Daily Papers

The design and implementation of theoretically-sound robot motion planning algorithms is challenging. Within the framework of resolution-exact algorithms, it is possible to exploit soft predicates for collision detection. The design of soft predicates is a balancing act between easily implementable predicates and their accuracy/effectivity. In this paper, we focus on the class of planar polygonal rigid robots with arbitrarily complex geometry. We exploit the remarkable decomposability property of soft collision-detection predicates of such robots. We introduce a general technique to produce such a decomposition. If the robot is an m-gon, the complexity of this approach scales linearly in m. This contrasts with the O(m^3) complexity known for exact planners. It follows that we can now routinely produce soft predicates for any rigid polygonal robot. This results in resolution-exact planners for such robots within the general Soft Subdivision Search (SSS) framework. This is a significant advancement in the theory of sound and complete planners for planar robots. We implemented such decomposed predicates in our open-source Core Library. The experiments show that our algorithms are effective, perform in real time on non-trivial environments, and can outperform many sampling-based methods.

Quadruped robots are increasingly expected to navigate through narrow passages, cluttered indoor scenes, and large-scale 3D unstructured environments. Existing local planners commonly approximate the robot using isotropic geometric inflation or rely on planar and elevation-map representations, leading to conservative motion in tight spaces and limited reasoning about overhanging structures. This letter presents SCAN-Planner, a spatial collision-aware local planning framework for long-range quadruped navigation. A yaw-aware twin-cylinder footprint is used to model the elongated robot body, enabling whole-body collision evaluation through sparse queries in an inflated 3D occupancy map. We further introduce a projected A* search that generates collision-free guidance on an interpolated ground-following surface, with z-gradient suppression to avoid obstacles horizontally while maintaining vertical stability. For large-scale deployment, a robot-centric sliding map with boundary fallback provides high-resolution local collision checking and recovery from local dead ends. Simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that SCAN-Planner generates safe, smooth, and efficient trajectories in dense clutter, 3D unstructured scenes, stair traversal, and long-range navigation tasks.

This paper introduces ByteWrist, a novel highly-flexible and anthropomorphic parallel wrist for robotic manipulation. ByteWrist addresses the critical limitations of existing serial and parallel wrists in narrow-space operations through a compact three-stage parallel drive mechanism integrated with arc-shaped end linkages. The design achieves precise RPY (Roll-Pitch-Yaw) motion while maintaining exceptional compactness, making it particularly suitable for complex unstructured environments such as home services, medical assistance, and precision assembly. The key innovations include: (1) a nested three-stage motor-driven linkages that minimize volume while enabling independent multi-DOF control, (2) arc-shaped end linkages that optimize force transmission and expand motion range, and (3) a central supporting ball functioning as a spherical joint that enhances structural stiffness without compromising flexibility. Meanwhile, we present comprehensive kinematic modeling including forward / inverse kinematics and a numerical Jacobian solution for precise control. Empirically, we observe ByteWrist demonstrates strong performance in narrow-space maneuverability and dual-arm cooperative manipulation tasks, outperforming Kinova-based systems. Results indicate significant improvements in compactness, efficiency, and stiffness compared to traditional designs, establishing ByteWrist as a promising solution for next-generation robotic manipulation in constrained environments.

Effective robotic manipulation relies on a precise understanding of 3D scene geometry, and one of the most straightforward ways to acquire such geometry is through multi-view observations. Motivated by this, we present GP3 -- a 3D geometry-aware robotic manipulation policy that leverages multi-view input. GP3 employs a spatial encoder to infer dense spatial features from RGB observations, which enable the estimation of depth and camera parameters, leading to a compact yet expressive 3D scene representation tailored for manipulation. This representation is fused with language instructions and translated into continuous actions via a lightweight policy head. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that GP3 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on simulated benchmarks. Furthermore, GP3 transfers effectively to real-world robots without depth sensors or pre-mapped environments, requiring only minimal fine-tuning. These results highlight GP3 as a practical, sensor-agnostic solution for geometry-aware robotic manipulation.

Multi-part assembly poses significant challenges for robots to execute long-horizon, contact-rich manipulation with generalization across complex geometries. We present Fabrica, a dual-arm robotic system capable of end-to-end planning and control for autonomous assembly of general multi-part objects. For planning over long horizons, we develop hierarchies of precedence, sequence, grasp, and motion planning with automated fixture generation, enabling general multi-step assembly on any dual-arm robots. The planner is made efficient through a parallelizable design and is optimized for downstream control stability. For contact-rich assembly steps, we propose a lightweight reinforcement learning framework that trains generalist policies across object geometries, assembly directions, and grasp poses, guided by equivariance and residual actions obtained from the plan. These policies transfer zero-shot to the real world and achieve 80% successful steps. For systematic evaluation, we propose a benchmark suite of multi-part assemblies resembling industrial and daily objects across diverse categories and geometries. By integrating efficient global planning and robust local control, we showcase the first system to achieve complete and generalizable real-world multi-part assembly without domain knowledge or human demonstrations. Project website: http://fabrica.csail.mit.edu/

We introduce RoboNinja, a learning-based cutting system for multi-material objects (i.e., soft objects with rigid cores such as avocados or mangos). In contrast to prior works using open-loop cutting actions to cut through single-material objects (e.g., slicing a cucumber), RoboNinja aims to remove the soft part of an object while preserving the rigid core, thereby maximizing the yield. To achieve this, our system closes the perception-action loop by utilizing an interactive state estimator and an adaptive cutting policy. The system first employs sparse collision information to iteratively estimate the position and geometry of an object's core and then generates closed-loop cutting actions based on the estimated state and a tolerance value. The "adaptiveness" of the policy is achieved through the tolerance value, which modulates the policy's conservativeness when encountering collisions, maintaining an adaptive safety distance from the estimated core. Learning such cutting skills directly on a real-world robot is challenging. Yet, existing simulators are limited in simulating multi-material objects or computing the energy consumption during the cutting process. To address this issue, we develop a differentiable cutting simulator that supports multi-material coupling and allows for the generation of optimized trajectories as demonstrations for policy learning. Furthermore, by using a low-cost force sensor to capture collision feedback, we were able to successfully deploy the learned model in real-world scenarios, including objects with diverse core geometries and soft materials.

Polygon meshes are an efficient representation of 3D geometry, and are of central importance in computer graphics, robotics and games development. Existing learning-based approaches have avoided the challenges of working with 3D meshes, instead using alternative object representations that are more compatible with neural architectures and training approaches. We present an approach which models the mesh directly, predicting mesh vertices and faces sequentially using a Transformer-based architecture. Our model can condition on a range of inputs, including object classes, voxels, and images, and because the model is probabilistic it can produce samples that capture uncertainty in ambiguous scenarios. We show that the model is capable of producing high-quality, usable meshes, and establish log-likelihood benchmarks for the mesh-modelling task. We also evaluate the conditional models on surface reconstruction metrics against alternative methods, and demonstrate competitive performance despite not training directly on this task.

Robotic systems operating in unstructured environments require the ability to switch between compliant and rigid states to perform diverse tasks such as adaptive grasping, high-force manipulation, shape holding, and navigation in constrained spaces, among others. However, many existing variable stiffness solutions rely on complex actuation schemes, continuous input power, or monolithic designs, limiting their modularity and scalability. This paper presents the Programmable Locking Cell (PLC)-a modular, tendon-driven unit that achieves discrete stiffness modulation through mechanically interlocked joints actuated by cable tension. Each unit transitions between compliant and firm states via structural engagement, and the assembled system exhibits high stiffness variation-up to 950% per unit-without susceptibility to damage under high payload in the firm state. Multiple PLC units can be assembled into reconfigurable robotic structures with spatially programmable stiffness. We validate the design through two functional prototypes: (1) a variable-stiffness gripper capable of adaptive grasping, firm holding, and in-hand manipulation; and (2) a pipe-traversing robot composed of serial PLC units that achieves shape adaptability and stiffness control in confined environments. These results demonstrate the PLC as a scalable, structure-centric mechanism for programmable stiffness and motion, enabling robotic systems with reconfigurable morphology and task-adaptive interaction.

In this letter, an integrated task planning and reactive motion planning framework termed Multi-FLEX is presented that targets real-world, industrial multi-robot applications. Reactive motion planning has been attractive for the purposes of collision avoidance, particularly when there are sources of uncertainty and variation. Most industrial applications, though, typically require parts of motion to be at least partially non-reactive in order to achieve functional objectives. Multi-FLEX resolves this dissonance and enables such applications to take advantage of reactive motion planning. The Multi-FLEX framework achieves 1) coordination of motion requests to resolve task-level conflicts and overlaps, 2) incorporation of application-specific task constraints into online motion planning using the new concepts of task dependency accommodation, task decomposition, and task bundling, and 3) online generation of robot trajectories using a custom, online reactive motion planner. This planner combines fast-to-create, sparse dynamic roadmaps (to find a complete path to the goal) with fast-to-execute, short-horizon, online, optimization-based local planning (for collision avoidance and high performance). To demonstrate, we use two six-degree-of-freedom, high-speed industrial robots in a deburring application to show the ability of this approach to not just handle collision avoidance and task variations, but to also achieve industrial applications.

This work presents a novel online model-predictive trajectory planner for robotic manipulators called BoundMPC. This planner allows the collision-free following of Cartesian reference paths in the end-effector's position and orientation, including via-points, within desired asymmetric bounds of the orthogonal path error. The path parameter synchronizes the position and orientation reference paths. The decomposition of the path error into the tangential direction, describing the path progress, and the orthogonal direction, which represents the deviation from the path, is well known for the position from the path-following control in the literature. This paper extends this idea to the orientation by utilizing the Lie theory of rotations. Moreover, the orthogonal error plane is further decomposed into basis directions to define asymmetric Cartesian error bounds easily. Using piecewise linear position and orientation reference paths with via-points is computationally very efficient and allows replanning the pose trajectories during the robot's motion. This feature makes it possible to use this planner for dynamically changing environments and varying goals. The flexibility and performance of BoundMPC are experimentally demonstrated by two scenarios on a 7-DoF Kuka LBR iiwa 14 R820 robot. The first scenario shows the transfer of a larger object from a start to a goal pose through a confined space where the object must be tilted. The second scenario deals with grasping an object from a table where the grasping point changes during the robot's motion, and collisions with other obstacles in the scene must be avoided.

Trajectory optimization offers mature tools for motion planning in high-dimensional spaces under dynamic constraints. However, when facing complex configuration spaces, cluttered with obstacles, roboticists typically fall back to sampling-based planners that struggle in very high dimensions and with continuous differential constraints. Indeed, obstacles are the source of many textbook examples of problematic nonconvexities in the trajectory-optimization problem. Here we show that convex optimization can, in fact, be used to reliably plan trajectories around obstacles. Specifically, we consider planning problems with collision-avoidance constraints, as well as cost penalties and hard constraints on the shape, the duration, and the velocity of the trajectory. Combining the properties of Bézier curves with a recently-proposed framework for finding shortest paths in Graphs of Convex Sets (GCS), we formulate the planning problem as a compact mixed-integer optimization. In stark contrast with existing mixed-integer planners, the convex relaxation of our programs is very tight, and a cheap rounding of its solution is typically sufficient to design globally-optimal trajectories. This reduces the mixed-integer program back to a simple convex optimization, and automatically provides optimality bounds for the planned trajectories. We name the proposed planner GCS, after its underlying optimization framework. We demonstrate GCS in simulation on a variety of robotic platforms, including a quadrotor flying through buildings and a dual-arm manipulator (with fourteen degrees of freedom) moving in a confined space. Using numerical experiments on a seven-degree-of-freedom manipulator, we show that GCS can outperform widely-used sampling-based planners by finding higher-quality trajectories in less time.

Manipulating objects with varying geometries and deformable objects is a major challenge in robotics. Tasks such as insertion with different objects or cloth hanging require precise control and effective modelling of complex dynamics. In this work, we frame this problem through the lens of a heterogeneous graph that comprises smaller sub-graphs, such as actuators and objects, accompanied by different edge types describing their interactions. This graph representation serves as a unified structure for both rigid and deformable objects tasks, and can be extended further to tasks comprising multiple actuators. To evaluate this setup, we present a novel and challenging reinforcement learning benchmark, including rigid insertion of diverse objects, as well as rope and cloth manipulation with multiple end-effectors. These tasks present a large search space, as both the initial and target configurations are uniformly sampled in 3D space. To address this issue, we propose a novel graph-based policy model, dubbed Heterogeneous Equivariant Policy (HEPi), utilizing SE(3) equivariant message passing networks as the main backbone to exploit the geometric symmetry. In addition, by modeling explicit heterogeneity, HEPi can outperform Transformer-based and non-heterogeneous equivariant policies in terms of average returns, sample efficiency, and generalization to unseen objects. Our project page is available at https://thobotics.github.io/hepi.

Grasping is a fundamental capability for robots to interact with the physical world. Humans, equipped with two hands, autonomously select appropriate grasp strategies based on the shape, size, and weight of objects, enabling robust grasping and subsequent manipulation. In contrast, current robotic grasping remains limited, particularly in multi-strategy settings. Although substantial efforts have targeted parallel-gripper and single-hand grasping, dexterous grasping for bimanual robots remains underexplored, with data being a primary bottleneck. Achieving physically plausible and geometrically conforming grasps that can withstand external wrenches poses significant challenges. To address these issues, we introduce UltraDexGrasp, a framework for universal dexterous grasping with bimanual robots. The proposed data-generation pipeline integrates optimization-based grasp synthesis with planning-based demonstration generation, yielding high-quality and diverse trajectories across multiple grasp strategies. With this framework, we curate UltraDexGrasp-20M, a large-scale, multi-strategy grasp dataset comprising 20 million frames across 1,000 objects. Based on UltraDexGrasp-20M, we further develop a simple yet effective grasp policy that takes point clouds as input, aggregates scene features via unidirectional attention, and predicts control commands. Trained exclusively on synthetic data, the policy achieves robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and consistently succeeds on novel objects with varied shapes, sizes, and weights, attaining an average success rate of 81.2% in real-world universal dexterous grasping. To facilitate future research on grasping with bimanual robots, we open-source the data generation pipeline at https://github.com/InternRobotics/UltraDexGrasp.

We report our recent progress towards building generalist robot policies, the development of GR-3. GR-3 is a large-scale vision-language-action (VLA) model. It showcases exceptional capabilities in generalizing to novel objects, environments, and instructions involving abstract concepts. Furthermore, it can be efficiently fine-tuned with minimal human trajectory data, enabling rapid and cost-effective adaptation to new settings. GR-3 also excels in handling long-horizon and dexterous tasks, including those requiring bi-manual manipulation and mobile movement, showcasing robust and reliable performance. These capabilities are achieved through a multi-faceted training recipe that includes co-training with web-scale vision-language data, efficient fine-tuning from human trajectory data collected via VR devices, and effective imitation learning with robot trajectory data. In addition, we introduce ByteMini, a versatile bi-manual mobile robot designed with exceptional flexibility and reliability, capable of accomplishing a wide range of tasks when integrated with GR-3. Through extensive real-world experiments, we show GR-3 surpasses the state-of-the-art baseline method, pi_0, on a wide variety of challenging tasks. We hope GR-3 can serve as a step towards building generalist robots capable of assisting humans in daily life.

Learning-based simulation of multi-object rigid-body dynamics remains difficult because contact is discontinuous and errors compound over long horizons. Most existing methods remain tied to mesh connectivity and vertex-level message passing, which limits their applicability to mesh-free inputs such as point clouds and leads to high computational cost. Efficiently modeling high-fidelity rigid-body dynamics from mesh-free representations, therefore, remains challenging. We introduce RigidFormer, an object-centric Transformer-based model that learns mesh-free rigid-body dynamics with controllable integration step sizes. RigidFormer reasons at the object level and advances each object through compact anchors; Anchor-Vertex Pooling enriches these anchors with local vertex features, retaining contact-relevant geometry without dense vertex-level interaction. We propose Anchor-based RoPE to inject anchor geometry into attention while respecting the unordered nature of objects and anchors: object-token processing is permutation-equivariant, and the mean-pooled anchor descriptor is invariant to anchor reindexing while preserving shape extent. RigidFormer further enforces rigidity by projecting updates onto the rigid-body manifold using differentiable Kabsch alignment. On standard benchmarks, RigidFormer outperforms or matches mesh-based baselines using point inputs, runs faster, generalizes to unseen point resolutions and across datasets, and scales to 200+ objects; we also show a preliminary extension to command-conditioned articulated bodies by treating body parts as interacting object-level components.

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 equipped with a dexterous manipulator. The proposed platform incorporates independently actuated steering modules and hub-driven wheels, enabling agile omnidirectional locomotion with high maneuverability in structured environments. To address the challenges of contact-rich interaction, we develop a contact-aware whole-body dynamic optimization framework that integrates point-contact modeling for manipulation with line-contact modeling for wheel-ground interactions. A warm-start strategy is introduced to accelerate online optimization, ensuring real-time feasibility for high-dimensional control. Furthermore, a unified kinematic model tailored for the robot's 4WIS-4WID actuation scheme eliminates the need for mode switching across different locomotion strategies, improving control consistency and robustness. Simulation and experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, demonstrating agile terrain traversal, high-speed omnidirectional mobility, and precise manipulation under diverse scenarios, underscoring the system's potential for factory automation, urban logistics, and service robotics in semi-structured environments.

Interlocking brick assemblies provide a standardized yet challenging testbed for contact-rich and long-horizon robotic manipulation, but existing rigid-body simulators do not faithfully capture snap-fit mechanics. We present BrickSim, the first real-time physics-based simulator for interlocking brick assemblies. BrickSim introduces a compact force-based mechanics model for snap-fit connections and solves the resulting internal force distribution using a structured convex quadratic program. Combined with a hybrid architecture that delegates rigid-body dynamics to the underlying physics engine while handling snap-fit mechanics separately, BrickSim enables real-time, high-fidelity simulation of assembly, disassembly, and structural collapse. On 150 real-world assemblies, BrickSim achieves 100% accuracy in static stability prediction with an average solve time of 5 ms. In dynamic drop tests, it also faithfully reproduces real-world structural collapse, precisely mirroring both the occurrence of breakage and the specific breakage locations. Built on Isaac Sim, BrickSim further supports seamless integration with a wide variety of robots and existing pipelines. We demonstrate robotic construction of brick assemblies using BrickSim, highlighting its potential as a foundation for research in dexterous, long-horizon robotic manipulation. BrickSim is open-source, and the code is available at https://github.com/intelligent-control-lab/BrickSim.

Robot design aims at learning to create robots that can be easily controlled and perform tasks efficiently. Previous works on robot design have proven its ability to generate robots for various tasks. However, these works searched the robots directly from the vast design space and ignored common structures, resulting in abnormal robots and poor performance. To tackle this problem, we propose a Symmetry-Aware Robot Design (SARD) framework that exploits the structure of the design space by incorporating symmetry searching into the robot design process. Specifically, we represent symmetries with the subgroups of the dihedral group and search for the optimal symmetry in structured subgroups. Then robots are designed under the searched symmetry. In this way, SARD can design efficient symmetric robots while covering the original design space, which is theoretically analyzed. We further empirically evaluate SARD on various tasks, and the results show its superior efficiency and generalizability.

Humans anticipate, from a glance and a contemplated action of their bodies, how the 3D world will respond, a capability that is equally vital for robotic manipulation. We introduce PointWorld, a large pre-trained 3D world model that unifies state and action in a shared 3D space as 3D point flows: given one or few RGB-D images and a sequence of low-level robot action commands, PointWorld forecasts per-pixel displacements in 3D that respond to the given actions. By representing actions as 3D point flows instead of embodiment-specific action spaces (e.g., joint positions), this formulation directly conditions on physical geometries of robots while seamlessly integrating learning across embodiments. To train our 3D world model, we curate a large-scale dataset spanning real and simulated robotic manipulation in open-world environments, enabled by recent advances in 3D vision and simulated environments, totaling about 2M trajectories and 500 hours across a single-arm Franka and a bimanual humanoid. Through rigorous, large-scale empirical studies of backbones, action representations, learning objectives, partial observability, data mixtures, domain transfers, and scaling, we distill design principles for large-scale 3D world modeling. With a real-time (0.1s) inference speed, PointWorld can be efficiently integrated in the model-predictive control (MPC) framework for manipulation. We demonstrate that a single pre-trained checkpoint enables a real-world Franka robot to perform rigid-body pushing, deformable and articulated object manipulation, and tool use, without requiring any demonstrations or post-training and all from a single image captured in-the-wild. Project website at https://point-world.github.io/.

We present the first approach to build hierarchical task-driven 3D scene graphs of arbitrary indoor or outdoor environments using an uncalibrated monocular camera in real-time. We leverage geometric foundation models to estimate geometric attributes of the scene graph (e.g., object bounding boxes), but we also observe that traversability information (the "places" layer of a scene graph) can be directly reconstructed by adding an extra head to existing geometric foundation models, like VGGT. Our approach is task-driven in the sense that we adjust the granularity of the objects and regions in the map depending on the task; for instance, during a manipulation task, our approach is able to resolve small knobs on a stove, while during a navigation task it can focus on large objects (e.g., the entire stove). However, in a major departure from related work, we consider the realistic case where the list of tasks is not predefined and fixed, but evolves as the robot operates. This naturally allows dealing with complex loco-manipulation tasks, where the robot can dynamically adjust its representation as the task unfolds. We dub the resulting approach FOUND-IT. FOUND-IT also includes an agentic approach to query information in the scene graph. In addition to achieving 79% higher accuracy on the ASHiTA SG3D task grounding benchmark, we demonstrate FOUND-IT runs in real-time on a ground robot using a Jetson Thor. Furthermore, to highlight the robustness of our method, we demonstrate constructing 3D scene graphs on casually captured realtor apartment tours from YouTube. Code will be made available upon publication.

Fast and efficient motion planning algorithms are crucial for many state-of-the-art robotics applications such as self-driving cars. Existing motion planning methods become ineffective as their computational complexity increases exponentially with the dimensionality of the motion planning problem. To address this issue, we present Motion Planning Networks (MPNet), a neural network-based novel planning algorithm. The proposed method encodes the given workspaces directly from a point cloud measurement and generates the end-to-end collision-free paths for the given start and goal configurations. We evaluate MPNet on various 2D and 3D environments including the planning of a 7 DOF Baxter robot manipulator. The results show that MPNet is not only consistently computationally efficient in all environments but also generalizes to completely unseen environments. The results also show that the computation time of MPNet consistently remains less than 1 second in all presented experiments, which is significantly lower than existing state-of-the-art motion planning algorithms.

Representing robotic manipulation tasks as constraints that associate the robot and the environment is a promising way to encode desired robot behaviors. However, it remains unclear how to formulate the constraints such that they are 1) versatile to diverse tasks, 2) free of manual labeling, and 3) optimizable by off-the-shelf solvers to produce robot actions in real-time. In this work, we introduce Relational Keypoint Constraints (ReKep), a visually-grounded representation for constraints in robotic manipulation. Specifically, ReKep is expressed as Python functions mapping a set of 3D keypoints in the environment to a numerical cost. We demonstrate that by representing a manipulation task as a sequence of Relational Keypoint Constraints, we can employ a hierarchical optimization procedure to solve for robot actions (represented by a sequence of end-effector poses in SE(3)) with a perception-action loop at a real-time frequency. Furthermore, in order to circumvent the need for manual specification of ReKep for each new task, we devise an automated procedure that leverages large vision models and vision-language models to produce ReKep from free-form language instructions and RGB-D observations. We present system implementations on a wheeled single-arm platform and a stationary dual-arm platform that can perform a large variety of manipulation tasks, featuring multi-stage, in-the-wild, bimanual, and reactive behaviors, all without task-specific data or environment models. Website at https://rekep-robot.github.io/.

Accurate and efficient simulation of modern robots remains challenging due to their high degrees of freedom and intricate mechanisms. Neural simulators have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional analytical simulators, capable of efficiently predicting complex dynamics and adapting to real-world data; however, existing neural simulators typically require application-specific training and fail to generalize to novel tasks and/or environments, primarily due to inadequate representations of the global state. In this work, we address the problem of learning generalizable neural simulators for robots that are structured as articulated rigid bodies. We propose NeRD (Neural Robot Dynamics), learned robot-specific dynamics models for predicting future states for articulated rigid bodies under contact constraints. NeRD uniquely replaces the low-level dynamics and contact solvers in an analytical simulator and employs a robot-centric and spatially-invariant simulation state representation. We integrate the learned NeRD models as an interchangeable backend solver within a state-of-the-art robotics simulator. We conduct extensive experiments to show that the NeRD simulators are stable and accurate over a thousand simulation steps; generalize across tasks and environment configurations; enable policy learning exclusively in a neural engine; and, unlike most classical simulators, can be fine-tuned from real-world data to bridge the gap between simulation and reality.

A vast number of applications for legged robots entail tasks in complex, dynamic environments. But these environments put legged robots at high risk for limb damage. This paper presents an empirical study of fault tolerant dynamic gaits designed for a quadrupedal robot suffering from a single, known "missing" limb. Preliminary data suggests that the featured gait controller successfully anchors a previously developed planar monopedal hopping template in the three-legged spatial machine. This compositional approach offers a useful and generalizable guide to the development of a wider range of tripedal recovery gaits for damaged quadrupedal machines.

In this paper, we present STRIDE, a Simple, Terrestrial, Reconfigurable, Intelligent, Dynamic, and Educational bipedal platform. STRIDE aims to propel bipedal robotics research and education by providing a cost-effective implementation with step-by-step instructions for building a bipedal robotic platform while providing flexible customizations via a modular and durable design. Moreover, a versatile terrain setup and a quantitative disturbance injection system are augmented to the robot platform to replicate natural terrains and push forces that can be used to evaluate legged locomotion in practical and adversarial scenarios. We demonstrate the functionalities of this platform by realizing an adaptive step-to-step dynamics based walking controller to achieve dynamic walking. Our work with the open-soured implementation shows that STRIDE is a highly versatile and durable platform that can be used in research and education to evaluate locomotion algorithms, mechanical designs, and robust and adaptative controls.

Dexterous interaction with articulated objects is important for household, assistive, and humanoid manipulation, where multi-finger hands can provide compliant contact patterns beyond parallel-jaw grasping. However, articulated-object manipulation differs from static-object manipulation: the target part cannot be directly actuated, and its motion must emerge through sustained physical hand--handle contact. This makes the transition from object-centric articulated generation to hand-driven dexterous hand--object interaction non-trivial, since geometric trajectory replay or open-loop execution does not model the contact dynamics required to move the articulated part. Moreover, policies trained only for task completion under fixed dynamics can overfit nominal contact loads, especially without tactile or force feedback, and may degrade when the contact load changes. To address these challenges, we present DragMesh-2, a contact-driven framework for dexterous interaction with articulated objects that extends articulated interaction from object-centric generation to hand-driven dexterous hand--object interaction, where articulated motion must arise through physical contact. We further propose PICA, a physically informed contact-aware training mechanism that injects physical signals into policy learning without tactile or force feedback, improving robustness and task success under changing contact loads. Finally, we conduct systematic evaluation across multiple damping conditions and articulated-object categories to study robustness under contact-load variation, and provide a pure-geometry dexterous interaction resource to support future loco-manipulation and humanoid hand--object interaction research. Across seven GAPartNet objects, DragMesh-2 achieves stronger robustness under contact-load variation than the compared methods while maintaining high task success across damping conditions.

A deep understanding of kinematic structures and movable components is essential for enabling robots to manipulate objects and model their own articulated forms. Such understanding is captured through articulated objects, which are essential for tasks such as physical simulation, motion planning, and policy learning. However, creating these models, particularly for objects with high degrees of freedom (DoF), remains a significant challenge. Existing methods typically rely on motion sequences or strong assumptions from hand-curated datasets, which hinders scalability. In this paper, we introduce Kinematify, an automated framework that synthesizes articulated objects directly from arbitrary RGB images or textual descriptions. Our method addresses two core challenges: (i) inferring kinematic topologies for high-DoF objects and (ii) estimating joint parameters from static geometry. To achieve this, we combine MCTS search for structural inference with geometry-driven optimization for joint reasoning, producing physically consistent and functionally valid descriptions. We evaluate Kinematify on diverse inputs from both synthetic and real-world environments, demonstrating improvements in registration and kinematic topology accuracy over prior work.

Ensuring safety is of paramount importance in physical human-robot interaction applications. This requires both adherence to safety constraints defined on the system state, as well as guaranteeing compliant behavior of the robot. If the underlying dynamical system is known exactly, the former can be addressed with the help of control barrier functions. The incorporation of elastic actuators in the robot's mechanical design can address the latter requirement. However, this elasticity can increase the complexity of the resulting system, leading to unmodeled dynamics, such that control barrier functions cannot directly ensure safety. In this paper, we mitigate this issue by learning the unknown dynamics using Gaussian process regression. By employing the model in a feedback linearizing control law, the safety conditions resulting from control barrier functions can be robustified to take into account model errors, while remaining feasible. In order to enforce them on-line, we formulate the derived safety conditions in the form of a second-order cone program. We demonstrate our proposed approach with simulations on a two-degree-of-freedom planar robot with elastic joints.

For robots to operate in general environments like households, they must be able to perform non-prehensile manipulation actions such as toppling and rolling to manipulate ungraspable objects. However, prior works on non-prehensile manipulation cannot yet generalize across environments with diverse geometries. The main challenge lies in adapting to varying environmental constraints: within a cabinet, the robot must avoid walls and ceilings; to lift objects to the top of a step, the robot must account for the step's pose and extent. While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive success in non-prehensile manipulation, accounting for such variability presents a challenge for the generalist policy, as it must learn diverse strategies for each new combination of constraints. To address this, we propose a modular and reconfigurable architecture that adaptively reconfigures network modules based on task requirements. To capture the geometric variability in environments, we extend the contact-based object representation (CORN) to environment geometries, and propose a procedural algorithm for generating diverse environments to train our agent. Taken together, the resulting policy can zero-shot transfer to novel real-world environments and objects despite training entirely within a simulator. We additionally release a simulation-based benchmark featuring nine digital twins of real-world scenes with 353 objects to facilitate non-prehensile manipulation research in realistic domains.

Recent advancements in large multimodal models have led to the emergence of remarkable generalist capabilities in digital domains, yet their translation to physical agents such as robots remains a significant challenge. This report introduces a new family of AI models purposefully designed for robotics and built upon the foundation of Gemini 2.0. We present Gemini Robotics, an advanced Vision-Language-Action (VLA) generalist model capable of directly controlling robots. Gemini Robotics executes smooth and reactive movements to tackle a wide range of complex manipulation tasks while also being robust to variations in object types and positions, handling unseen environments as well as following diverse, open vocabulary instructions. We show that with additional fine-tuning, Gemini Robotics can be specialized to new capabilities including solving long-horizon, highly dexterous tasks, learning new short-horizon tasks from as few as 100 demonstrations and adapting to completely novel robot embodiments. This is made possible because Gemini Robotics builds on top of the Gemini Robotics-ER model, the second model we introduce in this work. Gemini Robotics-ER (Embodied Reasoning) extends Gemini's multimodal reasoning capabilities into the physical world, with enhanced spatial and temporal understanding. This enables capabilities relevant to robotics including object detection, pointing, trajectory and grasp prediction, as well as multi-view correspondence and 3D bounding box predictions. We show how this novel combination can support a variety of robotics applications. We also discuss and address important safety considerations related to this new class of robotics foundation models. The Gemini Robotics family marks a substantial step towards developing general-purpose robots that realizes AI's potential in the physical world.

Text- and image-conditioned video generation models have achieved strong visual fidelity and temporal coherence, but they often fail to generate motion governed by kinematic and geometric constraints. In these settings, object parts must remain rigid, maintain contact or coupling with neighboring components, and transfer motion consistently across connected parts. These requirements are especially explicit in articulated mechanical assemblies, where motion is constrained by rigid-link geometry, contact/coupling relations, and transmission through kinematic chains. A generated video may therefore appear plausible while violating the intended mechanism, such as rotating a part that should translate, deforming a rigid component, breaking coupling between parts, or failing to move downstream components. To evaluate this gap, We introduce MechVerse, a benchmark for mechanically consistent image-to-video generation. MechVerse contains 21,156 synthetic clips from 1,357 mechanical assemblies across 141 categories, organized into three tiers of increasing kinematic complexity: independent articulation, pairwise coupling, and densely coupled multi-part mechanisms. Each clip is paired with a structured prompt describing part identities, stationary supports, moving components, motion primitives, direction, speed/extent, and inter-part dependencies. We evaluate proprietary, open-source, and fine-tuned image-to-video models using standard video metrics, instruction-following scores, and human judgments of motion correctness and kinematic coupling. Results show that current models can preserve appearance and smoothness while failing to generate mechanically admissible motion, with errors increasing as coupling complexity grows. MechVerse provides a benchmark for measuring and improving mechanism-aware video generation from image and language inputs.

Operating robots precisely and at high speeds has been a long-standing goal of robotics research. Balancing these competing demands is key to enabling the seamless collaboration of robots and humans and increasing task performance. However, traditional motor-driven systems often fall short in this balancing act. Due to their rigid and often heavy design exacerbated by positioning the motors into the joints, faster motions of such robots transfer high forces at impact. To enable precise and safe dynamic motions, we introduce a four degree-of-freedom~(DoF) tendon-driven robot arm. Tendons allow placing the actuation at the base to reduce the robot's inertia, which we show significantly reduces peak collision forces compared to conventional robots with motors placed near the joints. Pairing our robot with pneumatic muscles allows generating high forces and highly accelerated motions, while benefiting from impact resilience through passive compliance. Since tendons are subject to additional friction and hence prone to wear and tear, we validate the reliability of our robotic arm on various experiments, including long-term dynamic motions. We also demonstrate its ease of control by quantifying the nonlinearities of the system and the performance on a challenging dynamic table tennis task learned from scratch using reinforcement learning. We open-source the entire hardware design, which can be largely 3D printed, the control software, and a proprioceptive dataset of 25 days of diverse robot motions at webdav.tuebingen.mpg.de/pamy2.

We present FORGE, a method for sim-to-real transfer of force-aware manipulation policies in the presence of significant pose uncertainty. During simulation-based policy learning, FORGE combines a force threshold mechanism with a dynamics randomization scheme to enable robust transfer of the learned policies to the real robot. At deployment, FORGE policies, conditioned on a maximum allowable force, adaptively perform contact-rich tasks while avoiding aggressive and unsafe behaviour, regardless of the controller gains. Additionally, FORGE policies predict task success, enabling efficient termination and autonomous tuning of the force threshold. We show that FORGE can be used to learn a variety of robust contact-rich policies, including the forceful insertion of snap-fit connectors. We further demonstrate the multistage assembly of a planetary gear system, which requires success across three assembly tasks: nut threading, insertion, and gear meshing. Project website can be accessed at https://noseworm.github.io/forge/.

We develop a novel policy synthesis algorithm, RMPflow, based on geometrically consistent transformations of Riemannian Motion Policies (RMPs). RMPs are a class of reactive motion policies designed to parameterize non-Euclidean behaviors as dynamical systems in intrinsically nonlinear task spaces. Given a set of RMPs designed for individual tasks, RMPflow can consistently combine these local policies to generate an expressive global policy, while simultaneously exploiting sparse structure for computational efficiency. We study the geometric properties of RMPflow and provide sufficient conditions for stability. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate that accounting for the geometry of task policies can simplify classically difficult problems, such as planning through clutter on high-DOF manipulation systems.

We present Dojo, a differentiable physics engine for robotics that prioritizes stable simulation, accurate contact physics, and differentiability with respect to states, actions, and system parameters. Dojo models hard contact and friction with a nonlinear complementarity problem with second-order cone constraints. We introduce a custom primal-dual interior-point method to solve the second order cone program for stable forward simulation over a broad range of sample rates. We obtain smooth gradient approximations with this solver through the implicit function theorem, giving gradients that are useful for downstream trajectory optimization, policy optimization, and system identification applications. Specifically, we propose to use the central path parameter threshold in the interior point solver as a user-tunable design parameter. A high value gives a smooth approximation to contact dynamics with smooth gradients for optimization and learning, while a low value gives precise simulation rollouts with hard contact. We demonstrate Dojo's differentiability in trajectory optimization, policy learning, and system identification examples. We also benchmark Dojo against MuJoCo, PyBullet, Drake, and Brax on a variety of robot models, and study the stability and simulation quality over a range of sample frequencies and accuracy tolerances. Finally, we evaluate the sim-to-real gap in hardware experiments with a Ufactory xArm 6 robot. Dojo is an open source project implemented in Julia with Python bindings, with code available at https://github.com/dojo-sim/Dojo.jl.

While generative models have excelled at creating static 3D content, the pursuit of systems that understand how objects move and respond to interactions remains a fundamental challenge. Current methods for articulated motion lie at a crossroads: they are either physically consistent but too slow for real-time use, or generative but violate basic kinematic constraints. We present DragMesh, a robust framework for real-time interactive 3D articulation built around a lightweight motion generation core. Our core contribution is a novel decoupled kinematic reasoning and motion generation framework. First, we infer the latent joint parameters by decoupling semantic intent reasoning (which determines the joint type) from geometric regression (which determines the axis and origin using our Kinematics Prediction Network (KPP-Net)). Second, to leverage the compact, continuous, and singularity-free properties of dual quaternions for representing rigid body motion, we develop a novel Dual Quaternion VAE (DQ-VAE). This DQ-VAE receives these predicted priors, along with the original user drag, to generate a complete, plausible motion trajectory. To ensure strict adherence to kinematics, we inject the joint priors at every layer of the DQ-VAE's non-autoregressive Transformer decoder using FiLM (Feature-wise Linear Modulation) conditioning. This persistent, multi-scale guidance is complemented by a numerically-stable cross-product loss to guarantee axis alignment. This decoupled design allows DragMesh to achieve real-time performance and enables plausible, generative articulation on novel objects without retraining, offering a practical step toward generative 3D intelligence. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/DragMesh. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/DragMesh.

Existing RGB-based imitation learning approaches typically employ traditional vision encoders such as ResNet or ViT, which lack explicit 3D reasoning capabilities. Recent geometry-grounded vision models, such as VGGT~wang2025vggt, provide robust spatial understanding and are promising candidates to address this limitation. This work investigates the integration of geometry-aware visual representations into robotic manipulation. Our results suggest that incorporating the geometry-aware vision encoder into imitation learning frameworks, including ACT and DP, yields up to 6.5% improvement over standard vision encoders in success rate across single- and bi-manual manipulation tasks in both simulation and real-world settings. Despite these benefits, most geometry-grounded models require high computational cost, limiting their deployment in practical robotic systems. To address this challenge, we propose eVGGT, an efficient geometry-aware encoder distilled from VGGT. eVGGT is nearly 9 times faster and 5 times smaller than VGGT, while preserving strong 3D reasoning capabilities. Code and pretrained models will be released to facilitate further research in geometry-aware robotics.

This paper introduces H-MaP, a hybrid sequential manipulation planner that addresses complex tasks requiring both sequential actions and dynamic contact mode switches. Our approach reduces configuration space dimensionality by decoupling object trajectory planning from manipulation planning through object-based waypoint generation, informed contact sampling, and optimization-based motion planning. This architecture enables handling of challenging scenarios involving tool use, auxiliary object manipulation, and bimanual coordination. Experimental results across seven diverse tasks demonstrate H-MaP's superior performance compared to existing methods, particularly in highly constrained environments where traditional approaches fail due to local minima or scalability issues. The planner's effectiveness is validated through both simulation and real-robot experiments.

Motion planning under dynamics constraints, i.e., kinodynamic planning, enables safe robot operation by generating dynamically feasible trajectories that the robot can accurately track. For high-\dof robots such as manipulators, sampling-based motion planners are commonly used, especially for complex tasks in cluttered environments. However, enforcing constraints on robot dynamics in such planners requires solving either challenging two-point boundary value problems (BVPs) or propagating robot dynamics over time, both of which are computational bottlenecks that drastically increase planning times. Meanwhile, recent efforts have shown that sampling-based motion planners can generate plans in microseconds using parallelization, but are limited to geometric paths. This paper develops AkinoPDF, a fast parallelized sampling-based kinodynamic motion planning technique for a broad class of differentially flat robot systems, including manipulators, ground and aerial vehicles, and more. Differential flatness allows us to transform the motion planning problem from the original state space to a flat output space, where an analytical time-parameterized solution of the BVP and dynamics integration can be obtained. A trajectory in the flat output space is then converted back to a closed-form dynamically feasible trajectory in the original state space, enabling fast validation via ``single instruction, multiple data" parallelism. Our method is fast, exact, and compatible with any sampling-based motion planner. We extensively verify the effectiveness of our approach in both simulated benchmarks and real experiments with cluttered and dynamic environments, requiring mere microseconds to milliseconds of planning time.

Robot co-design, where the morphology of a robot is optimized jointly with a learned policy to solve a specific task, is an emerging area of research. It holds particular promise for soft robots, which are amenable to novel manufacturing techniques that can realize learned morphologies and actuators. Inspired by nature and recent novel robot designs, we propose to go a step further and explore the novel reconfigurable robots, defined as robots that can change their morphology within their lifetime. We formalize control of reconfigurable soft robots as a high-dimensional reinforcement learning (RL) problem. We unify morphology change, locomotion, and environment interaction in the same action space, and introduce an appropriate, coarse-to-fine curriculum that enables us to discover policies that accomplish fine-grained control of the resulting robots. We also introduce DittoGym, a comprehensive RL benchmark for reconfigurable soft robots that require fine-grained morphology changes to accomplish the tasks. Finally, we evaluate our proposed coarse-to-fine algorithm on DittoGym and demonstrate robots that learn to change their morphology several times within a sequence, uniquely enabled by our RL algorithm. More results are available at https://dittogym.github.io.

Micro-Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have the advantage of moving freely in 3D space. However, creating compact and sparse map representations that can be efficiently used for planning for such robots is still an open problem. In this paper, we take maps built from noisy sensor data and construct a sparse graph containing topological information that can be used for 3D planning. We use a Euclidean Signed Distance Field, extract a 3D Generalized Voronoi Diagram (GVD), and obtain a thin skeleton diagram representing the topological structure of the environment. We then convert this skeleton diagram into a sparse graph, which we show is resistant to noise and changes in resolution. We demonstrate global planning over this graph, and the orders of magnitude speed-up it offers over other common planning methods. We validate our planning algorithm in real maps built onboard an MAV, using RGB-D sensing.

Generalist robot policies must follow user instructions while reasoning about how objects, cameras, and robot actions interact in the 3D physical world. Recent vision-language-action models (VLAs) and video world-action models (WAMs) inherit strong semantic or temporal priors from large-scale foundation models, but they still operate primarily on 2D image frames or 2D-derived latent spaces, leaving implicit the 3D geometry required for contact-rich manipulation. We propose the Geometric Action Model (GAM), a language-conditioned manipulation policy that directly repurposes a pretrained geometric foundation model (GFM) as a shared substrate for perception, temporal prediction, and action decoding. GAM splits the GFM at an intermediate layer: the shallow layers serve as an observation encoder, and a causal future predictor inserted at the split layer forecasts future latent tokens conditioned on language, proprioception, and action history. The predicted future tokens are then routed through the remaining GFM blocks for feature propagation and decoding, allowing a single backbone to produce both future geometry and actions. This design equips the GFM with language-conditioned temporal world modeling through minimal architectural modification while preserving its rich geometric priors. Across a broad suite of simulation and real-robot manipulation benchmarks, GAM is more accurate, more robust, faster, and lighter than current foundation-model-scale baselines.

Vision-language-action models have emerged as a crucial paradigm in robotic manipulation. However, existing VLA models exhibit notable limitations in handling ambiguous language instructions and unknown environmental states. Furthermore, their perception is largely constrained to static two-dimensional observations, lacking the capability to model three-dimensional interactions between the robot and its environment. To address these challenges, this paper proposes GraphCoT-VLA, an efficient end-to-end model. To enhance the model's ability to interpret ambiguous instructions and improve task planning, we design a structured Chain-of-Thought reasoning module that integrates high-level task understanding and planning, failed task feedback, and low-level imaginative reasoning about future object positions and robot actions. Additionally, we construct a real-time updatable 3D Pose-Object graph, which captures the spatial configuration of robot joints and the topological relationships between objects in 3D space, enabling the model to better understand and manipulate their interactions. We further integrates a dropout hybrid reasoning strategy to achieve efficient control outputs. Experimental results across multiple real-world robotic tasks demonstrate that GraphCoT-VLA significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of task success rate and response speed, exhibiting strong generalization and robustness in open environments and under uncertain instructions.

While significant research progress has been made in robot learning for control, unique challenges arise when simultaneously co-optimizing morphology. Existing work has typically been tailored for particular environments or representations. In order to more fully understand inherent design and performance tradeoffs and accelerate the development of new breeds of soft robots, a comprehensive virtual platform with well-established tasks, environments, and evaluation metrics is needed. In this work, we introduce SoftZoo, a soft robot co-design platform for locomotion in diverse environments. SoftZoo supports an extensive, naturally-inspired material set, including the ability to simulate environments such as flat ground, desert, wetland, clay, ice, snow, shallow water, and ocean. Further, it provides a variety of tasks relevant for soft robotics, including fast locomotion, agile turning, and path following, as well as differentiable design representations for morphology and control. Combined, these elements form a feature-rich platform for analysis and development of soft robot co-design algorithms. We benchmark prevalent representations and co-design algorithms, and shed light on 1) the interplay between environment, morphology, and behavior; 2) the importance of design space representations; 3) the ambiguity in muscle formation and controller synthesis; and 4) the value of differentiable physics. We envision that SoftZoo will serve as a standard platform and template an approach toward the development of novel representations and algorithms for co-designing soft robots' behavioral and morphological intelligence.

Legged robots have achieved impressive feats in dynamic locomotion in challenging unstructured terrain. However, in entertainment applications, the design and control of these robots face additional challenges in appealing to human audiences. This work aims to unify expressive, artist-directed motions and robust dynamic mobility for legged robots. To this end, we introduce a new bipedal robot, designed with a focus on character-driven mechanical features. We present a reinforcement learning-based control architecture to robustly execute artistic motions conditioned on command signals. During runtime, these command signals are generated by an animation engine which composes and blends between multiple animation sources. Finally, an intuitive operator interface enables real-time show performances with the robot. The complete system results in a believable robotic character, and paves the way for enhanced human-robot engagement in various contexts, in entertainment robotics and beyond.

Path-velocity decomposition is an intuitive yet powerful approach to address the complexity of kinodynamic motion planning. The difficult trajectory planning problem is solved in two separate, simpler, steps: first, find a path in the configuration space that satisfies the geometric constraints (path planning), and second, find a time-parameterization of that path satisfying the kinodynamic constraints. A fundamental requirement is that the path found in the first step should be time-parameterizable. Most existing works fulfill this requirement by enforcing quasi-static constraints in the path planning step, resulting in an important loss in completeness. We propose a method that enables path-velocity decomposition to discover truly dynamic motions, i.e. motions that are not quasi-statically executable. At the heart of the proposed method is a new algorithm -- Admissible Velocity Propagation -- which, given a path and an interval of reachable velocities at the beginning of that path, computes exactly and efficiently the interval of all the velocities the system can reach after traversing the path while respecting the system kinodynamic constraints. Combining this algorithm with usual sampling-based planners then gives rise to a family of new trajectory planners that can appropriately handle kinodynamic constraints while retaining the advantages associated with path-velocity decomposition. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method on some difficult kinodynamic planning problems, where, in particular, quasi-static methods are guaranteed to fail.

Sampling-based algorithms are viewed as practical solutions for high-dimensional motion planning. Recent progress has taken advantage of random geometric graph theory to show how asymptotic optimality can also be achieved with these methods. Achieving this desirable property for systems with dynamics requires solving a two-point boundary value problem (BVP) in the state space of the underlying dynamical system. It is difficult, however, if not impractical, to generate a BVP solver for a variety of important dynamical models of robots or physically simulated ones. Thus, an open challenge was whether it was even possible to achieve optimality guarantees when planning for systems without access to a BVP solver. This work resolves the above question and describes how to achieve asymptotic optimality for kinodynamic planning using incremental sampling-based planners by introducing a new rigorous framework. Two new methods, Stable Sparse-RRT (SST) and SST*, result from this analysis, which are asymptotically near-optimal and optimal, respectively. The techniques are shown to converge fast to high-quality paths, while they maintain only a sparse set of samples, which makes them computationally efficient. The good performance of the planners is confirmed by experimental results using dynamical systems benchmarks, as well as physically simulated robots.

We introduce PAT3D, the first physics-augmented text-to-3D scene generation framework that integrates vision-language models with physics-based simulation to produce physically plausible, simulation-ready, and intersection-free 3D scenes. Given a text prompt, PAT3D generates 3D objects, infers their spatial relations, and organizes them into a hierarchical scene tree, which is then converted into initial conditions for simulation. A differentiable rigid-body simulator ensures realistic object interactions under gravity, driving the scene toward static equilibrium without interpenetrations. To further enhance scene quality, we introduce a simulation-in-the-loop optimization procedure that guarantees physical stability and non-intersection, while improving semantic consistency with the input prompt. Experiments demonstrate that PAT3D substantially outperforms prior approaches in physical plausibility, semantic consistency, and visual quality. Beyond high-quality generation, PAT3D uniquely enables simulation-ready 3D scenes for downstream tasks such as scene editing and robotic manipulation. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Simulation-Intelligence/PAT3D.

Creating accurate, physical simulations directly from real-world robot motion holds great value for safe, scalable, and affordable robot learning, yet remains exceptionally challenging. Real robot data suffers from occlusions, noisy camera poses, dynamic scene elements, which hinder the creation of geometrically accurate and photorealistic digital twins of unseen objects. We introduce a novel real-to-sim framework tackling all these challenges at once. Our key insight is a hybrid scene representation merging the photorealistic rendering of 3D Gaussian Splatting with explicit object meshes suitable for physics simulation within a single representation. We propose an end-to-end optimization pipeline that leverages differentiable rendering and differentiable physics within MuJoCo to jointly refine all scene components - from object geometry and appearance to robot poses and physical parameters - directly from raw and imprecise robot trajectories. This unified optimization allows us to simultaneously achieve high-fidelity object mesh reconstruction, generate photorealistic novel views, and perform annotation-free robot pose calibration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach both in simulation and on challenging real-world sequences using an ALOHA 2 bi-manual manipulator, enabling more practical and robust real-to-simulation pipelines.

For robots to be useful outside labs and specialized factories we need a way to teach them new useful behaviors quickly. Current approaches lack either the generality to onboard new tasks without task-specific engineering, or else lack the data-efficiency to do so in an amount of time that enables practical use. In this work we explore dense tracking as a representational vehicle to allow faster and more general learning from demonstration. Our approach utilizes Track-Any-Point (TAP) models to isolate the relevant motion in a demonstration, and parameterize a low-level controller to reproduce this motion across changes in the scene configuration. We show this results in robust robot policies that can solve complex object-arrangement tasks such as shape-matching, stacking, and even full path-following tasks such as applying glue and sticking objects together, all from demonstrations that can be collected in minutes.

We propose a contact-explicit hierarchical architecture coupling Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Model Predictive Control (MPC), where a high-level RL agent provides gait and navigation commands to a low-level locomotion MPC. This offloads the combinatorial burden of contact timing from the MPC by learning acyclic gaits through trial and error in simulation. We show that only a minimal set of rewards and limited tuning are required to obtain effective policies. We validate the architecture in simulation across robotic platforms spanning 50 kg to 120 kg and different MPC implementations, observing the emergence of acyclic gaits and timing adaptations in flat-terrain legged and hybrid locomotion, and further demonstrating extensibility to non-flat terrains. Across all platforms, we achieve zero-shot sim-to-sim transfer without domain randomization, and we further demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer without domain randomization on Centauro, our 120 kg wheeled-legged humanoid robot. We make our software framework and evaluation results publicly available at https://github.com/AndrePatri/AugMPC.

This paper explores the problem of collision-free motion generation for manipulators by formulating it as a global motion optimization problem. We develop a parallel optimization technique to solve this problem and demonstrate its effectiveness on massively parallel GPUs. We show that combining simple optimization techniques with many parallel seeds leads to solving difficult motion generation problems within 50ms on average, 60x faster than state-of-the-art (SOTA) trajectory optimization methods. We achieve SOTA performance by combining L-BFGS step direction estimation with a novel parallel noisy line search scheme and a particle-based optimization solver. To further aid trajectory optimization, we develop a parallel geometric planner that plans within 20ms and also introduce a collision-free IK solver that can solve over 7000 queries/s. We package our contributions into a state of the art GPU accelerated motion generation library, cuRobo and release it to enrich the robotics community. Additional details are available at https://curobo.org

This paper investigates the direct application of standardized designs on the robot for conducting robot hand-eye calibration by employing 3D scanners with collaborative robots. The well-established geometric features of the robot flange are exploited by directly capturing its point cloud data. In particular, an iterative method is proposed to facilitate point cloud processing toward a refined calibration outcome. Several extensive experiments are conducted over a range of collaborative robots, including Universal Robots UR5 & UR10 e-series, Franka Emika, and AUBO i5 using an industrial-grade 3D scanner Photoneo Phoxi S & M and a commercial-grade 3D scanner Microsoft Azure Kinect DK. Experimental results show that translational and rotational errors converge efficiently to less than 0.28 mm and 0.25 degrees, respectively, achieving a hand-eye calibration accuracy as high as the camera's resolution, probing the hardware limit. A welding seam tracking system is presented, combining the flange-based calibration method with soft tactile sensing. The experiment results show that the system enables the robot to adjust its motion in real-time, ensuring consistent weld quality and paving the way for more efficient and adaptable manufacturing processes.

We study the problem of collision-free humanoid traversal in cluttered indoor scenes, such as hurdling over objects scattered on the floor, crouching under low-hanging obstacles, or squeezing through narrow passages. To achieve this goal, the humanoid needs to map its perception of surrounding obstacles with diverse spatial layouts and geometries to the corresponding traversal skills. However, the lack of an effective representation that captures humanoid-obstacle relationships during collision avoidance makes directly learning such mappings difficult. We therefore propose Humanoid Potential Field (HumanoidPF), which encodes these relationships as collision-free motion directions, significantly facilitating RL-based traversal skill learning. We also find that HumanoidPF exhibits a surprisingly negligible sim-to-real gap as a perceptual representation. To further enable generalizable traversal skills through diverse and challenging cluttered indoor scenes, we further propose a hybrid scene generation method, incorporating crops of realistic 3D indoor scenes and procedurally synthesized obstacles. We successfully transfer our policy to the real world and develop a teleoperation system where users could command the humanoid to traverse in cluttered indoor scenes with just a single click. Extensive experiments are conducted in both simulation and the real world to validate the effectiveness of our method. Demos and code can be found in our website: https://axian12138.github.io/CAT/.

Articulated objects are commonly found in daily life. It is essential that robots can exhibit robust perception and manipulation skills for articulated objects in real-world robotic applications. However, existing methods for articulated objects insufficiently address noise in point clouds and struggle to bridge the gap between simulation and reality, thus limiting the practical deployment in real-world scenarios. To tackle these challenges, we propose a framework towards Robust Perception and Manipulation for Articulated Objects (RPMArt), which learns to estimate the articulation parameters and manipulate the articulation part from the noisy point cloud. Our primary contribution is a Robust Articulation Network (RoArtNet) that is able to predict both joint parameters and affordable points robustly by local feature learning and point tuple voting. Moreover, we introduce an articulation-aware classification scheme to enhance its ability for sim-to-real transfer. Finally, with the estimated affordable point and articulation joint constraint, the robot can generate robust actions to manipulate articulated objects. After learning only from synthetic data, RPMArt is able to transfer zero-shot to real-world articulated objects. Experimental results confirm our approach's effectiveness, with our framework achieving state-of-the-art performance in both noise-added simulation and real-world environments. The code and data will be open-sourced for reproduction. More results are published on the project website at https://r-pmart.github.io .

This work proposes a new formulation to the long-standing problem of convex decomposition through learning feature fields, enabling the first feed-forward model for open-world convex decomposition. Our method produces high-quality decompositions of 3D shapes into a union of convex bodies, which are essential to accelerate collision detection in physical simulation, amongst many other applications. The key insight is to adopt a feature learning approach and learn a continuous feature field that can later be clustered to yield a good convex decomposition via our self-supervised, purely-geometric objective derived from the classical definition of convexity. Our formulation can be used for single shape optimization, but more importantly, feature prediction unlocks scalable, self-supervised learning on large datasets resulting in the first learned open-world model for convex decomposition. Experiments show that our decompositions are higher-quality than alternatives and generalize across open-world objects as well as across representations to meshes, CAD models, and even Gaussian splats. https://research.nvidia.com/labs/sil/projects/learning-convex-decomp/

Ensuring safe navigation in complex environments requires accurate real-time traversability assessment and understanding of environmental interactions relative to the robot`s capabilities. Traditional methods, which assume simplified dynamics, often require designing and tuning cost functions to safely guide paths or actions toward the goal. This process is tedious, environment-dependent, and not generalizable. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel learned perceptive Forward Dynamics Model (FDM) that predicts the robot`s future state conditioned on the surrounding geometry and history of proprioceptive measurements, proposing a more scalable, safer, and heuristic-free solution. The FDM is trained on multiple years of simulated navigation experience, including high-risk maneuvers, and real-world interactions to incorporate the full system dynamics beyond rigid body simulation. We integrate our perceptive FDM into a zero-shot Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning framework, leveraging the learned mapping between actions, future states, and failure probability. This allows for optimizing a simplified cost function, eliminating the need for extensive cost-tuning to ensure safety. On the legged robot ANYmal, the proposed perceptive FDM improves the position estimation by on average 41% over competitive baselines, which translates into a 27% higher navigation success rate in rough simulation environments. Moreover, we demonstrate effective sim-to-real transfer and showcase the benefit of training on synthetic and real data. Code and models are made publicly available under https://github.com/leggedrobotics/fdm.

Reconstructing dynamic hand-object interactions from monocular videos is critical for dexterous manipulation data collection and creating realistic digital twins for robotics and VR. However, current methods face two prohibitive barriers: (1) reliance on neural rendering often yields fragmented, non-simulation-ready geometries under heavy occlusion, and (2) dependence on brittle Structure-from-Motion (SfM) initialization leads to frequent failures on in-the-wild footage. To overcome these limitations, we introduce AGILE, a robust framework that shifts the paradigm from reconstruction to agentic generation for interaction learning. First, we employ an agentic pipeline where a Vision-Language Model (VLM) guides a generative model to synthesize a complete, watertight object mesh with high-fidelity texture, independent of video occlusions. Second, bypassing fragile SfM entirely, we propose a robust anchor-and-track strategy. We initialize the object pose at a single interaction onset frame using a foundation model and propagate it temporally by leveraging the strong visual similarity between our generated asset and video observations. Finally, a contact-aware optimization integrates semantic, geometric, and interaction stability constraints to enforce physical plausibility. Extensive experiments on HO3D, DexYCB, and in-the-wild videos reveal that AGILE outperforms baselines in global geometric accuracy while demonstrating exceptional robustness on challenging sequences where prior art frequently collapses. By prioritizing physical validity, our method produces simulation-ready assets validated via real-to-sim retargeting for robotic applications.

Physical simulators have been widely used in robot planning and control. Among them, differentiable simulators are particularly favored, as they can be incorporated into gradient-based optimization algorithms that are efficient in solving inverse problems such as optimal control and motion planning. Simulating deformable objects is, however, more challenging compared to rigid body dynamics. The underlying physical laws of deformable objects are more complex, and the resulting systems have orders of magnitude more degrees of freedom and therefore they are significantly more computationally expensive to simulate. Computing gradients with respect to physical design or controller parameters is typically even more computationally challenging. In this paper, we propose a real-time, differentiable hybrid Lagrangian-Eulerian physical simulator for deformable objects, ChainQueen, based on the Moving Least Squares Material Point Method (MLS-MPM). MLS-MPM can simulate deformable objects including contact and can be seamlessly incorporated into inference, control and co-design systems. We demonstrate that our simulator achieves high precision in both forward simulation and backward gradient computation. We have successfully employed it in a diverse set of control tasks for soft robots, including problems with nearly 3,000 decision variables.

Manipulating articulated tools, such as tweezers or scissors, has rarely been explored in previous research. Unlike rigid tools, articulated tools change their shape dynamically, creating unique challenges for dexterous robotic hands. In this work, we present a hierarchical, goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) framework to improve the manipulation capabilities of anthropomorphic robotic hands using articulated tools. Our framework comprises two policy layers: (1) a low-level policy that enables the dexterous hand to manipulate the tool into various configurations for objects of different sizes, and (2) a high-level policy that defines the tool's goal state and controls the robotic arm for object-picking tasks. We employ an encoder, trained on synthetic pointclouds, to estimate the tool's affordance states--specifically, how different tool configurations (e.g., tweezer opening angles) enable grasping of objects of varying sizes--from input point clouds, thereby enabling precise tool manipulation. We also utilize a privilege-informed heuristic policy to generate replay buffer, improving the training efficiency of the high-level policy. We validate our approach through real-world experiments, showing that the robot can effectively manipulate a tweezer-like tool to grasp objects of diverse shapes and sizes with a 70.8 % success rate. This study highlights the potential of RL to advance dexterous robotic manipulation of articulated tools.

In this paper we present a novel probabilistic sampling-based motion planning algorithm called the Fast Marching Tree algorithm (FMT*). The algorithm is specifically aimed at solving complex motion planning problems in high-dimensional configuration spaces. This algorithm is proven to be asymptotically optimal and is shown to converge to an optimal solution faster than its state-of-the-art counterparts, chiefly PRM* and RRT*. The FMT* algorithm performs a "lazy" dynamic programming recursion on a predetermined number of probabilistically-drawn samples to grow a tree of paths, which moves steadily outward in cost-to-arrive space. As a departure from previous analysis approaches that are based on the notion of almost sure convergence, the FMT* algorithm is analyzed under the notion of convergence in probability: the extra mathematical flexibility of this approach allows for convergence rate bounds--the first in the field of optimal sampling-based motion planning. Specifically, for a certain selection of tuning parameters and configuration spaces, we obtain a convergence rate bound of order O(n^{-1/d+ρ}), where n is the number of sampled points, d is the dimension of the configuration space, and ρ is an arbitrarily small constant. We go on to demonstrate asymptotic optimality for a number of variations on FMT*, namely when the configuration space is sampled non-uniformly, when the cost is not arc length, and when connections are made based on the number of nearest neighbors instead of a fixed connection radius. Numerical experiments over a range of dimensions and obstacle configurations confirm our theoretical and heuristic arguments by showing that FMT*, for a given execution time, returns substantially better solutions than either PRM* or RRT*, especially in high-dimensional configuration spaces and in scenarios where collision-checking is expensive.

Recent advances in multi-fingered robotic grasping have enabled fast 6-Degrees-Of-Freedom (DOF) single object grasping. Multi-finger grasping in cluttered scenes, on the other hand, remains mostly unexplored due to the added difficulty of reasoning over obstacles which greatly increases the computational time to generate high-quality collision-free grasps. In this work we address such limitations by introducing DDGC, a fast generative multi-finger grasp sampling method that can generate high quality grasps in cluttered scenes from a single RGB-D image. DDGC is built as a network that encodes scene information to produce coarse-to-fine collision-free grasp poses and configurations. We experimentally benchmark DDGC against the simulated-annealing planner in GraspIt! on 1200 simulated cluttered scenes and 7 real world scenes. The results show that DDGC outperforms the baseline on synthesizing high-quality grasps and removing clutter while being 5 times faster. This, in turn, opens up the door for using multi-finger grasps in practical applications which has so far been limited due to the excessive computation time needed by other methods.

While non-prehensile manipulation (e.g., controlled pushing/poking) constitutes a foundational robotic skill, its learning remains challenging due to the high sensitivity to complex physical interactions involving friction and restitution. To achieve robust policy learning and generalization, we opt to learn a world model of the 3D rigid body dynamics involved in non-prehensile manipulations and use it for model-based reinforcement learning. We propose PIN-WM, a Physics-INformed World Model that enables efficient end-to-end identification of a 3D rigid body dynamical system from visual observations. Adopting differentiable physics simulation, PIN-WM can be learned with only few-shot and task-agnostic physical interaction trajectories. Further, PIN-WM is learned with observational loss induced by Gaussian Splatting without needing state estimation. To bridge Sim2Real gaps, we turn the learned PIN-WM into a group of Digital Cousins via physics-aware randomizations which perturb physics and rendering parameters to generate diverse and meaningful variations of the PIN-WM. Extensive evaluations on both simulation and real-world tests demonstrate that PIN-WM, enhanced with physics-aware digital cousins, facilitates learning robust non-prehensile manipulation skills with Sim2Real transfer, surpassing the Real2Sim2Real state-of-the-arts.

Multi-cellular robot design aims to create robots comprised of numerous cells that can be efficiently controlled to perform diverse tasks. Previous research has demonstrated the ability to generate robots for various tasks, but these approaches often optimize robots directly in the vast design space, resulting in robots with complicated morphologies that are hard to control. In response, this paper presents a novel coarse-to-fine method for designing multi-cellular robots. Initially, this strategy seeks optimal coarse-grained robots and progressively refines them. To mitigate the challenge of determining the precise refinement juncture during the coarse-to-fine transition, we introduce the Hyperbolic Embeddings for Robot Design (HERD) framework. HERD unifies robots of various granularity within a shared hyperbolic space and leverages a refined Cross-Entropy Method for optimization. This framework enables our method to autonomously identify areas of exploration in hyperbolic space and concentrate on regions demonstrating promise. Finally, the extensive empirical studies on various challenging tasks sourced from EvoGym show our approach's superior efficiency and generalization capability.

We are surrounded by various objects with movable, articulated parts, e.g., box, handle, door. An accurate and generalizable perception of articulated parts is essential to enhance robotic manipulation capabilities. Building on this need, recent efforts in articulated parts perception have followed two main directions: One line of work uses pose-based representation, which requires high manual cost; in parallel, affordance-based methods extract future object motion from point tracking without additional manual efforts, but suffer from low-quality data. In this paper, we propose a new representation of articulated parts, Geometric Primary Structure (GPS), an abstraction of the part geometry structure to balance scalability and quality. For efficient and scalable data collection, GPS is integrated with a portable Virtual Reality (VR) device and requires only one minute to annotate one object sequence. This direct human annotation provides higher quality than the estimated affordance. With this efficient VR-GPS system, we collect 41K frames for 234 objects across six part classes, and train a generalizable GPS model with a single RGB-D object image as input. For object manipulation, we deploy a heuristic policy based on GPS prediction. Without any in-domain fine-tuning, our method achieves an 73% success rate, covering 270 initial states for 9 objects. Our code, data and reusable tool are available at https://enlighten0707.github.io/gps.

We describe a mobile manipulation hardware and software system capable of autonomously performing complex human-level tasks in real homes, after being taught the task with a single demonstration from a person in virtual reality. This is enabled by a highly capable mobile manipulation robot, whole-body task space hybrid position/force control, teaching of parameterized primitives linked to a robust learned dense visual embeddings representation of the scene, and a task graph of the taught behaviors. We demonstrate the robustness of the approach by presenting results for performing a variety of tasks, under different environmental conditions, in multiple real homes. Our approach achieves 85% overall success rate on three tasks that consist of an average of 45 behaviors each.

It is desired to equip robots with the capability of interacting with various soft materials as they are ubiquitous in the real world. While physics simulations are one of the predominant methods for data collection and robot training, simulating soft materials presents considerable challenges. Specifically, it is significantly more costly than simulating rigid objects in terms of simulation speed and storage requirements. These limitations typically restrict the scope of studies on soft materials to small and bounded areas, thereby hindering the learning of skills in broader spaces. To address this issue, we introduce UBSoft, a new simulation platform designed to support unbounded soft environments for robot skill acquisition. Our platform utilizes spatially adaptive resolution scales, where simulation resolution dynamically adjusts based on proximity to active robotic agents. Our framework markedly reduces the demand for extensive storage space and computation costs required for large-scale scenarios involving soft materials. We also establish a set of benchmark tasks in our platform, including both locomotion and manipulation tasks, and conduct experiments to evaluate the efficacy of various reinforcement learning algorithms and trajectory optimization techniques, both gradient-based and sampling-based. Preliminary results indicate that sampling-based trajectory optimization generally achieves better results for obtaining one trajectory to solve the task. Additionally, we conduct experiments in real-world environments to demonstrate that advancements made in our UBSoft simulator could translate to improved robot interactions with large-scale soft material. More videos can be found at https://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/ubsoft/.

In this paper, we address force-aware control and force distribution in robotic platforms with multi-fingered hands. Given a target goal and force estimates from tactile sensors, we design a controller that adapts the motion of the torso, arm, wrist, and fingers, redistributing forces to maintain stable contact with objects of varying mass distribution or unstable contacts. To estimate forces, we collect a dataset of tactile signals and ground-truth force measurements using five Xela magnetic sensors interacting with indenters, and train force estimators. We then introduce a model-based control scheme that minimizes the distance between the Center of Pressure (CoP) and the centroid of the fingertips contact polygon. Since our method relies on estimated forces rather than raw tactile signals, it has the potential to be applied to any sensor capable of force estimation. We validate our framework on a balancing task with five objects, achieving a 82.7% success rate, and further evaluate it in multi-object scenarios, achieving 80% accuracy. Code and data can be found here https://github.com/hsp-iit/multifingered-force-aware-control.

Stable locomotion in precipitous environments is an essential capability of quadruped robots, demanding the ability to resist various external disturbances. However, recent learning-based policies only use basic domain randomization to improve the robustness of learned policies, which cannot guarantee that the robot has adequate disturbance resistance capabilities. In this paper, we propose to model the learning process as an adversarial interaction between the actor and a newly introduced disturber and ensure their optimization with H_{infty} constraint. In contrast to the actor that maximizes the discounted overall reward, the disturber is responsible for generating effective external forces and is optimized by maximizing the error between the task reward and its oracle, i.e., "cost" in each iteration. To keep joint optimization between the actor and the disturber stable, our H_{infty} constraint mandates the bound of ratio between the cost to the intensity of the external forces. Through reciprocal interaction throughout the training phase, the actor can acquire the capability to navigate increasingly complex physical disturbances. We verify the robustness of our approach on quadrupedal locomotion tasks with Unitree Aliengo robot, and also a more challenging task with Unitree A1 robot, where the quadruped is expected to perform locomotion merely on its hind legs as if it is a bipedal robot. The simulated quantitative results show improvement against baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of the method and each design choice. On the other hand, real-robot experiments qualitatively exhibit how robust the policy is when interfering with various disturbances on various terrains, including stairs, high platforms, slopes, and slippery terrains. All code, checkpoints, and real-world deployment guidance will be made public.

Quadrupedal robots with manipulators offer strong mobility and adaptability for grasping in unstructured, dynamic environments through coordinated whole-body control. However, existing research has predominantly focused on static-object grasping, neglecting the challenges posed by dynamic targets and thus limiting applicability in dynamic scenarios such as logistics sorting and human-robot collaboration. To address this, we introduce DQ-Bench, a new benchmark that systematically evaluates dynamic grasping across varying object motions, velocities, heights, object types, and terrain complexities, along with comprehensive evaluation metrics. Building upon this benchmark, we propose DQ-Net, a compact teacher-student framework designed to infer grasp configurations from limited perceptual cues. During training, the teacher network leverages privileged information to holistically model both the static geometric properties and dynamic motion characteristics of the target, and integrates a grasp fusion module to deliver robust guidance for motion planning. Concurrently, we design a lightweight student network that performs dual-viewpoint temporal modeling using only the target mask, depth map, and proprioceptive state, enabling closed-loop action outputs without reliance on privileged data. Extensive experiments on DQ-Bench demonstrate that DQ-Net achieves robust dynamic objects grasping across multiple task settings, substantially outperforming baseline methods in both success rate and responsiveness.

Problems involving geometric data arise in a variety of fields, including computer vision, robotics, chemistry, and physics. Such data can take numerous forms, such as points, direction vectors, planes, or transformations, but to date there is no single architecture that can be applied to such a wide variety of geometric types while respecting their symmetries. In this paper we introduce the Geometric Algebra Transformer (GATr), a general-purpose architecture for geometric data. GATr represents inputs, outputs, and hidden states in the projective geometric algebra, which offers an efficient 16-dimensional vector space representation of common geometric objects as well as operators acting on them. GATr is equivariant with respect to E(3), the symmetry group of 3D Euclidean space. As a transformer, GATr is scalable, expressive, and versatile. In experiments with n-body modeling and robotic planning, GATr shows strong improvements over non-geometric baselines.

Visual navigation in robotics traditionally relies on globally-consistent 3D maps or learned controllers, which can be computationally expensive and difficult to generalize across diverse environments. In this work, we present a novel RGB-only, object-level topometric navigation pipeline that enables zero-shot, long-horizon robot navigation without requiring 3D maps or pre-trained controllers. Our approach integrates global topological path planning with local metric trajectory control, allowing the robot to navigate towards object-level sub-goals while avoiding obstacles. We address key limitations of previous methods by continuously predicting local trajectory using monocular depth and traversability estimation, and incorporating an auto-switching mechanism that falls back to a baseline controller when necessary. The system operates using foundational models, ensuring open-set applicability without the need for domain-specific fine-tuning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both simulated environments and real-world tests, highlighting its robustness and deployability. Our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, offering a more adaptable and effective solution for visual navigation in open-set environments. The source code is made publicly available: https://github.com/podgorki/TANGO.

Both the design and control of a robot play equally important roles in its task performance. However, while optimal control is well studied in the machine learning and robotics community, less attention is placed on finding the optimal robot design. This is mainly because co-optimizing design and control in robotics is characterized as a challenging problem, and more importantly, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for co-optimization does not exist. In this paper, we propose Evolution Gym, the first large-scale benchmark for co-optimizing the design and control of soft robots. In our benchmark, each robot is composed of different types of voxels (e.g., soft, rigid, actuators), resulting in a modular and expressive robot design space. Our benchmark environments span a wide range of tasks, including locomotion on various types of terrains and manipulation. Furthermore, we develop several robot co-evolution algorithms by combining state-of-the-art design optimization methods and deep reinforcement learning techniques. Evaluating the algorithms on our benchmark platform, we observe robots exhibiting increasingly complex behaviors as evolution progresses, with the best evolved designs solving many of our proposed tasks. Additionally, even though robot designs are evolved autonomously from scratch without prior knowledge, they often grow to resemble existing natural creatures while outperforming hand-designed robots. Nevertheless, all tested algorithms fail to find robots that succeed in our hardest environments. This suggests that more advanced algorithms are required to explore the high-dimensional design space and evolve increasingly intelligent robots -- an area of research in which we hope Evolution Gym will accelerate progress. Our website with code, environments, documentation, and tutorials is available at http://evogym.csail.mit.edu.

Articulated objects are common in the real world, yet modeling their structure and motion remains a challenging task for 3D reconstruction methods. In this work, we introduce Part^{2}GS, a novel framework for modeling articulated digital twins of multi-part objects with high-fidelity geometry and physically consistent articulation. Part^{2}GS leverages a part-aware 3D Gaussian representation that encodes articulated components with learnable attributes, enabling structured, disentangled transformations that preserve high-fidelity geometry. To ensure physically consistent motion, we propose a motion-aware canonical representation guided by physics-based constraints, including contact enforcement, velocity consistency, and vector-field alignment. Furthermore, we introduce a field of repel points to prevent part collisions and maintain stable articulation paths, significantly improving motion coherence over baselines. Extensive evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that Part^{2}GS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 10times in Chamfer Distance for movable parts.

Simulating robot-world interactions is a cornerstone of Embodied AI. Recently, a few works have shown promise in leveraging video generations to transcend the rigid visual/physical constraints of traditional simulators. However, they primarily operate in 2D space or are guided by static environmental cues, ignoring the fundamental reality that robot-world interactions are inherently 4D spatiotemporal events that require precise interactive modeling. To restore this 4D essence while ensuring the precise robot control, we introduce Kinema4D, a new action-conditioned 4D generative robotic simulator that disentangles the robot-world interaction into: i) Precise 4D representation of robot controls: we drive a URDF-based 3D robot via kinematics, producing a precise 4D robot control trajectory. ii) Generative 4D modeling of environmental reactions: we project the 4D robot trajectory into a pointmap as a spatiotemporal visual signal, controlling the generative model to synthesize complex environments' reactive dynamics into synchronized RGB/pointmap sequences. To facilitate training, we curated a large-scale dataset called Robo4D-200k, comprising 201,426 robot interaction episodes with high-quality 4D annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively simulates physically-plausible, geometry-consistent, and embodiment-agnostic interactions that faithfully mirror diverse real-world dynamics. For the first time, it shows potential zero-shot transfer capability, providing a high-fidelity foundation for advancing next-generation embodied simulation.

Articulated object recognition -- the task of identifying both the geometry and kinematic joints of objects with movable parts -- is essential for enabling robots to interact with everyday objects such as doors and laptops. However, existing approaches often rely on strong assumptions, such as a known number of articulated parts; require additional inputs, such as depth images; or involve complex intermediate steps that can introduce potential errors -- limiting their practicality in real-world settings. In this paper, we introduce ScrewSplat, a simple end-to-end method that operates solely on RGB observations. Our approach begins by randomly initializing screw axes, which are then iteratively optimized to recover the object's underlying kinematic structure. By integrating with Gaussian Splatting, we simultaneously reconstruct the 3D geometry and segment the object into rigid, movable parts. We demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art recognition accuracy across a diverse set of articulated objects, and further enables zero-shot, text-guided manipulation using the recovered kinematic model. See the project website at: https://screwsplat.github.io.

Recent advancements in robotics have enabled robots to navigate complex scenes or manipulate diverse objects independently. However, robots are still impotent in many household tasks requiring coordinated behaviors such as opening doors. The factorization of navigation and manipulation, while effective for some tasks, fails in scenarios requiring coordinated actions. To address this challenge, we introduce, HarmonicMM, an end-to-end learning method that optimizes both navigation and manipulation, showing notable improvement over existing techniques in everyday tasks. This approach is validated in simulated and real-world environments and adapts to novel unseen settings without additional tuning. Our contributions include a new benchmark for mobile manipulation and the successful deployment with only RGB visual observation in a real unseen apartment, demonstrating the potential for practical indoor robot deployment in daily life. More results are on our project site: https://rchalyang.github.io/HarmonicMM/

Robotic grasp and manipulation taxonomies, inspired by observing human manipulation strategies, can provide key guidance for tasks ranging from robotic gripper design to the development of manipulation algorithms. The existing grasp and manipulation taxonomies, however, often assume object rigidity, which limits their ability to reason about the complex interactions in the robotic manipulation of deformable objects. Hence, to assist in tasks involving deformable objects, taxonomies need to capture more comprehensively the interactions inherent in deformable object manipulation. To this end, we introduce T-DOM, a taxonomy that analyses key aspects involved in the manipulation of deformable objects, such as robot motion, forces, prehensile and non-prehensile interactions and, for the first time, a detailed classification of object deformations. To evaluate T-DOM, we curate a dataset of ten tasks involving a variety of deformable objects, such as garments, ropes, and surgical gloves, as well as diverse types of deformations. We analyse the proposed tasks comparing the T-DOM taxonomy with previous well established manipulation taxonomies. Our analysis demonstrates that T-DOM can effectively distinguish between manipulation skills that were not identified in other taxonomies, across different deformable objects and manipulation actions, offering new categories to characterize a skill. The proposed taxonomy significantly extends past work, providing a more fine-grained classification that can be used to describe the robotic manipulation of deformable objects. This work establishes a foundation for advancing deformable object manipulation, bridging theoretical understanding and practical implementation in robotic systems.

Scaling humanoid loco-manipulation requires robot-compatible demonstrations across diverse objects, whole-body motions, and scene geometries, but teleoperation and motion capture are difficult to scale because each collection depends on physical setups, instrumented actors, and robot operation. We present GRAIL, a digital generation pipeline that remains fully virtual until deployment: it composes 3D assets, simulator-ready scenes, and priors from video foundation models (VFMs) to synthesize interactions without rebuilding physical environments or teleoperating the robot. Rather than reconstructing unconstrained in-the-wild videos, GRAIL starts from fully specified 3D configurations in which object geometry, camera parameters, metric scale, environment depth, and a robot-proportioned character are known before video generation and reused during reconstruction. This privileged setup better conditions 4D recovery, allowing model-based object tracking, human motion estimation, and interaction-aware optimization to reconstruct metric 4D human-object interaction (HOI) trajectories with reduced depth ambiguity and morphology mismatch. We retarget the recovered motions to a humanoid robot and train complementary task-general trackers: an object-aware latent adaptor for manipulation and a scene-aware tracker for terrain traversal. GRAIL produces over 20,000 sequences spanning pick-up, object manipulation, sitting, and terrain traversal. Using only GRAIL-generated data, we train egocentric visual policies through a sim-to-real pipeline and deploy them on a Unitree G1 humanoid, achieving 84\% real-world success on diverse object pick-up and 90\% success on stair-climbing.

Autonomous manipulation of articulated objects remains a fundamental challenge for robots in human environments. Vision-based methods can infer hidden kinematics but can yield imprecise estimates on unfamiliar objects. Tactile approaches achieve robust control through contact feedback but require accurate initialization. This suggests a natural synergy: vision for global guidance, touch for local precision. Yet no framework systematically exploits this complementarity for generalized articulated manipulation. Here we present Vi-TacMan, which uses vision to propose grasps and coarse directions that seed a tactile controller for precise execution. By incorporating surface normals as geometric priors and modeling directions via von Mises-Fisher distributions, our approach achieves significant gains over baselines (all p<0.0001). Critically, manipulation succeeds without explicit kinematic models -- the tactile controller refines coarse visual estimates through real-time contact regulation. Tests on more than 50,000 simulated and diverse real-world objects confirm robust cross-category generalization. This work establishes that coarse visual cues suffice for reliable manipulation when coupled with tactile feedback, offering a scalable paradigm for autonomous systems in unstructured environments.

We present a learning-based mapless motion planner by taking the sparse 10-dimensional range findings and the target position with respect to the mobile robot coordinate frame as input and the continuous steering commands as output. Traditional motion planners for mobile ground robots with a laser range sensor mostly depend on the obstacle map of the navigation environment where both the highly precise laser sensor and the obstacle map building work of the environment are indispensable. We show that, through an asynchronous deep reinforcement learning method, a mapless motion planner can be trained end-to-end without any manually designed features and prior demonstrations. The trained planner can be directly applied in unseen virtual and real environments. The experiments show that the proposed mapless motion planner can navigate the nonholonomic mobile robot to the desired targets without colliding with any obstacles.

Reinforcement learning for legged locomotion has matured into a stack of multi-component reward functions and physics-engine benchmarks whose morphologies are uniformly derived from real commercial hardware. Game NPCs, however, are bound by stylistic constraints absent from sim-to-real robotics and routinely take the form of creatures with no real-robot counterpart. We introduce ARC-RL, a suite of four MuJoCo continuous-control environments featuring robotic morphologies inspired by the bestiary of ARC Raiders: the 18-DoF tall hexapod Queen, the 12-DoF armoured hexapod Bastion, the 18-DoF compact hexapod Tick, and the 12-DoF quadruped Leaper. All four robots share a unified observation template, action convention, simulation cadence, and a single closed-form multi-component reward function whose only per-morphology variation lives in a small set of weights and parameters. The reward fuses a velocity-tracking tent, a healthy survive bonus, a phase-locked gait-compliance bonus/cost pair, action regularisers, three safety penalties, and a posture anchor; no motion-capture data enters the reward at any point. We additionally provide hand-crafted Central Pattern Generator demonstrators per morphology, which serve both as fixed expert references and as sources of prior data for offline-to-online training. On this playground, we conduct a controlled empirical study comparing standard online algorithms (SAC, SPEQ, SOPE-EO) and methods augmented with prior data (SACfD, SPEQ-O2O, SOPE), and characterise how each paradigm copes with the playground's morphological diversity and animation-style stylistic constraints. Source code is available at https://github.com/CarloRomeo427/ARC_RL.git.

Deploying learned robot manipulation policies in industrial settings requires rigorous pre-deployment validation, yet exhaustive testing across high-dimensional parameter spaces is intractable. We present ROBOGATE, a deployment risk management framework that combines physics-based simulation with a two-stage adaptive sampling strategy to efficiently discover failure boundaries in the operational parameter space. Stage 1 employs Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) across an 8-dimensional parameter space to establish a coarse failure landscape from 20,000 uniformly distributed experiments. Stage 2 applies boundary-focused sampling that concentrates 10,000 additional experiments in the 30-70% success rate transition zone, enabling precise failure boundary mapping. Using NVIDIA Isaac Sim with Newton physics, we evaluate a scripted pick-and-place controller on two robot embodiments -- Franka Panda (7-DOF) and UR5e (6-DOF) -- across 30,000 total experiments. Our logistic regression risk model achieves an AUC of 0.780 on the combined dataset (vs. 0.754 for Stage 1 alone), identifies a closed-form failure boundary equation, and reveals four universal danger zones affecting both robot platforms. We further demonstrate the framework on VLA (Vision-Language-Action) model evaluation, where Octo-Small achieves 0.0% success rate on 68 adversarial scenarios versus 100% for the scripted baseline -- a 100-point gap that underscores the challenge of deploying foundation models in industrial settings. ROBOGATE is open-source and runs on a single GPU workstation.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has garnered significant attention in robotics for its explicit, high fidelity dense scene representation, demonstrating strong potential for robotic applications. However, 3DGS-based methods in robotics primarily focus on static scenes, with limited attention to the dynamic scene changes essential for long-term service robots. These robots demand sustained task execution and efficient scene updates-challenges current approaches fail to meet. To address these limitations, we propose GS-LTS (Gaussian Splatting for Long-Term Service), a 3DGS-based system enabling indoor robots to manage diverse tasks in dynamic environments over time. GS-LTS detects scene changes (e.g., object addition or removal) via single-image change detection, employs a rule-based policy to autonomously collect multi-view observations, and efficiently updates the scene representation through Gaussian editing. Additionally, we propose a simulation-based benchmark that automatically generates scene change data as compact configuration scripts, providing a standardized, user-friendly evaluation benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate GS-LTS's advantages in reconstruction, navigation, and superior scene updates-faster and higher quality than the image training baseline-advancing 3DGS for long-term robotic operations. Code and benchmark are available at: https://vipl-vsu.github.io/3DGS-LTS.

Despite transformative advances in generative motion synthesis, real-time interactive motion control remains dominated by traditional techniques. In this work, we identify two key challenges in bridging research and production: 1) Real-time scalability: Industry applications demand real-time generation of a vast repertoire of motion skills, while generative methods exhibit significant degradation in quality and scalability under real-time computation constraints, and 2) Integration: Industry applications demand fine-grained multi-modal control involving velocity commands, style selection, and precise keyframes, a need largely unmet by existing text- or tag-driven models. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MotionBricks: a large-scale, real-time generative framework with a two-fold solution. First, we propose a large-scale modular latent generative backbone tailored for robust real-time motion generation, effectively modeling a dataset of over 350,000 motion clips with a single model. Second, we introduce smart primitives that provide a unified, robust, and intuitive interface for authoring both navigation and object interaction. Applications can be designed in a plug-and-play manner like assembling bricks without expert animation knowledge. Quantitatively, we show that MotionBricks produces state-of-the-art motion quality on open-source and proprietary datasets of various scales, while also achieving a real-time throughput of 15,000 FPS with 2ms latency. We demonstrate the flexibility and robustness of MotionBricks in a complete production-level animation demo, covering navigation and object-scene interaction across various styles with a unified model. To showcase our framework's application beyond animation, we deploy MotionBricks on the Unitree G1 humanoid robot to demonstrate its flexibility and generalization for real-time robotic control.

Physics simulation for contact-rich robotics is often bottlenecked by contact resolution: mainstream engines enforce non-penetration and Coulomb friction via complementarity constraints or constrained optimization, requiring per-step iterative solves whose cost grows superlinearly with contact density. We present ComFree-Sim, a GPU-parallelized analytical contact physics engine built on complementarity-free contact modeling. ComFree-Sim computes contact impulses in closed form via an impedance-style prediction--correction update in the dual cone of Coulomb friction. Contact computation decouples across contact pairs and becomes separable across cone facets, mapping naturally to GPU kernels and yielding near-linear runtime scaling with the number of contacts. We further extend the formulation to a unified 6D contact model capturing tangential, torsional, and rolling friction, and introduce a practical dual-cone impedance heuristic. ComFree-Sim is implemented in Warp and exposed through a MuJoCo-compatible interface as a drop-in backend alternative to MuJoCo Warp (MJWarp). Experiments benchmark penetration, friction behaviors, stability, and simulation runtime scaling against MJWarp, demonstrating near-linear scaling and 2--3 times higher throughput in dense contact scenes with comparable physical fidelity. We deploy ComFree-Sim in real-time MPC for in-hand dexterous manipulation on a real-world multi-fingered LEAP hand and in dynamics-aware motion retargeting, demonstrating that low-latency simulation yields higher closed-loop success rates and enables practical high-frequency control in contact-rich tasks.

Developing world models that understand complex physical interactions is essential for advancing robotic planning and simulation.However, existing methods often struggle to accurately model the environment under conditions of data scarcity and complex contact-rich dynamic motion.To address these challenges, we propose ContactGaussian-WM, a differentiable physics-grounded rigid-body world model capable of learning intricate physical laws directly from sparse and contact-rich video sequences.Our framework consists of two core components: (1) a unified Gaussian representation for both visual appearance and collision geometry, and (2) an end-to-end differentiable learning framework that differentiates through a closed-form physics engine to infer physical properties from sparse visual observations.Extensive simulations and real-world evaluations demonstrate that ContactGaussian-WM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in learning complex scenarios, exhibiting robust generalization capabilities.Furthermore, we showcase the practical utility of our framework in downstream applications, including data synthesis and real-time MPC.

Leveraging human motion data to impart robots with versatile manipulation skills has emerged as a promising paradigm in robotic manipulation. Nevertheless, translating multi-source human hand motions into feasible robot behaviors remains challenging, particularly for robots equipped with multi-fingered dexterous hands characterized by complex, high-dimensional action spaces. Moreover, existing approaches often struggle to produce policies capable of adapting to diverse environmental conditions. In this paper, we introduce HERMES, a human-to-robot learning framework for mobile bimanual dexterous manipulation. First, HERMES formulates a unified reinforcement learning approach capable of seamlessly transforming heterogeneous human hand motions from multiple sources into physically plausible robotic behaviors. Subsequently, to mitigate the sim2real gap, we devise an end-to-end, depth image-based sim2real transfer method for improved generalization to real-world scenarios. Furthermore, to enable autonomous operation in varied and unstructured environments, we augment the navigation foundation model with a closed-loop Perspective-n-Point (PnP) localization mechanism, ensuring precise alignment of visual goals and effectively bridging autonomous navigation and dexterous manipulation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HERMES consistently exhibits generalizable behaviors across diverse, in-the-wild scenarios, successfully performing numerous complex mobile bimanual dexterous manipulation tasks. Project Page:https://gemcollector.github.io/HERMES/.

3D articulated objects modeling has long been a challenging problem, since it requires to capture both accurate surface geometries and semantically meaningful and spatially precise structures, parts, and joints. Existing methods heavily depend on training data from a limited set of handcrafted articulated object categories (e.g., cabinets and drawers), which restricts their ability to model a wide range of articulated objects in an open-vocabulary context. To address these limitations, we propose Articulate Anymesh, an automated framework that is able to convert any rigid 3D mesh into its articulated counterpart in an open-vocabulary manner. Given a 3D mesh, our framework utilizes advanced Vision-Language Models and visual prompting techniques to extract semantic information, allowing for both the segmentation of object parts and the construction of functional joints. Our experiments show that Articulate Anymesh can generate large-scale, high-quality 3D articulated objects, including tools, toys, mechanical devices, and vehicles, significantly expanding the coverage of existing 3D articulated object datasets. Additionally, we show that these generated assets can facilitate the acquisition of new articulated object manipulation skills in simulation, which can then be transferred to a real robotic system. Our Github website is https://articulate-anymesh.github.io.

The development of generalist robot manipulation policies has seen significant progress, driven by large-scale demonstration data across diverse environments. However, the high cost and inefficiency of collecting real-world demonstrations hinder the scalability of data acquisition. While existing simulation platforms enable controlled environments for robotic learning, the challenge of bridging the sim-to-real gap remains. To address these challenges, we propose RoboPearls, an editable video simulation framework for robotic manipulation. Built on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), RoboPearls enables the construction of photo-realistic, view-consistent simulations from demonstration videos, and supports a wide range of simulation operators, including various object manipulations, powered by advanced modules like Incremental Semantic Distillation (ISD) and 3D regularized NNFM Loss (3D-NNFM). Moreover, by incorporating large language models (LLMs), RoboPearls automates the simulation production process in a user-friendly manner through flexible command interpretation and execution. Furthermore, RoboPearls employs a vision-language model (VLM) to analyze robotic learning issues to close the simulation loop for performance enhancement. To demonstrate the effectiveness of RoboPearls, we conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets and scenes, including RLBench, COLOSSEUM, Ego4D, Open X-Embodiment, and a real-world robot, which demonstrate our satisfactory simulation performance.

Legged robots navigating cluttered environments must be jointly agile for efficient task execution and safe to avoid collisions with obstacles or humans. Existing studies either develop conservative controllers (< 1.0 m/s) to ensure safety, or focus on agility without considering potentially fatal collisions. This paper introduces Agile But Safe (ABS), a learning-based control framework that enables agile and collision-free locomotion for quadrupedal robots. ABS involves an agile policy to execute agile motor skills amidst obstacles and a recovery policy to prevent failures, collaboratively achieving high-speed and collision-free navigation. The policy switch in ABS is governed by a learned control-theoretic reach-avoid value network, which also guides the recovery policy as an objective function, thereby safeguarding the robot in a closed loop. The training process involves the learning of the agile policy, the reach-avoid value network, the recovery policy, and an exteroception representation network, all in simulation. These trained modules can be directly deployed in the real world with onboard sensing and computation, leading to high-speed and collision-free navigation in confined indoor and outdoor spaces with both static and dynamic obstacles.

Contact-rich manipulation tasks with stiff frictional elements like connector insertion are difficult to model with rigid-body simulators. In this work, we propose a new approach for modeling these environments by learning a quasi-static contact force model instead of a full simulator. Using a feature vector that contains information about the configuration and control, we find a linear mapping adequately captures the relationship between this feature vector and the sensed contact forces. A novel Linear Model Learning (LML) algorithm is used to solve for the globally optimal mapping in real time without any matrix inversions, resulting in an algorithm that runs in nearly constant time on a GPU as the model size increases. We validate the proposed approach for connector insertion both in simulation and hardware experiments, where the learned model is combined with an optimization-based controller to achieve smooth insertions in the presence of misalignments and uncertainty. Our website featuring videos, code, and more materials is available at https://model-based-plugging.github.io/.

Wheel-legged robots integrate leg agility on rough terrain with wheel efficiency on flat ground. However, most existing designs do not fully capitalize on the benefits of both legged and wheeled structures, which limits overall system flexibility and efficiency. We present FLORES, a novel wheel-legged robot design featuring a distinctive front-leg configuration that sets it beyond standard design approaches. Specifically, FLORES replaces the conventional hip-roll degree of freedom (DoF) of the front leg with hip-yaw DoFs, and this allows for efficient movement on flat surfaces while ensuring adaptability when navigating complex terrains. This innovative design facilitates seamless transitions between different locomotion modes (i.e., legged locomotion and wheeled locomotion) and optimizes the performance across varied environments. To fully exploit \flores's mechanical capabilities, we develop a tailored reinforcement learning (RL) controller that adapts the Hybrid Internal Model (HIM) with a customized reward structure optimized for our unique mechanical configuration. This framework enables the generation of adaptive, multi-modal locomotion strategies that facilitate smooth transitions between wheeled and legged movements. Furthermore, our distinctive joint design enables the robot to exhibit novel and highly efficient locomotion gaits that capitalize on the synergistic advantages of both locomotion modes. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate FLORES's enhanced steering capabilities, improved navigation efficiency, and versatile locomotion across various terrains. The open-source project can be found at https://github.com/ZhichengSong6/FLORES.

Exploiting the promise of recent advances in imitation learning for mobile manipulation will require the collection of large numbers of human-guided demonstrations. This paper proposes an open-source design for an inexpensive, robust, and flexible mobile manipulator that can support arbitrary arms, enabling a wide range of real-world household mobile manipulation tasks. Crucially, our design uses powered casters to enable the mobile base to be fully holonomic, able to control all planar degrees of freedom independently and simultaneously. This feature makes the base more maneuverable and simplifies many mobile manipulation tasks, eliminating the kinematic constraints that create complex and time-consuming motions in nonholonomic bases. We equip our robot with an intuitive mobile phone teleoperation interface to enable easy data acquisition for imitation learning. In our experiments, we use this interface to collect data and show that the resulting learned policies can successfully perform a variety of common household mobile manipulation tasks.

Object-Centric Motion Generation (OCMG) plays a key role in a variety of industrial applicationsx2014such as robotic spray painting and weldingx2014requiring efficient, scalable, and generalizable algorithms to plan multiple long-horizon trajectories over free-form 3D objects. However, existing solutions rely on specialized heuristics, expensive optimization routines, or restrictive geometry assumptions that limit their adaptability to real-world scenarios. In this work, we introduce a novel, fully data-driven framework that tackles OCMG directly from 3D point clouds, learning to generalize expert path patterns across free-form surfaces. We propose MaskPlanner, a deep learning method that predicts local path segments for a given object while simultaneously inferring "path masks" to group these segments into distinct paths. This design induces the network to capture both local geometric patterns and global task requirements in a single forward pass. Extensive experimentation on a realistic robotic spray painting scenario shows that our approach attains near-complete coverage (above 99%) for unseen objects, while it remains task-agnostic and does not explicitly optimize for paint deposition. Moreover, our real-world validation on a 6-DoF specialized painting robot demonstrates that the generated trajectories are directly executable and yield expert-level painting quality. Our findings crucially highlight the potential of the proposed learning method for OCMG to reduce engineering overhead and seamlessly adapt to several industrial use cases.

Contact-rich bimanual manipulation involves precise coordination of two arms to change object states through strategically selected contacts and motions. Due to the inherent complexity of these tasks, acquiring sufficient demonstration data and training policies that generalize to unseen scenarios remain a largely unresolved challenge. Building on recent advances in planning through contacts, we introduce Generalizable Planning-Guided Diffusion Policy Learning (GLIDE), an approach that effectively learns to solve contact-rich bimanual manipulation tasks by leveraging model-based motion planners to generate demonstration data in high-fidelity physics simulation. Through efficient planning in randomized environments, our approach generates large-scale and high-quality synthetic motion trajectories for tasks involving diverse objects and transformations. We then train a task-conditioned diffusion policy via behavior cloning using these demonstrations. To tackle the sim-to-real gap, we propose a set of essential design options in feature extraction, task representation, action prediction, and data augmentation that enable learning robust prediction of smooth action sequences and generalization to unseen scenarios. Through experiments in both simulation and the real world, we demonstrate that our approach can enable a bimanual robotic system to effectively manipulate objects of diverse geometries, dimensions, and physical properties. Website: https://glide-manip.github.io/

Generalizable dexterous grasping with suitable grasp types is a fundamental skill for intelligent robots. Developing such skills requires a large-scale and high-quality dataset that covers numerous grasp types (i.e., at least those categorized by the GRASP taxonomy), but collecting such data is extremely challenging. Existing automatic grasp synthesis methods are often limited to specific grasp types or object categories, hindering scalability. This work proposes an efficient pipeline capable of synthesizing contact-rich, penetration-free, and physically plausible grasps for any grasp type, object, and articulated hand. Starting from a single human-annotated template for each hand and grasp type, our pipeline tackles the complicated synthesis problem with two stages: optimize the object to fit the hand template first, and then locally refine the hand to fit the object in simulation. To validate the synthesized grasps, we introduce a contact-aware control strategy that allows the hand to apply the appropriate force at each contact point to the object. Those validated grasps can also be used as new grasp templates to facilitate future synthesis. Experiments show that our method significantly outperforms previous type-unaware grasp synthesis baselines in simulation. Using our algorithm, we construct a dataset containing 10.7k objects and 9.5M grasps, covering 31 grasp types in the GRASP taxonomy. Finally, we train a type-conditional generative model that successfully performs the desired grasp type from single-view object point clouds, achieving an 82.3% success rate in real-world experiments. Project page: https://pku-epic.github.io/Dexonomy.

Multi-embodiment grasping focuses on developing approaches that exhibit generalist behavior across diverse gripper designs. Existing methods often learn the kinematic structure of the robot implicitly and face challenges due to the difficulty of sourcing the required large-scale data. In this work, we present a data-efficient, flow-based, equivariant grasp synthesis architecture that can handle different gripper types with variable degrees of freedom and successfully exploit the underlying kinematic model, deducing all necessary information solely from the gripper and scene geometry. Unlike previous equivariant grasping methods, we translated all modules from the ground up to JAX and provide a model with batching capabilities over scenes, grippers, and grasps, resulting in smoother learning, improved performance and faster inference time. Our dataset encompasses grippers ranging from humanoid hands to parallel yaw grippers and includes 25,000 scenes and 20 million grasps.

Robotic mapping systems typically approach building metric-semantic scene representations from the robot's own sensors and cameras. However, these "first person" maps inherit the robot's own limitations due to its embodiment or skillset, which may leave many aspects of the environment unexplored. For example, the robot might not be able to open drawers or access wall cabinets. In this sense, the map representation is not as complete, and requires a more capable robot to fill in the gaps. We narrow these blind spots in current methods by leveraging egocentric data captured as a human naturally explores a scene wearing Project Aria glasses, giving a way to directly transfer knowledge about articulation from the human to any deployable robot. We demonstrate that, by using simple heuristics, we can leverage egocentric data to recover models of articulate object parts, with quality comparable to those of state-of-the-art methods based on other input modalities. We also show how to integrate these models into 3D scene graph representations, leading to a better understanding of object dynamics and object-container relationships. We finally demonstrate that these articulated 3D scene graphs enhance a robot's ability to perform mobile manipulation tasks, showcasing an application where a Boston Dynamics Spot is tasked with retrieving concealed target items, given only the 3D scene graph as input.

This paper presents a safety-critical approach to the coordination of robots in dynamic environments. To this end, we leverage control barrier functions (CBFs) with the forward reachable set to guarantee the safe coordination of the robots while preserving a desired trajectory via a layered controller. The top-level planner generates a safety-ensured trajectory for each agent, accounting for the dynamic constraints in the environment. This planner leverages high-order CBFs based on the forward reachable set to ensure safety-critical coordination control, i.e., guarantee the safe coordination of the robots during locomotion. The middle-level trajectory planner employs single rigid body (SRB) dynamics to generate optimal ground reaction forces (GRFs) to track the safety-ensured trajectories from the top-level planner. The whole-body motions to adhere to the optimal GRFs while ensuring the friction cone condition at the end of each stance leg are generated from the low-level controller. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated through simulation and hardware experiments.

Most existing robotic manipulation benchmarks focus on simplified tabletop scenarios, typically involving a stationary robotic arm interacting with various objects on a flat surface. To address this limitation, we introduce RoboBenchMart, a more challenging and realistic benchmark designed for dark store environments, where robots must perform complex manipulation tasks with diverse grocery items. This setting presents significant challenges, including dense object clutter and varied spatial configurations -- with items positioned at different heights, depths, and in close proximity. By targeting the retail domain, our benchmark addresses a setting with strong potential for near-term automation impact. We demonstrate that current state-of-the-art generalist models struggle to solve even common retail tasks. To support further research, we release the RoboBenchMart suite, which includes a procedural store layout generator, a trajectory generation pipeline, evaluation tools and fine-tuned baseline models.

We present PhysiFormer, a diffusion transformer for physically-plausible 3D object motion. Unlike video world models that operate in view-dependent pixel space, PhysiFormer represents objects as 3D meshes expressed in world coordinates. Given the initial vertex positions and velocities, as well as object material type, rigid or elastic, the model samples future vertex trajectories. While related neural physics approaches build on ad-hoc latent spaces or explicitly enforce rigidity and causality, PhysiFormer shows that excellent results can be obtained without any such inductive biases, by casting vertex trajectory prediction as a single denoising diffusion process directly in world coordinates. The probabilistic formulation captures uncertainty in the learned dynamics, enabling diverse plausible futures from initial conditions, making this framework potentially useful for applications with unobserved uncertainty. The model features attention factorised over time, space, and objects for efficiency, enabling permutation-invariant multi-object reasoning without needing explicit object encoding. Trained on over 100k simulated trajectories, PhysiFormer generates rigid and elastic mechanics, and generalises to mixed-material settings, unseen real-world geometries, and larger object counts. It substantially outperforms autoregressive baselines in trajectory accuracy, rigidity preservation, and momentum-based physical consistency. Our results position coordinate-space diffusion as a promising step toward view-invariant, geometry-aware world modelling for robotics, graphics, and physical design. Visualisations, code, and models are available at https://yimingc9.github.io/physiformer.

Robotic arms are increasingly deployed in uncertain environments, yet conventional control pipelines often become rigid and brittle when exposed to perturbations or incomplete information. Virtual Model Control (VMC) enables compliant behaviors by embedding virtual forces and mapping them into joint torques, but its reliance on fixed parameters and limited coordination among virtual components constrains adaptability and may undermine stability as task objectives evolve. To address these limitations, we propose Adaptive VMC with Large Language Model (LLM)- and Lyapunov-Based Reinforcement Learning (RL), which preserves the physical interpretability of VMC while supporting stability-guaranteed online adaptation. The LLM provides structured priors and high-level reasoning that enhance coordination among virtual components, improve sample efficiency, and facilitate flexible adjustment to varying task requirements. Complementarily, Lyapunov-based RL enforces theoretical stability constraints, ensuring safe and reliable adaptation under uncertainty. Extensive simulations on a 7-DoF Panda arm demonstrate that our approach effectively balances competing objectives in dynamic tasks, achieving superior performance while highlighting the synergistic benefits of LLM guidance and Lyapunov-constrained adaptation.

Generalizable articulated object manipulation is essential for home-assistant robots. Recent efforts focus on imitation learning from demonstrations or reinforcement learning in simulation, however, due to the prohibitive costs of real-world data collection and precise object simulation, it still remains challenging for these works to achieve broad adaptability across diverse articulated objects. Recently, many works have tried to utilize the strong in-context learning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve generalizable robotic manipulation, but most of these researches focus on high-level task planning, sidelining low-level robotic control. In this work, building on the idea that the kinematic structure of the object determines how we can manipulate it, we propose a kinematic-aware prompting framework that prompts LLMs with kinematic knowledge of objects to generate low-level motion trajectory waypoints, supporting various object manipulation. To effectively prompt LLMs with the kinematic structure of different objects, we design a unified kinematic knowledge parser, which represents various articulated objects as a unified textual description containing kinematic joints and contact location. Building upon this unified description, a kinematic-aware planner model is proposed to generate precise 3D manipulation waypoints via a designed kinematic-aware chain-of-thoughts prompting method. Our evaluation spanned 48 instances across 16 distinct categories, revealing that our framework not only outperforms traditional methods on 8 seen categories but also shows a powerful zero-shot capability for 8 unseen articulated object categories. Moreover, the real-world experiments on 7 different object categories prove our framework's adaptability in practical scenarios. Code is released at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/LLM_articulated_object_manipulation/tree/main.

Language-guided long-horizon mobile manipulation has long been a grand challenge in embodied semantic reasoning, generalizable manipulation, and adaptive locomotion. Three fundamental limitations hinder progress: First, although large language models have improved spatial reasoning and task planning through semantic priors, existing implementations remain confined to tabletop scenarios, failing to address the constrained perception and limited actuation ranges of mobile platforms. Second, current manipulation strategies exhibit insufficient generalization when confronted with the diverse object configurations encountered in open-world environments. Third, while crucial for practical deployment, the dual requirement of maintaining high platform maneuverability alongside precise end-effector control in unstructured settings remains understudied. In this work, we present ODYSSEY, a unified mobile manipulation framework for agile quadruped robots equipped with manipulators, which seamlessly integrates high-level task planning with low-level whole-body control. To address the challenge of egocentric perception in language-conditioned tasks, we introduce a hierarchical planner powered by a vision-language model, enabling long-horizon instruction decomposition and precise action execution. At the control level, our novel whole-body policy achieves robust coordination across challenging terrains. We further present the first benchmark for long-horizon mobile manipulation, evaluating diverse indoor and outdoor scenarios. Through successful sim-to-real transfer, we demonstrate the system's generalization and robustness in real-world deployments, underscoring the practicality of legged manipulators in unstructured environments. Our work advances the feasibility of generalized robotic assistants capable of complex, dynamic tasks. Our project page: https://kaijwang.github.io/odyssey.github.io/

Furniture assembly is a crucial yet challenging task for robots, requiring precise dual-arm coordination where one arm manipulates parts while the other provides collaborative support and stabilization. To accomplish this task more effectively, robots need to actively adapt support strategies throughout the long-horizon assembly process, while also generalizing across diverse part geometries. We propose A3D, a framework which learns adaptive affordances to identify optimal support and stabilization locations on furniture parts. The method employs dense point-level geometric representations to model part interaction patterns, enabling generalization across varied geometries. To handle evolving assembly states, we introduce an adaptive module that uses interaction feedback to dynamically adjust support strategies during assembly based on previous interactions. We establish a simulation environment featuring 50 diverse parts across 8 furniture types, designed for dual-arm collaboration evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that our framework generalizes effectively to diverse part geometries and furniture categories in both simulation and real-world settings.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in spatial reasoning, yet they remain fundamentally limited to qualitative precision and lack the computational precision required for real-world robotics. Current approaches fail to leverage metric cues from depth sensors and camera calibration, instead reducing geometric problems to pattern recognition tasks that cannot deliver the centimeter-level accuracy essential for robotic manipulation. We present TIGeR (Tool-Integrated Geometric Reasoning), a novel framework that transforms VLMs from perceptual estimators to geometric computers by enabling them to generate and execute precise geometric computations through external tools. Rather than attempting to internalize complex geometric operations within neural networks, TIGeR empowers models to recognize geometric reasoning requirements, synthesize appropriate computational code, and invoke specialized libraries for exact calculations. To support this paradigm, we introduce TIGeR-300K, a comprehensive tool-invocation-oriented dataset covering point transformations, pose estimation, and spatial compatibility verification, complete with tool invocation sequences and intermediate computations. Through a two-stage training pipeline combining supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) with our proposed hierarchical reward design, TIGeR achieves SOTA performance on geometric reasoning benchmarks while demonstrating centimeter-level precision in real-world robotic manipulation tasks.

Non-prehensile manipulation is challenging due to complex contact interactions between objects, the environment, and robots. Model-based approaches can efficiently generate complex trajectories of robots and objects under contact constraints. However, they tend to be sensitive to model inaccuracies and require access to privileged information (e.g., object mass, size, pose), making them less suitable for novel objects. In contrast, learning-based approaches are typically more robust to modeling errors but require large amounts of data. In this paper, we bridge these two approaches to propose a framework for learning closed-loop pivoting manipulation. By leveraging computationally efficient Contact-Implicit Trajectory Optimization (CITO), we design demonstration-guided deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), leading to sample-efficient learning. We also present a sim-to-real transfer approach using a privileged training strategy, enabling the robot to perform pivoting manipulation using only proprioception, vision, and force sensing without access to privileged information. Our method is evaluated on several pivoting tasks, demonstrating that it can successfully perform sim-to-real transfer. The overview of our method and the hardware experiments are shown at https://youtu.be/akjGDgfwLbM?si=QVw6ExoPy2VsU2g6

We present the HANDAL dataset for category-level object pose estimation and affordance prediction. Unlike previous datasets, ours is focused on robotics-ready manipulable objects that are of the proper size and shape for functional grasping by robot manipulators, such as pliers, utensils, and screwdrivers. Our annotation process is streamlined, requiring only a single off-the-shelf camera and semi-automated processing, allowing us to produce high-quality 3D annotations without crowd-sourcing. The dataset consists of 308k annotated image frames from 2.2k videos of 212 real-world objects in 17 categories. We focus on hardware and kitchen tool objects to facilitate research in practical scenarios in which a robot manipulator needs to interact with the environment beyond simple pushing or indiscriminate grasping. We outline the usefulness of our dataset for 6-DoF category-level pose+scale estimation and related tasks. We also provide 3D reconstructed meshes of all objects, and we outline some of the bottlenecks to be addressed for democratizing the collection of datasets like this one.

We introduce a practical robotics solution for the task of heterogeneous bagging, requiring the placement of multiple rigid and deformable objects into a deformable bag. This is a difficult task as it features complex interactions between multiple highly deformable objects under limited observability. To tackle these challenges, we propose a robotic system consisting of two learned policies: a rearrangement policy that learns to place multiple rigid objects and fold deformable objects in order to achieve desirable pre-bagging conditions, and a lifting policy to infer suitable grasp points for bi-manual bag lifting. We evaluate these learned policies on a real-world three-arm robot platform that achieves a 70% heterogeneous bagging success rate with novel objects. To facilitate future research and comparison, we also develop a novel heterogeneous bagging simulation benchmark that will be made publicly available.

Robotic manipulation with deformable objects represents a data-intensive regime in embodied learning, where shape, contact, and topology co-evolve in ways that far exceed the variability of rigids. Although simulation promises relief from the cost of real-world data acquisition, prevailing sim-to-real pipelines remain rooted in rigid-body abstractions, producing mismatched geometry, fragile soft dynamics, and motion primitives poorly suited for cloth interaction. We posit that simulation fails not for being synthetic, but for being ungrounded. To address this, we introduce SIM1, a physics-aligned real-to-sim-to-real data engine that grounds simulation in the physical world. Given limited demonstrations, the system digitizes scenes into metric-consistent twins, calibrates deformable dynamics through elastic modeling, and expands behaviors via diffusion-based trajectory generation with quality filtering. This pipeline transforms sparse observations into scaled synthetic supervision with near-demonstration fidelity. Experiments show that policies trained on purely synthetic data achieve parity with real-data baselines at a 1:15 equivalence ratio, while delivering 90% zero-shot success and 50% generalization gains in real-world deployment. These results validate physics-aligned simulation as scalable supervision for deformable manipulation and a practical pathway for data-efficient policy learning.

3D modeling is shifting from static visual representations toward physical, articulated assets that can be directly used in simulation and interaction. However, most existing 3D generation methods overlook key physical and articulation properties, thereby limiting their utility in embodied AI. To bridge this gap, we introduce PhysX-Anything, the first simulation-ready physical 3D generative framework that, given a single in-the-wild image, produces high-quality sim-ready 3D assets with explicit geometry, articulation, and physical attributes. Specifically, we propose the first VLM-based physical 3D generative model, along with a new 3D representation that efficiently tokenizes geometry. It reduces the number of tokens by 193x, enabling explicit geometry learning within standard VLM token budgets without introducing any special tokens during fine-tuning and significantly improving generative quality. In addition, to overcome the limited diversity of existing physical 3D datasets, we construct a new dataset, PhysX-Mobility, which expands the object categories in prior physical 3D datasets by over 2x and includes more than 2K common real-world objects with rich physical annotations. Extensive experiments on PhysX-Mobility and in-the-wild images demonstrate that PhysX-Anything delivers strong generative performance and robust generalization. Furthermore, simulation-based experiments in a MuJoCo-style environment validate that our sim-ready assets can be directly used for contact-rich robotic policy learning. We believe PhysX-Anything can substantially empower a broad range of downstream applications, especially in embodied AI and physics-based simulation.

We introduce Habitat 2.0 (H2.0), a simulation platform for training virtual robots in interactive 3D environments and complex physics-enabled scenarios. We make comprehensive contributions to all levels of the embodied AI stack - data, simulation, and benchmark tasks. Specifically, we present: (i) ReplicaCAD: an artist-authored, annotated, reconfigurable 3D dataset of apartments (matching real spaces) with articulated objects (e.g. cabinets and drawers that can open/close); (ii) H2.0: a high-performance physics-enabled 3D simulator with speeds exceeding 25,000 simulation steps per second (850x real-time) on an 8-GPU node, representing 100x speed-ups over prior work; and, (iii) Home Assistant Benchmark (HAB): a suite of common tasks for assistive robots (tidy the house, prepare groceries, set the table) that test a range of mobile manipulation capabilities. These large-scale engineering contributions allow us to systematically compare deep reinforcement learning (RL) at scale and classical sense-plan-act (SPA) pipelines in long-horizon structured tasks, with an emphasis on generalization to new objects, receptacles, and layouts. We find that (1) flat RL policies struggle on HAB compared to hierarchical ones; (2) a hierarchy with independent skills suffers from 'hand-off problems', and (3) SPA pipelines are more brittle than RL policies.

We present ArtMesh, a mesh-native method for reconstructing articulated objects explicitly as connected triangle meshes with per-part rigid motion from multi-view images in start and end states. Existing 3D Gaussian Splatting pipelines for articulated reconstruction inherit the unstructured point-based geometry of their splatting base, which provides no surface topology for reasoning about part boundaries or enforcing motion consistency along the object's connectivity. ArtMesh instead builds on a mesh-based differentiable rendering backbone, enabling part-aware dynamics to act directly on the structured topology. To make the topology compatible with articulation, we introduce part-aware restricted Delaunay remeshing, producing connected submeshes whose triangles do not cross semantic part boundaries. The dynamic mesh field then optimizes articulation using bidirectional Vertex-wise Motion Consistency on transported mesh vertices and Pixel-wise Motion Consistency on rendered RGB-D observations. We introduce Articulate-100, a new benchmark of 100 articulated objects spanning 16 PartNet-Mobility categories. On this benchmark, ArtMesh outperforms prior 3DGS-based pipelines in joint parameter estimation and part-level geometric reconstruction, with the largest gains on objects with many movable parts.

Articulated objects are central to interactive 3D applications, including embodied AI, robotics, and VR/AR, where functional part decomposition and kinematic motion are essential. Yet producing high-fidelity articulated assets remains difficult to scale because it requires reliable part decomposition and kinematic rigging. Existing approaches largely fall into two paradigms: optimization-based reconstruction or distillation, which can be accurate but often takes tens of minutes to hours per instance, and inference-time methods that rely on template or part retrieval, producing plausible results that may not match the specific structure and appearance in the input observation. We introduce a part-centric generative framework for articulated object creation that synthesizes part geometry, composition, and articulation under explicit part-aware conditioning. Our representation models an object as a set of movable parts, each encoded by latent tokens augmented with part identity and articulation cues. Conditioned on a single image, the model generates articulated 3D assets that preserve instance-level correspondence while maintaining valid part structure and motion. The resulting approach avoids per-instance optimization, enables fast feed-forward inference, and supports controllable assembly and articulation, which are important for embodied interaction. Experiments on common articulated categories (e.g., drawers and doors) show improved input consistency, part accuracy, and articulation plausibility over optimization-based and retrieval-driven baselines, while substantially reducing inference time.

Legged robots have the potential to expand the reach of autonomy beyond paved roads. In this work, we consider the difficult problem of locomotion on challenging terrains using a single forward-facing depth camera. Due to the partial observability of the problem, the robot has to rely on past observations to infer the terrain currently beneath it. To solve this problem, we follow the paradigm in computer vision that explicitly models the 3D geometry of the scene and propose Neural Volumetric Memory (NVM), a geometric memory architecture that explicitly accounts for the SE(3) equivariance of the 3D world. NVM aggregates feature volumes from multiple camera views by first bringing them back to the ego-centric frame of the robot. We test the learned visual-locomotion policy on a physical robot and show that our approach, which explicitly introduces geometric priors during training, offers superior performance than more na\"ive methods. We also include ablation studies and show that the representations stored in the neural volumetric memory capture sufficient geometric information to reconstruct the scene. Our project page with videos is https://rchalyang.github.io/NVM .

Modern robotic manipulation primarily relies on visual observations in a 2D color space for skill learning but suffers from poor generalization. In contrast, humans, living in a 3D world, depend more on physical properties-such as distance, size, and shape-than on texture when interacting with objects. Since such 3D geometric information can be acquired from widely available depth cameras, it appears feasible to endow robots with similar perceptual capabilities. Our pilot study found that using depth cameras for manipulation is challenging, primarily due to their limited accuracy and susceptibility to various types of noise. In this work, we propose Camera Depth Models (CDMs) as a simple plugin on daily-use depth cameras, which take RGB images and raw depth signals as input and output denoised, accurate metric depth. To achieve this, we develop a neural data engine that generates high-quality paired data from simulation by modeling a depth camera's noise pattern. Our results show that CDMs achieve nearly simulation-level accuracy in depth prediction, effectively bridging the sim-to-real gap for manipulation tasks. Notably, our experiments demonstrate, for the first time, that a policy trained on raw simulated depth, without the need for adding noise or real-world fine-tuning, generalizes seamlessly to real-world robots on two challenging long-horizon tasks involving articulated, reflective, and slender objects, with little to no performance degradation. We hope our findings will inspire future research in utilizing simulation data and 3D information in general robot policies.

Synthesizing controllable 6-DOF object manipulation trajectories in 3D environments is essential for enabling robots to interact with complex scenes, yet remains challenging due to the need for accurate spatial reasoning, physical feasibility, and multimodal scene understanding. Existing approaches often rely on 2D or partial 3D representations, limiting their ability to capture full scene geometry and constraining trajectory precision. We present GMT, a multimodal transformer framework that generates realistic and goal-directed object trajectories by jointly leveraging 3D bounding box geometry, point cloud context, semantic object categories, and target end poses. The model represents trajectories as continuous 6-DOF pose sequences and employs a tailored conditioning strategy that fuses geometric, semantic, contextual, and goaloriented information. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that GMT outperforms state-of-the-art human motion and human-object interaction baselines, such as CHOIS and GIMO, achieving substantial gains in spatial accuracy and orientation control. Our method establishes a new benchmark for learningbased manipulation planning and shows strong generalization to diverse objects and cluttered 3D environments. Project page: https://huajian- zeng.github. io/projects/gmt/.

Large language models (LLMs) are shown to possess a wealth of actionable knowledge that can be extracted for robot manipulation in the form of reasoning and planning. Despite the progress, most still rely on pre-defined motion primitives to carry out the physical interactions with the environment, which remains a major bottleneck. In this work, we aim to synthesize robot trajectories, i.e., a dense sequence of 6-DoF end-effector waypoints, for a large variety of manipulation tasks given an open-set of instructions and an open-set of objects. We achieve this by first observing that LLMs excel at inferring affordances and constraints given a free-form language instruction. More importantly, by leveraging their code-writing capabilities, they can interact with a visual-language model (VLM) to compose 3D value maps to ground the knowledge into the observation space of the agent. The composed value maps are then used in a model-based planning framework to zero-shot synthesize closed-loop robot trajectories with robustness to dynamic perturbations. We further demonstrate how the proposed framework can benefit from online experiences by efficiently learning a dynamics model for scenes that involve contact-rich interactions. We present a large-scale study of the proposed method in both simulated and real-robot environments, showcasing the ability to perform a large variety of everyday manipulation tasks specified in free-form natural language. Project website: https://voxposer.github.io

Robotic manipulation policies often struggle to generalize to novel objects, limiting their real-world utility. In contrast, cognitive science suggests that children develop generalizable dexterous manipulation skills by mastering a small set of simple toys and then applying that knowledge to more complex items. Inspired by this, we study if similar generalization capabilities can also be achieved by robots. Our results indicate robots can learn generalizable grasping using randomly assembled objects that are composed from just four shape primitives: spheres, cuboids, cylinders, and rings. We show that training on these "toys" enables robust generalization to real-world objects, yielding strong zero-shot performance. Crucially, we find the key to this generalization is an object-centric visual representation induced by our proposed detection pooling mechanism. Evaluated in both simulation and on physical robots, our model achieves a 67% real-world grasping success rate on the YCB dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches that rely on substantially more in-domain data. We further study how zero-shot generalization performance scales by varying the number and diversity of training toys and the demonstrations per toy. We believe this work offers a promising path to scalable and generalizable learning in robotic manipulation. Demonstration videos, code, checkpoints and our dataset are available on our project page: https://lego-grasp.github.io/ .