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  • EVPeriscope: Extended Perception across Aerial and Ground Vehicles with Event-based Propeller Tracking
    2609.119209/10/2026Dexter Ong, Vijay Kumar, Pratik Chaudhari

    Reliable relative localization between aerial and ground robots is a key requirement for tightly coordinated heterogeneous teams. This can be difficult to do using conventional frame-based cameras and fiducial markers because they are sensitive to motion blur, lighting variations, and payload constraints. This paper presents EVPeriscope, an event-based perception system that enables detection, localization and control of a quadrotor using an upward-facing event camera on a ground robot by detecting the high-frequency visual signature of its propellers. This system allows the quadrotor to function as an extended perception system for the ground robot when onboard sensors exhibit degradation or occlusion. We demonstrate the capabilities of this marsupial ground-aerial system via experiments in challenging field conditions with wind speeds of up to 15 mph, in both daylight and at night. We show that the system supports localization and closed-loop navigation through dense foliage where the ground robot's sensors are occluded. Our control system for the quadrotor operates at 200 Hz entirely with onboard sensing and computation. More details and experiment videos can be found on the project page: https://ongdexter.github.io/evperiscope.

    renderingsensorsperception
  • RIDE: Relocalization-Informed Depth Estimation with 3D Gaussian Splatting
    2609.110799/10/2026Jiarong Lian, Zhe Xiao, Zhaoyang Zhang, Wei Li

    Render--match--PnP relocalization establishes correspondences between query image pixels and 3D map points for camera pose recovery, but their potential to support dense depth estimation is often overlooked. To exploit this geometric information, we present RIDE, which estimates dense metric depth from a robot's RGB stream. Given a metrically scaled 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model, RIDE combines sparse metric depth observations derived from PnP-RANSAC inlier correspondences with the geometric prior of a pretrained video-depth model. To handle uneven and intermittent observations, it integrates global and local depth correction with temporal memory, supporting depth estimation through short observation gaps after metric scale initialization. Trained on public RGB-D videos, RIDE is evaluated on robot sequences without fine tuning. Experiments show improved depth accuracy and temporal consistency over scale-only calibration, demonstrating how localization geometry can support both pose recovery and dense robot perception.

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  • Learning Terrain-Adaptive Humanoid Locomotion on Granular Terrain
    2609.102869/9/2026Junnosuke Kamohara, Feiyang Wu, Andy Ningan Zong, Daniel I. Goldman

    Humanoid locomotion on granular terrain remains a significant challenge due to its complex foot-terrain interaction dynamics that are difficult to model. Existing approaches either ignore granular contact dynamics or incorporate simplified normal force models with heuristic tangential components. In this work, we present a physics-grounded granular contact model based on three-dimensional resistive force theory (3D RFT) and efficiently simulate granular terrain for reinforcement learning (RL) training. Unlike traditional rigid contact models and simplified granular contact models with ad-hoc heuristics, our contact solver produces physically accurate granular intrusion dynamics without resorting to heuristics. It captures realistic penetration and tangential drag during training, enabling the policy to learn behaviors that transfer reliably to real-world granular terrain where rigid contact models fail. To adapt to varying terrain conditions, we train a terrain-adaptive locomotion controller via teacher-student RL, using a variational autoencoder to encode terrain information into a compact latent representation. Simulation studies using material point method (MPM) with NVIDIA Newton demonstrate that our method generalizes to unseen granular terrains, achieves a significantly higher success rate than baselines, and demonstrates zero-shot terrain identification and adaptation. We further validate our approach through extensive hardware experiments across diverse real-world granular terrains including basalt, dry sand, and beach sand. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of agile humanoid locomotion on real-world granular terrain. Project page: https://humanoid-gm-locomotion.github.io/HUMANOID-GM/

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  • FolDeX: A Physical-World Benchmark for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation of Deformable Objects
    2609.102439/9/2026Chenhuan Liu, Yi Xu, Feng Wu, Hanyang Wang

    Embodied AI, including vision-language-action and world-action models, must operate reliably in the physical world. Yet methods that perform well in simulation can degrade substantially on real robots, especially in long-horizon deformable-object manipulation, where policies must track changing states and execute reliable multi-stage bimanual interactions. Existing real-robot benchmarks mainly focus on short-horizon rigid-object tasks and offer limited coverage of long-horizon deformable manipulation. We introduce FolDeX, a physical-world benchmark built entirely from real-robot data, with garment folding as its primary task. Since real-robot data collection is costly, FolDeX studies how heterogeneous physical experience can be reused efficiently. The benchmark is organized around four research axes: leveraging human intervention and recovery data collected during deployment; transferring data across tasks, including across garment categories and from rigid to deformable-object manipulation; reusing data across scenes with changes in lighting, background, and layout; and transferring data across robotic embodiments. FolDeX provides 2,000+ hours of real-robot data spanning 20+ tasks and 10+ embodiments. We also establish a fair real-robot evaluation platform for externally submitted policies, with standardized tasks, held-out physical objects, controlled initializations, and a unified execution protocol. The platform is publicly accessible at https://ai.midea.com/#/fold-challenge. We hope FolDeX will serve as a unified testbed for heterogeneous real-robot data reuse and reliable long-horizon deformable manipulation.

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  • AXON: A ROS 2 RMW with Shared-Memory/QUIC Transport and QKD/ML-KEM Key Establishment
    2609.100249/9/2026Sergio Sánchez de la Fuente, Miguel Ángel González-Santamarta, Francisco Javier Rodríguez-Lera, Vicente Matellán Olivera

    Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) standardizes application code against a middleware interface (RMW) whose reference implementations are built on the Data Distribution Service (DDS). We present AXON, an alternative ROS 2 RMW implementation that separates transport policy by deployment scope. A Rust core and C++ adapter use POSIX shared-memory rings for same-host communication, QUIC for remote communication, and a daemon for discovery and graph synchronization. We then describe two fail-closed TLS 1.3 key-establishment configurations for remote traffic. The classic configuration offers only the hybrid X25519MLKEM768 group, preventing negotiation of a classical-only group. The qkd configuration imports a 256-bit key obtained through the ETSI GS QKD 014 API as a pairwise external PSK and offers no Diffie-Hellman group. Its default messages10 strategy additionally protects remote application messages with AES-256-GCM, rotating KME material after ten outgoing messages and using a fresh nonce per envelope; session relies on QUIC protection alone. The external-PSK path requires a narrow extension to rustls, now bundled with AXON. We define the threat model, distinguish peer authentication in the two configurations, and delimit the implementation-level validation from ROS 2 conformance, comparative performance, and physical-QKD validation.

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  • RealSimLoop: Online Real-to-Sim Adaptation via Differentiable Reduced-Order Simulation with Vision Feedback
    2609.098289/9/2026Zhihao Cen, Chuhua Xian, Hailin Sun, Yuliang Liufu

    Real-world observations of deformable objects are often sparse or surface-level, while downstream tasks require hidden physical quantities such as internal deformation, stress fields, and interaction forces. Physics-based simulation can recover these quantities, but online real-to-sim adaptation remains challenging due to costly full-space optimization, limited feedback, and time-varying material properties. To address these challenges, we propose RealSimLoop, a differentiable framework for online real-to-sim adaptation using vision data as physical feedback. Our approach achieves quasi-real-time performance by executing differentiable simulation within a reduced-order neural subspace, drastically accelerating the optimization loop. We couple this efficient dynamics model with differentiable rendering, enabling direct gradient backpropagation that leverages high-fidelity pixel data to refine physical parameters such as material stiffness. Furthermore, by employing a sliding-window objective function, RealSimLoop enables robust online adaptation, allowing the system to track time-varying material properties and effectively bridge the real-to-sim gap arising from model reduction or unmodeled dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms conventional offline methods, and we validate the framework's versatility in downstream applications, including external force prediction and 3D stress field reconstruction with novel view synthesis.

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  • FRAME: Factored Retrieval via Attribute Readouts for Object-Centric Scene Memory
    2609.088869/8/2026Woosang Jeon, Sanghyeok Choi, Minwoo Kim, Taehyun Jung

    Language-guided robots need persistent scene memories to follow instructions, revisit objects, and resolve references to objects encountered over time. While much of language-guided scene-memory retrieval has emphasized spatial or relational references, many everyday object references specify objects by multiple persistent attributes, such as category, material, size, or surface appearance. We formalize this problem as attribute-compositional retrieval, where a fixed object-centric scene memory is queried with natural language to retrieve the object satisfying the requested attributes. To investigate this capability directly, we introduce a controlled evaluation protocol with fixed scene memories and attribute-defined targets, separating retrieval from perception and annotation ambiguities. We then propose FRAME, which turns language into query-relevant attribute weights, uses learned readouts to estimate per-attribute evidence from object embeddings, and ranks objects by aggregating this evidence according to the query. Across held-out scenes and object assets, FRAME outperforms representative scene-memory retrieval baselines while reducing post-decomposition object scoring to lightweight matrix-vector computation. These results position attribute-compositional retrieval as a complementary scene-memory capability for language-guided robots, showing that persistent object attributes can be exposed as composable evidence for accurate and efficient multi-attribute retrieval.

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  • Real-time Puncture Detection and Recovery for Pneumatic Soft Actuators
    2609.088049/8/2026Tejonidhi R. Deshpande, Tingyu Cheng, Josiah Hester

    Soft robots offer safe and adaptive interaction with humans and unstructured environments through their inherent ability to deform and comply. Pneumatic actuators are one way to build soft robots. They are typically made from soft silicone materials and are especially effective for driving such systems, enabling smooth and adaptable motion. However, their compliant nature also makes them vulnerable to mechanical failures like punctures and tears, limiting practical deployment. To address this, we propose a puncture detection system for soft actuators using motion data from a single inertial measurement unit. Extracted features are used to train anomaly detectors for puncture detection and non-linear models to estimate severity. We also introduce a multi-chamber pneumatic soft bending actuator capable of diverse configurations via selective chamber inflation. Our algorithm identifies the punctured chamber and provides a severity score using a chamber perturbation scheme. Anomaly detectors are trained on normal operation data and detect damage through reconstruction errors, while severity is estimated by a separate model trained under slightly modified conditions. Finally, we demonstrate a failure recovery strategy to maintain actuation force post-failure. This approach enhances the reliability and safety of soft robotic systems through real-time, data-driven damage detection.

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  • BIFTA: Brain-Inspired Few-Shot Tactile Adaptation for Unknown Sensors
    2609.086739/8/2026Boheng Liu, Ziyu Li, Xia Wu

    Advances in tactile sensing have made contact-rich perception possible, accelerating progress in robotic manipulation, material understanding, and embodied interaction. However, because optical design, elastomer mechanics, and imaging geometry differ substantially across tactile sensors, models trained on known sensor types can suffer an abrupt performance collapse on unknown sensors. To address this problem, we propose the Brain-Inspired Few-Shot Tactile Adaptation (BIFTA) framework; it draws on the brain's rapid sensory adaptation mechanism to adapt a frozen encoder to an unknown tactile sensor from a small labeled support set. BIFTA preserves pretrained representations through dual-view statistical memory, constructs support-conditioned spectral graphs to repair sensor-dependent feature neighborhoods, and applies uncertainty-gated recurrent propagation to strengthen reliable cross-query evidence. Extensive benchmarks across three tactile datasets show that BIFTA substantially improves adaptation to unknown sensors: with only 10\% labeled target data on SITR, it raises mean Sparsh accuracy from 6.86\% for the frozen source classifier to 87.09\%, exceeding the strongest implemented prior comparison by 47.22 percentage points, and these gains generalize across datasets, pretrained backbones, and tactile tasks. These results validate BIFTA for data-efficient adaptation to unknown tactile sensors and offer a promising route toward tactile models that transfer across heterogeneous hardware.

    renderingmanipulationsensorsperception
  • Learning to build covering structures with continuous adjustments
    2609.086699/8/2026Gabriel Vallat, Maryam Kamgarpour, Stefana Parascho

    Robotic construction offers the potential to use materials more efficiently and create complex geometries, but current methods rely on rigid, high-precision plans that cannot accommodate the tolerances, inaccuracies, and unexpected changes inherent in physical fabrication. In this work, we introduce a reinforcement learning approach that forgoes predefined plans entirely, instead generating construction sequences adaptively as the structure is built. Our method operates on graph-structured state representations and a mixed (parameterized) action space, requiring both discrete block selection and continuous placement parameters. Because the stability simulation of a structure is computationally heavy, we develop an efficient exploration strategy by incorporating unilateral edges into graph neural networks, extending soft actor-critic (SAC) to this hybrid setting. We evaluate our algorithm, HSAC, against the prior method hybrid-PPO (HPPO), demonstrating significantly higher asymptotic performance and good sample efficiency. We also demonstrate HSAC's robustness to hyperparameter choices and its exploration capability, handling up to 10 discrete actions without performance degradation. Finally, we validate our approach on a physical two-robot setup, successfully building a spanning arch with 3D-printed blocks in closed-loop execution, confirming that policies trained in simulation transfer to real hardware.

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  • HaptiNet: Networked Haptic Robots Enable Physical Co-presence in Geographically-Unconstrained Rehabilitation
    2609.047999/4/2026Chenyang Sun, Mingjie Dong, Haodong Deng, Yudong Liu

    Cooperative rehabilitation enhances engagement, task performance, and social-motor interaction, yet it demands physical co-presence: users must transmit forces, coordinate movements, and infer intent through haptic contact. Telerehabilitation promises to expand access for patients constrained by distance, mobility, or clinical disparities, yet current techniques remain predominantly audiovisual while leaving users haptically and physically isolated. Here, we introduce HaptiNet, a networked haptic robotic system enabling physical co-presence for geographically distributed users via force-mediated interaction. Each robotic terminal features a low-inertia, long-stroke design with high force-feedback capacity, tailored for haptic rendering in upper-limb training. Building on these terminals, HaptiNet creates a distributed haptic network with an imitation-learning-based delay compensator, enabling users to physically perceive and coordinate with one another over distance. We validated HaptiNet in 284 healthy participants and 111 patients with neurological impairments across progressively realistic settings, including laboratory tests, cross-city deployments, and clinical applications. HaptiNet preserved task-level force rendering consistency across single-user and multi-user scenarios. Compared with solo and visual cooperative training, haptic cooperation improved task performance by 24% and 22%, respectively, while also boosting engagement and interpersonal motor synchrony. Across three intercity links totaling approximately 4,000 km, HaptiNet maintained stable haptic interaction among patients with neurological impairments, producing a 3.87-fold greater baseline-to-training score improvement and a 106% higher patient-applied effort over the solo condition.

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  • NavArena: Automated Construction of Goal-Oriented Navigation Benchmarks from 3D Gaussian Splatting Reconstructions
    2609.046029/3/2026Junhui Wang, Wei Yang, Xinyao Li, Ningjing Fan

    Fixed 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) reconstructions provide realistic novel views but lack the traversability constraints, valid goals, and closed-loop protocols required for navigation evaluation. We introduce NavArena, an automated framework that transforms fixed 3DGS reconstructions into benchmarks for goal-oriented visual navigation. NavArena integrates a frozen 3DGS model for egocentric RGB-D rendering, an occupancy costmap derived from Gaussian density and height statistics for reachability and collision queries, and semantic goal candidates lifted from multi-view open-vocabulary masks. These components support the automatic generation and unified closed-loop evaluation of goal-oriented navigation episodes. Across more than 2{,}000 scenes, NavArena generates 22.2 million expert trajectories. Spatial and semantic evaluations assess the derived navigation representations, while policy rollouts demonstrate the diagnostic value of the unified evaluation protocol. NavArena enables scalable and reproducible navigation evaluation on large-scale 3DGS reconstructions, and all benchmark-generation tools, evaluation protocols, and derived assets will be released publicly.

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  • Where Appearance Fails, Geometry Recognizes: A CAD-Free 3D Shape Prior That Complements Vision Foundation Models
    2609.043819/3/2026Chenxi Tao, Seung-Kyum Choi

    Recognizing specific objects onboarded without a labeled training set recurs across manufacturing and service robotics, yet the conventional renderable prior, a computer-aided-design (CAD) model, is often unavailable. Two-dimensional capture supplies no shape prior, and frozen foundation features fail on geometrically similar, low-texture industrial parts. We ask what a short object-centric scan buys for recognition beyond the captured images themselves: each object is reconstructed with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), summarized into a per-class shape prototype, and fused with frozen DINOv2 image features. First, the scan recovers the recognition value of CAD without CAD: geometry from RGB-D depth (on T-LESS), 3DGS, and CAD gives comparable recognition (tied on HOPE, within 1.6 points on T-LESS); 3DGS is only a convenient route to a point cloud. Second, the payoff is governed by how recognizable the shape is: on shape-distinctive household objects (HOPE) geometry alone reaches 0.920 versus image-only 0.832, a ceiling below which fixed-weight fusion (0.872) sits. On shape-confusable textureless industrial parts (T-LESS) the gain is modest but consistent (0.560 to 0.591 fused, above both single signals). Third, the prior is complementary, not uniformly additive: it rescues far more image failures than it breaks successes, and its benefit grows under partial occlusion. Finally, the worth lies in geometry, not rendered pixels: 3DGS renderings do not help the image side, and frozen-feature recognition is nearly lighting-invariant (within 2.5 points). The study is scoped to recognition, not the BOP pose benchmark.

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  • GraFT: A Training-Free Framework for Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models via 3D Scene Graphs
    2609.038929/3/2026Junqing Du, Fernando Ropero, Erkin Turkoz, Yanfeng Zhang

    3D spatial reasoning underpins understanding and acting in the physical world, yet it remains unreliable in current multimodal large language models (MLLMs). These models falter at precise geometric measurement, at transforming between egocentric and allocentric viewpoints, and at grounding fine-grained appearance. The most common remedies fine-tune the model on large-scale curated spatial-reasoning datasets or attach dedicated encoders for 3D geometry, which typically couples the solution to costly supervision and a specific backbone. We instead introduce GraFT, a training-free framework that supplies the missing 3D structure through a compact, easily maintained 3D scene graph (3DSG). From this 3DSG, GraFT provides three spatial reasoning capabilities: (1) deterministic geometry through symbolic tools, (2) allocentric layout through a bird's-eye-view (BEV) rendering, and (3) visual-attribute grounding through task-relevant egocentric frames. On ScanQA, GraFT improves every metric over the same-backbone baseline, raising CIDEr by 27%. On VSI-Bench, GraFT improves frozen MLLMs by up to 65%, surpassing every proprietary and general-purpose open-source baseline, and several prominent fine-tuned spatial models.

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  • Robot Aware Computational Design of Object Specific Passive Grippers for Additive Manufacturing
    2609.037619/3/2026Abdullah Yahya Abdullah Omaisan, Ibrahim Sheikh Mohamed

    This paper presents an end-to-end computational pipeline that converts a selected object mesh, a measured object state, and a selected six-axis robot into an object-specific, unactuated, additively manufacturable gripper. The method couples exact-mesh RGB-D/ICP pose registration, deterministic surface-contact sampling, uncertainty-aware wrench screening, selection among six passive capture mechanisms, object-conformal surface synthesis, full-orientation robot inverse kinematics, a swept-volume-aware manufacturing domain, directional fused-deposition finite-element screening, and constrained three-dimensional SIMP topology optimization. Unlike workflows that treat grasp selection, tool geometry, motion, and structural design as separate problems, every exported design is bound to the source mesh, object pose, robot flange, contact set, and insertion hypothesis by a traceable design identifier. We derive the implemented registration, contact, fit-tolerance, finite-element, and density-optimization equations and prove three properties of the numerical construction: nodal load preservation, monotonic compliance sensitivity under SIMP interpolation, and voxel-domain containment after topology post-processing. Four archived object-specific attempts - a rabbit, camera flange, 3DBenchy, and faceted bust - meet the nominal fit, uncertain-wrench, runtime-sweep, and baseline/post-topology FEA gates. A deliberately enlarged +/-3 mm, +/-5 degree pose stress check differentiates the designs, retaining 29-134 of 160 simulated trials. Their reconstructed topologies retain 92.0-97.6% of the FE domain because functional regions are protected. Archived robot photographs show the corresponding printed assemblies qualitatively, while nominal material properties and absent coupon-calibrated, instrumented tests keep all four at digital-screening status rather than operational release.

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  • A Multi-Vine Soft Robot Enabling Accessible Working Channel and Steering
    2609.037589/3/2026Reza Kashef, Cem Suulker, Mohammad Sheikh Sofla, Kaspar Althoefer

    Soft eversion robots, also known as vine robots, have attracted growing interest for navigation and inspection tasks, including minimally invasive medical applications [1]. A vine robot consists of a thin, flexible, inextensible tube folded inward that everts and grows forward when pressurized. This tip-growth enables navigation with minimal friction, making vine robots well suited for complex environments such as the human colon [2]. While their inherent softness allows passive conforma- tion to curved pathways in confined spaces, navigation performance strongly depends on environmental inter- actions, including contact angle and the length of un- constrained deployed material [3], [4]. Sharp directional changes, such as those in the sigmoid colon, often limit passive growth and necessitate active steering. Existing solutions include distributed artificial muscles [5] or dedicated tip-based steering mechanisms [6]. In addition, many applications require payload delivery, such as sensors and tools [7], [8]. Within the ERC Synergy project EndoTheranostics, this motivates the development of vine robots capable of delivering micro- surgical tools during growth. Prior work has integrated working channels within the vine body [8], [9], but these approaches constrain tool size, introduce friction, and limit access to the environment to the robot tip. In this work, we propose a multi-vine architecture in which two vine robots are coupled to an externally integrated working channel via soft mounting tips [10]. Independent vine actuation enables active tip steering while advancing the working channel without embed- ding it within the vine bodies Figure 1. Experiments demonstrate sharp steering of nearly 90 degrees during growth, highlighting the potential of this architecture for versatile medical and non-medical applications.

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  • BRIDGE: An Open-Source Humanoid Platform via Morphology-Control Co-Design for Physical AI
    2609.034979/3/2026Jianren Wang, Letian Qian, Zikai Wang, Weiwei Wu

    Developing humanoid robots capable of leveraging human behavioral data is essential for general-purpose embodiment, yet conventional development remains bottlenecked by a decoupled paradigm that isolates hardware design from whole-body control. This approach leads to suboptimal systems that compromise human-like fluidity and agility. To bridge this gap, we introduce a data-driven morphology-control co-design framework that optimizes humanoid morphology for human-like movement. To quantify morphological fidelity, we also introduce a novel metric that jointly considers kinematic retargeting fidelity to human motion and dynamic tracking performance. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across all metrics compared to baseline humanoids (Bumi, K1, and Toddlerbot). Finally, we realize this design in Bridge, an open-source, 88cm-tall humanoid platform released alongside its control policy. We demonstrate that Bridge captures human motion data with superior fidelity, exhibiting exceptional performance across foundational locomotion, robust balance, and highly dynamic maneuvers. Videos and open-source materials: https://sites.google.com/view/bridgerobot.

    rlrenderinglocomotionhumanoidagility
  • WireSeg-32K: A Physics-Grounded Synthetic Dataset for Wire Instance Segmentation
    2609.031029/2/2026Zilin Dai, Lehong Wang, Yi Yang, Xiang Fei

    Deformable linear objects such as wires and cables are difficult to segment because they are thin, highly deformable, and frequently self-occluded, while large-scale instance-level annotations are expensive to obtain in real scenes. Existing resources either focus on cable tracing or semantic segmentation under constrained settings, or generate visually plausible images without physically grounded wire deformation. We present WireSeg-32k, a synthetic dataset for wire instance segmentation with 32,000 RGB images, instance masks, depth maps, and a complementary real-world test set with annotations. To generate this dataset, we develop DeformX, a co-simulation pipeline that couples Cosserat-rod dynamics with photorealistic Isaac Sim rendering, enabling physically plausible, contact-consistent wire shapes, CAD-based wire assets, and diverse visually grounded scenes. As a simple baseline, LoRA fine-tuning SAM3 on WireSeg-32k alone improves real-world mAP@75 by 10.2% over the off-the-shelf model, showing that physically grounded synthetic data can transfer to real wire perception.

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  • Hardware-Accelerated Instance Segmentation for Resource-Constrained Space Robotics with Criticality Analysis
    2609.022199/2/2026Siddhant Shete, Hilmi Dogu Kücüker, Udo Frese, Frank Kirchner

    Autonomous lunar missions require real-time per- ception under three coupled constraints: extreme low-light conditions, limited onboard compute, and radiation-induced hardware faults that can silently corrupt inference. We present a deployment-oriented instance segmentation framework for resource-constrained lunar robotics that jointly addresses quan- tization calibration and system-level fault exposure under strict compute constraints. First, we introduce Activation Variance Informative Sampling (AVIS), a label-free calibration strategy that deterministically selects calibration samples based on activation variance statistics. Second, we deploy a YOLO-based segmentation model on a Deep Learning Processor Unit (DPU) with architectural modifications that reduce CPU fallback paths and enable statically compiled execution with bounded latency in low-lighting conditions. We further introduce a software-level criticality analysis to estimate fault exposure and guide mitigation under radiation-constrained operation. On a lunar micro-rover platform, AVIS with bias correction recovers 69.8% of quantization-induced accuracy loss while achieving 309 ms inference latency and 5.7 W power consumption. Targeted mitigation reduces global criticality by 31.7%. The results demonstrate an integrated approach and a blueprint for a reliable and safe AI perception framework under space deployment constraints.

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  • One Print, Many Moves: Monolithic Origami-inspired Folding Actuator for Composable Soft Multi-DoF Systems
    2609.007519/1/2026Jaehyung Jang, Zhenish Zhakypov, Jasmin Elena Palmer, Melissa Klein

    Conventional soft robot actuators excel in compliance, but their uncontrolled deformations compromise accuracy and hinder scaling to multi-degree-of-freedom (DoF) systems. We introduce a MONOlithic ORIGAMI-inspired soft folding actuator design (MONORIGAMI) that establishes a design strategy based on spatially programmed stiffness anisotropy to preserve material compliance along desired folding directions while selectively restricting deformation in unwanted directions. The actuator leverages stiffness tiers based on material thickness, patterned in an origami-inspired geometry with facets and creases, converting unconstrained soft deformation into accurate, repeatable, and composable folding motions without additional reinforcements. The design is fully 3D-printable through a single-material, single-print process that requires no assembly. Each actuator serves as a scalable motion primitive, and linking and orienting multiple actuators mechanically programs multi-DoF trajectories. Using the same fundamental module, we demonstrate three 3D-printed soft multi-DoF robotic systems spanning distinct application domains: (1) a compact 4-DoF wearable haptic device for high-fidelity cutaneous feedback in virtual reality (VR), (2) a 3-DoF joystick for kinesthetic feedback in teleoperation, and (3) a modular robotic gripper capable of underwater operation with geometry-encoded grasp trajectories. These systems demonstrate the module's capabilities for compact multi-axis integration, controlled physical interaction, and geometry-programmed operation across different environments. Together, these results show that MONORIGAMI provides a general, composable, accessible, reliable, and scalable platform for high-precision soft multi-DoF robotics, addressing long-standing limitations in both soft actuator design and fabrication.

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  • DSG: Dynamic 3D Scene Graph Construction for Embodied Agents in Changing Indoor Environments
    2609.006198/31/2026Ming Liao, Chao Ye, Jianing Fei, Weiyang Lin

    In indoor environments, object positions frequently change due to human activities or embodied-agent interactions, causing previously constructed scene graphs to become inconsistent with the current scene. To address this issue, we propose DSG, a dynamic 3D scene graph construction framework that detects object changes and performs spatial relationship reasoning. First, we construct a semantic-aware 3D Gaussian scene representation and develop a dual-view rendering-based object change detection method to enable reliable scene graph node updates. Second, we propose a spatial relationship reasoning method that incorporates multi-granularity visual context, enabling a large language model to identify a richer set of interobject spatial relationships. Furthermore, we introduce DynTHOR, a dynamic indoor scene graph benchmark built on the AI2-THOR simulation platform for evaluating scene graph construction in dynamic environments. Extensive experiments on Dyn-THOR, 3RScan, and real-world scenes demonstrate that DSG consistently outperforms existing methods in both object node construction and spatial relationship reasoning, significantly improving the accuracy of dynamic scene graph construction.

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  • SpectraTac: A Compact Camera-Free Optical Tactile Sensor with Distributed Color Sensing
    2608.303688/31/2026Hao Wu, Haotian Guo, Yu Feng, Yutong Wang

    Tactile sensing is essential for physical interaction in robotics and human--machine systems. However, combining rich tactile information with compact hardware, low cost, and low computational overhead remains challenging. This work presents SpectraTac, a compact, camera-free optical tactile sensor that combines active red--green--blue (RGB) illumination with spatially distributed color sensing. Contact deforms a compliant transparent elastomer and modulates its internal light field, producing spatially differentiated changes in color and intensity. Three distributed color sensors capture these responses as low-dimensional spatio-spectral features, avoiding cameras, imaging optics, and high-dimensional image processing. The device measures 19.2 mm in diameter and 4 mm in height, with a material cost below USD~5. A data-driven decoding framework simultaneously estimates three-dimensional (3D) force and the contact region from the optical measurements. For 3D force prediction, the sensor achieved mean absolute errors (MAEs) of 0.161, 0.164, and 0.429 N along the x-, y-, and z-axes, respectively. The nine-region contact-classification accuracy was 99.9%. We further evaluated real-time 3D force tracking and contact-region-based human--machine interaction through an interactive control task. These results indicate that distributed color-resolved optical sensing offers a compact, low-cost alternative to camera-based tactile sensing for robotics, wearable sensing, and interactive systems.

    usdrenderingsensors
  • Data-Centric Neuromotor Interfaces for Portable Human-Machine Interaction
    2608.303018/31/2026Jiaxuan Li, Di Wu, Jianhua Liu, Yuxin Zhao

    Dexterous human-machine interaction requires intuitive and expressive interfaces that can be efficiently deployed on constrained edge devices. Flexible material-based neuromotor interfaces hold considerable promise, as they decode human movement intention into natural control. Although emerging flexible electronic skins enable wearable high-fidelity data acquisition, practical deployment inevitably involves trade-offs between computational resources and portability. We present a data-centric paradigm where physiological features yield fundamental separability, providing sufficient discriminative cues for recognition. A wireless, high-bandwidth system developed for collecting various electrophysiological signals, when integrated with muscle-specific electrodes, forms a surface electromyography-based interface. Exploiting highly separable data, a 2,210-parameter model achieves 94.36% accuracy across 34 gestures and can be rapidly deployed on edge devices, establishing a new thousand-parameter benchmark for dexterous decoding. The underlying data-algorithm interactions in the data-centric paradigm are further clarified, demonstrating its feasibility in real-world scenarios. This study provides a principled and validated pathway for practical deployment of reliable neuromotor interfaces.

    renderingdeployment
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