HyReach: Vision-Guided Hybrid Manipulator Reaching in Unseen Cluttered Environments
This addresses the need for adaptive and reliable robotic manipulation in unstructured environments, representing a strong specific gain rather than a broad paradigm shift.
The paper tackles the problem of robotic manipulators reaching objects in unseen, cluttered environments by developing a real-time hybrid rigid-soft continuum manipulator system that integrates vision and motion planning, achieving consistent reaching performance with errors below 2 cm across diverse setups.
As robotic systems increasingly operate in unstructured, cluttered, and previously unseen environments, there is a growing need for manipulators that combine compliance, adaptability, and precise control. This work presents a real-time hybrid rigid-soft continuum manipulator system designed for robust open-world object reaching in such challenging environments. The system integrates vision-based perception and 3D scene reconstruction with shape-aware motion planning to generate safe trajectories. A learning-based controller drives the hybrid arm to arbitrary target poses, leveraging the flexibility of the soft segment while maintaining the precision of the rigid segment. The system operates without environment-specific retraining, enabling direct generalization to new scenes. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate consistent reaching performance with errors below 2 cm across diverse cluttered setups, highlighting the potential of hybrid manipulators for adaptive and reliable operation in unstructured environments.