arXiv:2604. 09487v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tendon drives paired with soft muscle actuation enable faster and safer robots while potentially accelerating skill acquisition.
arXiv:2607. 11734v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Differentiable simulators have advanced policy learning and model-based control, yet actuator dynamics remain an important source of sim-to-real error.
arXiv:2602. 02402v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simulating deformable objects under rich interactions remains a fundamental challenge for real-to-sim robot manipulation, with dynamics jointly driven by environmental effects and robot actions.
arXiv:2503.10118v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The sim-to-real gap remains a critical challenge in robotics, hindering the deployment of algorithms trained in simulation to real-world syst...
The paper compares two leading motion‑imitation reinforcement learning pipelines—HyFyDy, which uses detailed musculotendon modeling, and MuJoCo, which focuses on computational speed. Using the same human motion‑capture and EMG data, both pipelines reproduce kinematics similarly, but HyFyDy’s muscle activation predictions align more closely with experimental EMG (RMSE 0.164, r = 0.4) than MuJoCo’s (RMSE 0.344, r = 0.11). The authors conclude that HyFyDy’s higher physiological realism makes it currently more suitable for musculoskeletal modeling, though both systems need further development for GPU‑parallelizable environments and robotic assistive‑device design.
Aero Hand Open is a tendon‑driven, anthropomorphic hand designed for affordable, simulation‑ready dexterous manipulation. The release includes a realistic simulation model of the cable transmission, an identified actuation map that links motor commands to joint motions (including thumb coupling), and a reinforcement‑learning package that trains policies entirely in simulation. These components enable policies to run on the physical hand without fine‑tuning or state estimation.
arXiv:2511. 06667v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: With the explosive growth of rigid-body simulators, policy learning in simulation has become the de facto standard for most rigid morphologies.
arXiv:2607. 06740v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Soft robots have attracted significant attention in applications such as medical intervention, rehabilitation, and robotic manipulation due to their inherent compliance, flexibility, and high degrees of freedom.
arXiv:2609.37089v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world videos provide rich demonstrations of manipulation, but turning them into reusable robot skills requires visually aligned environments, exec...
arXiv:2608. 00484v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Soft robotic substrates are promising for Physical Reservoir Computing (PRC) because their compliant nonlinear dynamics can provide temporal memory, high-dimensional state transformations, and efficient inference.
This paper introduces an energy-aware approach to robotic manipulation by defining a joint-space mechanical-work proxy based on joint torque and angular displacement. A differentiable energy predictor is trained to estimate this work from robot states and actions, enabling it to serve as a regularizer that fine‑tunes a pretrained manipulation policy. Applied to RVT‑2 on RLBench, the method reduces average mechanical work from 208.8 J to 204.4 J (a 2.1 % drop) while slightly improving task success from 86.2 % to 86.9 % across 12 manipulation tasks.
The paper introduces PA‑RL, a reinforcement‑learning framework that uses artificial potential fields as the action representation for contact‑rich robotic manipulation. Instead of directly commanding motion, the policy adjusts potential‑field parameters, which a Cartesian impedance controller then executes, decoupling task strategy from low‑level control. In peg‑in‑hole experiments, PA‑RL achieved a 100% success rate in simulation, outperformed baselines in torque and acceleration variation, and transferred to a real robot without fine‑tuning.
arXiv:2606. 06218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A policy tuned for one robot often behaves differently on another, whether due to the sim-to-real gap, unknown payloads, or the differing dynamics of two instances of the same robot.