Recovering the skeletal shape of an animal from a monocular video is a longstanding challenge. Prevailing animal reconstruction methods often adopt a control-point driven animation model and optimize bone transforms individually without considering skeletal topology, yielding unsatisfactory shape and articulation. In contrast, humans can easily infer the articulation structure of an unknown animal by associating it with a seen articulated character in their memory. Inspired by this fact, we present CASA, a novel Category-Agnostic Skeletal Animal reconstruction method consisting of two major components: a video-to-shape retrieval process and a neural inverse graphics framework. During inference, CASA first retrieves an articulated shape from a 3D character assets bank so that the input video scores highly with the rendered image, according to a pretrained language-vision model. CASA then integrates the retrieved character into an inverse graphics framework and jointly infers the shape deformation, skeleton structure, and skinning weights through optimization.

However, on-body displacement of sensors is inevitable since the device cannot be firmly worn at a fixed position across different sessions.

Recovering the skeletal shape of an animal from a monocular video is a longstanding challenge.

This paper presents a hetero-associative sequential memory system for mobile manipulators that learns compact, neuromorphic bindings between robot joint states and tactile observations to produce step-wise action decisions with low compute and memory cost. The method encodes joint angles via population place coding and converts skin-measured forces into spike-rate features using an Izhikevich neuron model; both signals are transformed into bipolar binary vectors and bound element-wise to create associations stored in a large-capacity sequential memory. To improve separability in binary space and inject geometry from touch, we introduce 3D rotary positional embeddings that rotate subspaces as a function of sensed force direction, enabling fuzzy retrieval through a softmax weighted recall over temporally shifted action patterns. On a Toyota Human Support Robot covered by robot skin, the hetero-associative sequential memory system realizes a pseudocompliance controller that moves the link under touch in the direction and with speed correlating to the amplitude of applied force, and it retrieves multi-joint grasp sequences by continuing tactile input. The system sets up quickly, trains from synchronized streams of states and observations, and exhibits a degree of generalization while remaining economical. Results demonstrate single-joint and full-arm behaviors executed via associative recall, and suggest extensions to imitation learning, motion planning, and multi-modal integration.

Electronic devices are essential for robots but limit their usable environments. To overcome this, methods excluding electronics from the operating environment while retaining advanced electronic control and actuation have been explored. These include the remote hydraulic drive of electronics-free mobile robots, which offer high reachability, and long wire-driven robot arms with motors consolidated at the base, which offer high environmental resistance. To combine the advantages of both, this study proposes a new system, "Remote Wire Drive." As a proof-of-concept, we designed and developed the Remote Wire-Driven robot "REWW-ARM", which consists of the following components: 1) a novel power transmission mechanism, the "Remote Wire Transmission Mechanism" (RWTM), the key technology of the Remote Wire Drive; 2) an electronics-free distal mobile robot driven by it; and 3) a motor-unit that generates power and provides electronic closed-loop control based on state estimation via the RWTM. In this study, we evaluated the mechanical and control performance of REWW-ARM through several experiments, demonstrating its capability for locomotion, posture control, and object manipulation both on land and underwater. This suggests the potential for applying the Remote Wire-Driven system to various types of robots, thereby expanding their operational range.

Pose estimation of a robot arm from visual inputs is a challenging task. However, with the increasing adoption of robot arms for both industrial and residential use cases, reliable joint angle estimation can offer improved safety and performance guarantees, and also be used as a verifier to further train robot policies. This paper introduces using frontier vision-language models (VLMs) as an ``off-the-shelf" tool to estimate a robot arm's joint angles from a single target image. By evaluating frontier VLMs on both synthetic and real-world image-data pairs, this paper establishes a performance baseline attained by current FLMs. In addition, this paper presents empirical results suggesting that test time scaling or parameter scaling alone does not lead to improved joint angle predictions.

The primary output of the nervous system is movement and behavior. While recent advances have democratized pose tracking during complex behavior, kinematic trajectories alone provide only indirect access to the underlying control processes. Here we present MIMIC-MJX, a framework for learning biologically-plausible neural control policies from kinematics. MIMIC-MJX models the generative process of motor control by training neural controllers that learn to actuate biomechanically-realistic body models in physics simulation to reproduce real kinematic trajectories. We demonstrate that our implementation is accurate, fast, data-efficient, and generalizable to diverse animal body models. Policies trained with MIMIC-MJX can be utilized to both analyze neural control strategies and simulate behavioral experiments, illustrating its potential as an integrative modeling framework for neuroscience.

Dexterous grasp datasets are vital for embodied intelligence, but mostly emphasize grasp stability, ignoring functional grasps needed for tasks like opening bottle caps or holding cup handles. Most rely on bulky, costly, and hard-to-control high-DOF Shadow Hands. Inspired by the human hand's underactuated mechanism, we establish UniFucGrasp, a universal functional grasp annotation strategy and dataset for multiple dexterous hand types. Based on biomimicry, it maps natural human motions to diverse hand structures and uses geometry-based force closure to ensure functional, stable, human-like grasps. This method supports low-cost, efficient collection of diverse, high-quality functional grasps. Finally, we establish the first multi-hand functional grasp dataset and provide a synthesis model to validate its effectiveness. Experiments on the UFG dataset, IsaacSim, and complex robotic tasks show that our method improves functional manipulation accuracy and grasp stability, demonstrates improved adaptability across multiple robotic hands, helping to alleviate annotation cost and generalization challenges in dexterous grasping. The project page is at https://haochen611.github.io/UFG.