Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2603.21421

HyReach: Vision-Guided Hybrid Manipulator Reaching in Unseen Cluttered Environments

Shivani Kamtikar·Kendall Koe·Justin Wasserman·Samhita Marri·Benjamin Walt·Naveen Kumar Uppalapati·Girish Krishnan·Girish Chowdhary
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

As robotic systems increasingly operate in unstructured, cluttered, and previously unseen environments, there is a growing need for manipulators that combine compliance, adaptability, and precise control. This work presents a real-time hybrid rigid-soft continuum manipulator system designed for robust open-world object reaching in such challenging environments. The system integrates vision-based perception and 3D scene reconstruction with shape-aware motion planning to generate safe trajectories. A learning-based controller drives the hybrid arm to arbitrary target poses, leveraging the flexibility of the soft segment while maintaining the precision of the rigid segment. The system operates without environment-specific retraining, enabling direct generalization to new scenes. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate consistent reaching performance with errors below 2 cm across diverse cluttered setups, highlighting the potential of hybrid manipulators for adaptive and reliable operation in unstructured environments.

Explore related subjects

cs.ROcs.AI

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Shivani Kamtikar, Kendall Koe, Justin Wasserman, Samhita Marri, Benjamin Walt, Naveen Kumar Uppalapati, Girish Krishnan, Girish Chowdhary. 2026-03-22. HyReach: Vision-Guided Hybrid Manipulator Reaching in Unseen Cluttered Environments. https://doi.org/10.1177/21695172261439479

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

IMLE-VLA: Fast Single-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Policies

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies leverage pretrained vision-language backbones to achieve strong cross-task generalization. A leading design couples this backbone with a dedicated continuous action head trained via diffusion or flow matching. However, such heads rely on iterative multi-step sampling, for example 10 Euler steps in $\pi_{0.5}$. This creates an inference bottleneck that produces stop-and-go movement in the robot and slower task completion. We introduce IMLE-VLA, which replaces the iterative action head with a single-step conditional generator trained via conditional Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (cIMLE). The cIMLE objective promotes multimodal action coverage, avoiding the mode collapse of naive regression heads while eliminating multi-step sampling entirely. When IMLE-VLA is applied to $\pi_{0.5}$, it increases inference frequency 3.67x (55 Hz vs. 15 Hz), enabling up to 11x higher action throughput. On the 40-task LIBERO benchmark, IMLE-VLA achieves the highest average success rate (98.0%) among all baselines while leading in inference frequency. Under the test-time perturbations of LIBERO-plus, IMLE-VLA retains $\pi_{0.5}$'s robustness while other baselines degrade sharply, confirming that the cIMLE head preserves generalization. Real-world experiments on a Franka Emika Panda across four tasks demonstrate smoother motion (2.2x to 3.0x lower jerk) and faster task completion, with IMLE-VLA outperforming $\pi_{0.5}$ on every task and reducing average VLA inference time per episode by 3.9x to 6.6x. Videos and code are available at https://kianhk6.github.io/IMLE-VLA/

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

ObstaDiff: Generalizable Diffusion Policy Learning via Obstacle-aware Representations

Imitation learning has achieved impressive results in robotic manipulation, yet most existing approaches assume clean backgrounds and lack explicit mechanisms for obstacle-aware motion generation. Extending such policies to cluttered, real-world scenes with unstructured obstacles remains a key generalization challenge. We present ObstaDiff, a decomposed diffusion-policy framework with a lightweight obstacle-aware visual encoder. ObstaDiff extracts a structured target-obstacle-background representation, enabling the downstream alignment policy to generate end-effector trajectories toward a target-centered bottleneck pose while reasoning about surrounding obstacles. We evaluate ObstaDiff on 61 real-robot greenhouse trials per method (366 executions in total). ObstaDiff achieves 75.41% average task success and 8.20% average obstacle collision rate, outperforming representative imitation-learning baselines and improving generalization in cluttered agricultural scenes.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Testing Between the Test Cases: Proving End-to-End Steering in Conditions You Never Drove

AI-based automated vehicle testing is challenging because a model that passes every test condition can still fail in the real world. Formal verification offers a way to directly address this gap. On a simulated highway and an arterial road we trained two small end-to-end steering networks each in CARLA, one on clear conditions alone and one on clear, fog, night and low sun. All four models were driven against a 2.19 ft lane-departure budget. Without driving again, we used bound propagation, a formal method that reads the trained weights, to compute how far steering can drift at every disturbance strength between two captured images. One calculation covers more than a campaign could drive: on the arterial it spans 133 poses, where ten intensities each would be 10^133 combinations, in minutes on one GPU. Not only did formal verification find conditions that broke the clear-trained policy without simulation testing, it provided some preliminary evidence for potential failures between the test cases. Our overall conclusion is that formal verification is a viable complement to simulation, and could be adopted as a part of verification and validation for automated driving.

cs.RO↗