SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2603.08089

Adaptive Vision-Based Control of Redundant Robots with Null-Space Interaction for Human-Robot Collaboration

Abstract

Human-robot collaboration aims to extend human ability through cooperation with robots. This technology is currently helping people with physical disabilities, has transformed the manufacturing process of companies, improved surgical performance, and will likely revolutionize the daily lives of everyone in the future. Being able to enhance the performance of both sides, such that human-robot collaboration outperforms a single robot/human, remains an open issue. For safer and more effective collaboration, a new control scheme has been proposed for redundant robots in this paper, consisting of an adaptive vision-based control term in task space and an interactive control term in null space. Such a formulation allows the robot to autonomously carry out tasks in an unknown environment without prior calibration while also interacting with humans to deal with unforeseen changes (e.g., potential collision, temporary needs) under the redundant configuration. The decoupling between task space and null space helps to explore the collaboration safely and effectively without affecting the main task of the robot end-effector. The stability of the closed-loop system has been rigorously proved with Lyapunov methods, and both the convergence of the position error in task space and that of the damping model in null space are guaranteed. The experimental results of a robot manipulator guided with the technology of augmented reality (AR) are presented to illustrate the performance of the control scheme.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Xiangjie Yan, Chen Chen, Xiang Li. 2026-03-09. Adaptive Vision-Based Control of Redundant Robots with Null-Space Interaction for Human-Robot Collaboration. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08089

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

IMLE-VLA: Fast Single-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Policies

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies leverage pretrained vision-language backbones to achieve strong cross-task generalization. A leading design couples this backbone with a dedicated continuous action head trained via diffusion or flow matching. However, such heads rely on iterative multi-step sampling, for example 10 Euler steps in $\pi_{0.5}$. This creates an inference bottleneck that produces stop-and-go movement in the robot and slower task completion. We introduce IMLE-VLA, which replaces the iterative action head with a single-step conditional generator trained via conditional Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (cIMLE). The cIMLE objective promotes multimodal action coverage, avoiding the mode collapse of naive regression heads while eliminating multi-step sampling entirely. When IMLE-VLA is applied to $\pi_{0.5}$, it increases inference frequency 3.67x (55 Hz vs. 15 Hz), enabling up to 11x higher action throughput. On the 40-task LIBERO benchmark, IMLE-VLA achieves the highest average success rate (98.0%) among all baselines while leading in inference frequency. Under the test-time perturbations of LIBERO-plus, IMLE-VLA retains $\pi_{0.5}$'s robustness while other baselines degrade sharply, confirming that the cIMLE head preserves generalization. Real-world experiments on a Franka Emika Panda across four tasks demonstrate smoother motion (2.2x to 3.0x lower jerk) and faster task completion, with IMLE-VLA outperforming $\pi_{0.5}$ on every task and reducing average VLA inference time per episode by 3.9x to 6.6x. Videos and code are available at https://kianhk6.github.io/IMLE-VLA/

cs.RO

ObstaDiff: Generalizable Diffusion Policy Learning via Obstacle-aware Representations

Imitation learning has achieved impressive results in robotic manipulation, yet most existing approaches assume clean backgrounds and lack explicit mechanisms for obstacle-aware motion generation. Extending such policies to cluttered, real-world scenes with unstructured obstacles remains a key generalization challenge. We present ObstaDiff, a decomposed diffusion-policy framework with a lightweight obstacle-aware visual encoder. ObstaDiff extracts a structured target-obstacle-background representation, enabling the downstream alignment policy to generate end-effector trajectories toward a target-centered bottleneck pose while reasoning about surrounding obstacles. We evaluate ObstaDiff on 61 real-robot greenhouse trials per method (366 executions in total). ObstaDiff achieves 75.41% average task success and 8.20% average obstacle collision rate, outperforming representative imitation-learning baselines and improving generalization in cluttered agricultural scenes.

cs.RO

Testing Between the Test Cases: Proving End-to-End Steering in Conditions You Never Drove

AI-based automated vehicle testing is challenging because a model that passes every test condition can still fail in the real world. Formal verification offers a way to directly address this gap. On a simulated highway and an arterial road we trained two small end-to-end steering networks each in CARLA, one on clear conditions alone and one on clear, fog, night and low sun. All four models were driven against a 2.19 ft lane-departure budget. Without driving again, we used bound propagation, a formal method that reads the trained weights, to compute how far steering can drift at every disturbance strength between two captured images. One calculation covers more than a campaign could drive: on the arterial it spans 133 poses, where ten intensities each would be 10^133 combinations, in minutes on one GPU. Not only did formal verification find conditions that broke the clear-trained policy without simulation testing, it provided some preliminary evidence for potential failures between the test cases. Our overall conclusion is that formal verification is a viable complement to simulation, and could be adopted as a part of verification and validation for automated driving.

cs.RO