Personal use of this material is permitted. Abstract -- Recently, many humanoid robots have been increasingly deployed in various facilities, including hospitals and assisted living environments, where they are often remotely controlled by human operators. Their kinematic redundancy enhances reachability and manipulability, enabling them to navigate complex, cluttered environments and perform a wide range of tasks. However, this redundancy also presents significant control challenges, particularly in coordinating the movements of the robot's macro-micro structure (torso and arms). Therefore, we propose various human-robot collaborative (HRC) methods for coordinating the torso and arm of remotely controlled mobile humanoid robots, aiming to balance autonomy and human input to enhance system efficiency and task execution. The proposed methods include human-initiated approaches, where users manually control torso movements, and robot-initiated approaches, which autonomously coordinate torso and arm based on factors such as reachability, task goal, or inferred human intent. We conducted a user study with N=17 participants to compare the proposed approaches in terms of task performance, manipulability, and energy efficiency, and analyzed which methods were preferred by participants. Human-robot collaborative (HRC) control enables humans and robot autonomy to complement each other and improve overall robotic manipulation performance.

In this work, Yoshikawa's manipulability index is used to investigate reinforcement learning (RL) as a framework for morphology optimization in planar robotic manipulators. A 2R manipulator tracking a circular end-effector path is first examined because this case has a known analytical optimum: equal link lengths and the second joint orthogonal to the first. This serves as a validation step to test whether RL can rediscover the optimum using reward feedback alone, without access to the manipulability expression or the Jacobian. Three RL algorithms (SAC, DDPG, and PPO) are compared with grid search and black-box optimizers, with morphology represented by a single action parameter phi that maps to the link lengths. All methods converge to the analytical solution, showing that numerical recovery of the optimum is possible without supplying analytical structure. Most morphology design tasks have no closed-form solutions, and grid or heuristic search becomes expensive as dimensionality increases. RL is therefore explored as a scalable alternative. The formulation used for the circular path is extended to elliptical and rectangular paths by expanding the action space to the full morphology vector (L1, L2, theta2). In these non-analytical settings, RL continues to converge reliably, whereas grid and black-box methods require far larger evaluation budgets. These results indicate that RL is effective for both recovering known optima and solving morphology optimization problems without analytical solutions.

This paper introduces an upper limb postural optimization method for enhancing physical ergonomics and force manipulability during bimanual human-robot co-carrying tasks. Existing research typically emphasizes human safety or manipulative efficiency, whereas our proposed method uniquely integrates both aspects to strengthen collaboration across diverse conditions (e.g., different grasping postures of humans, and different shapes of objects). Specifically, the joint angles of a simplified human skeleton model are optimized by minimizing the cost function to prioritize safety and manipulative capability. To guide humans towards the optimized posture, the reference end-effector poses of the robot are generated through a transformation module. A bimanual model predictive impedance controller (MPIC) is proposed for our human-like robot, CURI, to recalibrate the end effector poses through planned trajectories. The proposed method has been validated through various subjects and objects during human-human collaboration (HHC) and human-robot collaboration (HRC). The experimental results demonstrate significant improvement in muscle conditions by comparing the activation of target muscles before and after optimization.

Personal use of this material is permitted. Abstract-- Real-time control is an essential aspect of safe robot operation in the real world with dynamic objects. We present a framework for the analysis of object-aware controllers, methods for altering a robot's motion to anticipate and avoid possible collisions. This framework is focused on three design considerations: kinematics, motion profiles, and virtual constraints. Additionally, the analysis in this work relies on verification of robot behaviors using fundamental robot-obstacle experimental scenarios. T o showcase the effectiveness of our method we compare three representative object-aware controllers. The comparison uses metrics originating from the design considerations. From the analysis, we find that the design of object-aware controllers often lacks kinematic considerations, continuity of control points, and stability in movement profiles. We conclude that this framework can be used in the future to design, compare, and benchmark obstacle avoidance methods.

Recent work has demonstrated the potential of diffusion models in robot bimanual skill learning. However, existing methods ignore the learning of posture-dependent task features, which are crucial for adapting dual-arm configurations to meet specific force and velocity requirements in dexterous bimanual manipulation. To address this limitation, we propose Manipulability-Aware Diffusion Policy (ManiDP), a novel imitation learning method that not only generates plausible bimanual trajectories, but also optimizes dual-arm configurations to better satisfy posture-dependent task requirements. ManiDP achieves this by extracting bimanual manipulability from expert demonstrations and encoding the encapsulated posture features using Riemannian-based probabilistic models. These encoded posture features are then incorporated into a conditional diffusion process to guide the generation of task-compatible bimanual motion sequences. We evaluate ManiDP on six real-world bimanual tasks, where the experimental results demonstrate a 39.33$\%$ increase in average manipulation success rate and a 0.45 improvement in task compatibility compared to baseline methods. This work highlights the importance of integrating posture-relevant robotic priors into bimanual skill diffusion to enable human-like adaptability and dexterity.

Responsible AI demands systems whose behavioral tendencies can be effectively measured, audited, and adjusted to prevent inadvertently nudging users toward risky decisions or embedding hidden biases in risk aversion. As language models (LMs) are increasingly incorporated into AI-driven decision support systems, understanding their risk behaviors is crucial for their responsible deployment. This study investigates the manipulability of risk aversion (MoRA) in LMs, examining their ability to replicate human risk preferences across diverse economic scenarios, with a focus on gender-specific attitudes, uncertainty, role-based decision-making, and the manipulability of risk aversion. The results indicate that while LMs such as DeepSeek Reasoner and Gemini-2.0-flash-lite exhibit some alignment with human behaviors, notable discrepancies highlight the need to refine bio-centric measures of manipulability. These findings suggest directions for refining AI design to better align human and AI risk preferences and enhance ethical decision-making. The study calls for further advancements in model design to ensure that AI systems more accurately replicate human risk preferences, thereby improving their effectiveness in risk management contexts. This approach could enhance the applicability of AI assistants in managing risk.

Robotic manipulation in dynamic environments often requires seamless transitions between different grasp types to maintain stability and efficiency. However, achieving smooth and adaptive grasp transitions remains a challenge, particularly when dealing with external forces and complex motion constraints. Existing grasp transition strategies often fail to account for varying external forces and do not optimize motion performance effectively. In this work, we propose an Imitation-Guided Bimanual Planning Framework that integrates efficient grasp transition strategies and motion performance optimization to enhance stability and dexterity in robotic manipulation. Our approach introduces Strategies for Sampling Stable Intersections in Grasp Manifolds for seamless transitions between uni-manual and bi-manual grasps, reducing computational costs and regrasping inefficiencies. Additionally, a Hierarchical Dual-Stage Motion Architecture combines an Imitation Learning-based Global Path Generator with a Quadratic Programming-driven Local Planner to ensure real-time motion feasibility, obstacle avoidance, and superior manipulability. The proposed method is evaluated through a series of force-intensive tasks, demonstrating significant improvements in grasp transition efficiency and motion performance. A video demonstrating our simulation results can be viewed at \href{https://youtu.be/3DhbUsv4eDo}{\textcolor{blue}{https://youtu.be/3DhbUsv4eDo}}.

In particular, we show that fairwashed explanation models can generalize beyond the suing group ( i.e., data points that are being explained), meaning that

It is well-understood that, in the absence of monetary transfers, fairness, efficiency and truthfulness cannot be reconciled, in a very strong sense.