Generative Action-Chunk Sampling for Adaptive Stiffness Control in Physical Human-Robot Collaboration
arXiv:2608.25284v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical human-robot collaboration requires a robot to provide assistance when human intention is clear while remaining compliant when several future motions are plausible. We present an adaptive stiffness framework based on generative action-chunk sampling. Conditioned on an RGB image and external joint-torque estimates, the policy samples multiple future action chunks from an observation-conditioned prior. Variation among the sampled action chunks is used to continuously adapt joint stiffness and damping. Greater variation makes the robot more compliant to facilitate human guidance, whereas lower variation provides firmer assistance. In a real-world collaborative transport task with four possible directions, the proposed method achieved an average success rate of 0.95, compared with 0.83 for a fixed-stiffness ablation and 0.69 for a deterministic baseline. Near direction determination, variation among the sampled action chunks increased and the controller accordingly reduced stiffness. These results suggest that variation among actions sampled by a generative policy can serve as an online control signal for balancing assistance and compliance in physical human-robot interaction.
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[Submitted on 26 Aug 2026]
Title:Generative Action-Chunk Sampling for Adaptive Stiffness Control in Physical Human-Robot Collaboration
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Abstract:Physical human-robot collaboration requires a robot to provide assistance when human intention is clear while remaining compliant when several future motions are plausible. We present an adaptive stiffness framework based on generative action-chunk sampling. Conditioned on an RGB image and external joint-torque estimates, the policy samples multiple future action chunks from an observation-conditioned prior. Variation among the sampled action chunks is used to continuously adapt joint stiffness and damping. Greater variation makes the robot more compliant to facilitate human guidance, whereas lower variation provides firmer assistance. In a real-world collaborative transport task with four possible directions, the proposed method achieved an average success rate of 0.95, compared with 0.83 for a fixed-stiffness ablation and 0.69 for a deterministic baseline. Near direction determination, variation among the sampled action chunks increased and the controller accordingly reduced stiffness. These results suggest that variation among actions sampled by a generative policy can serve as an online control signal for balancing assistance and compliance in physical human-robot interaction.
Comments: Preprint version
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.25284 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2608.25284v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.25284
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Shingo Murata [view email] [v1] Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:44:11 UTC (4,557 KB)
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