Mixtac: A Novel Bio-Inspired Hybrid Tactile Sensor with Synergistic Event-Frame Perception

Vision based and event based tactile sensors are important in robotic manipulation research. However, they suffer from a fundamental tradeoff: vision based sensors have low sampling rates, while event based sensors are prone to drift during long term static force estimation. To solve this challenge and achieve human level tactile perception, the novel hybrid event frame tactile sensor (Mixtac) is proposed in this paper by emulating the synergistic function of biological mechanoreceptors, which achieves normal force estimation. The prototype leverages events for high frequency force tracking and frames for long term accuracy. The Frame Guided Event Recurrent Network (FGER-Net) was proposed to fuse the two data streams. Frames were used by the net to correct event drift during training and guide high frequency predictions during inference. Experiments demonstrated an MAE of 0.04 N. This paper could bridge the sampling rate gap from 0 to 500 Hz in current vision based tactile sensors and pave the way for human level robotic manipulation.

RobotEQ: Transitioning from Passive Intelligence to Active Intelligence in Embodied AI

Embodied AI is a prominent research topic in both academia and industry. Current research centers on completing tasks based on explicit user instructions. However, for robots to integrate into human society, they must understand which actions are permissible and which are prohibited, even without explicit commands. We refer to the user-guided AI as passive intelligence and the unguided AI as active intelligence. This paper introduces RobotEQ, the first benchmark for active intelligence, aiming to assess whether existing models can comprehend and adhere to social norms in embodied scenarios. First, we construct RobotEQ-Data, a dataset consisting of 1,900 egocentric images, spanning 10 representative embodied categories and 56 subcategories. Through extensive manual annotation, we provide 5,353 action judgment questions and 1,286 spatial grounding questions, specifying appropriate robot actions across diverse scenarios. Furthermore, we establish RobotEQ-Bench to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art models on this task. Experimental results show that current models still fall short in achieving reliable active intelligence, particularly in spatial grounding. Meanwhile, we observe that leveraging RAG techniques to incorporate external social norm knowledge bases can generally enhance performance. This work can facilitate the transition of robotics from user-guided passive manipulation to active social compliance.

DLM: Unified Decision Language Models for Offline Multi-Agent Sequential Decision Making

Building scalable and reusable multi-agent decision policies from offline datasets remains a challenge in offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), as existing methods often rely on fixed observation formats and action spaces that limit generalization. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) offer a flexible modeling interface that can naturally accommodate heterogeneous observations and actions. Motivated by this, we propose the Decision Language Model (DLM), which formulates multi-agent decision making as a dialogue-style sequence prediction problem under the centralized training with decentralized execution paradigm. DLM is trained in two stages: a supervised fine-tuning phase, which leverages dialogue-style datasets for centralized training with inter-agent context and generates executable actions from offline trajectories, followed by a group relative policy optimization phase to enhance robustness to out-of-distribution actions through lightweight reward functions. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that a unified DLM outperforms strong offline MARL baselines and LLM-based conversational decision-making methods, while demonstrating strong zero-shot generalization to unseen scenarios across tasks.

ROSClaw: A Hierarchical Semantic-Physical Framework for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Collaboration

The integration of large language models (LLMs) with embodied agents has improved high-level reasoning capabilities; however, a critical gap remains between semantic understanding and physical execution. While vision-language-action (VLA) and vision-language-navigation (VLN) systems enable robots to perform manipulation and navigation tasks from natural language instructions, they still struggle with long-horizon sequential and temporally structured tasks. Existing frameworks typically adopt modular pipelines for data collection, skill training, and policy deployment, resulting in high costs in experimental validation and policy optimization. To address these limitations, we propose ROSClaw, an agent framework for heterogeneous robots that integrates policy learning and task execution within a unified vision-language model (VLM) controller. The framework leverages e-URDF representations of heterogeneous robots as physical constraints to construct a sim-to-real topological mapping, enabling real-time access to the physical states of both simulated and real-world agents. We further incorporate a data collection and state accumulation mechanism that stores robot states, multimodal observations, and execution trajectories during real-world execution, enabling subsequent iterative policy optimization. During deployment, a unified agent maintains semantic continuity between reasoning and execution, and dynamically assigns task-specific control to different agents, thereby improving robustness in multi-policy execution. By establishing an autonomous closed-loop framework, ROSClaw minimizes the reliance on robot-specific development workflows. The framework supports hardware-level validation, automated generation of SDK-level control programs, and tool-based execution, enabling rapid cross-platform transfer and continual improvement of robotic skills. Ours project page: https://www.rosclaw.io/.

MorphoGuard: A Morphology-Based Whole-Body Interactive Motion Controller

Whole-body control (WBC) has demonstrated significant advantages in complex interactive movements of high-dimensional robotic systems. However, when a robot is required to handle dynamic multi-contact combinations along a single kinematic chain-such as pushing open a door with its elbow while grasping an object-it faces major obstacles in terms of complex contact representation and joint configuration coupling. To address this, we propose a new control approach that explicitly manages arbitrary contact combinations, aiming to endow robots with whole-body interactive capabilities. We develop a morphology-constrained WBC network (MorphoGuard)-which is trained on a self-constructed dual-arm physical and simulation platform. A series of model recommendation experiments are designed to systematically investigate the impact of backbone architecture, fusion strategy, and model scale on network performance. To evaluate the control performance, we adopt a multi-object interaction task as the benchmark, requiring the model to simultaneously manipulate multiple target objects to specified positions. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a contact point management error of approximately 1 cm, demonstrating its effectiveness in whole-body interactive control.

Dual-Horizon Hybrid Internal Model for Low-Gravity Quadrupedal Jumping with Hardware-in-the-Loop Validation

Locomotion under reduced gravity is commonly realized through jumping, yet continuous pronking in lunar gravity remains challenging due to prolonged flight phases and sparse ground contact. The extended aerial duration increases landing impact sensitivity and makes stable attitude regulation over rough planetary terrain difficult. Existing approaches primarily address single jumps on flat surfaces and lack both continuous-terrain solutions and realistic hardware validation. This work presents a Dual-Horizon Hybrid Internal Model for continuous quadrupedal jumping under lunar gravity using proprioceptive sensing only. Two temporal encoders capture complementary time scales: a short-horizon branch models rapid vertical dynamics with explicit vertical velocity estimation, while a long-horizon branch models horizontal motion trends and center-of-mass height evolution across the jump cycle. The fused representation enables stable and continuous jumping under extended aerial phases characteristic of lunar gravity. To provide hardware-in-the-loop validation, we develop the MATRIX (Mixed-reality Adaptive Testbed for Robotic Integrated eXploration) platform, a digital-twin-driven system that offloads gravity through a pulley-counterweight mechanism and maps Unreal Engine lunar terrain to a motion platform and treadmill in real time. Using MATRIX, we demonstrate continuous jumping of a quadruped robot under lunar-gravity emulation across cratered lunar-like terrain.

Morphogenetic Assembly and Adaptive Control for Heterogeneous Modular Robots

This paper presents a closed-loop automation framework for heterogeneous modular robots, covering the full pipeline from morphological construction to adaptive control. In this framework, a mobile manipulator handles heterogeneous functional modules including structural, joint, and wheeled modules to dynamically assemble diverse robot configurations and provide them with immediate locomotion capability. To address the state-space explosion in large-scale heterogeneous reconfiguration, we propose a hierarchical planner: the high-level planner uses a bidirectional heuristic search with type-penalty terms to generate module-handling sequences, while the low level planner employs A* search to compute optimal execution trajectories. This design effectively decouples discrete configuration planning from continuous motion execution. For adaptive motion generation of unknown assembled configurations, we introduce a GPU accelerated Annealing-Variance Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) controller. By incorporating a multi stage variance annealing strategy to balance global exploration and local convergence, the controller enables configuration-agnostic, real-time motion control. Large scale simulations show that the type-penalty term is critical for planning robustness in heterogeneous scenarios. Moreover, the greedy heuristic produces plans with lower physical execution costs than the Hungarian heuristic. The proposed annealing-variance MPPI significantly outperforms standard MPPI in both velocity tracking accuracy and control frequency, achieving real time control at 50 Hz. The framework validates the full-cycle process, including module assembly, robot merging and splitting, and dynamic motion generation.

Embodied Arena: A Comprehensive, Unified, and Evolving Evaluation Platform for Embodied AI

Embodied AI development significantly lags behind large foundation models due to three critical challenges: (1) lack of systematic understanding of core capabilities needed for Embodied AI, making research lack clear objectives; (2) absence of unified and standardized evaluation systems, rendering cross-benchmark evaluation infeasible; and (3) underdeveloped automated and scalable acquisition methods for embodied data, creating critical bottlenecks for model scaling. To address these obstacles, we present Embodied Arena, a comprehensive, unified, and evolving evaluation platform for Embodied AI. Our platform establishes a systematic embodied capability taxonomy spanning three levels (perception, reasoning, task execution), seven core capabilities, and 25 fine-grained dimensions, enabling unified evaluation with systematic research objectives. We introduce a standardized evaluation system built upon unified infrastructure supporting flexible integration of 22 diverse benchmarks across three domains (2D/3D Embodied Q&A, Navigation, Task Planning) and 30+ advanced models from 20+ worldwide institutes. Additionally, we develop a novel LLM-driven automated generation pipeline ensuring scalable embodied evaluation data with continuous evolution for diversity and comprehensiveness. Embodied Arena publishes three real-time leaderboards (Embodied Q&A, Navigation, Task Planning) with dual perspectives (benchmark view and capability view), providing comprehensive overviews of advanced model capabilities. Especially, we present nine findings summarized from the evaluation results on the leaderboards of Embodied Arena. This helps to establish clear research veins and pinpoint critical research problems, thereby driving forward progress in the field of Embodied AI.

Data-driven solar forecasting enables near-optimal economic decisions

Solar energy adoption is critical to achieving net-zero emissions. However, it remains difficult for many industrial and commercial actors to decide on whether they should adopt distributed solar-battery systems, which is largely due to the unavailability of fast, low-cost, and high-resolution irradiance forecasts. Here, we present SunCastNet, a lightweight data-driven forecasting system that provides 0.05$^\circ$, 10-minute resolution predictions of surface solar radiation downwards (SSRD) up to 7 days ahead. SunCastNet, coupled with reinforcement learning (RL) for battery scheduling, reduces operational regret by 76--93\% compared to robust decision making (RDM). In 25-year investment backtests, it enables up to five of ten high-emitting industrial sectors per region to cross the commercial viability threshold of 12\% Internal Rate of Return (IRR). These results show that high-resolution, long-horizon solar forecasts can directly translate into measurable economic gains, supporting near-optimal energy operations and accelerating renewable deployment.

LLMs-guided adaptive compensator: Bringing Adaptivity to Automatic Control Systems with Large Language Models

With rapid advances in code generation, reasoning, and problem-solving, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in robotics. Most existing work focuses on high-level tasks such as task decomposition. A few studies have explored the use of LLMs in feedback controller design; however, these efforts are restricted to overly simplified systems, fixed-structure gain tuning, and lack real-world validation. To further investigate LLMs in automatic control, this work targets a key subfield: adaptive control. Inspired by the framework of model reference adaptive control (MRAC), we propose an LLM-guided adaptive compensator framework that avoids designing controllers from scratch. Instead, the LLMs are prompted using the discrepancies between an unknown system and a reference system to design a compensator that aligns the response of the unknown system with that of the reference, thereby achieving adaptivity. Experiments evaluate five methods: LLM-guided adaptive compensator, LLM-guided adaptive controller, indirect adaptive control, learning-based adaptive control, and MRAC, on soft and humanoid robots in both simulated and real-world environments. Results show that the LLM-guided adaptive compensator outperforms traditional adaptive controllers and significantly reduces reasoning complexity compared to the LLM-guided adaptive controller. The Lyapunov-based analysis and reasoning-path inspection demonstrate that the LLM-guided adaptive compensator enables a more structured design process by transforming mathematical derivation into a reasoning task, while exhibiting strong generalizability, adaptability, and robustness. This study opens a new direction for applying LLMs in the field of automatic control, offering greater deployability and practicality compared to vision-language models.