arXiv subjects

Pei Qu

Publications and source records attributed to Pei Qu.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

From Gameplay to Policy: Towards Scalable Robot Data Collection via Gamified Robot-Free Interaction

Learning generalizable robot manipulation policies requires large-scale and diverse interaction data, yet collecting real-world demonstrations remains costly and difficult to scale. Existing approaches to data collection are either dependent on specific robot hardware that limits crowdsourcing and transferability, or suffer from incomplete annotation and limited behavioral diversity. Inspired by how games sustain long-term human engagement, we explore an alternative paradigm that turns data collection into an engaging gameplay experience and transfers the resulting human manipulation experience to real robots. We present Project Kitchen, a VR-based gamified egocentric data collection platform that elicits diverse, goal-directed manipulation while remaining independent of specific robot embodiments and hardware, making it applicable to broader and potentially large-scale deployment. To bridge the game-to-real gap, we further introduce Game2Policy, which extracts embodiment-invariant affordance cues, including contact points and sub-goal states, from gameplay trajectories. An affordance model is pre-trained on game-collected data and then jointly fine-tuned with downstream policies using only a handful of real-robot demonstrations. Experiments show that Game2Policy improves average success rates by 10.0 points in simulation and 18.3 points on real robots in the few-shot setting. User studies and quantitative analyses further show that Project Kitchen promotes diverse manipulation behaviors and provides an engaging data collection experience. These results demonstrate the potential of gamified virtual environments as a scalable source of manipulation knowledge. The platform and code will be released upon acceptance.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Tac4Loco: Learning Spatiotemporal Plantar Pressure Representations for Humanoid Locomotion

Humanoid robots are expected to traverse complex terrains, where the plantar support may vary dramatically due to foot placement errors, ground properties, and transient dynamics. To achieve robust locomotion, the robots are required to adapt to uneven terrain and uncertain foot--ground interactions. Existing locomotion policies rely primarily on proprioception or exteroceptive terrain perception, where the former provides only indirect evidence of plantar support, while the latter predicts contact conditions before touchdown but cannot observe the actual support in real-time. Although some studies incorporate plantar contacts as an auxiliary perception, they rely mainly on summary statistics, overlooking the spatial topology of plantar pressure, which provides a more direct characterization of the realized contact state. To bridge this gap, we present Tac4Loco, a tactile-perceptive framework that incorporates multi-array plantar pressure as direct feedback for humanoid locomotion. We formulate a topology-preserving ordinal representation to map simulated and physical sensor signals into a shared observation space, with a dual-branch encoder for extracting their spatial and temporal representations. Subsequently, the learned spatiotemporal features are integrated with augmented proprioception including terrain estimation cues, and provided to an asymmetric actor-critic architecture for policy learning. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate improved tracking performance and support adaptation on terrains with inclined, partial, asymmetric, and changing support. We further demonstrate its zero-shot deployment on unseen compliant and unstructured terrains, including a foam platform and a gravel road. All code and experimental configurations will be released as open-source to facilitate reproducibility.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

ManiVID-3D: Generalizable View-Invariant Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Manipulation via Disentangled 3D Representations

Deploying visual reinforcement learning (RL) policies in real-world manipulation is often hindered by camera viewpoint changes. A policy trained from a fixed front-facing camera may fail when the camera is shifted -- an unavoidable situation in real-world settings where sensor placement is hard to manage appropriately. Existing methods often rely on precise camera calibration or struggle with large perspective changes. To address these limitations, we propose ManiVID-3D, a novel 3D RL architecture designed for robotic manipulation, which learns view-invariant representations through self-supervised disentangled feature learning. The framework incorporates ViewNet, a lightweight yet effective module that automatically aligns point cloud observations from arbitrary viewpoints into a unified spatial coordinate system without the need for extrinsic calibration. Additionally, we develop an efficient GPU-accelerated batch rendering module capable of processing over 5000 frames per second, enabling large-scale training for 3D visual RL at unprecedented speeds. Extensive evaluation across 10 simulated and 5 real-world tasks demonstrates that our approach achieves a 40.6% higher success rate than state-of-the-art methods under viewpoint variations while using 80% fewer parameters. The system's robustness to severe perspective changes and strong sim-to-real performance highlight the effectiveness of learning geometrically consistent representations for scalable robotic manipulation in unstructured environments.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

OmniDP: Beyond-FOV Large-Workspace Humanoid Manipulation with Omnidirectional 3D Perception

The deployment of humanoid robots for dexterous manipulation in unstructured environments remains challenging due to perceptual limitations that constrain the effective workspace. In scenarios where physical constraints prevent the robot from repositioning itself, maintaining omnidirectional awareness becomes far more critical than color or semantic information.While recent advances in visuomotor policy learning have improved manipulation capabilities, conventional RGB-D solutions suffer from narrow fields of view (FOV) and self-occlusion, requiring frequent base movements that introduce motion uncertainty and safety risks. Existing approaches to expanding perception, including active vision systems and third-view cameras, introduce mechanical complexity, calibration dependencies, and latency that hinder reliable real-time performance. In this work, We propose OmniDP, an end-to-end LiDAR-driven 3D visuomotor policy that enables robust manipulation in large workspaces. Our method processes panoramic point clouds through a Time-Aware Attention Pooling mechanism, efficiently encoding sparse 3D data while capturing temporal dependencies. This 360° perception allows the robot to interact with objects across wide areas without frequent repositioning. To support policy learning, we develop a whole-body teleoperation system for efficient data collection on full-body coordination. Extensive experiments in simulation and real-world environments show that OmniDP achieves robust performance in large-workspace and cluttered scenarios, outperforming baselines that rely on egocentric depth cameras.

cs.RO↗