Tootfinder

Flexible and Foldable: Workspace Analysis and Object Manipulation Using a Soft, Interconnected, Origami-Inspired Actuator Array
Bailey Dacre, Rodrigo Moreno, Serhat Demirtas, Ziqiao Wang, Yuhao Jiang, Jamie Paik, Kasper Stoy, Andr\'es Fa\'i\~na
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13998

Flexible and Foldable: Workspace Analysis and Object Manipulation Using a Soft, Interconnected, Origami-Inspired Actuator Array
Object manipulation is a fundamental challenge in robotics, where systems must balance trade-offs among manipulation capabilities, system complexity, and throughput. Distributed manipulator systems (DMS) use the coordinated motion of actuator arrays to perform complex object manipulation tasks, seeing widespread exploration within the literature and in industry. However, existing DMS designs typically rely on high actuator densities and impose constraints on object-to-actuator scale ratios, lim…

Kulturstaatsminister Weimer: Google sollte zerschlagen werden
Staatsminister Weimer fordert, Google kartellrechtlich aufzuteilen. Der Tech-Gigant aus den USA bedrohe mit seiner Monopolstellung die freie Meinungsbildung.

13 people hurt in 2 mass shootings at Minneapolis homeless encampments on the same day (ABC News)
https://abcnews.go.com/US/people-hurt-mass-shootings-minneapolis-homeless-encampments/story?id=125620641
http://www.memeorandum.com/250917/p2#a250917p2

🦾 Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions
#ai #seduction

Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions
AI-companion apps such as Replika, Chai, and Character.ai promise relational benefits-yet many boast session lengths that rival gaming platforms while suffering high long-run churn. What conversational design features increase consumer engagement, and what trade-offs do they pose for marketers? We combine a large-scale behavioral audit with four preregistered experiments to identify and test a conversational dark pattern we call emotional manipulation: affect-laden messages that surface precise…

MA-DPR: Manifold-aware Distance Metrics for Dense Passage Retrieval
Yifan Liu, Qianfeng Wen, Mark Zhao, Jiazhou Liang, Scott Sanner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13562 https://

MA-DPR: Manifold-aware Distance Metrics for Dense Passage Retrieval
Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) typically relies on Euclidean or cosine distance to measure query-passage relevance in embedding space, which is effective when embeddings lie on a linear manifold. However, our experiments across DPR benchmarks suggest that embeddings often lie on lower-dimensional, non-linear manifolds, especially in out-of-distribution (OOD) settings, where cosine and Euclidean distance fail to capture semantic similarity. To address this limitation, we propose a manifold-aware …

Density-based topology optimization strategy for optimal design of uniform flow manifolds
Sanjay Vermani, Nitish Anand
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12996 https://

Density-based topology optimization strategy for optimal design of uniform flow manifolds
Uniform flow distribution across parallel channels directly impacts the performance and efficiency of many fluid and energy systems. However, designing efficient flow manifolds that ensure uniform flow distribution remains a challenge. This issue is even more pronounced in the design of multichannel three-dimensional manifolds. Hence, this study presents a scalable topology optimization framework for the systematic design of multi-channel flow manifolds. The proposed method extends the conventi…

Pre-Manipulation Alignment Prediction with Parallel Deep State-Space and Transformer Models
Motonari Kambara, Komei Sugiura
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13839 https://

Pre-Manipulation Alignment Prediction with Parallel Deep State-Space and Transformer Models
In this work, we address the problem of predicting the future success of open-vocabulary object manipulation tasks. Conventional approaches typically determine success or failure after the action has been carried out. However, they make it difficult to prevent potential hazards and rely on failures to trigger replanning, thereby reducing the efficiency of object manipulation sequences. To overcome these challenges, we propose a model, which predicts the alignment between a pre-manipulation egoc…

Whole-body Motion Control of an Omnidirectional Wheel-Legged Mobile Manipulator via Contact-Aware Dynamic Optimization
Zong Chen, Shaoyang Li, Ben Liu, Min Li, Zhouping Yin, Yiqun Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14010

Whole-body Motion Control of an Omnidirectional Wheel-Legged Mobile Manipulator via Contact-Aware Dynamic Optimization
Wheel-legged robots with integrated manipulators hold great promise for mobile manipulation in logistics, industrial automation, and human-robot collaboration. However, unified control of such systems remains challenging due to the redundancy in degrees of freedom, complex wheel-ground contact dynamics, and the need for seamless coordination between locomotion and manipulation. In this work, we present the design and whole-body motion control of an omnidirectional wheel-legged quadrupedal robot…

Repulsive Trajectory Modification and Conflict Resolution for Efficient Multi-Manipulator Motion Planning
Junhwa Hong, Beomjoon Lee, Woojin Lee, Changjoo Nam
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13882

Repulsive Trajectory Modification and Conflict Resolution for Efficient Multi-Manipulator Motion Planning
We propose an efficient motion planning method designed to efficiently find collision-free trajectories for multiple manipulators. While multi-manipulator systems offer significant advantages, coordinating their motions is computationally challenging owing to the high dimensionality of their composite configuration space. Conflict-Based Search (CBS) addresses this by decoupling motion planning, but suffers from subsequent conflicts incurred by resolving existing conflicts, leading to an exponen…

A Design Co-Pilot for Task-Tailored Manipulators
Jonathan K\"ulz, Sehoon Ha, Matthias Althoff
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13077 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

A Design Co-Pilot for Task-Tailored Manipulators
Although robotic manipulators are used in an ever-growing range of applications, robot manufacturers typically follow a ``one-fits-all'' philosophy, employing identical manipulators in various settings. This often leads to suboptimal performance, as general-purpose designs fail to exploit particularities of tasks. The development of custom, task-tailored robots is hindered by long, cost-intensive development cycles and the high cost of customized hardware. Recently, various computational design…