5.4ROMay 12
Rainbow Deep Q-Learning with Kinematics-Aware Design for Cooperative Delta and 3-RRS Parallel Robot InsertionHassen Nigatu, Gaokun Shi, Jituo Li et al.
This paper presents a kinematics-aware deep reinforcement learning framework based on Rainbow Deep Q-Networks (DQN) for cooperative peg-in-hole manipulation by a Delta parallel robot and a 3-RRS (Revolute--Revolute--Spherical) parallel manipulator. A key contribution is the integration of a geometric design-optimization stage that precedes learning: the 3-RRS geometry is tuned to maximize the singularity-free workspace and improve conditioning, which in turn enlarges the safe region in which the reinforcement learning policy can explore. Together the two manipulators expose a 6~degree-of-freedom (DoF) controllable subspace (three Delta translations, two 3-RRS rotations, and one 3-RRS vertical translation); the peg-in-hole task is invariant to rotation about the peg axis, so the task-relevant manifold is five dimensional. The cooperative insertion problem is cast as a Markov Decision Process with a 12-dimensional state vector and a discrete action set containing $6 \times 2 = 12$ incremental commands (one positive and one negative per controlled DoF). A shaped reward combines dense proximity guidance, penalties for kinematic and workspace violations, and sparse bonuses for successful insertions. The Rainbow DQN -- integrating double Q-learning, dueling architecture, prioritized replay, multi-step returns, noisy linear layers for exploration, and a distributional value head -- is trained with a two-stage curriculum. The co-designed framework is validated in a high-fidelity kinematic simulator, where it achieves stable policy convergence, reliable insertions, and reduced constraint violations compared against a vanilla DQN agent and a classical sampling-based planner.
15.6ROJun 25
Tactile-WAM: Touch-Aware World Action Model with Tactile Asymmetric AttentionSiyu Wu, Linjing You, Junjie Zhu et al.
World Action Models (WAMs) generate actions together with predicted futures, offering a powerful interface for robot decision making. In contact-rich manipulation, however, visually plausible futures can be physically incomplete: insertion, assembly, search, and reorientation often depend on slip, jamming, contact normals, or small alignment errors that are weakly visible or hidden in RGB. A natural solution is to predict future tactile states, however, we identify tactile pollution, a failure mode where unconstrained tactile-token injection degrades video and action prediction by forcing a visual dynamics model to absorb sparse, local, event-driven contact signals. To address this, we propose Tactile-WAM, a touch-aware WAM with a Tactile Asymmetric Attention Mechanism (TAAM). TAAM combines a VideoClean mask, which blocks video-query access to tactile key/value tokens while preserving action-query access, with a touch-aware bias for action attention. The VideoClean mask protects visual prediction while keeping contact information available for action generation; the touch-aware bias is derived from predicted touch changes and modulates action attention to tactile tokens during denoising. On ManiFeel, Tactile-WAM improves the mean success rate by 38.9% overall and by 86% on contact-rich tasks.
8.6CVJun 15
MVOFormer: Flow-Semantic Transformer for Robust Monocular Visual OdometryJituo Li, Shunwang Sun, Jialu Zhang et al.
Monocular visual odometry (MVO) is foundational to autonomous navigation and robotic localization. However, existing learning-based MVO approaches often struggle with either a lack of interpretable, complementary features or overly complex multi-stage architectures. These limitations inherently restrict their robustness and cross-domain generalization. In this work, we propose MVOFormer, a novel transformer framework for robust monocular visual odometry. Our architecture features a Flow-Semantic Dual Branch Encoder that synergizes dense geometric motion cues with object-centric semantic priors, explicitly distinguishing static structures from dynamic distractors. These representations are then fused by an Iterative Multimodal Decoder, enabling coarse-to-fine pose refinement while dynamically suppressing attention on unreliable regions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that, without any target-domain fine-tuning, MVOFormer achieves superior zero-shot generalization and robustness, significantly outperforming prior learning-based frame-to-frame methods across diverse benchmarks including TartanAir, KITTI, TUM-RGBD, and ETH3D-SLAM.
Real-time Skeletonization for Sketch-based ModelingJing Ma, Jin Wang, Jituo Li et al.
Skeleton creation is an important phase in the character animation pipeline. However, handcrafting skeleton takes extensive labor time and domain knowledge. Automatic skeletonization provides a solution. However, most of the current approaches are far from real-time and lack the flexibility to control the skeleton complexity. In this paper, we present an efficient skeletonization method, which can be seamlessly integrated into the sketch-based modeling process in real-time. The method contains three steps: local sub-skeleton extraction; sub-skeleton connection; and global skeleton refinement. Firstly, the local skeleton is extracted from the processed polygon stroke and forms a subpart along with the sub-mesh. Then, local sub-skeletons are connected according to the intersecting relationships and the modeling sequence of subparts. Lastly, a global refinement method is proposed to give users coarse-to-fine control on the connected skeleton. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a variety of examples created by both novices and professionals.