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Dandan Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Dandan Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

RefGuard: Identity-Aware Language-Guided Robot Manipulation via Joint Target-Anchor-Frame Grounding

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have substantially advanced language-guided robot manipulation, yet reliable execution still hinges on identifying which physical object an instruction refers to. In cluttered scenes containing repeated objects, ambiguous anchors, or frame-dependent spatial terms, a robot can execute a geometrically valid action on a semantically compatible but unintended instance; we call this failure an identity switch. The referent is jointly determined by three coupled latent variables: the target, the anchor, and the reference frame, so committing to any one of them before execution turns residual ambiguity into a silent and irreversible error. We propose RefGuard, an identity-aware grounding framework that delays commitment by maintaining a joint posterior over all three variables. RefGuard builds a frame-conditioned object-centric scene graph from RGB-D observations, separating frame-independent geometry from directional relations, and routes the posterior through a decision policy that executes, clarifies, reobserves, or aborts. On a real UF850 arm, RefGuard records no identity switch on any ambiguity-stress trial and executes correctly on 90.0% of them, whereas fine-tuned VLA and LLM (Large Language Model)-based baselines switch identity in 33-46% of the same trials, while retaining 93.3% success on unambiguous scenes and recovering from post-grounding scene changes in 86.7% of trials. On a 3200-episode procedural suite, it raises correct execution on solvable instructions from 56.6% to 80.5% over the ablation that commits to the anchor and frame before the target, while deferring less often (19.5% vs. 43.4%).

cs.RO

Bridging Semantics and Physics with Constrained LLMs for Safe and Trustworthy Robotic Manipulation

A language-guided robot operating in a real kitchen must do more than produce a plan that appears correct. It must also execute that plan safely in cluttered environments under imperfect perception. Large language models (LLM) can decompose instructions into action sequences, yet a language-action gap remains: a plan may appear valid linguistically while being physically infeasible under kinematic and collision constraints. We bridge this gap by formalizing the reasoning-execution boundary as a typed contract. From RGB-D observations, the system grounds perceived objects in an explicit, collision-aware scene model and constrains language-level decisions through schema-validated tool calls defined by the Model Context Protocol (MCP), rejecting malformed commands before they reach the robot. Each validated call is deterministically grounded in a MoveIt Task Constructor pipeline, where candidate motions are evaluated against the reconstructed planning scene in a verify-then-act step. Only trajectories that pass both kinematic and collision checks are sent to the robot. On a physical UFactory 850, the method achieves up to 80% success across ten trials per task on pouring tasks involving liquids, granular media, and discrete solids. It achieves 90% success on a grasp-and-place task using the same planning, protocol, and verification stack. Although a scripted policy slightly outperforms our method on the easiest task, its success rate falls to 10% on the hardest, compared with 60% for our method.

cs.RO

Toward Trustworthy Robot-Assisted Sliding Palpation for Shallow Vessel Localisation with a Calibrated Digital Twin

Reliable localisation of shallow subsurface vessels is important for safe robot-assisted venous access and vessel-aware manipulation, but collecting diverse tactile data on physical hardware is costly, time-consuming, and can degrade soft vision-based tactile sensors. We present a robot-assisted sliding-palpation framework in which a calibrated digital twin generates labelled tactile sequences, reducing reliance on real-world data. The twin models sensor-vessel contact, is calibrated against real palpation trajectories using Bayesian-optimisation-based domain adaptation, and is randomised over sliding direction and contact conditions. A spatio-temporal graph neural network trained on simulated marker trajectories performs per-node vessel classification and produces a human-verifiable top-view localisation map through 2D-to-3D-to-2D geometric projection. We evaluate three datasets: Sim, Silicone, and Meat, the latter a raw-meat phantom with vessel models at nominal depths of 0 to 30 mm, using four train-to-test configurations: Sim to Sim, Sim to Silicone, Sim to Meat, and Meat to Silicone. The calibrated twin achieves a simulated-to-real marker-alignment mean absolute error of 0.50 mm at deepest contact across four canonical interactions. After reprojection onto a 1 mm top-view grid, predicted vessel pixels lie on average 1.05 to 5.49 mm from the nearest true vessel pixel across the four models, with 1.05 to 1.31 mm for all except Sim to Meat. The larger error for Sim to Meat reflects the greater domain shift and current limit of simulation transfer. These results demonstrate progress toward trustworthy tactile palpation through calibrated simulation, interpretable localisation, and transparent cross-domain evaluation. Code, model weights, and data are publicly available on GitHub and Zenodo.

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KnockGS:interaction-Grounded Calibrationof Physical Gaussian Representations

Physics-integrated 3D Gaussian representations now allow reconstructed deformable objects to be simulated and rendered under explicit material models. Existing pipelines, however, assume that material parameters are known or manually specified, limiting their applicability when these parameters must be inferred from observed object dynamics. We propose KnockGS, an interaction-response PhysicalGS framework that estimates the elasticity and density scales of a 3D Gaussian object from its dynamics under a known applied force. Rather than treating physical simulation only as a forward process, we turn the force-induced response into a calibration signal: temporal response features are xtracted from the observed dynamics, the two material scales are estimated from those features, and the estimate is then frozen and written back into the same simulator so that it can be tested on an interaction it was never fitted to.We evaluate the framework on both parameter recovery and response-level fidelity. The estimated scales are compared against hidden ground truth, and the re-simulated object is measured against the target using 3D particle trajectories, response-curve statistics, and rendered-frame quality. Across five held-out material targets, our method recovers the scales substantially more accurately than response retrieval, global regression, or a fixed default material, and the frozen estimate remains predictive under interactions that differ in direction and in magnitude. Interaction response therefore carries enough information to calibrate material scales in physically grounded 3D Gaussian representations.Our study is a first step toward interactive PhysicalGS systems that calibrate a Gaussian asset whose rendered appearance and simulated response are consistent.

cs.CV

SoftVTBench: A Deformation-Aware Visuo-Tactile Dataset and Benchmark for Deformable-Object Manipulation

Physical interaction quality is central to deformable-object manipulation, yet most benchmarks evaluate task success alone. A policy may complete the task while allowing slip or causing excessive compression. A primary bottleneck is the absence of visuo-tactile datasets that pair policy-visible contact observations with independent physical ground truth over complete tasks. We introduce SoftVTBench, a visuo-tactile dataset for physical-interaction-aware deformable-object manipulation. It contains 4,000 expert demonstrations and more than 50 assets, including volumetric deformable objects and visually matched rigid twins. At 20 Hz, each episode synchronizes multi-view RGB, dual-finger tactile RGB and marker motion, proprioception, language, and binary and continuous gripper actions, alongside evaluator-only finite-element (FEM) states. Building upon this dataset, we establish a closed-loop benchmark that uses fixed object-specific calibration to define the Deformation-aware Success Rate (DSR), which counts a rollout as successful only when it completes the task and keeps peak normalized deformation within tolerance. Across Diffusion Policy, $\pi_{0.5}$, and FastWAM, all 12 in-distribution configurations contain successful rollouts that violate the deformation tolerance, accounting for 0.7--24% of each configuration's successes. Under distribution shift, visuo-tactile variants achieve higher task success in all six policy--suite comparisons and higher DSR in five, whereas their in-distribution benefits are mixed. These results show that making touch available does not by itself ensure effective multimodal fusion. SoftVTBench therefore provides a common visuo-tactile resource for studying not only whether a policy succeeds, but how it physically interacts with deformable objects and when touch improves that interaction.

cs.RO

A Compact 3D-Printed Soft Finger with Cyclic Hydraulic Actuation

Hydraulic soft fingers offer compliant and gentle manipulation, but their practical deployment is limited by bulky fluidic hardware, fabrication complexity, and insufficient design validation. This paper presents a compact 3D-printed soft hydraulic finger driven by a miniature cyclic peristaltic loop. The finger integrates compliant bellows, rigid connectors, and fluidic ports, while an Abaqus fluid-structure model is used to guide selection of wall thickness, pitch angle, and bellows length. The selected design is validated through baseline-corrected chamber-pressure measurements and vision-based angle tracking. Results show that the quasi-static finite-element model captures the main pressure-angle trends, with remaining offsets mainly attributed to bonding-induced stiffness and hydraulic losses. Vision-feedback control further enables repeatable angle tracking over a large bending range. Finally, grasping tests on fragile and deformable objects, including tofu and blueberries, demonstrate gentle, slip-free contact without visible damage. Overall, this work establishes a reproducible pipeline from FEA-guided design to closed-loop validation for compact 3D-printed hydraulic soft fingers.

eess.SY

A Closed-Loop Multi-Agent Framework for Robust Multi-Robot Manipulation

Multi-robot systems provide the parallelism and redundancy necessary for long-horizon tasks, while Large Language Models (LLMs) offer the reasoning capabilities to decompose these objectives into actionable plans. However, effectively grounding this high-level reasoning in physical multi-robot execution remains an open challenge. Existing LLM-based approaches fall mainly into two categories: Single-robot methods achieve robust contact-rich manipulation but lack the coordination mechanisms required for tasks spanning multiple workspaces. Current multi-robot frameworks focus on high-level planning, often treating manipulation as an idealized primitive that fails to account for real-world execution uncertainties. To address this, we propose a hierarchical closed-loop agentic LLM-based framework to ensure robust multi-robot manipulation. Our system consists of three specialized agents: the Planning Agent decomposes instructions into allocated sub-tasks, the Manipulation Agent for each robot executes actions via adaptive tool use, and the Verification Agent closes the loop by monitoring physical outcomes and feeding back semantic corrections. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves superior success rates, ensures robust adaptability ranging from single to cross workspace manipulation, and offers a generalizable approach for diverse manipulation tasks.

cs.RO

SoftVTBench: A Safety-Aware Visuo-Tactile Benchmark for Physically Constrained Robotic Manipulation of Deformable Objects (Early Version)

Deformable object manipulation poses challenges beyond task completion: successful execution must also maintain safe physical interaction, holding the object stably without slip or drop while avoiding excessive deformation. However, existing manipulation benchmarks are predominantly success-oriented and rarely evaluate whether a policy remains physically safe throughout execution. We present SoftVTBench, a safety-aware visuo-tactile benchmark for physically constrained deformable object manipulation. Built in Isaac Sim with finite-element-simulated deformable objects, SoftVTBench provides multi-view RGB observations, RGB tactile sensing with marker motion, proprioception, and language instructions, and defines four matched task suites over object type (deformable vs. rigid) and variation axis (object vs. spatial). It separately reports Goal Success and Safety Success; the latter additionally requires no drop and peak deformation below a calibrated object-specific threshold, measured from policy-hidden privileged Finite Element Method (FEM) states. We implement pi0.5-based baselines under this protocol. Experiments show that success-only evaluation substantially overstates policy performance, as a large fraction of goal-completing rollouts still violate physical safety. Furthermore, incorporating tactile sensing improves Safety Success (e.g., from 21.4% to 35.6% on object-centric deformable tasks) and reduces object deformation during execution, while maintaining comparable Goal Success. SoftVTBench provides a reproducible benchmark for studying visuo-tactile deformable manipulation under physical interaction constraints.

cs.RO

RoboDojo: A Unified Sim-and-Real Benchmark for Comprehensive Evaluation of Generalist Robot Manipulation Policies

Generalist robot manipulation policies have advanced rapidly, yet existing benchmarks remain limited in systematically evaluating their capabilities. Many rely on simple, short-horizon, or skill-narrow tasks with limited capability coverage, and are often conducted only in simulation or only in the real world. Simulation enables scalable feedback but misses physical deployment challenges, while real-world evaluation is costly, time-consuming, and difficult to reproduce. We introduce RoboDojo, a unified sim-and-real benchmark for comprehensive evaluation of generalist robot manipulation policies. RoboDojo includes 42 simulation tasks and 18 real-world tasks covering diverse and complementary manipulation capabilities. The simulation benchmark evaluates five dimensions: generalization, memory, precision, long-horizon execution, and open-vocabulary instruction following, while the real-world benchmark exposes policies to challenging physical-world deployment conditions. RoboDojo supports scalable evaluation through heterogeneous parallel simulation in Isaac Sim and provides RoboDojo-RealEval, a reproducible real-world evaluation system with remote cloud access, standardized hardware, scene reset, evaluation protocol, and deployment interface. Together with XPolicyLab, policies can be integrated once and evaluated across simulation and real-world settings with minimal adaptation. We integrate 30 policies into XPolicyLab and evaluate them on RoboDojo, establishing a public leaderboard and systematic analysis of current policy performance. The website is available at http://robodojo-benchmark.com/.

cs.RO

TacEvo: Self-Evolving Architecture Discovery for Robotic Tactile Perception via LLM-Driven Quality-Diversity Search

Vision-based tactile sensing converts contact-induced surface deformation into images, enabling robots to infer contact forces and fine surface textures that are not accessible through conventional vision alone. However, tactile images are sensor- and physics-specific, so effective architectures often require expert intuition and extensive manual iteration. Existing neural architecture search (NAS) pipelines can reduce this burden, but they are often computationally expensive and restricted to hand-designed search spaces, which limits architectural novelty and diversity. We introduce TacEvo, a self-evolving architecture discovery framework that improves network designs from downstream feedback. TacEvo uses an LLM to generate code-level mutations and crossovers, and a MAP-Elites quality-diversity loop that preserves diverse elite architectures while preferentially reusing prompts that consistently yield improvements. Exploration is guided by two behavioural descriptors, Architectural Diversity and Efficiency Ratio, which encourage coverage across structural variations and compute-size trade-offs. On ViTacTip force regression and grating classification, TacEvo achieves high autonomous generation reliability (96.0%/94.5% trainable) and improves best validation fitness over 20 generations by 56.1%/96.1%. In a 20-seed post-search high-fidelity evaluation, TacEvo matches the expert baseline on force prediction and outperforms it on fine-grained grating classification. These results suggest that LLM-driven self-evolving search constitutes a practical paradigm for AI-assisted scientific discovery in specialised robotic sensing.

cs.RO

TacVerse: A Multi-Sensor Dataset and Benchmark for Cross-Sensor Vision-Based Tactile Perception

Vision-based tactile sensors (VBTSs) enable robots to infer contact geometry and force-related cues by imaging deformation through an internal camera, yet generalisation across sensor designs remains poorly understood. We present TacVerse, a multi-sensor dataset and benchmark for cross-sensor vision-based tactile perception. The dataset contains 106,800 tactile images from seven VBTSs and supports three downstream tasks: shape classification, grating classification, and force regression. Experiments are conducted under three settings: within-sensor training, zero-shot cross-sensor transfer, and few-shot adaptation. Strong within-sensor performance across all tasks indicates that the collected tactile observations are informative for the target objectives. Direct cross-sensor transfer, however, leads to substantial degradation. Shape classification is comparatively robust, whereas grating classification and force regression are more sensitive to sensor shift. Few-shot adaptation for force regression consistently improves performance on unseen target sensors but does not fully close the gap to within-sensor upper bounds. A representation study further shows that MAE (Masked Autoencoder) pretraining provides the most consistent gains across tasks and sensors. TacVerse provides a controlled testbed for studying sensor shift, data-efficient adaptation, and self-supervised learning in tactile perception.

cs.RO

HATS: A Human-Agent Teleoperation System for Multi-Arm Data Collection

Many real-world manipulation scenarios, such as handling complex collaborative tasks and dealing with large workspaces, require coordination of more than two robotic arms. Consequently, an effective multi-arm teleoperation system is required to collect demonstrations for training coordinated multi-arm manipulation policies. However, existing teleoperation frameworks mainly focus on single-operator or multi-operator setups, facing a practical trade-off between the cognitive load placed on a single operator and the coordination cost incurred by multiple operators. To address this problem, we introduce HATS, a human-agent teleoperation system that enables a single human operator, assisted by an MLLM-based agent, to collect data for multi-arm manipulation tasks. Our system decouples the control space: two primary arms are directly teleoperated by the human, while two assistive arms are controlled by a training-free agent that handles sub-tasks. In addition, the human operator can use voice commands to prevent collisions and correct assistive arm behaviors during execution. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that HATS achieves data collection efficiency and success rates comparable to expert dual-human teams. Moreover, downstream policy evaluations demonstrate the efficacy and quality of the data collected through HATS.

cs.RO

Task Editing for Generalizable 3D Visuomotor Policy Learning

3D visuomotor policies offer a promising direction for complex robotic manipulation, as depth maps and point clouds provide rich geometric information for spatial reasoning. However, their success often depends on large-scale real-world demonstrations, which are costly and time-consuming to collect. To this end, existing methods commonly use demonstration generation strategies to improve data efficiency by applying object-centric transformations to human-collected demonstrations, such as varying object poses or scales. While effective for local variation, these transformations largely preserve the original scene structure and skill sequence, limiting their ability to synthesize diverse scene-skill-object combinations for complex tasks. In this paper, we propose Task-Edit, a novel demonstration generation framework that generates diverse trajectories from a task-centric editing perspective. The key insight of Task-Edit is to decompose a task into scene, skill and object components, and flexibly recombine them. In this way, Task-Edit enables scalable demonstration generation and significantly improves generalization for long-horizon manipulation tasks. We evaluate Task-Edit through extensive real-world experiments and demonstrate three advantages: (1) Effectiveness: Task-Edit significantly improves 3D visuomotor policies across various real-world tasks and robot embodiments. (2) Generalizability: Task-Edit improves model generalization across different scenario setups. (3) Applicability: Task-Edit enables models to handle scenarios that are difficult to collect in the real world, including disturbance resistance, obstacle avoidance and unseen cluttered scenes.

cs.RO

Simultaneous Contact Selection and Planning for Contact-Rich Manipulation with Cascaded Optimization

We propose an optimization-based framework for robust contact-rich manipulation. Recent contact-implicit methods enable online hybrid planning across contact modes, allowing closed-loop manipulation for a given target state and contact location sequence of the robot and object. However, most existing approaches lack the ability to autonomously reason and generate diverse contact location sequences and manipulation trajectories, i.e., active contact location selection, which limits their applicability to relatively simple tasks. Active contact location selection is challenging due to complementarity in contact dynamics and the sparse gradients, making the design of a unified framework for contact selection and planning difficult. To address these challenges, we introduce Simultaneous Contact Selection and Planning (SCSP), a cascaded optimization framework comprising Contact Selection Optimization (CSO) and Contact Planning Optimization (CPO). CSO leverages a surrogate contact model and discrete-continuous optimization to efficiently resolve the nonsmoothness and coupling in contact selection, enabling online global searching of optimal contact locations. CPO performs prior-guided contact planning by evaluating the reference contact locations produced by CSO and generating corresponding manipulation trajectories in real time for redundant manipulators. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that SCSP produces diverse manipulation behaviors and robust control under inaccurate dynamics and perceptual noise. We further validate the generalization of the framework on challenging manipulation tasks. Project website: \href{https://sites.google.com/view/scsp-robot}{https://sites.google.com/view/scsp-robot}.

cs.RO

A Digital Twin Framework for Virtual Visuo-Haptic Teleoperation of Complex-Shaped Optical Microrobots

Optical tweezers (OT) provide piconewton-scale manipulation for delicate biomedical tasks, where visuo-haptic feedback can improve operator awareness by conveying interaction-force cues and trap-stability information. However, visuo-haptic teleoperation frameworks for complex-shaped optical microrobots remain underdeveloped, particularly in multi-trap manipulation scenarios. This paper presents a digital twin framework for virtual visuo-haptic teleoperation of complex-shaped OT-driven microrobots. The framework integrates a digital twin environment, image-based pose and depth estimation, microrobot motion simulation, and model-based haptic rendering within a Robot Operating System (ROS)-connected bimanual teleoperation system. For force modeling, we combine a Multi-Sphere Distributed Manipulation (MSDM) model with optical-force estimation from the Optical Tweezers Toolbox, enabling simulator-driven visuo-haptic feedback. The framework reproduces representative microrobot motion trends and provides haptic force rendering that is numerically consistent with the fitted optical-force model. In simulated cell-delivery tasks, haptic feedback reduced the standard deviations of the contact-force metric and the microrobot-to-trap-center distance metric by 53.2% and 55.2%, respectively, and improved task success from 30% to 80%. These results demonstrate the framework's effectiveness for evaluating visuo-haptic teleoperation strategies for complex-shaped optical microrobots.

cs.RO

Mag-VLA: Vision-Language-Action Model for Bimanual Magnetically Actuated Microrobot Manipulation

Magnetically actuated microrobots have been used as wireless, non-contact manipulation tools at microscales, making them promising for minimally invasive applications. However, their control remains challenging due to indirect actuation, limited sensing, and nonlinear magnetic interactions. In this work, we propose Mag-VLA, a vision-language-action (VLA) model for dexterous magnetic microrobot manipulation using two robotic arms with mounted magnets for dynamic magnetic-field construction. Bimanual coordination enables capabilities such as microrobot reorientation that are difficult or infeasible with a single arm, but it also introduces coupled control challenges, as the policy must generate coordinated trajectories for both actuators within a shared workspace. Our framework adapts a Qwen2.5-VL-7B backbone using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to process visual observations and language instructions for action prediction. To capture task progression, we introduce a motion-aware phase classifier and a phase-conditioned Action Chunking Transformer (ACT) decoder for temporally coherent multi-step control. We further construct a teleoperated magnetic microrobot manipulation dataset covering three task configurations. Ablation studies show that the ACT-based decoder substantially outperforms alternative generative action heads. In real-robot experiments, Mag-VLA achieves a 90% approach success rate across all tasks and transport success rates of 80%, 70%, and 50% as task difficulty increases. These results demonstrate that hierarchical VLA modeling provides a promising framework for magnetic microrobot manipulation.

cs.RO

Micro-Dexterity in Biological Micromanipulation: Embodiment, Perception, and Control

Microscale manipulation has advanced substantially in controlled locomotion and targeted transport, yet many biomedical applications require precise and adaptive interaction with biological micro-objects. At these scales, manipulation is realized through three main classes of platforms: embodied microrobots that physically interact as mobile agents, field-mediated systems that generate contactless trapping or manipulation forces, and externally actuated end-effectors that interact through remotely driven physical tools. Unlike macroscale manipulators, these systems function in fluidic, confined, and surface-dominated environments characterized by negligible inertia, dominant interfacial forces, and soft, heterogeneous, and fragile targets. Consequently, classical assumptions of dexterous manipulation, including rigid-body contact, stable grasping, and rich proprioceptive feedback, become difficult to maintain. This review introduces micro-dexterity as a framework for analyzing biological micromanipulation through the coupled roles of embodiment, perception, and control. We examine how classical manipulation primitives, including pushing, reorientation, grasping, and cooperative manipulation, are reformulated at the microscale; compare the architectures that enable them, from contact-based micromanipulators to contactless field-mediated systems and cooperative multi-agent platforms; and review the perception and control strategies required for task execution. We identify the current dexterity gap between laboratory demonstrations and clinically relevant biological manipulation, and outline key challenges for future translation.

cs.RO

Dual-Control Frequency-Aware Diffusion Model for Depth-Dependent Optical Microrobot Microscopy Image Generation

Optical microrobots actuated by optical tweezers (OT) are important for cell manipulation and microscale assembly, but their autonomous operation depends on accurate 3D perception. Developing such perception systems is challenging because large-scale, high-quality microscopy datasets are scarce, owing to complex fabrication processes and labor-intensive annotation. Although generative AI offers a promising route for data augmentation, existing generative adversarial network (GAN)-based methods struggle to reproduce key optical characteristics, particularly depth-dependent diffraction and defocus effects. To address this limitation, we propose Du-FreqNet, a dual-control, frequency-aware diffusion model for physically consistent microscopy image synthesis. The framework features two independent ControlNet branches to encode microrobot 3D point clouds and depth-specific mesh layers, respectively. We introduce an adaptive frequency-domain loss that dynamically reweights high- and low-frequency components based on the distance to the focal plane. By leveraging differentiable FFT-based supervision, Du-FreqNet captures physically meaningful frequency distributions often missed by pixel-space methods. Trained on a limited dataset (e.g., 80 images per pose), our model achieves controllable, depth-dependent image synthesis, improving SSIM by 20.7% over baselines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Du-FreqNet generalizes effectively to unseen poses and significantly enhances downstream tasks, including 3D pose and depth estimation, thereby facilitating robust closed-loop control in microrobotic systems.

cs.RO