Alexis Duburcq

Jiayi Weng, Huayu Chen, Dong Yan et al.

In this paper, we present Tianshou, a highly modularized Python library for deep reinforcement learning (DRL) that uses PyTorch as its backend. Tianshou intends to be research-friendly by providing a flexible and reliable infrastructure of DRL algorithms. It supports online and offline training with more than 20 classic algorithms through a unified interface. To facilitate related research and prove Tianshou's reliability, we have released Tianshou's benchmark of MuJoCo environments, covering eight classic algorithms with state-of-the-art performance. We open-sourced Tianshou at https://github.com/thu-ml/tianshou/.

Trinity Chung, Kashu Yamazaki, Dhruv Patel et al.

Tactile sensing is critical for contact-rich dexterous manipulation, yet it remains unclear which tactile abstractions a policy needs and when richer tactile fields justify their hardware cost. This is hard to study empirically: each sensor effectively defines a new robot, and no lab can replicate the same learning experiment across all of them. We present Tactile Genesis, a GPU-parallel tactile sensor simulation platform that exposes binary contact, contact depth, per-taxel kinematic force/torque, elastomer marker displacement, geometry-aware proximity, contact audio, and a voxelized temperature field (the first of its kind in robot learning physics simulation platforms) under a common interface, with configurable placement, resolution, and a realistic noise model (drift, hysteresis, dead taxels, crosstalk). It scales past 20,000 parallel environments and 1,000 taxels on a single GPU, improving throughput by 3 to 20 times over previous tactile simulators. We train teacher-student policies on three dexterous tasks, ablating sensor type, placement, resolution, and noise, and verify transfer to the real XHand1. Proprioception alone is insufficient on every task. Sensor placement dominates sensor type: fingertip-only coverage trails whole-hand coverage by a wide margin, while adding the palm and proximal phalanges closes most of the gap to the privileged teacher. Resolution matters far less than coverage: placing 200 taxels across the whole hand suffices across tasks. We find that force/torque per taxel is consistently the most useful sensor type. These results give concrete guidance for both future tactile hardware design for improving robot hands and policy-side observation choice in dexterous manipulation. https://neuroagents-lab.github.io/2026-tactile-genesis/

Alexis Duburcq, Yann Chevaleyre, Nicolas Bredeche et al.

Autonomous robots require online trajectory planning capability to operate in the real world. Efficient offline trajectory planning methods already exist, but are computationally demanding, preventing their use online. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm called Guided Trajectory Learning that learns a function approximation of solutions computed through trajectory optimization while ensuring accurate and reliable predictions. This function approximation is then used online to generate trajectories. This algorithm is designed to be easy to implement, and practical since it does not require massive computing power. It is readily applicable to any robotics systems and effortless to set up on real hardware since robust control strategies are usually already available. We demonstrate the computational performance of our algorithm on flat-foot walking with the self-balanced exoskeleton Atalante.

Omar Harib, Ayonga Hereid, Ayush Agrawal et al.

This manuscript presents control of a high-DOF fully actuated lower-limb exoskeleton for paraplegic individuals. The key novelty is the ability for the user to walk without the use of crutches or other external means of stabilization. We harness the power of modern optimization techniques and supervised machine learning to develop a smooth feedback control policy that provides robust velocity regulation and perturbation rejection. Preliminary evaluation of the stability and robustness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through the Gazebo simulation environment. In addition, preliminary experimental results with (complete) paraplegic individuals are included for the previous version of the controller.