Robotics: Science and Systems XXII

Latent Diffeomorphic Co-Design of End-Effectors for Deformable and Fragile Object Manipulation

Kei Ikemura, Yifei Dong, Florian T. Pokorny

Abstract:

Manipulating deformable and fragile objects remains a fundamental challenge in robotics due to complex contact dynamics and strict requirements on object integrity. Existing approaches typically optimize either end-effector design or control strategies in isolation, limiting achievable performance. In this work, we present the first co-design framework that jointly optimizes end-effector morphology and manipulation control for deformable and fragile object manipulation. We introduce (1) a latent diffeomorphic shape parameterization enabling expressive yet tractable end-effector geometry optimization, (2) a stress-aware bi-level co-design pipeline coupling morphology and control optimization, and (3) a privileged-to-pointcloud policy distillation scheme for zero-shot real-world deployment. We evaluate our approach on challenging food manipulation tasks, including grasping and pushing jelly and scooping fillets. Simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{IkemuraK-RSS-26, 
    AUTHOR    = {Kei Ikemura AND Yifei Dong AND Florian T. Pokorny}, 
    TITLE     = {{Latent Diffeomorphic Co-Design of End-Effectors for Deformable and Fragile Object Manipulation}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2026}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Sydney, Australia}, 
    MONTH     = {July}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2026.XXII.195} 
}