RoTri-Diff: A Spatial Robot-Object Triadic Interaction-Guided Diffusion Model for Bimanual Manipulation
Authors: Zixuan Chen, Nga Teng Chan, Yiwen Hou, Chenrui Tie, Zixuan Liu, Haonan Chen, Junting Chen, Jieqi Shi, +3 more
Organizations: Zixuan Chen and Jing Huo are with the School of Computer Science, Nanjing University, China. · Yiwen Hou, Chenrui Tie, Zixuan Liu, Haonan Chen, Junting Chen and Lin Shao are with the School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore. · Nga Teng Chan is with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China. · Jieqi Shi and Yang Gao are with the School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University, China.
Bimanual manipulation is a fundamental robotic skill that requires continuous and precise coordination between two arms. While imitation learning (IL) is the dominant paradigm for acquiring this capability, existing approaches, whether robot-centric or object-centric, often overlook the dynamic geometric relationship among the two arms and the manipulated object. This limitation frequently leads to inter-arm collisions, unstable grasps, and degraded performance in complex tasks. To address this, in this paper we explicitly models the Robot-Object Triadic Interaction (RoTri) representation in bimanual systems, by encoding the relative 6D poses between the two arms and the object to capture their spatial triadic relationship and establish continuous triangular geometric constraints. Building on this, we further introduce RoTri-Diff, a diffusion-based imitation learning framework that combines RoTri constraints with robot keyposes and object motion in a hierarchical diffusion process. This enables the generation of stable, coordinated trajectories and robust execution across different modes of bimanual manipulation. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 10.2% on 11 representative RLBench2 tasks and achieves stable performance on 4 challenging real-world bimanual tasks. Project website: https://rotri-diff.github.io/.
Figures & tables
Imitation Learning Guides
Method
Robot Keyposes
Object Movement
Robot–Object Interaction
Prediction Type
ACT [ 17 ]
X
X
X
Continuous Actions
PerAct2 [ 10 ]
✓
X
X
Keyposes
DP3 [ 18 ]
X
X
X
Continuous Actions
AnyBimanual [ 14 ]
✓
X
X
Keyposes
3D Diffuser Actor [ 19 ]
✓
X
X
Keyposes & Continuous Actions
TABLE I : Comparison of representative bimanual imitation learning methods.
Fig. 2 : Overview of RoTri-Diff. (a) Visual Perception and RoTri Modeling: Extracting the initial object point cloud F0 , 3D semantic features St , and the initial RoTri representation R0 from multi-view observations. (b) Imitation Learning Guidance Signals: Three complementary signals used for supervision: Keyposes, Object Pointflow, and the RoTri Relationship. (c) Hierarchical Diffusion Model: The model concurrently predicts object pointflow and autoregressively predicts a future RoTri segment. These predictions then serve as dynamic conditions to guide the denoising and generation of keyposes and continuous actions within a synergistic attention module.
Fig. 3 : Visualization of the 11 RLBench2 tasks.
Fig. 4 : Ablation Study. Comparing Dense with Sparse (5/10 step) variants shows that higher guidance density consistently yields superior task success.
Fig. 5 : Real-world experimental setup.
Fig. 6 : Task process visualizations in 4 real-world tasks.
Coordinated bimanual manipulation is challenging because the motion of either arm can alter the shared 3D scene and thereby affect the other arm. Yet most diffusion policies generate actions without explicitly modeling these future geometric consequences, while predictive variants typically use future state only as auxiliary supervision or fixed conditioning. We address this limitation by proposing JAMB, a diffusion policy that jointly denoises bimanual actions and future 3D point tracks. By allowing action and track hypotheses to evolve together within a shared Transformer, each can inform and refine the other throughout denoising. We further ground multimodal representations in a shared spatiotemporal coordinate system to facilitate geometry-aware interaction during joint denoising. We evaluate JAMB on diverse bimanual manipulation tasks in RoboTwin 2.0 and on a real-world robot, comparing it with action-only policies and alternative future-prediction approaches spanning different state representations and learning objectives. Across 16 simulation tasks, JAMB achieves an average success rate of 83.4%, outperforming the strongest baseline by 23.9 percentage points. On three real-world tasks, it outperforms the action-only and auxiliary geometry prediction methods by 50.0 and 21.2 percentage points, respectively. Beyond these performance gains, JAMB shows stronger generalization to cluttered scenes and out-of-distribution backgrounds than the evaluated baselines. Together, these results demonstrate the effectiveness of our joint action-motion modeling framework for coordinated bimanual manipulation. Our project website is available at https://jam-bimanual.github.io/
Chuyang Xiao, Peilin Meng, David Held
Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. · University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
Bimanual teleoperation provides an effective way to collect robot demonstrations, but it assumes that the operator and robot have matching numbers of simultaneous control channels. This assumption breaks for tri-manual systems: the robot can coordinate three arms concurrently, whereas a single operator can continuously control only two. Pairwise mode switching may therefore record otherwise independent motions sequentially, causing behaviour cloning to reproduce delays imposed by the interface rather than required by the task. We present TriManPolicy, a tri-manual imitation learning system that allows one operator to demonstrate behaviours for three arms. Its central component is Dependency-Aware Tri-Arm Scheduling (DATS). The key idea is to preserve the demonstrated arm motions while reconsidering when they occur. DATS retimes demonstrations offline by preserving local sensorimotor segments of fixed duration and repositioning them according to constraints on task order and arm usage that are reviewed by a human. The resulting data train a single synchronous policy for all three arms, while deployment requires neither the dependency graph nor the scheduler. Across six challenging tasks performed in the real world, policies trained on demonstrations retimed by DATS exhibit more efficient coordination while maintaining comparable observed task success. Offline analysis further shows that DATS changes the supervision across arms rather than merely removing idle periods. Project videos and additional material are available at https://aus.bot/trimanpolicy/.
James Zhao, Mingyuan Ba, Weiming Zhi
School of Computer Science and 2Australian Center For Robotics, The University of Sydney, Australia · College of Connected Computing, Vanderbilt University, TN, USA
Bimanual manipulation requires policies that can reason about 3D geometry, anticipate how it evolves under action, and generate smooth, coordinated motions. However, existing methods typically rely on 2D features with limited spatial awareness, or require explicit point clouds that are difficult to obtain reliably in real-world settings. At the same time, recent 3D geometric foundation models show that accurate and diverse 3D structure can be reconstructed directly from RGB images in a fast and robust manner. We leverage this opportunity and propose a framework that builds bimanual manipulation directly on a pre-trained 3D geometric foundation model. Our policy fuses geometry-aware latents, 2D semantic features, and proprioception into a unified state representation, and uses diffusion model to jointly predict a future action chunk and a future 3D latent that decodes into a dense pointmap. By explicitly predicting how the 3D scene will evolve together with the action sequence, the policy gains strong spatial understanding and predictive capability using only RGB observations. We evaluate our method both in simulation on the RoboTwin benchmark and in real-world robot executions. Our approach consistently outperforms 2D-based and point-cloud-based baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance in manipulation success, inter-arm coordination, and 3D spatial prediction accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/Chongyang-99/GAP.git.
Chongyang Xu, Haipeng Li, Shen Cheng +4
College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, China · Dexmal · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China +1