Abstract:An often overlooked factor of robot manipulation performance is the embodiment of the robot itself. Motivated by this problem, we study motion-conditioned robot co-design, where the goal is to generate complete robot designs that track target end-effector trajectories (from human demonstrations) while optimizing user-defined rewards. We introduce Transformer Transformer, a diffusion transformer trained on RoboTokens, a unified tokenization of robot embodiments, states, and actions. The same architecture can be used across embodiment spaces (e.g., wheeled bimanual, quadrupeds, humanoids) and use cases (embodiment generation, cross embodiment controller). Rather than overfitting to one reward function, Transformer Transformer is a dynamics model, whose reward-agnostic state and action predictions can be converted into reward-specific value predictions. These value predictions are used to steer embodiment diffusion towards high value robot designs, through a procedure we call Dynamics Self-Guidance. Experiments across multiple design spaces show zero-shot optimization of unseen rewards and trajectories, improving performance and runtime over the evolutionary baseline. Finally, we fabricated an optimized ALOHA design, which reduced tracking error by over 70% compared to the original design.
Abstract:Existing teleoperation systems are often tailored to specific robot hardware and task domains, limiting their scalability and adaptability. We present ModPack, a modular and extensible teleoperation system designed to support diverse robot embodiments and task requirements within a unified framework. At the core of ModPack is a self-contained wearable "backpack" that integrates onboard computation, power, communication, and data storage. Built on top of this shared interface, the system supports plug-and-play capability modules including joint-level teleoperation with haptic feedback, mobile manipulation, and active perception. Experiments across two distinct robot platforms and real-world mobile manipulation tasks demonstrate that ModPack provides a flexible and reusable framework for data collection and policy learning. To support future research, we open-source the complete hardware design and software stack. Project website: https://modpack-robotics.github.io/
Abstract:Dexterous hands and humanoid robots are typically developed as distinct embodiments: the former enable contact-rich manipulation at the object scale, whereas the latter provide mobility and whole-body interaction in human-centered environments. We introduce \textbf{Handroid}, a desktop-scale dual-embodiment robot that integrates both capabilities within a single reconfigurable platform. Handroid reuses one 27-DoF electromechanical body as either a dexterous hand or a desktop humanoid, measuring 0.33 m in height and 2.05 kg in weight. In the dexterous hand embodiment, 20 DoFs form an anthropomorphic hand closely matching the kinematic structure of the human hand. In the humanoid embodiment, the same articulated modules are reconfigured into a humanoid with a head, arms, and legs, including a 12-DoF lower-limb structure for locomotion and whole-body motion. Handroid further provides a unified control and learning framework supporting hand teleoperation, dexterous grasping, in-hand manipulation, humanoid locomotion, gait generation, and interactive motion authoring. We validate the platform through real-world dexterous manipulation, reinforcement-learning-based locomotion, keyframe motion deployment, and a long-horizon task involving embodiment reconfiguration, locomotion, docking, and dexterous pick-and-place. These results position Handroid as a compact and reproducible platform for advancing morphology-reconfigurable robotics and cross-embodiment robot learning.
Abstract:Robotic manipulation is inherently multi-frame: local actions may be simple in an end-effector frame, while transport, upright-object handling, and whole-body coordination are better represented in a base-aligned frame. However, modern diffusion-based visuomotor policies typically commit to a single predefined action frame, forcing one denoiser to model action distributions that are often unnecessarily complex in that frame. We propose Mixture of Frames Policy (MoF), a diffusion policy that performs synchronized action denoising across multiple coordinate frames. MoF maintains a single canonical diffusion state, re-expresses it in several task-relevant frames, applies frame-specialized denoisers, and fuses their noise predictions back in the canonical frame. To make this possible for intermediate noisy diffusion states, we introduce a column-based 6D rotation representation within an SE(3) action parameterization that supports exact, differentiable frame transformations without requiring noisy rotations to lie on the SO(3) manifold. Across nine simulated bimanual manipulation tasks, we show that the best action frame is task-dependent and that MoF improves over oracle frame selection and standard Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) baselines. We further evaluate MoF on two real-world bimanual mobile manipulation tasks, demonstrating that it outperforms all constituent single-frame baselines. Project homepage: https://mofpo.github.io
Abstract:Robot manipulation often relies on sensory feedback beyond vision, particularly in contact-rich settings where force, tactile, or audio signals reveal interaction states that are not directly observable from images. However, these modalities are often hardware- and task-specific, and large-scale multisensory robot datasets remain scarce. As a result, it is impractical to pretrain policies with every sensor they may encounter. We study multisensory continual learning: adapting a pretrained robot policy to new tasks with newly introduced modalities while preserving performance under the original sensor suite. We propose MuSe, which incorporates limited multisensory data into pretrained vision-only policies through multi-stage fusion, multisensory future prediction, and experience replay over pretraining data. We instantiate MuSe by augmenting a pretrained vision-only policy with force-torque sensing and evaluate it on real-world manipulation tasks. Our experiments show that MuSe performs strongly on contact-rich finetuning tasks while preserving, and in some cases improving, performance on the original pretraining tasks. These results suggest that a modest multisensory dataset can improve general robot capabilities beyond the finetuning distribution. Project website: https://jadenvc.github.io/multisensory-continual-learning/
Abstract:Robotics foundation models (RFMs) are making general-purpose robots increasingly practical for factory deployments. While RFM serving systems are central to this vision, existing systems are largely shaped by a single-robot, single-model assumption: inference is treated as an edge-computing problem handled by an on-robot or dedicated nearby GPU, and the serving objective is to minimize the latency of a single action model. In this paper, we propose ROSA, an RFM serving system for robot factories designed around three key principles. First, ROSA adopts shared GPU-pool serving, allowing a fleet of robots to access powerful server-class GPUs over the network in order to improve inference performance, battery duration, and GPU utilization. Second, ROSA provides a robotics-aware programming abstraction and system design that supports multi-model pipelines, per-task performance requirements, and failure handling. Third, ROSA uses factory-objective-driven scheduling to maximize SLO-qualified factory productivity rather than minimizing individual request latency. We implement ROSA on top of Ray Serve for distributed orchestration, with vLLM, PyTorch, and JAX as model-serving backends, and evaluate it on both real robots and synthetic large-scale workloads. The results show that ROSA improves factory productivity by up to 12.06x over conventional dedicated serving systems.
Abstract:Humans and animals exhibit remarkable robustness in physical manipulation, yet robots remain far behind. Progress toward human-level manipulation robustness is hindered by the absence of a unified and systematic understanding: different subfields frame robustness in distinct ways, often leaving the concept ambiguous and limiting deeper analysis as well as communication across research areas. This paper presents a systematic study of manipulation robustness. We begin with a formal definition, characterizing robustness as the degree to which a manipulation system can achieve its goal in the presence of uncertainty and variation. Building on this definition, we introduce general formulations of manipulation robustness from probabilistic and control-theoretic perspectives. We then synthesize the guiding principles and concrete mechanisms of manipulation robustness across perception, planning, control, policy learning, and hardware, illustrating each mechanism through representative works, including foundational and recent studies. In addition, we revisit existing metrics and evaluation methods for quantifying manipulation robustness. Finally, we distill broader lessons for designing robust manipulation systems and discuss open problems and future directions toward achieving human-level robustness in robotic manipulation.
Abstract:We study behavior prompting, a paradigm that enables robots to perform new tasks at inference time given a single human demonstration, which we call a behavior prompt. To enable this capability, we present contributions in algorithm, data, and evaluation. For algorithm, we introduce Behavior Prompting Policy (BPP), an in-context visuomotor architecture that translates the behavior prompt and the current observation into robot actions. For data, we identify that task diversity is the primary driver of the prompting capability and introduce iPhUMI, a handheld manipulation interface for collecting diverse training data. For evaluation, we introduce DrawAnything and LIBERO-Gen to evaluate test-time adaptation to unseen drawing and tabletop manipulation tasks. We also demonstrate that iPhUMI serves as a practical interface for specifying behavior prompts at test time, enabling a human to command a robot via a single demonstration to complete known tasks or to define new robot capabilities. Altogether, behavior prompting provides a flexible and scalable way to teach robots new skills without the need for expensive fine-tuning. Our project website is located at https://behavior-prompting.github.io/ .
Abstract:Vine robots, a class of soft, growing robots, are suitable for navigating complex and confined environments due to their compliant bodies and self-supporting growth mechanism. However, hysteresis, tether interactions, and deformations make them difficult to predict and model, which in turn limits the effectiveness of conventional planning and control approaches. In this work, we present a data-driven, vision-based control framework for the first autonomous vine robot system. Our system integrates 19 cameras distributed along the robot's body to provide comprehensive feedback of both the robot state and the surrounding environment. Using this rich whole-body vision feedback, we train an end-to-end visuomotor policy from demonstrations for closed-loop autonomous control in complex environments. The policy efficiently aggregates information from distributed sensing while maintaining robustness to inaccurate robot states and actuation. Experimental results demonstrate that the learned policy enables robust navigation and manipulation in challenging scenarios, including steering through branched structures, climbing up slopes, traversing unsupported terrain, reaching objects precisely, and maneuvering through confined spaces and obstacles. Project website https://panovine-bot.github.io
Abstract:A natural recipe for intelligent robotic decision-making is initializing from pretrained generative control policies, which have summarized offline experience, and adapting them to self-collected online experience. We present DF-ExpEnse, an exploration technique that improves the quality of online experience collection, thus increasing finetuning sample-efficiency. DF-ExpEnse leverages the multimodal modeling capabilities of the generative control policy to create an expressive and tractably evaluatable candidate set. It then utilizes an ensemble of critics to identify the action that best balances quality with high exploration interest. In fleet settings, DF-ExpEnse further enables cross-agent communication to facilitate collaborative exploration as a group. DF-ExpEnse can be seamlessly integrated with existing strategies that finetune pretrained generative control policies via reinforcement learning. We experimentally validate consistent sample-efficiency benefits through DF-ExpEnse across a variety of manipulation and locomotion tasks, compared to default finetuning and alternative action selection schemes. Project can be found at https://df-expense.github.io.