Science Robotics最新文献

{"title":"Stabilizing telerobotic endobronchial imaging and interventions in breathing lungs with a helical brace","authors":"Tinghua Zhang,&nbsp;Sishen Yuan,&nbsp;Chao Xu,&nbsp;Ruiyang Zhang,&nbsp;Jarinyagon Chantawannakul,&nbsp;Botao Lin,&nbsp;Chenyu Shang,&nbsp;Di Mei,&nbsp;Sze Hang Calvin Ng,&nbsp;Pierre E. Dupont,&nbsp;Hongliang Ren,&nbsp;Wu Yuan","doi":"10.1126/scirobotics.aed1960","DOIUrl":"10.1126/scirobotics.aed1960","url":null,"abstract":"<div >Physiological motion in dynamic luminal organs, such as respiration-induced lung displacement, compromises the stability of tool-tissue interaction during telerobotic endoluminal imaging and interventions. However, existing devices for stabilizing the distal end of a catheter or endoscope face critical limitations: Rigid shape-locking mechanisms risk pressure-induced trauma, electrical hazard, and thermal injury, whereas balloon-based designs obstruct luminal patency. Moreover, they lack sufficient adjustable-diameter range for anatomies such as the bronchial tree. In this work, we present a reconfigurable helical brace that overcomes these challenges. Constructed of rotationally stacking tubular modules of asymmetric stiffness, the helical brace achieved up to almost 10 times diameter tunability (3.0 to 29.3 millimeters), enabling adaptive anchoring across diverse bronchial diameters. The established brace in a dynamic bronchus phantom reduced respiration-induced catheter displacement by about 96.0% while preserving more than 97.4% luminal flow conductance. Ex vivo and in vivo bronchial studies confirmed safety under prolonged radial loading, with no notable surface trauma or deep tissue injury observed. We demonstrate a helically braced telerobotic manipulator that can operate with submillimeter control accuracy in dynamic environments, enabling targeted transbronchial needle interventions in live porcine models, including drug delivery, bronchus puncture, and fluid aspiration. In addition, in vivo studies on porcine lungs showed that the brace-aided telerobotic catheter enhances the stability of optical coherence tomography imaging, effectively achieving respiratory motion-free conditions. This patency-preserving brace enhances stabilization without compromising physiological function and safety, ensuring accurate telerobotic operations in dynamic luminal environments.</div>","PeriodicalId":56029,"journal":{"name":"Science Robotics","volume":"11 118","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.science.org/doi/reader/10.1126/scirobotics.aed1960","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149020034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bioimpedance meets biomechanics: Wearable electrical impedance myography encodes fascicle and activation dynamics","authors":"Christopher J. Nichols,&nbsp;Nicholas Harris,&nbsp;H. Trask Crane,&nbsp;Autumn Routt,&nbsp;Milki D. Haile,&nbsp;Quentin Goossens,&nbsp;Minoru Shinohara,&nbsp;Gregory S. Sawicki,&nbsp;Kristen L. Jakubowski,&nbsp;Omer T. Inan","doi":"10.1126/scirobotics.aea4580","DOIUrl":"10.1126/scirobotics.aea4580","url":null,"abstract":"<div >Modern assistive robotic control demands parallel advancements in wearable, noninvasive sensing. Electrical impedance myography (EIM)—a noninvasive, wearable technology for dynamically measuring tissue electrical impedance properties—is a promising but poorly established solution for quantifying muscle force and fatigue, given that prior approaches have relied on black-box algorithms when attempting to relate EIM to muscle physiology or have extrapolated relationships between EIM and muscle force from singular, isolated movements. Here, we elucidate direct relationships between EIM and muscle kinematics and kinetics during functional movement using biomechanical principles and traditional measures of joint torque, muscle architecture, and activation. Dual-frequency EIM measurements of the medial gastrocnemius of 10 participants were collected and compared against dynamometer, B-mode ultrasound, and electromyography measurements. Participants performed multiple categories of dynamic movements spanning constrained isometric, self-selected isometric, concentric, and eccentric contractions at multiple force levels, joint angles, and angular velocities. EIM correlated to joint torque only for specific conditions, whereas EIM correlated with muscle length change dynamics across all movements. Mixed-effects modeling and sequential feature analysis showed fascicle length and muscle activation as primary drivers of EIM variance. Last, dual-frequency EIM combined with principal components analysis reliably captured changes in fascicle length and activation during walking. These findings validate EIM as a robust, real-time biomechanical tool for sensing muscle kinematics and neuromuscular activity during functional movement, expanding its use in assistive robotic control and injury prevention.</div>","PeriodicalId":56029,"journal":{"name":"Science Robotics","volume":"11 118","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149020038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How robot dogs see the unseeable: Improving visual interpretability via peering for exploratory robots","authors":"Oliver Bimber,&nbsp;Karl Dietrich von Ellenrieder,&nbsp;Michael Haller,&nbsp;Rakesh John Amala Arokia Nathan,&nbsp;Gianni Lunardi,&nbsp;Mohamed Youssef,&nbsp;Marco Camurri,&nbsp;Santos Miguel Orozco Soto,&nbsp;Jeremy E. Niven","doi":"10.1126/scirobotics.aed8577","DOIUrl":"10.1126/scirobotics.aed8577","url":null,"abstract":"<div >In vegetated environments, such as forests, exploratory robots play a vital role in navigating complex, cluttered environments where human access is limited and traditional equipment struggles. Visual occlusion from obstacles, such as foliage, can severely obstruct a robot’s sensors, impairing scene understanding. We show that “peering,” a characteristic side-to-side movement used by insects to overcome their visual limitations, can also allow robots to markedly improve visual reasoning under partial occlusion. This is accomplished by applying core signal processing principles, specifically optical synthetic aperture sensing, together with the vision reasoning capabilities of modern large multimodal models. Peering enables real-time, high-resolution, and wavelength-independent perception, which is crucial for vision-based scene understanding across a wide range of applications. The approach is low cost and immediately deployable on any camera-equipped robot. We investigated different peering motions and occlusion masking strategies, demonstrating that, unlike peering, state-of-the-art multiview three-dimensional vision techniques fail under these conditions because of their high susceptibility to occlusion. Our experiments were carried out on an industrial-grade quadrupedal robot. However, the ability to peer is not limited to such platforms but potentially also applicable to bipedal, hexapod, wheeled, or crawling platforms. Robots that can effectively see through partial occlusion will gain superior perception abilities, including enhanced scene understanding, situational awareness, camouflage breaking, and advanced navigation in complex environments.</div>","PeriodicalId":56029,"journal":{"name":"Science Robotics","volume":"11 118","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148973329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"AthenaZero: A low-inertia, bimanual robot for dynamic manipulation","authors":"Andrew S. Morgan,&nbsp;Gregory Xie,&nbsp;Capprin Bass,&nbsp;Rachel Thomasson,&nbsp;Chunpeng Wang,&nbsp;Erfan Shahriari,&nbsp;Harrison Busa,&nbsp;Oluwaseun Araromi,&nbsp;Joseph Aronov,&nbsp;Michael Burgess,&nbsp;Velin D. Dimitrov,&nbsp;Matthew A. Estrada,&nbsp;Faris Hamdi,&nbsp;Samuel Kendig,&nbsp;Taeyoon Lee,&nbsp;Jose Oscar Mur-Miranda,&nbsp;Emma Sommers,&nbsp;Paul Titchener,&nbsp;Margaret Wang,&nbsp;Achu Wilson,&nbsp;Mark Yeatman,&nbsp;Osman Dogan Yirmibesoglu,&nbsp;Alfred A. Rizzi,&nbsp;Annan Mozeika,&nbsp;Nicolas Rojas,&nbsp;Lael Odhner","doi":"10.1126/scirobotics.aee1868","DOIUrl":"10.1126/scirobotics.aee1868","url":null,"abstract":"<div >AthenaZero is a bimanual manipulator designed to minimize inertia without compromising control authority. By using quasidirect drive actuation and transmission remotization techniques, the system achieves an effective end-point mass comparable to that of a human, about an order of magnitude less than that of conventional robot manipulators. This characteristic, combined with its inherent torque transparency, makes AthenaZero exceptionally well suited for dynamic manipulation. We describe the methodology that led to this design and demonstrate the robot’s capabilities on three baseball-inspired tasks, throwing, catching, and batting, which showcase complex interactions on human-comparable timescales where milliseconds matter. AthenaZero was capable of throwing at speeds in excess of 30 meters per second, with catching and batting at speeds in excess of 14 meters per second over a short 7.3-meter distance. Batting practice and a game of catch were subsequently performed in robot-to-robot and human-to-robot variations, showcasing the efficacy and adaptability of our system in tasks that require high acceleration.</div>","PeriodicalId":56029,"journal":{"name":"Science Robotics","volume":"11 118","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.science.org/doi/reader/10.1126/scirobotics.aee1868","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148973327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Advancing minimally invasive precision surgery in large open cavities with robotic flexible endoscopy","authors":"Michelle Mattille,&nbsp;Alexandre Mesot,&nbsp;Miriam Weisskopf,&nbsp;Nicole Ochsenbein-Kölble,&nbsp;Ueli Moehrlen,&nbsp;Bradley J. Nelson,&nbsp;Quentin Boehler","doi":"10.1126/scirobotics.aed1470","DOIUrl":"10.1126/scirobotics.aed1470","url":null,"abstract":"<div >Flexible robots hold great promise for enhancing minimally invasive surgery (MIS) by providing superior dexterity, precise control, and safe tissue interaction. Yet, translating these advantages into endoscopic interventions in large open cavities remains challenging. The lack of anatomical constraints and the inherent flexibility of such devices complicate their control, and the limited field of view of endoscopes restricts situational awareness. We present a robotic platform designed to overcome these challenges and demonstrate its potential in fetoscopic laser coagulation—a complex MIS procedure typically performed only by highly experienced surgeons. Our system combines a magnetically actuated flexible endoscope with teleoperated and semi-autonomous navigation capabilities for performing targeted laser ablations. To enhance surgical awareness, the platform reconstructs real-time mosaics of the endoscopic scene, providing an extended and continuous visual context. The ability of this system to address the key limitations of MIS in open spaces is validated in vivo in an ovine model.</div>","PeriodicalId":56029,"journal":{"name":"Science Robotics","volume":"11 118","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.5,"publicationDate":"2026-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148973330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Robot in a crib: How a playing robot helps us understand sensorimotor contingency learning","authors":"Josua Spisak, Sergiu Tcaci Popescu, Lukas Rustler, Stefan Wermter, J. Kevin O’Regan, Matej Hoffmann","doi":"10.1126/scirobotics.aed4106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.aed4106","url":null,"abstract":"Learning sensorimotor contingencies—that is, the link between one’s actions and their sensory effects—is fundamental to developing body knowledge, understanding causality, and developing a sense of agency. In developmental psychology, this process is classically studied using the mobile paradigm, where infants learn that movement of a limb causes motion of a connected mobile. To expand our understanding of how infants learn this, we tested an embodied computational model that learns through two biologically inspired mechanisms: prediction and curiosity. Implemented on the child-sized iCub humanoid robot interacting with a mobile, the model detected sensorimotor contingencies across several experimental conditions using a variety of movement strategies. Our findings suggest that contingency learning cannot be captured by a single behavioral metric, such as the amount of movement, but instead emerges through a spectrum of exploratory behaviors. Analysis of the robot’s internal activity reveals that these behaviors emerge from the dynamic trade-off between prediction and curiosity—between exploitation and exploration. Our work provides a biologically motivated, physically embodied model of sensorimotor interaction that connects theories of infant learning with robotic implementations. The results allow us to generate testable hypotheses for developmental research and to inform the design of autonomous learning systems.","PeriodicalId":56029,"journal":{"name":"Science Robotics","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.0,"publicationDate":"2026-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148815569","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Convergent binocular stereo: Depth perception for humanoid robot vision","authors":"Mingshi Chi, John K. Tsotsos","doi":"10.1126/scirobotics.aec7205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.aec7205","url":null,"abstract":"The design of robotic binocular camera systems has been inspired by human vision, as has their use in humanoid robots. One aspect of this inspiration has yet to play a major role, namely, that humans determine depth using a convergent binocular imaging geometry with both eyes pointing at the same location. Although some robot heads have the functionality to use vergence and version movements and thus alter binocular imaging geometry, a method to exploit it for depth computation has not been explored. Even though to an observer, their motions and appearance might resemble that of humans, in detail, the resemblance to the motions required for actual convergent depth computation is not seen. To bridge this gap, we present convergent binocular stereo (CBS), a stereo algorithm designed to provide a foundation for purposeful binocular computations under the humanoid constraint, intended for active binocular robots. CBS computes horizontal and vertical disparities using a coarse-to-fine refinement strategy with Gabor-filtered responses. We also introduce the Convergent Binocular Stereo–BenchMark (CBS-BM), a convergent, natural image dataset containing 49 scenes with ground-truth horizontal disparity collected on a four-degrees-of-freedom robotic system. Our evaluation, a quantitative comparison between parallel and convergent stereo systems, shows that CBS is broadly competitive with state-of-the-art parallel methods, even outperforming them in scenes with repeated patterns and in mean horizontal disparity and depth error over all scenes. Although not intended to replace parallel stereo where humanlike behavior is unnecessary, CBS enables functionally realistic depth computation for humanoid robotic heads.","PeriodicalId":56029,"journal":{"name":"Science Robotics","volume":"126 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.0,"publicationDate":"2026-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148815568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From acrobatics to generality: Humanoid robots at an inflection point.","authors":"Hae-Won Park","doi":"10.1126/scirobotics.aek7970","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.aek7970","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This special issue examines what it takes to move humanoids beyond task-specific demonstrations toward dependable generality.</p>","PeriodicalId":56029,"journal":{"name":"Science Robotics","volume":"11 117","pages":"eaek7970"},"PeriodicalIF":25.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148834898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"BeyondMimic: From motion tracking to versatile humanoid control via guided diffusion","authors":"Qiayuan Liao, Takara E. Truong, Xiaoyu Huang, Yuman Gao, Guy Tevet, Koushil Sreenath, C. Karen Liu","doi":"10.1126/scirobotics.adx8924","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.adx8924","url":null,"abstract":"The humanlike form of humanoid robots uniquely positions them to achieve the agility and versatility in motor skills that humans have. Learning from human demonstrations offers a scalable approach to acquiring these capabilities. However, prior works either produced unnatural motions or relied on motion-specific tuning to achieve satisfactory naturalness. Furthermore, these methods are often motion or goal specific, lacking the versatility to compose diverse skills, especially when solving unseen tasks. We present BeyondMimic, a framework that scales to diverse motions and carries the versatility to compose them seamlessly in tackling unseen downstream tasks. A compact motion tracking formulation enables mastery of a wide range of highly agile behaviors, including aerial cartwheels, spin kicks, flip kicks, and sprinting, with a single setup and shared hyperparameters, all while achieving humanlike performance. Moving beyond the mere imitation of existing motions, we propose a unified latent diffusion model that empowers versatile goal specification, seamless task switching, and dynamic composition of these agile behaviors. Leveraging classifier guidance, a diffusion-specific technique for test-time optimization toward unseen objectives, our model extended its capability to solve downstream tasks never encountered during training, including motion inpainting, joystick teleoperation, and obstacle avoidance, and transferred these skills zero-shot to real hardware. Together, these components enable scalable acquisition of humanlike motor skills from human motion and motion synthesis that generalizes and adapts beyond the training setup.","PeriodicalId":56029,"journal":{"name":"Science Robotics","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.0,"publicationDate":"2026-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148815571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Learning vision-driven reactive soccer skills for humanoid robots","authors":"Yushi Wang, Changsheng Luo, Penghui Chen, Jianran Liu, Weijian Sun, Tong Guo, Kechang Yang, Biao Hu, Yangang Zhang, Mingguo Zhao","doi":"10.1126/scirobotics.aed1152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.aed1152","url":null,"abstract":"Humanoid soccer poses a representative challenge for embodied intelligence, requiring robots to coordinate agile locomotion with unreliable visual perception in dynamic environments. However, existing systems typically rely on modular pipelines that separate perception from control or assume ideal sensing, making it difficult to achieve coherent and reactive behavior under real-world perceptual limitations. In this work, we present a unified reinforcement learning–based controller that enables humanoid robots to learn vision-driven reactive soccer skills by directly coupling visual perception with locomotion control. The robot is trained in simulation to acquire soccer behaviors, and adversarial motion priors guide policy learning toward natural motion patterns. To support robust performance under imperfect sensing, we introduce an encoder-decoder architecture together with a virtual perception system that models key characteristics of onboard vision, exposing the policy to perceptual noise and detection failures during training. This design encourages the policy to internalize perceptual uncertainty and continuously adapt its motion in a closed loop. The resulting controller produces coordinated soccer behaviors using only onboard vision, including ball searching, chasing, and multidirectional kicking. It reduces ball position estimation error by 46% and shortens time-to-kick by up to 64% compared with a rule-based baseline, achieving around 90% kicking success in frontfield positions. Experiments across diverse environments and dynamic scenarios, including real RoboCup competitions, further demonstrate the robust performance of the controller. These results highlight the practical effectiveness of integrating perceptual uncertainty directly into policy learning for achieving reliable vision-driven behaviors in humanoid robots operating under real-world conditions.","PeriodicalId":56029,"journal":{"name":"Science Robotics","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":25.0,"publicationDate":"2026-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148766796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}