Robust Operational Space Control with Conformal Disturbance Bounds for Safe Redundant Manipulation - 2026-07-01 - Research Publication - In contrast, the data-driven paradigm of residual learning approximates disturbances as functions learned from full-state measurements, which are often noisy in practice, lack rigorous theoretical guarantees, and introduce… - source: arxiv.org
Sequential Planning via Anchored Robotic Keypoints - 2026-06-29 - Research Publication - The authors present Sequential Planning via Anchored Robotic Keypoints, SPARK, a training-free neurosymbolic manipulation system that reaches 43.7% on six LIBERO-PRO position \& task cells, more than doubling CaP-Agent0… - source: arxiv.org
WatchAct: A Benchmark for Behavior-Grounded Robot Manipulation - 2026-06-24 - Research Publication - The authors introduce WatchAct, a benchmark for robot manipulation grounded in observed human behavior. In both simulation and on a Franka Research 3 robot, current systems remain far from solving WatchAct. - source: arxiv.org
Backpropagating Through Simulation: Analytic Policy Gradients for Sample and Learning Efficient Differentiable Continuous Control - 2026-06-19 - Research Publication - Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) treat the environment as a black box, estimating policy gradients from sampled rewards; this process demands millions of interactions… - source: arxiv.org
Object-Centric Residual RL for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real VLA Enhancement - 2026-06-17 - Research Publication - Residual RL, which learns a corrective policy on top of a frozen VLA, offers a natural framework, but existing approaches face a fundamental sim-to-real dilemma: privileged-state methods require lossy distillation for… - source: arxiv.org
Real-World Deployment of Massively Parallel Sampling-Based MPC for Contact-Rich Manipulation - 2026-06-16 - Research Publication - The authors present an MPC framework that leverages JAX for large-scale parallelization and efficient computation, coupled with the high-fidelity MuJoCo MJX simulator, and deploy it on a Franka Research 3 executing the… - source: arxiv.org
PhAIL: A Real-Robot VLA Benchmark and Distributional Methodology - 2026-05-28 - Research Publication - Launches a real-robot VLA benchmark on Franka FR3 with distributional metrics beyond binary success rates. Includes analysis code, paper sources, annotation pipeline, dataset metadata, and public dataset download… - source: arxiv.org
WangLei-ZJU-CSC/pi05-fr3-reproduction - 2026-05-28 - Research Publication - The VR system enables intuitive robot control and efficient demonstration collection for manipulation tasks. Demo Video Task Description Platform: Franka Research 3 (FR3) + Franka Hand Policy: π0.5 + LoRA fine-tuning with… - source: github.com
Rethinking Muon Beyond Pretraining: Spectral Failures and High-Pass Remedies for VLA and RLVR - 2026-05-19 - Research Publication - To preserve pretrained per-head heterogeneity, Pion also supports a per-head mode that applies updates independently across attention heads via a simple reshape, at no extra cost. The advantage of Pion further extends to a… - source: arxiv.org
XingxinHE/franka_moveit_camera_calibration - 2026-05-05 - Research Publication - When the target parameters are set, choose one robot-control method: 7.1.1 MoveIt Motion Planning or 7.1.2 Gravity Compensation. Franka MoveIt Calibration This repo helps you calibrate RealSense cameras with a Franka… - source: github.com
EmbodiedForge/droid-fr3 - 2026-04-29 - Research Publication - The DROID Robot Platform - Franka FR3 Edition This repository contains the code for setting up your DROID robot platform for Franka Research 3 (FR3) robots and using it to collect teleoperated demonstration data.… - source: github.com
Passive iFIR filters for data-driven velocity control in robotics - 2026-03-31 - Research Publication - The authors present a passive, data-driven velocity control method for nonlinear robotic manipulators that achieves better tracking performance than optimized PID with comparable design complexity. When the robot… - source: arxiv.org
Form-Fitting, Large-Area Sensor Mounting for Obstacle Detection - 2026-03-24 - Research Publication - The authors introduce a low-cost method for mounting sensors onto robot links for large-area sensing coverage that does not require the sensor's positions or orientations to be calibrated before use. The authors… - source: arxiv.org
Learning Adaptive Force Control for Contact-Rich Sample Scraping with Heterogeneous Materials - 2026-03-11 - Research Publication - Their work proposes an adaptive control framework to address this, relying on a low-level Cartesian impedance controller for stable and compliant physical interaction and a high-level reinforcement learning agent that… - source: arxiv.org
Learning-Based Robust Control: Unifying Exploration and Distributional Robustness for Reliable Robotics via Free Energy - 2026-03-06 - Research Publication - Inspired by the free energy principle in computational neuroscience, to address these challenges, the authors propose a model for policy computation that jointly learns environment dynamics and rewards, while ensuring… - source: arxiv.org
Design, Mapping, and Contact Anticipation with 3D-printed Whole-Body Tactile and Proximity Sensors - 2026-03-05 - Research Publication - The authors present GenTact-Prox, a fully 3D-printed artificial skin that integrates tactile and proximity sensing for contact detection and anticipation. The authors demonstrate this approach on a Franka Research 3 robot… - source: arxiv.org
GaussTwin: Unified Simulation and Correction with Gaussian Splatting for Robotic Digital Twins - 2026-03-05 - Research Publication - These results highlight GaussTwin as a step toward unified, physically meaningful digital twins that can support closed-loop robotic interaction and learning. Through experiments in both simulation and on a Franka Research… - source: arxiv.org
VLAD-Grasp: Zero-shot Grasp Detection via Vision-Language Models - 2025-11-08 - Research Publication - Towards this, the authors present VLAD-Grasp, a Vision-Language model Assisted zero-shot approach for Detecting Grasps. Furthermore, the authors demonstrate zero-shot generalization to real-world objects on a Franka… - source: arxiv.org
Dual-Stream Diffusion for World-Model Augmented Vision-Language-Action Model - 2025-10-31 - Research Publication - To address this, the authors propose DUal-STream diffusion (DUST), a world-model augmented VLA framework featuring a multimodal diffusion transformer that maintains separate modality streams while enabling cross-modal… - source: arxiv.org
How Well Do Latent World Models Understand Partially Observable Safety Constraints? - 2025-10-07 - Research Publication - The authors introduce two diagnostics for these gaps: a mutual-information-based measure of safety observability and a rollout-based measure of future safety predictability. Across two hardware case studies -- using… - source: arxiv.org
Gaussian Process-Based Active Exploration Strategies in Vision and Touch - 2025-07-07 - Research Publication - This work proposes fusing visual and tactile observations into a unified Gaussian Process Distance Field (GPDF) representation for active perception of object properties. For the real-world robot experiment, the authors… - source: arxiv.org
Proactive Hierarchical Control Barrier Function-Based Safety Prioritization in Close Human-Robot Interaction Scenarios - 2025-05-21 - Research Publication - This paper presents a hierarchical control framework based on Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) designed to ensure safe and adaptive operation of autonomous robotic manipulators during close-proximity human-robot… - source: arxiv.org
Safe Multi-Robotic Arm Interaction via 3D Convex Shapes - 2025-03-14 - Research Publication - The authors present an online collision avoidance methodology leveraging High-Order Control Barrier Functions (HOCBFs) constructed for safe interactions among 3D convex shapes to address this issue. The effectiveness of… - source: arxiv.org
Generalizing Safety Beyond Collision-Avoidance via Latent-Space Reachability Analysis - 2025-02-02 - Research Publication - The authors propose Latent Safety Filters, a latent-space generalization of HJ reachability that tractably operates directly on raw observation data (e.g., RGB images) to automatically compute safety-preserving actions… - source: arxiv.org