arXiv subjects

Tiecheng Guo

Publications and source records attributed to Tiecheng Guo.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

FlexWorm: Primitive-augmented Hybrid Contact-motion Planning for Suction-based Multi-segment Deformable Robots

Multi-segment suction-based soft robots are promising for inspection and maintenance in confined or fragile environments, but existing approaches still depend heavily on manually designed gaits and environment-specific motion scripts. This work presents a planning framework for serial multi-segment soft robots with deformable body segments and boundary suction pads. The formulation targets full 3D navigation on complex surfaces and explicitly handles discrete adhesion switching and continuous body deformation under geometric, collision, and quasi-static feasibility constraints, while remaining agnostic to the specific actuation realization used to produce segment deformation. Its core, block-wise IK hybrid search (IKHS), performs best-first search over feasible adhesion transitions while solving inverse kinematics only on induced free blocks. On top of IKHS, primitive-augmented hybrid search (PaHS) uses a learned observation--primitive embedding to retrieve short validated motion segments for fast local proposal, with fallback to standard IKHS branching when retrieval fails. In simulation, the framework consistently outperforms controlled baselines in planning success, transition quality, and efficiency across diverse terrains. PaHS matches IKHS in success rate while substantially reducing planning time. Repeated hardware experiments on a pneumatic multi-segment soft robot further demonstrate executability and online recovery under actuation and adhesion uncertainty.

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arXiv2026

Action ControlNet: A Lightweight Delay-Aware Adapter for Smooth Asynchronous Control in Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong potential for general-purpose robot manipulation, but their inference latency remains a major obstacle to stable high-frequency control. Asynchronous execution mitigates this bottleneck by overlapping policy inference with action execution, yet the next action chunk is still predicted from stale observations while the robot continues to move. Direct chunk stitching therefore introduces handoff discontinuities, action jitter, and failures in contact-rich manipulation. Existing remedies typically require either full-policy retraining or architecture-specific runtime logic. This work proposes Action ControlNet (ACNet), a lightweight delay-aware adapter that uses the executed motion suffix as a residual condition for a mostly frozen action head. ACNet leaves the pretrained backbone unchanged, introduces few trainable parameters, and remains compatible with generative action heads such as diffusion and flow matching. On Kinetix, Meta-World MT50, and a real-world SO-ARM101 platform, ACNet improves robustness under inference delay and yields smoother asynchronous trajectories than direct chunk stitching, while remaining more lightweight than full delay-conditioned retraining.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

IOI: Decoupling Kinematics and Physics for Interactive World Models

Developing generalist embodied agents requires interactive environments providing visually realistic feedback and accurate action-conditioned dynamics. Interactive world models address this by simulating such complex dynamics. However, purely data-driven methods struggle to ensure precise control alignment and physically plausible visual feedback due to a lack of explicit structural constraints. To address this, we propose IOI, a hybrid interactive world model integrating analytical kinematic priors with learned physical dynamics. Unlike data-driven approaches prone to spatiotemporal drift, IOI introduces explicit kinematic guidance, computing forward kinematics from action sequences for accurate motion trajectories. These trajectories are rendered into synchronized front, side, and top orthographic projections, eliminating the need for extrinsic camera calibration. A Multi-view Kinematic Aggregation and Injection module fuses these geometric cues and injects them into the video generator, providing geometry-consistent guidance. Conditioning video generation on these deterministic trajectories establishes a synergy between the analytical simulator and the world model. Decoupling deterministic motion into the kinematic prior frees the generator to model stochastic physical interactions. Experiments on the RoboTwin benchmark validate IOI across kinematic fidelity, out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, and policy evaluation. IOI achieves state-of-the-art simulation performance and robust zero-shot generalization to unseen OOD tasks. Furthermore, IOI serves as a reliable policy evaluator, yielding success rates closely aligning with ground-truth physics simulators. On real-world platforms, policies trained on IOI-synthesized data match those trained on teleoperation demonstrations, solidifying its practical value for embodied policy learning.

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arXiv2026

Efficient-WAM: A 1B-Parameter World-Action Model with Low-Cost Future Imagination

World-Action Models (WAMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for embodied control by coupling future visual prediction with action generation. However, most existing WAMs rely on photorealistic future prediction, which incurs high inference latency and makes real-time robot deployment difficult. This motivates a more efficient WAM design that preserves the control benefits of future visual prediction while reducing its inference cost. We introduce Efficient-WAM, a World-Action Model that reduces the cost of future imagination while preserving its control benefit. Efficient-WAM improves inference efficiency via a compact video expert transferred from WAN-2.2-5B, token-sparse video latents, and asymmetric video-action denoising that allocates fewer sampling steps to video than to actions. Instead of optimizing the future branch for visual fidelity, Efficient-WAM treats future video prediction as a compact guidance signal for action generation. Comprehensive experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 and real-world manipulation tasks show that Efficient-WAM maintains strong action performance despite visibly coarse future predictions. While maintaining competitive control capabilities, our 1B-parameter model can reduce per-chunk latency to around 100 ms during physical deployment, achieving a 30x speedup over existing WAMs.

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arXiv2025

Customize Harmonic Potential Fields via Hybrid Optimization over Homotopic Paths

Safe navigation within a workspace is a fundamental skill for autonomous robots to accomplish more complex tasks. Harmonic potentials are artificial potential fields that are analytical, globally convergent and provably free of local minima. Thus, it has been widely used for generating safe and reliable robot navigation control policies. However, most existing methods do not allow customization of the harmonic potential fields nor the resulting paths, particularly regarding their topological properties. In this paper, we propose a novel method that automatically finds homotopy classes of paths that can be generated by valid harmonic potential fields. The considered complex workspaces can be as general as forest worlds consisting of numerous overlapping star-obstacles. The method is based on a hybrid optimization algorithm that searches over homotopy classes, selects the structure of each tree-of-stars within the forest, and optimizes over the continuous weight parameters for each purged tree via the projected gradient descent. The key insight is to transform the forest world to the unbounded point world via proper diffeomorphic transformations. It not only facilitates a simpler design of the multi-directional D-signature between non-homotopic paths, but also retain the safety and convergence properties. Extensive simulations and hardware experiments are conducted for non-trivial scenarios, where the navigation potentials are customized for desired homotopic properties. Project page: https://shuaikang-wang.github.io/CustFields.

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arXiv2016

Cold and Hot Nuclear Matter Effects on Charmonium Production in p+Pb Collisions at LHC Energy

We study cold and hot nuclear matter effects on charmonium production in p+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_\text{NN}}=5.02$ TeV in a transport approach. At the forward rapidity, the cold medium effect on all the $c\bar c$ states and the hot medium effect on the excited $c\bar c$ states only can explain well the $J/ψ$ and $ψ'$ yield and transverse momentum distribution measured by the ALICE collaboration, and we predict a significantly larger $ψ'$ $p_\text{T}$ broadening in comparison with $J/ψ$. However, we can not reproduce the $J/ψ$ and $ψ'$ data at the backward rapidity with reasonable cold and hot medium effects.

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