OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Incremental Learning for Robot Shared Autonomy
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Shared autonomy holds promise for improving the usability and accessibility of assistive robotic arms, but current methods often rely on costly expert demonstrations and remain static after pretraining, limiting their ability to handle real-world variations. Even with extensive training data, unforeseen challenges--especially those that fundamentally alter task dynamics, such as unexpected obstacles or spatial constraints--can cause assistive policies to break down, leading to ineffective or unreliable assistance. To address this, we propose ILSA, an Incrementally Learned Shared Autonomy framework that continuously refines its assistive policy through user interactions, adapting to real-world challenges beyond the scope of pre-collected data. At the core of ILSA is a structured fine-tuning mechanism that enables continual improvement with each interaction by effectively integrating limited new interaction data while preserving prior knowledge, ensuring a balance between adaptation and generalization. A user study with 20 participants demonstrates ILSA's effectiveness, showing faster task completion and improved user experience compared to static alternatives. Code and videos are available at https://ilsa-robo.github.io/.
Distributed Fault-Tolerant Multi-Robot Cooperative Localization in Adversarial Environments
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

In multi-robot systems (MRS), cooperative localization is a crucial task for enhancing system robustness and scalability, especially in GPS-denied or communication-limited environments. However, adversarial attacks, such as sensor manipulation, and communication jamming, pose significant challenges to the performance of traditional localization methods. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed fault-tolerant cooperative localization framework to enhance resilience against sensor and communication disruptions in adversarial environments. We introduce an adaptive event-triggered communication strategy that dynamically adjusts communication thresholds based on real-time sensing and communication quality. This strategy ensures optimal performance even in the presence of sensor degradation or communication failure. Furthermore, we conduct a rigorous analysis of the convergence and stability properties of the proposed algorithm, demonstrating its resilience against bounded adversarial zones and maintaining accurate state estimation. Robotarium-based experiment results show that our proposed algorithm significantly outperforms traditional methods in terms of localization accuracy and communication efficiency, particularly in adversarial settings. Our approach offers improved scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance for MRS, making it suitable for large-scale deployments in real-world, challenging environments.
On the Analysis of Stability, Sensitivity and Transparency in Variable Admittance Control for pHRI Enhanced by Virtual Fixtures
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

The interest in Physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) has significantly increased over the last two decades thanks to the availability of collaborative robots that guarantee user safety during force exchanges. For this reason, stability concerns have been addressed extensively in the literature while proposing new control schemes for pHRI applications. Because of the nonlinear nature of robots, stability analyses generally leverage passivity concepts. On the other hand, the proposed algorithms generally consider ideal models of robot manipulators. For this reason, the primary objective of this paper is to conduct a detailed analysis of the sources of instability for a class of pHRI control schemes, namely proxy-based constrained admittance controllers, by considering parasitic effects such as transmission elasticity, motor velocity saturation, and actuation delay. Next, a sensitivity analysis supported by experimental results is carried out, in order to identify how the control parameters affect the stability of the overall system. Finally, an adaptation technique for the proxy parameters is proposed with the goal of maximizing transparency in pHRI. The proposed adaptation method is validated through both simulations and experimental tests.
Learning to Perform Low-Contact Autonomous Nasotracheal Intubation by Recurrent Action-Confidence Chunking with Transformer
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Nasotracheal intubation (NTI) is critical for establishing artificial airways in clinical anesthesia and critical care. Current manual methods face significant challenges, including cross-infection, especially during respiratory infection care, and insufficient control of endoluminal contact forces, increasing the risk of mucosal injuries. While existing studies have focused on automated endoscopic insertion, the automation of NTI remains unexplored despite its unique challenges: Nasotracheal tubes exhibit greater diameter and rigidity than standard endoscopes, substantially increasing insertion complexity and patient risks. We propose a novel autonomous NTI system with two key components to address these challenges. First, an autonomous NTI system is developed, incorporating a prosthesis embedded with force sensors, allowing for safety assessment and data filtering. Then, the Recurrent Action-Confidence Chunking with Transformer (RACCT) model is developed to handle complex tube-tissue interactions and partial visual observations. Experimental results demonstrate that the RACCT model outperforms the ACT model in all aspects and achieves a 66% reduction in average peak insertion force compared to manual operations while maintaining equivalent success rates. This validates the system's potential for reducing infection risks and improving procedural safety.
Jacobian Exploratory Dual-Phase Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Endoluminal Navigation of Deformable Continuum Robots
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Deformable continuum robots (DCRs) present unique planning challenges due to nonlinear deformation mechanics and partial state observability, violating the Markov assumptions of conventional reinforcement learning (RL) methods. While Jacobian-based approaches offer theoretical foundations for rigid manipulators, their direct application to DCRs remains limited by time-varying kinematics and underactuated deformation dynamics. This paper proposes Jacobian Exploratory Dual-Phase RL (JEDP-RL), a framework that decomposes planning into phased Jacobian estimation and policy execution. During each training step, we first perform small-scale local exploratory actions to estimate the deformation Jacobian matrix, then augment the state representation with Jacobian features to restore approximate Markovianity. Extensive SOFA surgical dynamic simulations demonstrate JEDP-RL's three key advantages over proximal policy optimization (PPO) baselines: 1) Convergence speed: 3.2x faster policy convergence, 2) Navigation efficiency: requires 25% fewer steps to reach the target, and 3) Generalization ability: achieve 92% success rate under material property variations and achieve 83% (33% higher than PPO) success rate in the unseen tissue environment.
Symmetry-Guided Multi-Agent Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

In robotic systems, the performance of reinforcement learning depends on the rationality of predefined reward functions. However, manually designed reward functions often lead to policy failures due to inaccuracies. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) addresses this problem by inferring implicit reward functions from expert demonstrations. Nevertheless, existing methods rely heavily on large amounts of expert demonstrations to accurately recover the reward function. The high cost of collecting expert demonstrations in robotic applications, particularly in multi-robot systems, severely hinders the practical deployment of IRL. Consequently, improving sample efficiency has emerged as a critical challenge in multi-agent inverse reinforcement learning (MIRL). Inspired by the symmetry inherent in multi-agent systems, this work theoretically demonstrates that leveraging symmetry enables the recovery of more accurate reward functions. Building upon this insight, we propose a universal framework that integrates symmetry into existing multi-agent adversarial IRL algorithms, thereby significantly enhancing sample efficiency. Experimental results from multiple challenging tasks have demonstrated the effectiveness of this framework. Further validation in physical multi-robot systems has shown the practicality of our method.
TetraGrip: Sensor-Driven Multi-Suction Reactive Object Manipulation in Cluttered Scenes
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Warehouse robotic systems equipped with vacuum grippers must reliably grasp a diverse range of objects from densely packed shelves. However, these environments present significant challenges, including occlusions, diverse object orientations, stacked and obstructed items, and surfaces that are difficult to suction. We introduce \tetra, a novel vacuum-based grasping strategy featuring four suction cups mounted on linear actuators. Each actuator is equipped with an optical time-of-flight (ToF) proximity sensor, enabling reactive grasping. We evaluate \tetra in a warehouse-style setting, demonstrating its ability to manipulate objects in stacked and obstructed configurations. Our results show that our RL-based policy improves picking success in stacked-object scenarios by 22.86\% compared to a single-suction gripper. Additionally, we demonstrate that TetraGrip can successfully grasp objects in scenarios where a single-suction gripper fails due to physical limitations, specifically in two cases: (1) picking an object occluded by another object and (2) retrieving an object in a complex scenario. These findings highlight the advantages of multi-actuated, suction-based grasping in unstructured warehouse environments. The project website is available at: \href{https://tetragrip.github.io/}{https://tetragrip.github.io/}.
Probabilistic Collision Risk Estimation for Pedestrian Navigation
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Intelligent devices for supporting persons with vision impairment are becoming more widespread, but they are lacking behind the advancements in intelligent driver assistant system. To make a first step forward, this work discusses the integration of the risk model technology, previously used in autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems, into an assistance device for persons with vision impairment. The risk model computes a probabilistic collision risk given object trajectories which has previously been shown to give better indications of an object's collision potential compared to distance or time-to-contact measures in vehicle scenarios. In this work, we show that the risk model is also superior in warning persons with vision impairment about dangerous objects. Our experiments demonstrate that the warning accuracy of the risk model is 67% while both distance and time-to-contact measures reach only 51% accuracy for real-world data.
Dynamic Risk-Aware MPPI for Mobile Robots in Crowds via Efficient Monte Carlo Approximations
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Deploying mobile robots safely among humans requires the motion planner to account for the uncertainty in the other agents' predicted trajectories. This remains challenging in traditional approaches, especially with arbitrarily shaped predictions and real-time constraints. To address these challenges, we propose a Dynamic Risk-Aware Model Predictive Path Integral control (DRA-MPPI), a motion planner that incorporates uncertain future motions modelled with potentially non-Gaussian stochastic predictions. By leveraging MPPI's gradient-free nature, we propose a method that efficiently approximates the joint Collision Probability (CP) among multiple dynamic obstacles for several hundred sampled trajectories in real-time via a Monte Carlo (MC) approach. This enables the rejection of samples exceeding a predefined CP threshold or the integration of CP as a weighted objective within the navigation cost function. Consequently, DRA-MPPI mitigates the freezing robot problem while enhancing safety. Real-world and simulated experiments with multiple dynamic obstacles demonstrate DRA-MPPI's superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches, including Scenario-based Model Predictive Control (S-MPC), Frenet planner, and vanilla MPPI.
Feedback Control of a Single-Tail Bioinspired 59-mg Swimmer
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

We present an evolved steerable version of the single-tail Fish-&-Ribbon-Inspired Small Swimming Harmonic roBot (FRISSHBot), a 59-mg biologically inspired swimmer, which is driven by a new shape-memory alloy (SMA)-based bimorph actuator. The new FRISSHBot is controllable in the two-dimensional (2D) space, which enabled the first demonstration of feedback-controlled trajectory tracking of a single-tail aquatic robot with onboard actuation at the subgram scale. These new capabilities are the result of a physics-informed design with an enlarged head and shortened tail relative to those of the original platform. Enhanced by its design, this new platform achieves forward swimming speeds of up to 13.6 mm/s (0.38 Bl/s), which is over four times that of the original platform. Furthermore, when following 2D references in closed loop, the tested FRISSHBot prototype attains forward swimming speeds of up to 9.1 mm/s, root-mean-square (RMS) tracking errors as low as 2.6 mm, turning rates of up to 13.1 °/s, and turning radii as small as 10 mm.
SeGMan: Sequential and Guided Manipulation Planner for Robust Planning in 2D Constrained Environments
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

In this paper, we present SeGMan, a hybrid motion planning framework that integrates sampling-based and optimization-based techniques with a guided forward search to address complex, constrained sequential manipulation challenges, such as pick-and-place puzzles. SeGMan incorporates an adaptive subgoal selection method that adjusts the granularity of subgoals, enhancing overall efficiency. Furthermore, proposed generalizable heuristics guide the forward search in a more targeted manner. Extensive evaluations in maze-like tasks populated with numerous objects and obstacles demonstrate that SeGMan is capable of generating not only consistent and computationally efficient manipulation plans but also outperform state-of-the-art approaches.
M2H: Multi-Task Learning with Efficient Window-Based Cross-Task Attention for Monocular Spatial Perception
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Deploying real-time spatial perception on edge devices requires efficient multi-task models that leverage complementary task information while minimizing computational overhead. This paper introduces Multi-Mono-Hydra (M2H), a novel multi-task learning framework designed for semantic segmentation and depth, edge, and surface normal estimation from a single monocular image. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on independent single-task models or shared encoder-decoder architectures, M2H introduces a Window-Based Cross-Task Attention Module that enables structured feature exchange while preserving task-specific details, improving prediction consistency across tasks. Built on a lightweight ViT-based DINOv2 backbone, M2H is optimized for real-time deployment and serves as the foundation for monocular spatial perception systems supporting 3D scene graph construction in dynamic environments. Comprehensive evaluations show that M2H outperforms state-of-the-art multi-task models on NYUDv2, surpasses single-task depth and semantic baselines on Hypersim, and achieves superior performance on the Cityscapes dataset, all while maintaining computational efficiency on laptop hardware. Beyond benchmarks, M2H is validated on real-world data, demonstrating its practicality in spatial perception tasks.
Side Scan Sonar-based SLAM for Autonomous Algae Farm Monitoring
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

The transition of seaweed farming to an alternative food source on an industrial scale relies on automating its processes through smart farming, equivalent to land agriculture. Key to this process are autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) via their capacity to automate crop and structural inspections. However, the current bottleneck for their deployment is ensuring safe navigation within farms, which requires an accurate, online estimate of the AUV pose and map of the infrastructure. To enable this, we propose an efficient side scan sonar-based (SSS) simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) framework that exploits the geometry of kelp farms via modeling structural ropes in the back-end as sequences of individual landmarks from each SSS ping detection, instead of combining detections into elongated representations. Our method outperforms state of the art solutions in hardware in the loop (HIL) experiments on a real AUV survey in a kelp farm. The framework and dataset can be found at https://github.com/julRusVal/sss_farm_slam.
RecoveryChaining: Learning Local Recovery Policies for Robust Manipulation
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Model-based planners and controllers are commonly used to solve complex manipulation problems as they can efficiently optimize diverse objectives and generalize to long horizon tasks. However, they often fail during deployment due to noisy actuation, partial observability and imperfect models. To enable a robot to recover from such failures, we propose to use hierarchical reinforcement learning to learn a recovery policy. The recovery policy is triggered when a failure is detected based on sensory observations and seeks to take the robot to a state from which it can complete the task using the nominal model-based controllers. Our approach, called RecoveryChaining, uses a hybrid action space, where the model-based controllers are provided as additional \emph{nominal} options which allows the recovery policy to decide how to recover, when to switch to a nominal controller and which controller to switch to even with \emph{sparse rewards}. We evaluate our approach in three multi-step manipulation tasks with sparse rewards, where it learns significantly more robust recovery policies than those learned by baselines. We successfully transfer recovery policies learned in simulation to a physical robot to demonstrate the feasibility of sim-to-real transfer with our method.
VaLID: Verification as Late Integration of Detections for LiDAR-Camera Fusion
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Vehicle object detection benefits from both LiDAR and camera data, with LiDAR offering superior performance in many scenarios. Fusion of these modalities further enhances accuracy, but existing methods often introduce complexity or dataset-specific dependencies. In our study, we propose a model-adaptive late-fusion method, VaLID, which validates whether each predicted bounding box is acceptable or not. Our method verifies the higher-performing, yet overly optimistic LiDAR model detections using camera detections that are obtained from either specially trained, general, or open-vocabulary models. VaLID uses a lightweight neural verification network trained with a high recall bias to reduce the false predictions made by the LiDAR detector, while still preserving the true ones. Evaluating with multiple combinations of LiDAR and camera detectors on the KITTI dataset, we reduce false positives by an average of 63.9%, thus outperforming the individual detectors on 3D average precision (3DAP). Our approach is model-adaptive and demonstrates state-of-the-art competitive performance even when using generic camera detectors that were not trained specifically for this dataset.
Real-World Offline Reinforcement Learning from Vision Language Model Feedback
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

Offline reinforcement learning can enable policy learning from pre-collected, sub-optimal datasets without online interactions. This makes it ideal for real-world robots and safety-critical scenarios, where collecting online data or expert demonstrations is slow, costly, and risky. However, most existing offline RL works assume the dataset is already labeled with the task rewards, a process that often requires significant human effort, especially when ground-truth states are hard to ascertain (e.g., in the real-world). In this paper, we build on prior work, specifically RL-VLM-F, and propose a novel system that automatically generates reward labels for offline datasets using preference feedback from a vision-language model and a text description of the task. Our method then learns a policy using offline RL with the reward-labeled dataset. We demonstrate the system's applicability to a complex real-world robot-assisted dressing task, where we first learn a reward function using a vision-language model on a sub-optimal offline dataset, and then we use the learned reward to employ Implicit Q learning to develop an effective dressing policy. Our method also performs well in simulation tasks involving the manipulation of rigid and deformable objects, and significantly outperform baselines such as behavior cloning and inverse RL. In summary, we propose a new system that enables automatic reward labeling and policy learning from unlabeled, sub-optimal offline datasets.
SPADE: Towards Scalable Path Planning Architecture on Actionable Multi-Domain 3D ScenE Graphs
Venue: Conference IROS 2025
Year: 2025

In this work, we introduce SPADE, a path planning framework designed for autonomous navigation in dynamic environments using 3D scene graphs. SPADE combines hierarchical path planning with local geometric awareness to enable collision-free movement in dynamic scenes. The framework bifurcates the planning problem into two: (a) solving the sparse abstract global layer plan and (b) iterative path refinement across denser lower local layers in step with local geometric scene navigation. To ensure efficient extraction of a feasible route in a dense multi-task domain scene graphs, the framework enforces informed sampling of traversable edges prior to path-planning. This removes extraneous information not relevant to path-planning and reduces the overall planning complexity over a graph. Existing approaches address the problem of path planning over scene graphs by decoupling hierarchical and geometric path evaluation processes. Specifically, this results in an inefficient replanning over the entire scene graph when encountering path obstructions blocking the original route. In contrast, SPADE prioritizes local layer planning coupled with local geometric scene navigation, enabling navigation through dynamic scenes while maintaining efficiency in computing a traversable route. We validate SPADE through extensive simulation experiments and real-world deployment on a quadrupedal robot, demonstrating its efficacy in handling complex and dynamic scenarios.