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arXiv · 2507.17846

PinchBot: Long-Horizon Deformable Manipulation with Guided Diffusion Policy

Alison Bartsch·Arvind Car·Amir Barati Farimani
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Abstract

Pottery creation is a complicated art form that requires dexterous, precise and delicate actions to slowly morph a block of clay to a meaningful, and often useful 3D goal shape. In this work, we aim to create a robotic system that can create simple pottery goals with only pinch-based actions. This pinch pottery task allows us to explore the challenges of a highly multi-modal and long-horizon deformable manipulation task. To this end, we present PinchBot, a goal-conditioned diffusion policy model that when combined with pre-trained 3D point cloud embeddings, task progress prediction and collision-constrained action projection, is able to successfully create a variety of simple pottery goals. For experimental videos and access to the demonstration dataset, please visit our project website: https://sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.edu/pinchbot/home.

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Alison Bartsch, Arvind Car, Amir Barati Farimani. 2025-07-23. PinchBot: Long-Horizon Deformable Manipulation with Guided Diffusion Policy. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17846

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