missions, one indoor and two outdoor, demonstrate marker-guided navigation and autonomous return without operator motion commands or reported collisions. Field results document integration failures and corrective choices; repeated instrumented trials remain necessary to quantify physical navigation errors and reliability.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08100
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Ground Reaction Force-Aware Model Predictive Control for Underactuated Upright Physical Assistance
2026-11-09 20:29:14Darren Biskup, Jeonghan Yu, Zibo Yu, Sunil K. AgrawalAbstract
Many rehabilitation robots execute prescribed motions using reactive tracking controllers that do not explicitly incorporate the user's instantaneous human-ground interaction. This paper presents Ground Reaction Force-Aware Model Predictive Control (GRF-MPC), a framework for upright physical assistance. By integrating live GRF and center of pressure (CoP) measurements directly into a human centroidal dynamics model, GRF-MPC formulates a real-time quadratic program (QP) that optimizes assistive forces and moments over a receding horizon. We deployed GRF-MPC on the Robotic Upright Stand Trainer (RobUST) in an underactuated 4-cable configuration and evaluated it against a fully actuated 8-cable Cartesian impedance baseline in nearly 300 trials across six healthy participants. Across tasks spanning impulsive perturbations, lunge trajectories, and voluntary limits of stability, GRF-MPC reduced peak planar center-of-mass (CoM) error by 19.6% during perturbations, lowered trajectory tracking error by 24.1%, required 28.7% less net mechanical work, and permitted a 45.9% greater normalized voluntary excursion area. The underlying QP solves in under 1 ms, comfortably enabling 100 Hz replanning and demonstrating that incorporating live human-ground interaction into predictive control yields stronger, more transparent physical assistance with half the actuators.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13204
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Robo-MLT: Dual-System Robotic Manipulation for Long-Horizon Medical Laboratory Tasks
2026-11-09 11:27:55Zequan Zeng, Kai Wang, Delvin Ce Zhang, Huaping Liu, Zhipeng Yuan, Junqin Yang, YunLong ZhangAbstract
Reliable medical laboratory automation requires robots to complete entire workflows in protocol order while handling changes during execution. A robot may execute each motion correctly yet fail the workflow by confusing visually similar stages or stalling after human intervention. We present Robo-MLT, a dual-system framework that couples explicit workflow monitoring with learned action generation. A vision--language planner composes an ordered atomic-skill sequence from the protocol and the initial workspace observation. A multiframe execution monitor detects when the active skill has completed or become infeasible, then advances the workflow or triggers replanning. A skill-conditioned vision--language--action policy generates the manipulation trajectories, and an asynchronous runtime coordinates it with the monitor. We evaluate Robo-MLT against four policy baselines and a VLM-based monitor baseline on blood gas analysis and blood sample tube sorting, with 50 nominal configurations per method and 20 sample-removal configurations. Robo-MLT achieves task success rates of 82\% and 70\%, exceeding $\pi_{0.5}$ by 30 and 22 percentage points, respectively. After an operator removes the sample being handled, the system revises the remaining plan and continues processing the other samples. These results indicate that, under the evaluated conditions, explicit workflow monitoring makes long-horizon laboratory manipulation more reliable and recoverable.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13039
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RoboACE: Adversarial Co-Evolution for Robot Self-Improvement
2026-11-09 10:29:56Delin Zhao, Zhengrong Yue, Junlin He, Yali WangAbstract
Robot agents can improve reusable skills, planning procedures, and recovery strategies from execution feedback, yet a fixed practice source leaves the search for new weaknesses unchanged. Useful practice depends on the agent's current capabilities, so the procedure that chooses practice must also be revisable. We present RoboACE (Robot Adversarial Co-Evolution), a framework that jointly evolves curriculum and execution harnesses around frozen foundation models. The curriculum harness uses accumulated capability evidence to propose informative challenges, while the execution harness responds with reusable revisions that expand execution capabilities. Alternating updates hold one side fixed as the other changes, and admitted challenges form fixed snapshots for comparing execution revisions. Starting from a compact set of LIBERO practice conditions, the resulting frozen deployment outperforms the evaluated controllers and agent systems across four LIBERO-family panels. On LIBERO-PRO, it reaches 74.0% success, exceeding the initial deployment by 15.0 percentage points and direct execution by its VLA controller by 13.5 points. Case studies document changes to evidence-guided practice selection, drawer-skill grounding, and controller intervention.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13034
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CAFE: Closed-Loop Autonomous Task Formulation and Execution without Instance-Specific Instructions
2026-11-08 08:08:15Mingjia Chen, Xuewen Zhao, Philip Dames, Qi Mao, Fei Xie, Jun ChenAbstract
Scene-driven robot autonomy requires selecting tasks from observations as well as executing them. We study scene-driven task formulation and execution under predefined cleaning, safety, and storage/organization categories, without instance-specific goals or action sequences. CAFE maintains online memory of objects, functional zones, and execution states. A rule-guided Trigger-LLM admits formulation from accumulated evidence; Draft, Complete, and Audit propose goals, resolve execution details, and check dependencies. Outcomes update memory for correction and subsequent discovery. Evaluation in 12 AI2-THOR scenes compares three backbones and task-complexity tiers using coverage, constraint, and execution metrics. Tri-LLM records higher GCR scores than the evaluated baselines across three backbones and task-complexity tiers. Controls examine completion, auditing, zones, feedback, triggering, and prompt examples. LimoCobot traces illustrate storage, cleanup, and recovery from a failed grasp. The study examines how shared scene state connects task discovery to execution and outcome-driven revision.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12983
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Maze Runner: Autonomous Maze Navigation with Line-Based Localization and Control Barrier Functions
2026-11-06 22:32:59Alvaro J. Gaona, Lucas G\'omez-Velayos, Peter Pasuy-QuevedoAbstract
Maze navigation requires localization from sparse, repetitive geometry, planning through narrow corridors, and control that stays safe when the estimate or the map is wrong. We present Maze Runner, an open autonomy stack in C++ and ROS 2 that addresses these needs end to end on a simulated Husarion ROSbot XL with a 2D LiDAR in Gazebo. Perception extracts wall lines from each scan with RANSAC and total least squares, with per-line uncertainty. The same line front end feeds two estimators: an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) that localizes against a line map built from the maze mesh, and an EKF SLAM variant that builds the line map online. Planning runs online on an inflated occupancy grid with A* plus line-of-sight shortcutting, or with a forward-only Hybrid A*. A nonlinear Model Predictive Controller (NMPC) tracks the plan while discrete-time Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) on world-frame LiDAR points keep the robot clear of walls and unmapped obstacles. The algorithms live in a ROS-free, unit-tested core library, and the whole stack builds and runs from a single reproducible environment. In simulation, the robot drives a 135 m route through the maze with 1.0 cm localization RMSE against the known map and 24 cm in SLAM mode, the planner returns a path in 6 ms, and the NMPC solves in 11.7 ms on average, never exceeding its 80 ms budget.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12949
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Scenario Orchestration for Closed-loop Policy Evaluation of Autonomous Driving
2026-11-06 18:58:27Frieda Rong, Zhaoyue Wang, Veer Kapadia, Vishaka Rajani, Aren A. Babikian, Xujie Si, Mahsa Golchoubian, Raquel Urtasun, Igor GilitschenskiAbstract
Scenario-based simulation is central to evaluating autonomous-driving policies, but a scenario scripted before execution (i.e., with predetermined, fixed actor routes and speeds) may not preserve its intended interaction once the tested ego policy responds in closed loop. Scripted scenarios cannot adapt to unanticipated ego behavior, while learned traffic actors may remain reactive without reliably realizing a particular scenario intent. We introduce a scenario orchestrator that continuously monitors the joint traffic state and adapts non-ego actors through re-timing, re-routing, and role reassignment for creating a specific scenario intent. At each step, the orchestrator solves a constrained optimization problem that preserves the intended interaction while limiting interventions and maintaining traffic feasibility. We further distinguish scenario realization from policy failure, allowing a test to first be judged based on whether the intended interaction occurred and then by how the ego policy responded. Experiments in the CARLA simulator across multiple scenario families and driving policies show that orchestration realizes targeted interactions more reliably than scripted and learned actor-level baselines, particularly under variations in initial conditions and ego behavior. These results support closed-loop scenario orchestration as a tool for controlled and reproducible policy evaluation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09888
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Locating Contact on Tendon-Driven Continuum Robots From Tendon Measurements Alone via Constrained Moving Horizon Estimation
Abstract
Tendon-driven continuum robots can reach through constrained spaces, but contact along their bodies is invisible to the sensors at their motors. We show that this is a structural limitation rather than a tuning problem: the map from contact forces to tendon measurements has a null space of dimension at least seven, so no estimator that leaves the contact support free can locate contact. When the obstacle geometry is known, however, non-penetration and complementarity make the contact force locally identifiable, and we prove that the resulting system with unknown contact inputs is locally exponentially strongly detectable. We present a constrained moving horizon estimator (MHE) that encodes these conditions and runs in real time as one quadratic program per sample, and we give a local, mode-wise robust stability result for it. In a finite- element benchmark of a two-section robot pressing and sliding on a wall, the estimator located contact to 0.9 mm and estimated contact force to 0.22 N, compared with 65 mm and 0.72 N for a tuned extended Kalman filter (EKF) with state projection. The estimator tolerated millimeter- level errors in the obstacle position and unmodeled wall friction, under which the projected EKF failed. Under randomized model mismatch over 40 trials, including unmodeled tendon friction, it remained better in force and location in every trial. Without contact, the MHE offered no advantage over the EKF, which confirms that its benefit comes from the contact constraints. This report extends a letter submitted to IEEE Control Systems Letters with complete proofs and additional experiments.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09877
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Grasp-TAGS: Task-Aware Grasp Selection via Critic Distillation for Prehensile Loco-Manipulation
2026-11-06 18:44:33Xun Tu, Minghao Zou, Karthik DesinghAbstract
Loco-manipulation, which requires mobile manipulators to coordinate locomotion and manipulation over long horizons, is a key capability for large-object rearrangement in applications such as service robotics and warehouse automation. Despite recent progress, reliably executing these tasks remains challenging because performance depends on complex robot-object and object-environment interaction dynamics. Existing approaches address this challenge either through model-based methods, which often require accurate dynamics models, or through learning-based methods, which reduce this requirement but typically assume a fixed or predefined initial grasp. However, different geometrically stable grasps can lead to substantially different downstream manipulation performance. Therefore, we propose Grasp-TAGS, a task-aware grasp selection framework for goal-conditioned large-object rearrangement. We train a unified PPO-based reinforcement learning policy across multiple initial grasp configurations and distill the learned critic into a lightweight grasp utility network that ranks candidate grasps using only the candidate grasp configuration and goal information. At inference time, we select the grasp with the highest predicted downstream utility for the downstream policy to complete the task, before even making a contact. Experiments demonstrate that Grasp-TAGS improves rearrangement success over both fixed single-grasp policies and random grasp selection, achieving an average success rate of 89.84% compared with 79.87% for the best-performing single-grasp policies, an improvement of 9.97 percentage points. Grasp-TAGS also reduces final orientation errors across all evaluated objects. For more qualitative results, refer to the supplementary webpage: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09864
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Computer-Use Agents Are Embodied Generalists
Abstract
In many areas of AI, general-purpose models have increasingly replaced handcrafted methods and specialized architectures. We argue that embodied AI is poised for a similar shift. Our key claim is that embodied tasks can be formulated as interaction with digital software. Specifically, we build software that renders an agent's view of a physical environment on a screen and provides controls for acting in it. A computer-use agent (CUA) can then perform embodied tasks through the same screenshots and keyboard and mouse actions that it uses to operate ordinary software. Using a single CUA design and changing only the software, our entries win first-, second-, third-, and sixth-place prizes across four ECCV workshop competitions, without any competition-specific agent tuning. These results suggest that the skills CUAs learn on software, such as visual grounding, precise clicking, and exploration, already carry over to embodied tasks, giving CUAs a far broader scope in embodied AI than previously realized. We therefore advocate that computer-use agents can be embodied generalists. Further, we advocate that, by following the training strategy that made computer-use agents general, embodied AI can converge on a single general model as well, ushering in a new era of general embodied AI. Website: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09847
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Autonomous Whole-body Loco-manipulation Using a Snake Robot
2026-11-06 17:38:50Adarsh Salagame, Henry Noyes, Haroon Hublikar, Alireza RamezaniAbstract
Snake robots can leverage their hyper-redundant morphology for both locomotion and manipulation through distributed body contact but whole-body loco-manipulation is particularly challenging since the entire body serves simultaneously as propulsive mechanism and manipulation tool Prior work on wheeled legged and snake robot platforms has decoupled these functions through dedicated appendages body segmentation or grippers We present closed-loop loco-manipulation with our snake robot COBRA without this distinction such that any part of the body may make contact We develop a contact-implicit dynamic model unifying robot-ground robot-object and object-ground interactions within a Moreau-Jean time-stepping framework and formulate a trajectory optimization over the full-order dynamics guided by a geometric planner and nominal proportional controller to autonomously push an object to a goal location during sidewinding We validate the planner and controller on hardware across varied configurations and present simulation results for a simplified trajectory optimization that resolves robot-object and object-ground contacts
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09777
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A wearable input/output interface learns personalized models of haptic perception
2026-11-06 16:50:24Wen Li, E. Magnus Adams, Zijie Xu, Jiawen Yao, Aybala Esmer, Xiaoyue Ni, Bozhi Tian, Pedro LopesAbstract
Wearable haptic interfaces deliver physical stimuli to the skin, yet perceived locations vary widely across users and diverge from actuator locations, particularly for emergent tactile-feedback techniques. We developed a wearable haptic input/output (I/O) device integrating a 36-channel electrotactile array with capacitive touch sensing, enabling stimulation and user-reported percept locations to be registered within the same body-referenced coordinate frame. In 24 participants, the device revealed electrotactile and referred-thermal perceptual maps with notable interparticipant variability. Despite this variability, both modalities retained electrode-pair-specific spatial structure across participants. Tactile and thermal percepts also showed spatial correspondence, whose strength varied across participants. These findings motivated our human-in-the-loop calibration framework, which adapts a forward-prediction strategy to individual users and generates personalized perceptual models. These models enabled inverse rendering by selecting stimulation patterns predicted to generate a target percept for a specific user. Using these models, we demonstrate personalized haptic rendering in haptic-guided robot teleoperation, visual-to-haptic sensory substitution, interpersonal haptic communication, and virtual reality (VR). Together, this platform provides a route toward adaptive haptic interfaces that measure, model, and render according to each user's perception.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09708
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