High-Degree-of-Freedom Lightweight Bioinspired Leg for Enhanced Mobility in Small Robots

In microrobotics, enhancing locomotion capabilities by increasing the degrees of freedom (DoF) of leg mechanisms under severe spatial constraints remains a significant challenge. Inspired by insect locomotion, this paper presents a novel micro-scale parallel leg mechanism with four degrees of freedom, and systematically analyzes its mechanical design, electrical system, and kinematics. The design incorporates two spherical five-bar linkages to achieve spatial motion within a parallel four-bar configuration. Furthermore, a concentric design strategy is employed to simplify the analytical solution of the leg kinematics. Due to the parallel system architecture, all actuators are located on the main body, substantially reducing the equivalent inertia of moving parts compared to traditional high-DOF leg structures. The total mass of the system is only 18.9 g, with an end-effector output force of approximately 0.5 N and a workspace exceeding 22255 mm3. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed single-leg mechanism achieves excellent motion flexibility, highlighting its potential for micro bio-inspired robotics.

PhysiFlow: Physics-Aware Humanoid Whole-Body VLA via Multi-Brain Latent Flow Matching and Robust Tracking

In the domain of humanoid robot control, the fusion of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) with whole-body control is essential for semantically guided execution of real-world tasks. However, existing methods encounter challenges in terms of low VLA inference efficiency or an absence of effective semantic guidance for whole-body control, resulting in instability in dynamic limb-coordinated tasks. To bridge this gap, we present a semantic-motion intent guided, physics-aware multi-brain VLA framework for humanoid whole-body control. A series of experiments was conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework. The experimental results demonstrated that the framework enabled reliable vision-language-guided full-body coordination for humanoid robots.

PILOT: A Perceptive Integrated Low-level Controller for Loco-manipulation over Unstructured Scenes

Humanoid robots hold great potential for diverse interactions and daily service tasks within human-centered environments, necessitating controllers that seamlessly integrate precise locomotion with dexterous manipulation. However, most existing whole-body controllers lack exteroceptive awareness of the surrounding environment, rendering them insufficient for stable task execution in complex, unstructured scenarios.To address this challenge, we propose PILOT, a unified single-stage reinforcement learning (RL) framework tailored for perceptive loco-manipulation, which synergizes perceptive locomotion and expansive whole-body control within a single policy. To enhance terrain awareness and ensure precise foot placement, we design a cross-modal context encoder that fuses prediction-based proprioceptive features with attention-based perceptive representations. Furthermore, we introduce a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) policy architecture to coordinate diverse motor skills, facilitating better specialization across distinct motion patterns. Extensive experiments in both simulation and on the physical Unitree G1 humanoid robot validate the efficacy of our framework. PILOT demonstrates superior stability, command tracking precision, and terrain traversability compared to existing baselines. These results highlight its potential to serve as a robust, foundational low-level controller for loco-manipulation in unstructured scenes.