Scaling Latent Motor Adaptation to Coordinated Bimanual Manipulation
cs.RO
Submitted: 2026-10-10
Updated: 2026-10-10
Comments: Accepted at the IROS 2026 Bimanual Manipulation Workshop. 5 pages, 4 figures
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
The gist: Robust manipulation under uncertain object dynamics and geometry remains a core challenge in real-world robotics.
Terminology
Abstract
Robust manipulation under uncertain object dynamics and geometry remains a core challenge in real-world robotics. Policies trained under fixed assumptions often degrade when object mass, friction, scale, or shape vary. Embedding-based adaptation methods such as Rapid Motor Adaptation (RMA) address this by conditioning actions on latent representations of environment dynamics inferred from interaction history. We investigate whether this paradigm scales from single arm settings to coordinated bimanual manipulation, where higher dimensional control, coupled contacts, and shared object forces introduce additional complexity. We evaluate bimanual RMA on three contact-rich ManiSkill tasks with randomized YCB object properties. Bimanual RMA, using observation-action history and dual wrist depth images, retains privileged policy performance on bimanual picking and lifting, while an otherwise matched stationary PPO policy without latent conditioning achieves low success; all methods remain limited on long-horizon stacking. We further demonstrate direct sim-to-real transfer on a dual Franka lifting task without real-world finetuning. Together, these results suggest that latent conditioning provides useful structure for scaling robust control to coordinated bimanual systems, while longer horizon tasks require additional temporal structure.
Sources
- ManiSkill: Generalizable Manipulation Skill Benchmark with Large-Scale Demonstrations
- RMA: Rapid Motor Adaptation for Legged Robots
- Adapting Rapid Motor Adaptation for Bipedal Robots
- PerAct2: Benchmarking and Learning for Robotic Bimanual Manipulation Tasks
- DA-VIL: Adaptive Dual-Arm Manipulation with Reinforcement Learning and Variable Impedance Control
- Stabilize to Act: Learning to Coordinate for Bimanual Manipulation
- $\pi_0$: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control
- Bimanual Dexterity for Complex Tasks
- Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware
- QT-Opt: Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation
- Pick and Place Without Geometric Object Models
- Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World
- DeXtreme: Transfer of Agile In-hand Manipulation from Simulation to Reality
- Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand
- Preparing for the Unknown: Learning a Universal Policy with Online System Identification
- ALOHA Unleashed: A Simple Recipe for Robot Dexterity
- Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Dexterous Manipulation on Humanoids
- Towards Human-Level Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation with Reinforcement Learning
- Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms
- Rethinking Bimanual Robotic Manipulation: Learning with Decoupled Interaction Framework
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