Jiaming Qi

Fangyuan Wang, Ziyuan Wang, Guorui Pei et al.

Robotic manipulation depends on the ability to anticipate how actions reshape objects, contacts, and scene geometry before execution. Learned world models provide this capability by predicting task-relevant future evolution under robot intervention, yet the term now spans latent dynamics models, action-conditioned video generators, three- and four-dimensional scene predictors, physics-informed simulators, and predictive modules inside vision-language-action systems. This breadth has fragmented the literature and obscured the design choices that matter for manipulation. We survey world models for robotic manipulation through three questions: what future representation is predicted, how prediction is connected to action, and when prediction is used in the robot-learning pipeline. We operationally define a world model as an action-conditioned predictive system and distinguish it from perception modules, inverse models, policies, rewards, and value functions. We then organize existing work into five representation families, develop a functional taxonomy that separates integrated prediction-action models from explicit predictive planners, and characterize infrastructure roles including synthetic experience generation, candidate filtering, search-based evaluation, learned environments, and outcome verification. We further map these roles across pretraining, post-training, and inference adaptation, review 34 manipulation datasets, and synthesize evaluation protocols for predictive fidelity, task performance, and simulator reliability. This survey shows that world models are evolving from task-specific dynamics predictors into predictive infrastructure for robot learning, while exposing open challenges in contact modeling, hallucination control, action alignment, and benchmarking under closed-loop use.

Guorui Pei, Mengshi Zhang, Xi Chen et al.

Fast catching of free-flying objects is difficult because of short reaction time, impact uncertainty, and kinodynamic constraints. We use reinforcement learning in simulation to collect successful catching trajectories and learn a low-dimensional kinodynamic trajectory manifold. At run time, the estimated object initial state is mapped directly to a reference catching trajectory without online nonlinear optimization. The trajectory is tracked with compliant control near contact for improved impact absorption and capture stability.

Fangyuan Wang, Peng Zhou, Jiaming Qi et al.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models typically inject proprioception only as a late conditioning signal, which prevents robot state from shaping instruction understanding and from influencing which visual tokens are attended throughout the policy. We introduce ThinkProprio, which converts proprioception into a sequence of text tokens in the VLM embedding space and fuses them with the task instruction at the input. This early fusion lets embodied state participate in subsequent visual reasoning and token selection, biasing computation toward action-critical evidence while suppressing redundant visual tokens. In a systematic ablation over proprioception encoding, state entry point, and action-head conditioning, we find that text tokenization is more effective than learned projectors, and that retaining roughly 15% of visual tokens can match the performance of using the full token set. Across CALVIN, LIBERO, and real-world manipulation, ThinkProprio matches or improves over strong baselines while reducing end-to-end inference latency over 50%.

Jiaming Qi, Guangfu Ma, Jihong Zhu et al.

The robotic manipulation of composite rigid-deformable objects (i.e. those with mixed non-homogeneous stiffness properties) is a challenging problem with clear practical applications that, despite the recent progress in the field, it has not been sufficiently studied in the literature. To deal with this issue, in this paper we propose a new visual servoing method that has the capability to manipulate this broad class of objects (which varies from soft to rigid) with the same adaptive strategy. To quantify the object's infinite-dimensional configuration, our new approach computes a compact feedback vector of 2D contour moments features. A sliding mode control scheme is then designed to simultaneously ensure the finite-time convergence of both the feedback shape error and the model estimation error. The stability of the proposed framework (including the boundedness of all the signals) is rigorously proved with Lyapunov theory. Detailed simulations and experiments are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first time that contour moments along with finite-time control have been used to solve this difficult manipulation problem.

Jiaming Qi, Guangfu Ma, Peng Zhou et al.

The automatic shape control of deformable objects is a challenging (and currently hot) manipulation problem due to their high-dimensional geometric features and complex physical properties. In this study, a new methodology to manipulate elastic rods automatically into 2D desired shapes is presented. An efficient vision-based controller that uses a deep autoencoder network is designed to compute a compact representation of the object's infinite-dimensional shape. An online algorithm that approximates the sensorimotor mapping between the robot's configuration and the object's shape features is used to deal with the latter's (typically unknown) mechanical properties. The proposed approach computes the rod's centerline from raw visual data in real-time by introducing an adaptive algorithm on the basis of a self-organizing network. Its effectiveness is thoroughly validated with simulations and experiments.

Jiaming Qi, Guangtao Ran, Bohui Wang et al.

The robotic manipulation of deformable linear objects has shown great potential in a wide range of real-world applications. However, it presents many challenges due to the objects' complex nonlinearity and high-dimensional configuration. In this paper, we propose a new shape servoing framework to automatically manipulate elastic rods through visual feedback. Our new method uses parameterized regression features to compute a compact (low-dimensional) feature vector that quantifies the object's shape, thus, enabling to establish an explicit shape servo-loop. To automatically deform the rod into a desired shape, the proposed adaptive controller iteratively estimates the differential transformation between the robot's motion and the relative shape changes; This valuable capability allows to effectively manipulate objects with unknown mechanical models. An auto-tuning algorithm is introduced to adjust the robot's shaping motions in real-time based on optimal performance criteria. To validate the proposed framework, a detailed experimental study with vision-guided robotic manipulators is presented.

David Navarro-Alarcon, Jiaming Qi, Jihong Zhu et al.

In this article, we present a new scheme that approximates unknown sensorimotor models of robots by using feedback signals only. The formulation of the uncalibrated sensor-based regulation problem is first formulated, then, we develop a computational method that distributes the model estimation problem amongst multiple adaptive units that specialise in a local sensorimotor map. Different from traditional estimation algorithms, the proposed method requires little data to train and constrain it (the number of required data points can be analytically determined) and has rigorous stability properties (the conditions to satisfy Lyapunov stability are derived). Numerical simulations and experimental results are presented to validate the proposed method.