Robótica
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Trajectory-Initialized Neural Double Q-Routing for Large-Scale Overhead Hoist Transport Systems
Large-scale industrial robot fleets share constrained physical infrastructure, making vehicle travel times dependent on safety separation, intersection access, downstream blocking, and station contention. We study this problem in overhead hoist transport (OHT) systems, a representative ceiling-mounted material-handling system used in semiconductor fabs. Static shortest-path routing cannot account for these time-varying traffic costs, whereas tabular Q-routing adapts online but learns each destination--node--action value independently, limiting information sharing across sparsely visited routing contexts and making startup behavior sensitive to inaccurate value estimates. We propose Neural Double Q-routing, which replaces destination-indexed tables with a shared state--action value network. The network is warm-started through return-to-go regression on mixed simulator-generated routing trajectories and then refined online using Double-Q updates, local congestion correction, and event-stratified structured replay. Across nine matched fleet-size--arrival-rate settings with 100, 150, and 200 OHTs, the proposed framework reduces mean completion time relative to tabular Double Q-routing by 0.8\%--8.8\%. It achieves the lowest mean completion time among all compared methods in the six 150- and 200-OHT settings, whereas Dijkstra remains best in the three 100-OHT settings. Completed-task counts remain within 1\% of tabular Double Q-routing in eight of nine settings, and 95th-percentile completion time decreases in eight settings. In two matched startup scenarios, offline initialization increases the number of completed tasks by up to 23\% and reduces tail completion time by up to 15\%.
The US is building barriers around drones and robots, but China has scale to get around them
The U.S. is shutting out more foreign-made drones and robots. China’s scale means the global competition may simply move elsewhere.
{N}_0-Foundation: Towards the Age of Tactile Intelligence
We present {N}_0-Foundation, a paradigm for tactile-enabled embodied manipulation, which integrates tactile sensing hardware, large-scale multimodal data, tactile representation learning, and standardized evaluation. First, we engineer the infrastructure for scalable data collection, including a vision-based tactile sensor, a tactile Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI), and a synchronized visuo-tactile data collection system supporting both robot embodiments and UMI-based demonstrations. Leveraging this infrastructure, we construct NeoData, which contains more than 30000 hours of synchronized visual and tactile demonstrations, spanning six embodiments, 450 tasks, and billions of paired RGB and tactile frames collected through a mixture of real-robot teleoperation and UMI-based demonstrations. To facilitate open research, we further release OpenNeoData, a 5000-hour open-source subset of NeoData. The dataset addresses a central limitation of existing manipulation corpora, critical for deformable-object manipulation, precise assembly, delicate force control, and sustained surface interaction. Capitalizing on the large-scale, heterogeneous tactile measurements, we propose NeoForce, a visuo-tactile representation model that learn transferable tactile representations across different sensor designs. To enable systematic evaluation of tactile embodied models built upon our infrastructure, datasets and tactile representations, we further propose a comprehensive benchmark, which combines the real-world NeoReal suite and the simulated NeoSim suite for standardized evaluation. Experiments across both suites show that policies benefit from the physical contact state rather than from the device-specific appearance of the tactile signal. We release the dataset, the representation, and the benchmark, aiming at supporting future work on tactile-enabled embodied manipulation.
Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Security
Autonomous large language model (LLM) agents increasingly face reliability, context consumption, and execution stability bottlenecks when deployed on complex, long-horizon tasks. While monolithic prompt engineering and stateless tool-calling paradigms struggle to scale, the field is rapidly converging toward agentic skills: modular procedural abstractions that externalize execution knowledge into reusable, executable, and portable artifacts. This paper establishes a unified systems foundation and reference architecture for the agentic skills ecosystem. We formalize skills as externalized procedural knowledge bridging high-level cognitive planning with deterministic execution environments, and systematically delineate the architecture across a nine-stage lifecycle: autonomous discovery, authoring and representation formats, memory storage, dynamic retrieval and routing, composition and orchestration, execution and repair, lifelong adaptation, empirical evaluation, and security governance. We further examine marketplace dynamics, public registries, and emerging adversarial threat vectors, alongside runtime verification and defense mechanisms. Finally, we categorize system implementations across software engineering, operating system navigation, embodied robotics, and scientific discovery, while highlighting critical open challenges in continual learning and benchmark realism. This work establishes agentic skills as a foundational paradigm for building scalable, robust, and verifiable autonomous language agents.
Asynchronous Cooperative Online Learning for Multi-Robot Control under Computational Delays
Ensuring the safe operation of multi-agent systems (MASs) under uncertain environments is crucial for cooperative robotic, where external disturbances and inaccurate dynamic models can significantly compromise performance and reliability. To address this challenge, calibrated machine learning models, particularly Gaussian process (GP) regression, are extensively employed due to their interpretable performance quantification. As the interconnected communication of MASs facilitates cooperative learning, agents are able to enhance learning performance by exchanging local GP inferences with their neighbors and aggregating the received information via distributed GP strategies. However, variations in computational power and prediction tasks among agents inevitably lead to heterogeneous computational delays and differences in query points, which are often overlooked in existing aggregation methods. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes an asynchronous cooperative learning strategy that explicitly accounts for prediction accuracy, query point variations and delay effects. Additionally, a distributed control law based on an adjoint MAS is developed to ensure the desired control performance. Simulations on unmanned surface vehicles validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, demonstrating substantial improvements in both learning and control performance compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.
AGM: Achievement-Grounded Memory for Closed-Loop Agents with Frozen VLA Policies
Frozen vision-language-action (VLA) policies offer broad manipulation skills but execute open-loop action chunks without tracking task progress, so the agent cannot reliably decide whether to continue, retry, or terminate. External memory is a natural remedy, yet it can be harmful when attempted actions are treated as completed progress, turning local execution errors into persistent task-state errors. We propose Achievement-Grounded Memory (AGM), a lightweight closed-loop framework for frozen VLA policies that represents a task as a subgoal sequence with a progress pointer and advances this memory only after the current subgoal is verified by physical evidence. Proprioceptive interaction cues decide when to verify, while coherent point tracking and language-conditioned cross-view comparison, sourced from frozen foundation models through a single 2.43M-parameter verification head, decide what was achieved. AGM thereby converts open-loop execution into a closed loop of execution, verification, and progress, keeping the policy frozen without test-time large-model inference. On the RoboMME Counting benchmark, AGM reaches on PickXTimes and on BinFill, surpassing the strongest memory-augmented baseline by points on average, and the framework yields equally decisive gains on a physical robot. Reliable embodied memory thus depends more on disciplined state updates than on memory capacity.
The U.S. is building barriers around drones and robots, but China has scale to get around them
The U.S. is shutting out more foreign-made drones and robots. China’s scale means the global competition may simply move elsewhere.
When Robots Mishear Us: Mapping the Safety Risks of Voice-Controlled Embodied AI
We investigate whether automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors in user input can lead to unsafe outputs from Embodied AI (EAI) models. We find that ASR errors can lead to harmful instructions being accepted and executed by EAI models, thereby reducing safety. We simulate ASR errors and combine them with existing safety benchmarks (SafeAgentBench and POEX) to evaluate how different errors affect embodied AI safety. We find that some of them preserve semantic structure but increase harmful ambiguity, while others weaken the model refusal behaviour and allow unsafe plans to be generated and executed. We show that in some cases automatic correction of ASR errors can reduce the risk, but this is not always effective. Overall, we show that ASR errors lead to significant safety risks for embodied AI.
AcrossVAM1.0: Particle World Modeling for Text-Assisted Robot Video Prediction
Predicting robot videos requires both precise motion reasoning and preservation of high-frequency appearance, yet monolithic pixel models entangle these objectives and often conceal their progress behind a strong last-frame baseline. We present AcrossVAM1.0, a lightweight, text-assisted video action model that factorizes future prediction into object-centric motion and dense appearance. A frozen SAM3-DLP codec decomposes four context frames into semantic particles for the robot, arm, and gripper, together with a background latent. A 0.28M-parameter spatio-temporal Transformer aligns particle identities, rolls their states forward, and is modulated by a frozen OpenCLIP instruction embedding through FiLM. A causal dual-stream decoder combines particle-rendered motion with appearance encoded exclusively from the last observed frame; a residual refiner and learned delivery mask produce five future frames without access to future appearance. On our VRS benchmark constructed from diverse real-robot trajectories, particle dynamics reduce trajectory error by 21.0\% over persistence. Across three delivery-mask seeds, AcrossVAM1.0 improves future-frame PSNR/SSIM from 19.97/0.796 to 20.573/0.8004, while raw particle generation improves motion-region PSNR from 11.89 to 13.23. The delivered model does not yet beat persistence in LPIPS, and correct-versus- shuffled language changes trajectory error by only 2.8--3.1%. We report these limitations alongside oracle, negative-control, multi-seed, and per-robot analyses. The results show that explicit particle dynamics are a promising low-dimensional interface for robot video prediction, while robust language grounding and appearance delivery remain the principal open challenges.
PanelShield: Verifiable Closed-Loop Safe Planning for Robotic Industrial Panel Operation
Industrial panel operation is knowledge-intensive and safety-critical. Beyond control recognition and action generation, execution must satisfy constraints in operation manuals and safety regulations. While foundation-model-based planners show strong semantic capability, they typically lack computable, localizable, and reproducible mechanisms for violation detection and repair. To address this, we propose PanelShield, a verifiable closed-loop safety planning framework for manual-guided industrial panel operation. The framework generates parameterized action primitive sequences from task-relevant manual evidence and applies dual formal verification with LTL and a Safety FSM to enforce cross-step temporal correctness and local transition legality. When violations occur, it outputs a structured counterexample with the earliest violating step and cause, enabling targeted repair and re-verification. We build a multi-level long-horizon planning benchmark covering three representative industrial device panels, and evaluate the framework in simulation and real-world robotic experiments. Results show that PanelShield improves complex safety-constrained task performance over foundation-model-only planning baselines while reducing the violation rate to 2.7%, with 4.1 s total latency. Real-world experiments demonstrate end-toend feasibility. Overall, PanelShield offers a verifiable approach to robotic panel operation that balances flexibility, safety, and auditability.
CLAP: Cross-Embodiment Video World Models are Zero-Shot Physical Simulators
State-of-the-art action-conditioned video models are typically restricted to a single robot embodiment, preventing them from leveraging the vast corpus of heterogeneous video data that contains rich signals for learning generalizable physics. To bridge this gap, we introduce CLAP, a framework for cross-embodiment action-conditioned video generation capable of being trained on diverse, internet-scale videos across human and robotic agents. CLAP is grounded in the insight that universal physical laws govern spatiotemporal dynamics regardless of the actor. However, cross-embodiment learning is non-trivial because action representations vary sharply across robot platforms and are typically absent in human videos. CLAP addresses this fundamental challenge through the following core contributions. First, CLAP reconciles disparate action spaces using end-effector poses, language instructions, and latent actions. Second, to resolve their individual limitations, CLAP introduces a curriculum-based cross-embodiment learning recipe that first learns foundational physical priors across unlabeled video data using latent actions and subsequently grounds them in end-effector action spaces for zero-shot deployment to real-world tasks. Crucially, CLAP approaches or surpasses state-of-the-art single-embodiment video models in challenging environments like DROID. These performance advantages compound via few-shot adaptation to establish a novel paradigm for training single-embodiment video world models. Ultimately, CLAP delivers the most comprehensive suite of action-conditioned video world models to date - spanning diverse action-conditioning spaces (end-effector, language, and latent) and robot morphologies (including cross-embodiment, DROID, Bridge, bimanual YAM robots, and G1 humanoids). We open-source all code and models. Project Website at https://omni-clap.github.io .
Hugging Face is selling a cute $399 open-source duck robot, Microduck
Hugging Face is taking orders for the Microduck, a $399 tiny open-source duck robot that developers can train at home out of the box.
Diffusion Policies for Short-Horizon Planning in Robot Crowd Navigation
Robot crowd navigation requires safe and efficient decision-making under dense, dynamic, and multimodal human--robot interactions. Existing reinforcement-learning methods typically output a single reactive action at each timestep, which limits their ability to represent diverse short-term avoidance strategies. We propose Planning Diffusion Policy Optimization (PDPO), an offline-to-online reinforcement-learning framework that uses a diffusion policy to generate short-horizon action chunks for crowd navigation. PDPO is first pretrained on collision-avoidance demonstrations and then fine-tuned online with PPO by treating the denoising process as an internal decision process. During execution, the policy generates a five-step action chunk and applies it in a receding-horizon manner. Furthermore, we observe an evaluation artifact in common crowd-navigation benchmarks: without explicit boundary constraints, learned agents may leave the valid domain and bypass dense crowds. To address this, we introduce a setting in which boundary violations are treated as collisions. Experiments show that PDPO obtains an improved success rate over strong baselines, and ablations demonstrate that action chunks are especially important for the modified bounded benchmark.
Ultra Low-Power, Lightweight, Probabilistic RSS-Based Path Reconstruction: A System for Landscape-Scale Bee Tracking
Applications in fields such as movement ecology, Internet of Things or robotics share the need for systems that localize devices that are too small and power constrained to implement GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems). Alternative low-power localization methods often rely on only measurements of RSS (Received Signal Strength) to infer the AoA (Angle of Arrival) of a transmitted radio frequency signal, but are limited by range and the power demand of the large number of RSS measurements required to infer an accurate AoA. In this paper we address these issues with a novel RSS-based method for tracking ultra lightweight and low-power moving receivers across a complex landscape, achieved by using a minimal number of RSS measurements from simple rotating high-gain transmitters with a range of 300m, and applying probabilistic modelling to infer their AoA. The receiver's movement path is then modelled using a Gaussian process and reconstructed using doubly stochastic variational inference, resulting in approximately 15m accuracy tracking of receivers weighing 38mg (including power source) over a scalable landscape range while consuming less than 180uW, increased to approximately 10m accuracy at less than 600uW by taking more RSS measurements. We anticipate that this method will support fields such as the behavioural study of flying insect species, which we demonstrate by applying the system to track Bombus terrestris nest return flights.
Hugging Face’s new robot is an adorable rollerskating duck
Hugging Face's Pollen Robotics has launched its second cute AI robot, the Microduck, a one-eyed biped standing just under 10 inches tall. It's available to…
Active sensing to characterize the heterogeneity of plant stress
While most phenotyping platforms rely primarily on image-based measurements, advanced plant characterization requires the integration of active physiological sensing modali- ties such as chlorophyll fluorescence. We present an autonomous robotic platform designed to perform targeted fluorescence measurements on plant leaves. The system combines 3D plant reconstruction, geometric analysis, and motion planning to localize suitable measurement points and generate collision-free trajectories for a robotic manipulator. A dense 3D model of the plant is reconstructed from multi-view data and used to extract candidate leaf surfaces based on orientation, accessibility, and sensing constraints. These targets are then integrated into a task-level planning framework that guides the end-effector to precise contact or near-contact configurations required for point-based fluorescence acquisition. The platform enables automated, repeatable, and spatially resolved physiological measurements that go beyond passive imaging. By tightly coupling perception, geometric reasoning, and manipulation, the proposed system provides a robotics-driven approach to high-resolution plant phenotyping and opens new directions for autonomous agricultural inspection and plant-aware manipulation.
R^3: Training Robots to Reason in Natural Language via Reinforcement Learning
Reasoning in language allows foundation models to spend more test-time compute on hard problems, such as those requiring decomposition, constraint tracking, and prediction of future consequences. Whether this mechanism can improve robotic manipulation remains unclear, where long-horizon tasks require tracking partial progress, reasoning about object relations, recovering from mistakes, and steering noisy low-level policies. In this paper, we study whether VLMs can be trained to reason directly in natural language to guide low-level manipulation policies. We introduce R^3, a simple post-training recipe that turns off-the-shelf VLMs into robotic reasoners: it first mid-trains a VLM on expert-generated reasoning traces to initialize the desired reasoning style, then improves the reasoner with single-step rubric-based RL from offline action data. Unlike prior robotic reasoning methods that mostly use structured traces as auxiliary supervision, R^3 trains free-form language reasoning to produce test-time guidance for action. We instantiate R^3 on Language Table and simulated bimanual grocery packing, two controlled testbeds for studying robotic reasoning and long-horizon manipulation. R^3 improves exploration and generalization across unseen tasks and significantly outperforms instruction-only imitation learning baselines on both benchmarks. Our analyses suggest that free-form language reasoning can function as a test-time compute mechanism for steering low-level policies. Our project page is available at https://robotic-reasoner.github.io/.
Bill Gates wants to see a robot tax and ‘Human Reserved’ jobs to mitigate harms from AI
Gates is mostly in the Responsible AI camp, but there are a few ideas in here we hadn't heard before.