arXiv AI

SMART: Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Articulated Object Manipulation via Large-Scale Synthetic Pretraining

SMART introduces a scalable system for zero‑shot sim‑to‑real articulated object manipulation by leveraging large‑scale synthetic pretraining. The core component, SMART‑Sim, is an articulation‑aware simulation platform that facilitates efficient task generation and demonstration collection. Using SMART‑Sim, the authors synthesize SMART‑Data, comprising over 1 million demonstrations across 44 task types, 5 robot setups, and 2,507 articulated objects, and demonstrate that a vision‑language‑action model pretrained on this data achieves competitive simulation performance and zero‑shot transfer to real‑world tasks.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 19

Pose6DAug: Physically Plausible Multi-view Object Swapping for Robot Data Augmentation

arXiv:2606. 20118v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have shown strong potential for general-purpose manipulation, yet they often fail on novel, out-of-distribution objects whose appearance or geometry deviates from the training distribution.

By Jonghoon Lee, Seong Hyeon Park, Byungwoo Jeon, Minha Lee, Jinwoo Shin
arXiv AI
Sep 10

RoboCousin: Build Your Own Simulation Playground for Robust Bimanual Robotic Manipulation

RoboCousin is an extensible simulation platform that transforms user-provided observations into reusable assets, scenes, and expert trajectories for bimanual robotic manipulation. It converts object images into simulation-ready models with visual, collision, semantic, and physical metadata, automatically generates grasp candidates, and builds digital cousins that vary objects, backgrounds, layouts, and language instructions while preserving task-relevant affordances. The platform supports both tabletop and room-level scene construction, and the authors release RoboCousin-OBD with over 3,000 annotated objects and 50 backgrounds, generating more than one million expert trajectories across 50 tasks, with simulation and real-robot experiments demonstrating comparable annotation quality and effective sim-to-real transfer.

By Jingxuan Zhu, Jingyi Li, LiangLiang Chen, Zhiyuan Jing, Jidong Zhang, Hongming Li
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 28

From Pixel to Poses: Object-centric Tool Manipulation Learning from Human Demonstrations

The paper introduces P2P‑T, a data‑efficient, object‑centric framework that learns tool manipulation directly from human video demonstrations. It uses a two‑stage approach: first pretraining an object‑centric world model to extract stable pose priors, then integrating these priors into a pose‑aware low‑level policy. By automating data processing with foundation models, P2P‑T eliminates the need for human‑robot aligned data and achieves a 73% improvement over prior state‑of‑the‑art performance on complex real‑world tool manipulation tasks.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Human Videos to Robot Manipulation: A Survey on Scalable Vision-Language-Action Learning with Human-Centric Data

arXiv:2606. 00054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in generalizable embodied control has been driven by large-scale pretraining of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.

By Zhiyuan Feng, Qixiu Li, Huizhi Liang, Rushuai Yang, Yichao Shen, Zhiying Du, Zhaowei Zhang, Yu Deng, Li Zhao, Hao Zhao, Zongqing Lu, Oier Mees, Marc Pollefeys, Jiaolong Yang, Baining Guo
arXiv AI
Sep 21

KnowDemo: Knowledge-Guided Robot Demonstration Generation from Human Videos

KnowDemo is a framework that generates diverse robot demonstrations from human videos by leveraging structured manipulation knowledge. It uses a vision‑language model to extract task requirements and permissible execution variations, then resolves these against target‑scene entities to guide candidate generation and screening before motion planning. The resulting demonstrations feature multimodal behavior, alternative contact strategies, and valid subtask orders, and have been shown to improve planning success and enable sim‑to‑real policy transfer across three tasks.

By Zhiyuan Gao, Yanxiang Zhan, Mohammad Khoshnazar, Jeroen Sch\"afer, Michael Beetz