New robotics and physical-AI papers, with what each one means for the industry.
Voluntary movements have long been hypothesised to be comprised of discrete primitives called submovements, as a descriptive model of human motor behaviour. However, existing methods scale poorly, and no principled method exists to determine whether a decomposition is informative.
Robot AI models plan a short burst of movements at a time, and how many of those moves the robot carries out before it looks again is usually fixed by hand. This preprint from Tsinghua University, BAAI and partners adds a plug-in that picks that number while the robot works, raising success rates of existing Physical Intelligence and NVIDIA models in simulation and on a real two-arm robot without retraining them.
Robot policies are frequently trained from human corrections, yet teleoperating a robot to provide corrections is burdensome, and human demonstrators are not always optimal. We propose Blended DAgger (BlenDAgger), an approach for collecting data to train imitation learning policies by using shared control to blend the policy's and demonstrator's actions during interventions.
While contact-rich manipulation requires deliberate regulation of interaction forces, recent approaches to robot manipulation learning predominantly represent actions as target positions or poses. Even methods that incorporate force sensing either use it solely as an observation or, when predicting forces as part of the output, rely on a hybrid force controller.
Co-training a VLA on heterogeneous data (multi-robot, web, high-level subtask labels) lets a mobile manipulator clean unseen homes end-to-end.
Papers come from arXiv robotics feeds. Where our summary is not written yet, you see the opening lines of the abstract.