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Jia Pan

Publications and source records attributed to Jia Pan.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

CALM: Current Aligned Link Manipulation for Single Arm Oversized Object Lifting

Most robots manipulate objects solely with their end effectors, whereas humans flexibly leverage different body parts, such as the forearm and elbow, especially when handling oversized objects. Learning such whole-arm manipulation is chal-lenging due to long-horizon sparse rewards, limited contact sens-ing, and the sim-to-real gap in contact and actuator dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose Current-Aligned Link Manipulation, a framework for learning long-horizon contact-rich manipulation using motor current as joint load related feedback. Three stage-specific policies first learn repositioning, grasping, and lifting using privileged simulation information, and a stage router sequences them to generate complete task demonstrations. For sim-to-real transfer, a causal current mapper predicts physical motor current from simulated joint histories, aligning the actuator current observation between simulation and hardware. A unified student policy then learns from these demonstrations using only deployable sensor observations and is further refined with DAgger. The task policies are trained entirely in simulation, and the final student is deployed on hardware. Experiments demonstrate 76.2% (762/1000 trials) complete-task success in simulation and 73.3% success (22/30 trials) on the physical robot for sequential oversized-object lifting.

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CAMP: Cooperative Arm-Hand Motion Planning in Constrained Spaces

Coordinated arm-hand motion planning is fundamental to dexterous robotic manipulation in complex and constrained environments. A straightforward solution is to decompose the problem into separate arm path planning and hand motion generation; however, this poses a dilemma: decomposition can miss feasible solutions that require coordinated arm-hand adaptation along the path. Alternatively, directly planning in the high-dimensional joint arm-hand configuration space captures such coupling but faces a substantially enlarged search space and nonconvex collision constraints. To characterize this coupling, we formulate feasible hand fibers that capture collision-free hand configurations for each arm configuration. Based on this formulation, we propose CAMP, a high-success and efficient cooperative arm-hand motion planner for constrained environments. CAMP constructs candidate trajectories through layered hand search with local arm relaxation, then compactly represents them using endpoint-preserving via-point movement primitives (VMPs) for coarse-to-fine joint optimization. Across six constrained simulation tasks, CAMP achieves 84.2-98.5% planning success, outperforming alternative planners with competitive efficiency. Ablation studies verify the contributions of arm relaxation, VMP representation, and coarse-to-fine optimization, while real-robot experiments demonstrate CAMP on constrained manipulation tasks. The project website is available at https://camp-armhand.github.io/.

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Automatic Labelling for Bimanual Mobile Manipulation

Semantically meaningful subtask labels can provide useful contexts for long-horizon policies, but automatically identifying both reliable temporal boundaries and broad semantic descriptions for annotations remains difficult. We present an automatic labelling pipeline that assigns temporal localisation to deterministic trajectory analysis and semantic interpretation to vision-language (VL) reasoning. The pipeline segments synchronised kinematic signals into phases, performs phase-localised VL reasoning to describe the contents, and aggregates the outputs for the base, left arm, and right arm actions. We evaluate this pipeline primarily on 29 real Galaxea bimanual mobile-manipulation tasks. Repeating the VL reasoning three times first produces the same output value for 87.4% on selected tasks. A review by nine participants across all 29 tasks then judgements on the labelled phases and shows positive acceptance of temporal divisions (90.5%), body labels (90.7%), and arm labels (78.7%). The results indicate that the segmentation-VL design can produce structured annotations while preserving asynchronous bimanual behaviour, providing a basis for richer semantic subtask identification and state-based verification.

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2D GauSS-MI: Efficient Active Scene Reconstruction with Balanced Visual and Geometric Quality

Active reconstruction requires efficient active view selection to achieve high-quality reconstruction within limited onboard computational resources. Existing methods face challenges in adequately balancing visual and geometric quality with the computational efficiency required for real-time operation. In this work, we present an active reconstruction framework based on 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS). We develop an efficient online 2DGS mapping pipeline for incremental RGB-D observations and introduce a probabilistic reliability model that characterizes the view-dependent reconstruction quality of individual 2D Gaussian splats. Building on this model, we formulate 2D Gaussian Splatting Shannon Mutual Information (2D GauSS-MI), a mutual-information-based metric that exploits the explicit surface orientation of 2DGS to evaluate the expected information gain of candidate views. The proposed metric enables active view selection to account for both visual and geometric reconstruction quality. We evaluate the proposed system against three state-of-the-art baselines on eight Replica scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves a favorable balance between visual and geometric reconstruction quality with substantially lower computational cost and competitive model storage.

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Learning In-Hand Object Reaching to General 6D Poses

In-hand manipulation allows multi-fingered dexterous hands to reconfigure grasped objects without releasing and regrasping them. This improves manipulation efficiency by reducing repeated grasp acquisition and large arm motions. However, most learning-based methods focus on reorientation, continuous rotation, or translation, whereas many tasks require joint control of object position and orientation. We formulate this capability as in-hand 6D object pose reaching: starting from an existing grasp, coordinated finger motions move the object to a palm-relative target pose. We present POISE (Palm-relative Object reaching In SE(3)), a sim-to-real reinforcement learning framework for this task. POISE combines diverse stable-grasp initialization, goal- and geometry-conditioned control, an adaptive 6D goal curriculum, and a compact reward scheme for pose reaching and grasp preservation. In simulation, diverse initialization raises held-out-grasp success from 40.1% to 51.5% and post-drop recovery from 33.8% to 72.9%; the curriculum raises full-range success from 6.2% to 59.5%. On hardware, the grasp-maintenance reward improves three-target sequence success from 20% to 80%. In real-world experiments, POISE reaches successive 6D targets without manual reset across multiple object geometries and wrist orientations, and recovers from external disturbances. To support further research in dexterous manipulation, we will release our code at https://junxiaolin.github.io/poise-website/.

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SRL-MPC: Shape-Aware Reinforcement Learned Model Predictive Control

Safe and efficient shape-aware navigation in heterogeneous crowds and robot fleets remains challenging. Traditional approaches often assume homogeneous robots, sparse workspaces, simplified geometry, offline computation, or handcrafted parameters to make the problem tractable, which limits their deployment in dense crowd scenarios. Toward this end, we propose Shape-Aware Reinforcement Learned Model Predictive Control (SRL-MPC), a method for safe, efficient, and adaptive navigation in crowds with heterogeneous shapes without geometry simplification. To encode shape-aware safety, we formulate high-order control barrier function (HOCBF) constraints from geometric separation features (GSFs) based on support function transformation. A reinforcement learning (RL) framework then learns a neural policy that reads GSFs and outputs real-time MPC parameter updates, enabling the MPC solver to adapt to neighboring crowd geometries. The key advantage of SRL-MPC is that it preserves the safety structure and generalizability of MPC while integrating the adaptability and intelligence of RL. Experiments in randomized crowd scenarios with arbitrary shaped robot fleets demonstrate the effectiveness, scalability, and robustness of SRL-MPC. The results show that SRL-MPC substantially outperforms representative baselines in safety and adaptability. Project website: https://hanruihua.github.io/srl_mpc_project/

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ReTouch: Empowering Contact-Rich Dexterous Manipulation with Online-Refined Tactile Prediction

Fusing tactile signals has proven effective for contact-rich manipulation, enabling robots to perceive contact states and adapt to rapidly changing physical interactions. Yet effectively integrating tactile feedback into dexterous manipulation remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce ReTouch, a vision-language-action model (VLA) that supports contact-rich dexterous manipulation through tactile predictions continually refined online using execution-time feedback. ReTouch builds on two main innovations for tactile representation and closed-loop action generation. First, its Tactile-Patch Encoder represents tactile observations as structured tactile patch features that preserve finger identity and local contact structure, providing contact cues for fine-grained dexterous control. Second, its high-frequency action module jointly predicts future tactile states and action chunks and refines both using incoming tactile feedback during execution. This closed-loop refinement keeps tactile predictions aligned with evolving physical interactions, enabling responsive action correction and improving robustness to contact changes and execution errors. We further introduce XHT-Dataset, comprising 900 real-world demonstrations across seven contact-rich tasks collected on an XHand--UR7e platform, and evaluate ReTouch through closed-loop real-robot experiments. ReTouch surpasses the strongest baseline by 18.4 and 23.8 percentage points in average success rate under standard and challenging conditions, respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness.

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Vision-Based Tactile Intelligence for Robotics: Sensing, Learning, and Embodied Manipulation

Tactile sensing is essential for robots in contact-rich tasks, yet many tactile sensors still provide sparse, low-dimensional signals that do not capture sufficient information for complex robotic perception and interaction. Vision-based tactile sensors (VBTSs) offer a powerful alternative by con-verting contact-induced deformation of a soft interface into im-ages. The image-based formulation gives VBTSs high-resolution, information-rich tactile observations that enable complex robotic tasks. This review surveys the full VBTS pipeline and treats sensing hardware, learning methods, simulation, and datasets as an integrated sensing-and-learning system. We 1) organize representative VBTSs into a hardware taxonomy structured by deformable elastomer design, sensor size and shape, and optical system design to guide future sensor development; 2) present a hierarchical view of learning-based tactile intelligence from low-level signal understanding to task-level policies and foundation models; and 3) examine simulation platforms and tactile datasets as a scaling layer, together with sim-to-real transfer and cross-sensor adaptation for training, benchmarking, and deployment. Finally, we identify open challenges and future directions for VBTSs in robotics. By providing a holistic view of how hardware, AI architectures, simulation, and datasets interact, this review aims to advance tactile intelligence for contact-rich robotic tasks.

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SSC: A Verifiable Structured Representation for Bimanual Manipulation Labelling

Subtask labels decompose a long-horizon manipulation demonstration into shorter semantic segments for policy training and evaluation. Natural language descriptions are easy to read, but their linguistic variability makes automatic verification difficult. Rigid template formats, such as BEHAVIOR-1K's skill_annotation, are linguistically over-segmented, hindering both readability and annotation consistency. We propose the Structured Subtask Chain (SSC), a state-transition representation that bridges these extremes. A demonstration is a sequence of Structured Subtask Template (SST) entries. Each SST stores core action components (subject, predicate, object), flexible conditions (adverbial modifiers such as spatial or instrumental phrases), a base-motion field separate from arm actions, and an after-state scene graph. Built on this format, SSC supports three vision-language assisted functions: rendering SSTs as natural language, checking the assembled chain against four state-transition rules, and completing underspecified fields through a query resolution cascade. We instantiate the pipeline on BEHAVIOR-1K (50 tasks, 3 episodes per task, 2,357 annotated action cells) for logic verification and content completion, evaluating 13 selected state-of-the-art VL models as candidate verifiers and reporting labelling anomalies.

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EvoHIL: Self-Evolving Reward and Flow-Matched Policy Optimization for Robust Human-in-the-Loop Reinforcement Learning

Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (HIL-RL) enables robots to learn contact-rich manipulation from limited real-world interaction, but deployment exposes three coupled limitations: static visual reward models fail under scene changes; independently sampled actions cause temporally inconsistent motion; and vision-based policies remain sensitive to appearance shifts. We present EvoHIL, a unified framework that adapts the reward model, action generator, and visual do main within a staged human-in-the-loop learning process. First, self-evolving reward (SER) adapts the success classifier from human-confirmed positives and provisional weak negatives. Second, Action Flow Stabilization (AFS) generates temporally coherent action chunks through flow matching, grounding policy updates in executed action prefixes and demonstrated behavior. Third, retention-aware offline fine-tuning replays relit interaction data while anchoring the AFS actor-critic to prior behavior, adapting the visual domain without additional robot interaction. Across six manipulation tasks on Franka FR3 and SO-101 arms under a controlled lighting shift, EvoHIL improves task success, agreement with human-confirmation labels, motion smoothness, and completion time relative to human-in-the-loop and imitation baselines.Project page: https://anonymous4366.github.io/EvoHIL/

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E2Pano: Learning Event-to-Panorama Image Reconstruction

Event cameras offer microsecond-level temporal resolution and high dynamic range, potentially facilitating motion-blur-free panoramic imaging from fast rotational scanning. Nonetheless, existing optimization-based methods remain computationally demanding, while prior learning-based reconstruction methods are largely designed for perspective imagery and lack geometry-aware support for panoramic outputs. We present E2Pano, a geometry-guided event-to-panorama pipeline with an end-to-end learnable photometric reconstruction stage. Our framework preserves real spherical coordinates from geometric mapping throughout the pipeline, employs a lightweight enhancement module with frequency-domain supervision to bridge the event-image domain gap, and leverages a spherical Transformer with 3D positional embeddings for photometric reconstruction. Experiments on synthetic data and captured rotational scans show improved reconstruction quality and lower photometric reconstruction cost than optimization-based baselines, together with encouraging transfer to real captures under our acquisition protocol despite training purely on synthetic data. Additionally, we construct PanoScan, a dataset with 4,370 synthetic and 30 real-world panoramic scenes paired with event streams. Our dataset and code will be released.

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Decompose and Reorganize: Planning with Primitives and Visuomotor Policies Learned from Demonstrations

Successfully automating dexterous, long-horizon robotic manipulation requires frameworks capable of both high-level reasoning and fine-grained execution. Traditional task and motion planning (TAMP), while excellent at symbolic planning, is often brittle in contact-rich operations. Simultaneously, imitation learning (IL), while effective in manipulation tasks with visual feedback, is limited by its low capability in spatial generalization and multi-stage operation. To reconcile their complementary strengths and limitations, we propose DR-LfD (Decomposed and Reorganized Skills Learned from Demonstrations), a framework that seamlessly integrates visuomotor policies into a TAMP-gated decision-making system. Based on contact relationships, DR-LfD decomposes human demonstrations into atomic skills, which are reproduced as visuomotor policies or object-centric primitives. The initiation, termination, and constraints of the visuomotor policies are carefully modeled and implemented in a TAMP-compatible form, enabling reorganization of skills learned from different sources. DR-LfD transforms the learning problem from one requiring exponential demonstration data over possible skill sequences to one whose demonstration burden scales with the number of distinct skill types, with limited data for each skill. Through comprehensive real-world and simulation benchmarking across diverse scenarios, we demonstrate the strong performance of DR-LfD on tasks involving multiple steps, unseen setups, and physical constraints. Project website: https://dr-lfd.github.io/DR-LfD-website.

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SSI-Policy: Learning Structured Scene Interfaces for Vision-Language Robotic Manipulation

Real-world robotic manipulation demands spatial grounding, task-aware reasoning, and precise control. Learning such capabilities becomes particularly challenging in the low-data regime. Prior methods often trade off scalable task-level reasoning and explicit physical structure: video-based approaches can drift geometrically over long horizons, 3D approaches often require depth sensing, and many flow/trajectory interfaces emphasize motion without an explicit RGB-only geometric representation. We introduce SSI-Policy, a modular framework built around a Structured Scene Interface (SSI) -- a unified, RGB-only intermediate representation that jointly encodes monocular depth features, language-grounded object layouts, and instruction-conditioned 2D motion trajectories. Critically, SSI is robot-agnostic and trainable from action-free video, decoupling perception from control so that the downstream policy can learn from few demonstrations. On the LIBERO benchmark with only 10 demonstrations per task, SSI-Policy improves over the strongest prior method by nearly 15\% and remains competitive with 50-demo methods that leverage large-scale external pretraining. Ablations show that geometric and motion cues provide complementary benefits within the shared interface. We further validate on 13 real-world tasks spanning spatial reasoning, cross-embodiment transfer, and contact-rich manipulation.

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Keypose Exploration: Efficient Automatic Trajectory Labelling and Cross-Embodiment Policy Transfer

Keypose-based manipulation decomposes tasks into critical waypoints to simplify policy learning for long-horizon tasks, but existing approaches rely on task-specific heuristics or manual annotation to extract keyposes from demonstrations. We present an automatic trajectory labelling pipeline for grasp-related tasks. This pipeline combines vision-language models (VLMs) for semantic event detection with classical trajectory analysis for precise temporal alignment, requiring VLM inference only on one single demo among repeating ones per task. Using the labelled data, we train a keypose-guided Diffusion Policy (DP) that exploits keypose conditioning to intervene demonstration distributions. We explore the possibility to apply this property for cross-embodiment transfer: candidate keyposes are sampled and filtered via a reachability map, steering the policy toward kinematically feasible keyposes for the target robot. As a preliminary feasibility study, experiments on two robomimic tasks show that the labelled data produces policies matching a standard DP baseline, and that reachability-filtered keypose conditioning may benefit zero-shot transfer on the multimodal insertion task when feasible candidates are available.

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iFLYTEK-Embodied-Omni Technical Report

General-purpose embodied agents must understand multimodal instructions, anticipate how their environment will evolve, and produce precise control actions over extended horizons. Existing approaches typically specialize in visual-language reasoning, video-based world modeling, or action generation, while cascaded pipelines that first synthesize future observations and then infer actions can introduce interface bottlenecks and compound prediction errors. We present iFLYTEK-Embodied-Omni, a unified multimodal foundation model that jointly models vision(videos and images), language, and action within a single Omni framework. Its modality-specific visual-language, video-generation, and action-generation components communicate through shared multimodal self-attention. This design establishes brain-cerebellum collaboration: the vision-language modeland video generation model form a high-level brain for instruction understanding, task planning, progress tracking, and future visual-state prediction, whereas the action generation modelserves as a low-level cerebellum that directly converts planned subgoals and shared multimodal context into executable action chunks. To develop these capabilities, we combine action-annotated and action-free embodied videos from human demonstrations and robot interactions with embodied reasoning, embodied perception, and general-purpose image-text data to construct a comprehensive dataset. We further adopt a four-stage strategy that progressively trains the VLM, VGM, and AGM before jointly fine-tuning the complete model.

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NeuPAN: Direct Point Robot Navigation with End-to-End Model-based Learning

Navigating a nonholonomic robot in a cluttered, unknown environment requires accurate perception and precise motion control for real-time collision avoidance. This paper presents NeuPAN: a real-time, highly accurate, map-free, easy-to-deploy, and environment-invariant robot motion planner. Leveraging a tightly coupled perception-to-control framework, NeuPAN has two key innovations compared to existing approaches: 1) it directly maps raw point cloud data to a latent distance feature space for collision-free motion generation, avoiding error propagation from the perception to control pipeline; 2) it is interpretable from an end-to-end model-based learning perspective. The crux of NeuPAN is solving an end-to-end mathematical model with numerous point-level constraints using a plug-and-play (PnP) proximal alternating-minimization network (PAN), incorporating neurons in the loop. This allows NeuPAN to generate real-time, physically interpretable motions. It seamlessly integrates data and knowledge engines, and its network parameters can be fine-tuned via backpropagation. We evaluate NeuPAN on a ground mobile robot, a wheel-legged robot, and an autonomous vehicle, in extensive simulated and real-world environments. Results demonstrate that NeuPAN outperforms existing baselines in terms of accuracy, efficiency, robustness, and generalization capabilities across various environments, including the cluttered sandbox, office, corridor, and parking lot. We show that NeuPAN works well in unknown and unstructured environments with arbitrarily shaped objects, transforming impassable paths into passable ones.

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BIM-Loc: BIM-Integrated Discrepancy-Aware LiDAR-based Indoor Localization

Accurate and robust localization is a fundamental requirement for service and inspection robots, particularly in feature-sparse indoor environments where traditional systems struggle due to a lack of distinct landmarks. While prior maps can enhance robustness, precise and compact maps capturing real-world details are often unavailable for new or frequently changing environments. This paper presents BIM-Loc, a novel discrepancy-aware LiDAR-based localization method that directly integrates Building Information Models (BIM) from the design phase. BIM-Loc simultaneously estimates trajectories aligned with the BIM coordinate system and identifies discrepancies between real-world observations and the as-designed BIM in an online fashion. Our core contributions include: (1) a novel multi-hit ray casting strategy for efficient BIM-point data association and projection of 3D observations into 2D texture space; (2) a pose graph optimization framework with BIM-integrated factors that enforces consistency among odometry, sequential scans, and BIM structures; and (3) a hierarchical Bayesian inference module that incrementally updates a continuous 2D surface representation for discrepancy detection, propagating updates from the pixel to the structure level. Extensive evaluations in both simulation and real-world applications demonstrate that BIM-Loc significantly outperforms state-of-the-art map-based methods in localization accuracy and robustness.

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GEAR-VLA: Learning Geometry-Aware Action Representations for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong benchmark performance but still struggle in real-world deployment with unseen objects, background shifts, and different robot embodiments. We argue that this stems from the lack of a unified geometry-aware manipulation representation, leaving existing VLAs vulnerable to low-level trajectory supervision, misaligned 3D features, and embodiment differences. To address this, we propose GEAR-VLA, a VLA framework for learning unified geometry-aware action representations for generalizable robotic manipulation. GEAR-VLA adopts coarse-to-fine action learning, where multi-source embodied pretraining equips the VLM with embodied reasoning and discrete action understanding before latent action tokens connect action semantics to a gradient-decoupled DiT continuous action expert. It further performs semantic-aligned 3D integration by aligning a trainable 3D spatial backbone with the VLA representation while freezing the original VLM-aligned visual pathway. To share this representation across robots, GEAR-VLA uses embodiment canonicalization, where embodiment-aware states and embodiment-invariant actions confine robot differences to the low-level interface. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate strong generalization: GEAR-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO, zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin 2.0, reaches 85.9% success on AgileX and 81.0% on the pretraining-unseen LDT-01 embodiment, and obtains 90.1% success on a 6,360-trial universal grasping benchmark with 212 unseen objects. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/babynabeauty/GEAR-VLA.

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