Robotics plays a pivotal role in planetary science and exploration, where autonomous and reliable systems are crucial due to the risks and challenges inherent to space environments. The establishment of permanent lunar bases demands robotic platforms capable of navigating and manipulating in the harsh lunar terrain. While wheeled rovers have been the mainstay for planetary exploration, their limitations in unstructured and steep terrains motivate the adoption of legged robots, which offer superior mobility and adaptability. This paper introduces a constrained reinforcement learning framework designed for autonomous quadrupedal mobile manipulators operating in lunar environments. The proposed framework integrates whole-body locomotion and manipulation capabilities while explicitly addressing critical safety constraints, including collision avoidance, dynamic stability, and power efficiency, in order to ensure robust performance under lunar-specific conditions, such as reduced gravity and irregular terrain. Experimental results demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in achieving precise 6D task-space end-effector pose tracking, achieving an average positional accuracy of 4 cm and orientation accuracy of 8.1 degrees. The system consistently respects both soft and hard constraints, exhibiting adaptive behaviors optimized for lunar gravity conditions. This work effectively bridges adaptive learning with essential mission-critical safety requirements, paving the way for advanced autonomous robotic explorers for future lunar missions.

We introduce HoMeR, an imitation learning framework for mobile manipulation that combines whole-body control with hybrid action modes that handle both long-range and fine-grained motion, enabling effective performance on realistic in-the-wild tasks. At its core is a fast, kinematics-based whole-body controller that maps desired end-effector poses to coordinated motion across the mobile base and arm. Within this reduced end-effector action space, HoMeR learns to switch between absolute pose predictions for long-range movement and relative pose predictions for fine-grained manipulation, offloading low-level coordination to the controller and focusing learning on task-level decisions. We deploy HoMeR on a holonomic mobile manipulator with a 7-DoF arm in a real home. We compare HoMeR to baselines without hybrid actions or whole-body control across 3 simulated and 3 real household tasks such as opening cabinets, sweeping trash, and rearranging pillows. Across tasks, HoMeR achieves an overall success rate of 79.17% using just 20 demonstrations per task, outperforming the next best baseline by 29.17 on average. HoMeR is also compatible with vision-language models and can leverage their internet-scale priors to better generalize to novel object appearances, layouts, and cluttered scenes. In summary, HoMeR moves beyond tabletop settings and demonstrates a scalable path toward sample-efficient, generalizable manipulation in everyday indoor spaces. Code, videos, and supplementary material are available at: http://homer-manip.github.io

Abstract-- Operating high degree of freedom robots can be difficult for users of wheelchair mounted robotic manipulators. Mode switching in Cartesian space has several drawbacks such as unintuitive control reference frames, separate translation and orientation control, and limited movement capabilities that hinder performance. We propose Point and Go mode switching, which reallocates the Cartesian mode switching reference frames into a more intuitive action space comprised of new translation and rotation modes. We use a novel sweeping motion to point the gripper, which defines the new translation axis along the robot base frame's horizontal plane. This creates an intuitive'point and go' translation mode that allows the user to easily perform complex, human-like movements without switching control modes. The system's rotation mode combines position control with a refined end-effector oriented frame that provides precise and consistent robot actions in various end-effector poses. We verified its effectiveness through initial experiments, followed by a three-task user study that compared our method to Cartesian mode switching and a state of the art learning method. Results show that Point and Go mode switching reduced completion times by 31%, pauses by 41%, and mode switches by 33%, while receiving significantly favorable responses in user surveys. In the USA alone, there are over 17 million people with an independent living disability and over 9 million people with a self-care disability [1].

Abstract-- Vision-language-action policies learn manipulation skills across tasks, environments and embodiments through large-scale pre-training. However, their ability to generalize to novel robot configurations remains limited. Most approaches emphasize model size, dataset scale and diversity while paying less attention to the design of action spaces. This leads to the configuration generalization problem, which requires costly adaptation. We address this challenge by formulating cross-embodiment pre-training as designing policies equivariant to embodiment configuration transformations. Building on this principle, we propose a framework that (i) establishes a embodiment equivariance theory for action space and policy design, (ii) introduces an action decoder that enforces configuration equivariance, and (iii) incorporates a geometry-aware network architecture to enhance embodiment-agnostic spatial reasoning. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that our approach improves pre-training effectiveness and enables efficient fine-tuning on novel robot embodiments. Our code is available at https: //github.com/hhcaz/e2vla

Robotic manipulation in unstructured environments requires systems that can generalize across diverse tasks while maintaining robust and reliable performance. We introduce {GVF-TAPE}, a closed-loop framework that combines generative visual foresight with task-agnostic pose estimation to enable scalable robotic manipulation. GVF-TAPE employs a generative video model to predict future RGB-D frames from a single side-view RGB image and a task description, offering visual plans that guide robot actions. A decoupled pose estimation model then extracts end-effector poses from the predicted frames, translating them into executable commands via low-level controllers. By iteratively integrating video foresight and pose estimation in a closed loop, GVF-TAPE achieves real-time, adaptive manipulation across a broad range of tasks. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that our approach reduces reliance on task-specific action data and generalizes effectively, providing a practical and scalable solution for intelligent robotic systems.

Redundant manipulators are well understood to offer infinite joint configurations for achieving a desired end-effector pose. The multiplicity of inverse kinematics (IK) solutions allows for the simultaneous solving of auxiliary tasks like avoiding joint limits or obstacles. However, the most widely used IK solvers are numerical gradient-based iterative methods that inherently return a locally optimal solution. In this work, we explore the computation of self-motion manifolds (SMMs), which represent the set of all joint configurations that solve the inverse kinematics problem for redundant manipulators. Thus, SMMs are global IK solutions for redundant manipulators. We focus on task redundancies of dimensionality 1, introducing a novel ODE formulation for computing SMMs using standard explicit fixed-step ODE integrators. We also address the challenge of ``inducing'' redundancy in otherwise non-redundant manipulators assigned to tasks naturally described by one degree of freedom less than the non-redundant manipulator. Furthermore, recognizing that SMMs can consist of multiple disconnected components, we propose methods for searching for these separate SMM components. Our formulations and algorithms compute accurate SMM solutions without requiring additional IK refinement, and we extend our methods to prismatic joint systems -- an area not covered in current SMM literature. This manuscript presents the derivation of these methods and several examples that show how the methods work and their limitations.

--We introduce PAPRLE (Plug-And-Play Robotic Limb Environment), a modular ecosystem that enables flexible placement and control of robotic limbs. With PAPRLE, a user can change the arrangement of the robotic limbs, and control them using a variety of input devices, including puppeteers, gaming controllers, and VR-based interfaces. This versatility supports a wide range of teleoperation scenarios and promotes adaptability to different task requirements. T o further enhance configurability, we introduce a pluggable puppeteer device that can be easily mounted and adapted to match the target robot configurations. PAPRLE supports bilateral teleoperation through these puppeteer devices, agnostic to the type or configuration of the follower robot. By supporting both joint-space and task-space control, the system provides real-time force feedback, improving user fidelity and physical interaction awareness. The modular design of PAPRLE facilitates novel spatial arrangements of the limbs and enables scalable data collection, thereby advancing research in embodied AI and learning-based control. The system will be released as open source, including both hardware and software components, to support broader adoption and community-driven extension. In many research and deployment scenarios, the flexible arrangement of robotic limbs is often required to support a wide range of task configurations.

Robot teleoperation with extended reality (XR teleoperation) enables intuitive interaction by allowing remote robots to mimic user motions with real-time 3D feedback. However, existing systems face significant motion-to-motion (M2M) latency--the delay between the user's latest motion and the corresponding robot feedback--leading to high teleoperation error and mission completion time. This issue stems from the system's exclusive reliance on network communication, making it highly vulnerable to network degradation. To address these challenges, we introduce TeleXR, the first end-to-end, fully open-sourced XR teleoperation framework that decouples robot control and XR visualization from network dependencies. TeleXR leverages local sensing data to reconstruct delayed or missing information of the counterpart, thereby significantly reducing network-induced issues. This approach allows both the XR and robot to run concurrently with network transmission while maintaining high robot planning accuracy. TeleXR also features contention-aware scheduling to mitigate GPU contention and bandwidth-adaptive point cloud scaling to cope with limited bandwidth.

Despite the significant success of imitation learning in robotic manipulation, its application to bimanual tasks remains highly challenging. Existing approaches mainly learn a policy to predict a distant next-best end-effector pose (NBP) and then compute the corresponding joint rotation angles for motion using inverse kinematics. However, they suffer from two important issues: (1) rarely considering the physical robotic structure, which may cause self-collisions or interferences, and (2) overlooking the kinematics constraint, which may result in the predicted poses not conforming to the actual limitations of the robot joints. In this paper, we propose Kinematics enhanced Spatial-TemporAl gRaph Diffuser (KStar Diffuser). Specifically, (1) to incorporate the physical robot structure information into action prediction, KStar Diffuser maintains a dynamic spatial-temporal graph according to the physical bimanual joint motions at continuous timesteps. This dynamic graph serves as the robot-structure condition for denoising the actions; (2) to make the NBP learning objective consistent with kinematics, we introduce the differentiable kinematics to provide the reference for optimizing KStar Diffuser. This module regularizes the policy to predict more reliable and kinematics-aware next end-effector poses. Experimental results show that our method effectively leverages the physical structural information and generates kinematics-aware actions in both simulation and real-world

This paper presents ArticuBot, in which a single learned policy enables a robotics system to open diverse categories of unseen articulated objects in the real world. This task has long been challenging for robotics due to the large variations in the geometry, size, and articulation types of such objects. Our system, Articubot, consists of three parts: generating a large number of demonstrations in physics-based simulation, distilling all generated demonstrations into a point cloud-based neural policy via imitation learning, and performing zero-shot sim2real transfer to real robotics systems. Utilizing sampling-based grasping and motion planning, our demonstration generalization pipeline is fast and effective, generating a total of 42.3k demonstrations over 322 training articulated objects. For policy learning, we propose a novel hierarchical policy representation, in which the high-level policy learns the sub-goal for the end-effector, and the low-level policy learns how to move the end-effector conditioned on the predicted goal. We demonstrate that this hierarchical approach achieves much better object-level generalization compared to the non-hierarchical version. We further propose a novel weighted displacement model for the high-level policy that grounds the prediction into the existing 3D structure of the scene, outperforming alternative policy representations. We show that our learned policy can zero-shot transfer to three different real robot settings: a fixed table-top Franka arm across two different labs, and an X-Arm on a mobile base, opening multiple unseen articulated objects across two labs, real lounges, and kitchens. Videos and code can be found on our project website: https://articubot.github.io/.