RAM: Reachability Across Morphologies
cs.RO, cs.LG
Submitted: 2026-06-08
Updated: 2026-10-12
Comments: Accepted at the 10th Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2026). 23 pages, 15 figures. Project page: https://timwalter.github.io/ram, code: https://github.com/TimWalter/ram
Project page: https://timwalter.github.io/ram
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Many stages of the robotic lifecycle, from morphology synthesis to operation, rely fundamentally on the reachable workspace.
Terminology
Abstract
Many stages of the robotic lifecycle, from morphology synthesis to operation, rely fundamentally on the reachable workspace. However, current methods for approximating workspaces are slow, imprecise, or tied to a single morphology. We introduce Reachability Across Morphologies (RAM): a morphology-conditioned, implicit neural representation that acts as a fast, differentiable surrogate for pose reachability, generalising to unseen morphologies while inherently accounting for self-collisions. RAM is trained on a large-scale dataset of 3 times10 10 samples generated solely from forward kinematics, which we publish alongside the model. Experiments show that RAM reaches 84% balanced accuracy at nanosecond inference, 15 percentage points higher than a generative inverse kinematics baseline that also generalises across morphologies, while running three orders of magnitude faster. This speed carries over to downstream tasks, accelerating morphology and trajectory optimisation by one to two orders of magnitude.
Sources
- A Design Co-Pilot for Task-Tailored Manipulators
- HJCD-IK: GPU-Accelerated Inverse Kinematics through Batched Hybrid Jacobian Coordinate Descent
- Comparison of Distal Teacher Learning with Numerical and Analytical Methods to Solve Inverse Kinematics for Rigid-Body Mechanisms
- NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis
- Neural Fields in Robotics: A Survey
- Representing Robot Geometry as Distance Fields: Applications to Whole-body Manipulation
- Optimistix: modular optimisation in JAX and Equinox
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