Preprint Open access
As robots are increasingly deployed in everyday environments, ensuring their safety has become a central challenge. Existing methods often encode safety requirements as opaque mathematical/logical formulations or dense cost functions. While effective in specific tasks, they remain difficult to interpret, tightly couple …
Preprint Open access
Vision--language--action (VLA) models provide strong priors for robotic manipulation but are typically deployed as frozen policies, unable to improve from their own failures. Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) offers a path to continued improvement, yet manual environment resets and task-success supervision hinder …
Preprint Open access
Humans typically rely on vision, touch, hearing, and proprioception to perceive contact and adapt their actions during manipulation. Providing robots with comparable responsiveness therefore requires hardware that can retain and use these complementary sensory signals. Most imitation-learning systems, however, observe …
Preprint Open access
Contact-rich motion planning (CRMP) is essential for robotic manipulation and locomotion, yet remains computationally challenging due to combinatorial contact decisions. Existing methods typically avoid broad evaluation of contact-mode sequences through search heuristics or optimization reformulations. We revisit broad …