Aug 2026· npj Robotics· Vol 4· 1 citation· 116 references
Computer Science
TL;DR
It is shown that robots can generalize effectively under dynamics uncertainties even with limited training data by leveraging a feedback mechanism, namely PhyFilter, that corrects learning outputs with physics-filtered learning residuals, and shows that physics-filtered feedback can serve as a powerful alternative to massive data scaling.
Abstract
Living organisms exhibit extraordinary adaptability to unseen environments through their intrinsic physical structures and lifelong feedback-driven learning. Endowing robots with comparable generalization is critical for reliable operation in the real world. While recent approaches attempt to improve generalization by scaling training data, such strategies remain impractical for robotics, where collecting real-world demonstrations at the scale of large language models is prohibitively costly and slow. Contrary to this reliance on massive datasets, we show that robots can generalize effectively under dynamics uncertainties even with limited training data by leveraging a feedback mechanism, namely PhyFilter, that corrects learning outputs with physics-filtered learning residuals. PhyFilter operates as a lightweight, model-agnostic module whose parameters can be automatically optimized through an auto-learning algorithm, eliminating manual tuning and enabling seamless integration with diverse robot policies. We validate PhyFilter across four representative robotic systems, demonstrating that it enables quadruped robots to generalize to unseen terrains, payload variations, and speed ranges; drones to flight under unseen wind disturbances; aerial manipulators to achieve centimeter-level in-air capture despite wind and mass uncertainties; and acceleration differentiators to remain robust with distribution shift. These results show that physics-filtered feedback can serve as a powerful alternative to massive data scaling.
GeniWorld is presented, an interactive world model for robots that generalizes robustly across unseen scenarios by explicitly decoupling embodiment kinematics from environmental dynamics, and generates diverse manipulation trajectories within the world model, improving downstream policy performance and robustness in complex environments.
Quality-diversity (QD) algorithms have been gaining traction in robot learning, where diverse motion primitive libraries allow robots to adapt zero-shot to constraints at deployment time. However, such methods typically require expert designers to write the success condition, fitness and diversity metrics, and this strongly limits the robot's autonomy. On the other hand, existing LLM-based reward-shaping techniques allow robots to learn autonomously but only output single high-performing solutions, limiting the robot's adaptability. In this paper, we propose an approach designed to output diverse motion primitive archives by autonomously leveraging quality-diversity algorithms, only requiring a free-form description of the task in common language. To address the difficulty of designing relevant fitness and diversity metrics, we propose an autonomous exploration mechanism able to reliably output sets of functionals covering the fitness and behavior descriptor (BD) space. First, we pose policy exploration as a functional design problem, where the functional spaces are lower-dimensional than the full BD and fitness spaces, and propose an LLM-based exploration scheme to sample from these low-dimensional spaces without any task-specific prompts, fine-tuning or expert intervention. We adapt a multi-BD variant of the MAP-Elites success (MES) algorithm, designed to leverage the heterogeneous BD samples. Finally, through experiments based on the genesis simulator, we show that our method effectively generates archives of diverse motion primitives, outperforming classical QD algorithms with inferred and hand-written parametrizations on a set of $4$ robotic manipulation tasks.
Dual-arm manipulation or physical human-robot coordination requires robots to adapt rapidly to changing environments and constraints. Traditional Learning from Demonstration approaches struggle to generalize when faced with out-of-distribution scenarios, requiring costly retraining. We propose a Movement Primitive learning algorithm based on Gaussian Processes, combined with real-time zero-shot adaptation through Pathwise Conditioning. The method encapsulates the predictive uncertainty of the demonstrated movement using heteroscedastic GPs and utilizes an update via Matheron's rule to instantaneously adjust the trajectory to new via-points, without the need to retrain the underlying model. This formulation is extended to dual-arm coordination by dynamically calculating 6D relative constraints to maintain a closed kinematic chain. Experimental results, both in 2D comparisons against task-parameterized models and in tasks with the ADAM robot, demonstrate robust adaptation with near-zero error in real time, making it applicable for highly changing environments.
Adrián Prados, L. Lishan, Alberto Mendez et al.· Jornadas de Automática· 0 citations
This work uses Sample-based Model Predictive Control entirely in simulation as an automated, rapidly tunable expert to generate massive offline datasets and validate the robustness of this sim-to-real framework by successfully deploying complex loco-manipulation skills across different morphologies.
Martin Schuck, Maks Sorokin, S. Manni et al.· 0 citations
Space robots operate in extreme environments where hardware degradation can critically compromise traditional control strategies. While continual reinforcement learning offers a promising mechanism for online adaptation, it inherently requires access to a reward signal during deployment. However, precise reward computation in space is often infeasible due to the lack of external tracking systems and the overall complexity of the environment. To address the challenge of unobservable rewards, we introduce a reward-free continual learning framework that leverages latent-state world models. By pre-training a model-based agent across diverse simulations, the world model learns a robust predictor of the reward structure within its latent space. Upon deployment to an environment with severe hardware degradation, we freeze the observation encoder and reward predictor to update only the transition dynamics of the world model through unsupervised rollouts. By training the policy entirely on imagined trajectories generated by this updated world model, the agent adapts to altered dynamics without receiving new rewards. We demonstrate our approach across simulated planetary traversal, orbital navigation, and precision assembly tasks subjected to severe morphological failures.
Andrej Orsula, M. Olivares-Mendez, Carol Martínez· 0 citations
The Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI), originally developed by the Robotics and Embodied AI Lab at Stanford University, has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness for training manipulation policies for terrestrial robotic manipulators using imitation and diffusion based learning techniques. The long term objective of our research is to extend this technology to space robotic applications. There are numerous challenges largely unexplored, including harsh environmental conditions, stringent power and computational constraints, communication latency, and very limited opportunities for data collection and validation. This paper presents the first step toward achieving that goal by designing a similar gripper and testing it in both simulation and experiment with a Franka Emika robotic arm in our lab setting. We reproduce the data collection and diffusion policy training pipeline on commodity hardware, with a ViT-B/16 Vision Transformer serving as the policy’s vision backbone, and reconstruct a Franka Emika manipulator equipped with a custom electric gripper inside NVIDIA Isaac Sim, using the Lula inverse kinematics solver to perform kinematic control from the policy generated end effector commands. We identify and formalize the coordinate and action frame transformations required to transfer a policy trained on handheld demonstrations onto a simulated embodiment, and show that the simulated controller tracks the commanded trajectories to subcentimeter accuracy. We further report pick and place rollout statistics across randomized object configurations and identify the visual domain gap between rendered and real observations as the dominant remaining barrier to transfer. These results helped us understand the UMI framework and established a solid foundation for us to move forward toward free floating microgravity manipulation and autonomous dual arm object handover.
Neal D'Andrea, Joshua Wachs, Abdou Wade et al.· National Aerospace and Elect...· 0 citations
Requirements in large systems rarely exist in isolation. Their meaning depends on the wider project context - other requirements, policies, decisions, tests, and implementation details. That becomes especially important when AI is used for review, because spotting a possible conflict or gap is only the beginning. ReqSpace explores how AI, visualisation, and connected project context can help reviewers understand those findings, trace the relationships behind them, and focus on the questions that…
Microsoft Research Blog· microsoft.comSep 21, 2026
Custom-made molecules are advancing medicine, materials, and agriculture, but producing them is slow and expensive. A new Nature paper highlights RetroChimera, a predictive model that helps accelerate chemical synthesis, helping researchers explore a wide range of molecules. The post Improving synthesis prediction of small molecules at scale with RetroChimera appeared first on Microsoft Research.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduSep 14, 2026
The “HardFlow” algorithm could help generative AI models produce high-quality outputs that obey strict requirements when “pretty close” doesn’t cut it.
We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads.
See our Cookie Policy.
