Yashraj Narang

Stone Tao, Jie Xu, Hesam Rabeti et al.

Linear-deformable manipulation remains challenging due to the complex deformations of objects such as cables and ropes. Prior data-driven approaches, particularly imitation learning, have shown some promise in narrowly defined settings but typically require thousands of demonstrations for specific tasks and cable types, limiting scalability and generalization. We introduce a sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) framework for multi-stage cable routing that leverages GPU-parallelized simulation to approximate linear deformable behaviors. Training across thousands of parallel simulations enables the learned policies to generalize across diverse cable geometries and deformation patterns. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we propose a novel deployment strategy that combines a Simulation In the LOop (SILO) execution framework, localized RL policies, and robust cable state estimation. On real-world cable routing tasks, our approach achieves higher success rates and 2x reduction in cycle times compared to prior state-of-the-art learning methods. To our knowledge, this is the first successful sim-to-real transfer of RL policies for multi-stage cable routing. Videos and additional visualizations are available at https://silo-cable-routing.github.io/

Wenqi Jiang, Jason Clemons, Rowland O'Flaherty et al.

Robotics foundation models (RFMs) are making general-purpose robots increasingly practical for factory deployments. While RFM serving systems are central to this vision, existing systems are largely shaped by a single-robot, single-model assumption: inference is treated as an edge-computing problem handled by an on-robot or dedicated nearby GPU, and the serving objective is to minimize the latency of a single action model. In this paper, we propose ROSA, an RFM serving system for robot factories designed around three key principles. First, ROSA adopts shared GPU-pool serving, allowing a fleet of robots to access powerful server-class GPUs over the network in order to improve inference performance, battery duration, and GPU utilization. Second, ROSA provides a robotics-aware programming abstraction and system design that supports multi-model pipelines, per-task performance requirements, and failure handling. Third, ROSA uses factory-objective-driven scheduling to maximize SLO-qualified factory productivity rather than minimizing individual request latency. We implement ROSA on top of Ray Serve for distributed orchestration, with vLLM, PyTorch, and JAX as model-serving backends, and evaluate it on both real robots and synthetic large-scale workloads. The results show that ROSA improves factory productivity by up to 12.06x over conventional dedicated serving systems.