Shared Autonomy Assisted by Impedance-Driven Anisotropic Guidance Field

Shared autonomy (SA) enables robots to infer human intent and assist in its achievement. While most research focuses on improving intent inference, it overlooks whether humans can understand the robot's intent in return. Without such mutual understanding, collaboration becomes less effective, degrading user experience and task performance. To address this gap, previous studies have explicitly conveyed the robot intent through additional interfaces, which remain unintuitive and limited in expressiveness. Inspired by impedance control, we propose Impedance-Driven Anisotropic Guidance Field Enhanced Shared Autonomy (IAGF-SA), a novel paradigm that extends SA with an embodied, physically-grounded communication channel. This channel adaptively modulates the robot's dynamic response to human input, enabling intuitive, continuous, physically-grounded robot intent communication while naturally guiding human actions. User studies across three scenarios and two teleoperation interfaces indicate that IAGF-SA improves task performance, human-robot agreement, and subjective experience, thus demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing human-robot communication and collaboration.

RichMap: A Reachability Map Balancing Precision, Efficiency, and Flexibility for Rich Robot Manipulation Tasks

This paper presents RichMap, a high-precision reachability map representation designed to balance efficiency and flexibility for versatile robot manipulation tasks. By refining the classic grid-based structure, we propose a streamlined approach that achieves performance close to compact map forms (e.g., RM4D) while maintaining structural flexibility. Our method utilizes theoretical capacity bounds on $\mathbb{S}^2$ (or $SO(3)$) to ensure rigorous coverage and employs an asynchronous pipeline for efficient construction. We validate the map against comprehensive metrics, pursuing high prediction accuracy ($>98\%$), low false positive rates ($1\sim2\%$), and fast large-batch query ($\sim$15 $μ$s/query). We extend the framework applications to quantify robot workspace similarity via maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) metrics and demonstrate energy-based guidance for diffusion policy transfer, achieving up to $26\%$ improvement for cross-embodiment scenarios in the block pushing experiment.

ModLaNets: Learning Generalisable Dynamics via Modularity and Physical Inductive Bias

Deep learning models are able to approximate one specific dynamical system but struggle at learning generalisable dynamics, where dynamical systems obey the same laws of physics but contain different numbers of elements (e.g., double- and triple-pendulum systems). To relieve this issue, we proposed the Modular Lagrangian Network (ModLaNet), a structural neural network framework with modularity and physical inductive bias. This framework models the energy of each element using modularity and then construct the target dynamical system via Lagrangian mechanics. Modularity is beneficial for reusing trained networks and reducing the scale of networks and datasets. As a result, our framework can learn from the dynamics of simpler systems and extend to more complex ones, which is not feasible using other relevant physics-informed neural networks. We examine our framework for modelling double-pendulum or three-body systems with small training datasets, where our models achieve the best data efficiency and accuracy performance compared with counterparts. We also reorganise our models as extensions to model multi-pendulum and multi-body systems, demonstrating the intriguing reusable feature of our framework.