GSAM: A Generalizable and Safe Robotic Framework for Articulated Object Manipulation
Authors: Beichen Shao, Mengying Xie, Heng Su, Wanyi Zhang, Mingyan Li, Yan Ding, Fausto Giunchiglia, Chao Chen
Abstract
Articulated object manipulation is a unique challenge for service robots. Existing methods employ end-to-end policy learning, visionmotion planning, and large-language/visual-language model (LLM/VLM), but often overlook the diversity of articulated objects and the complexity of interactions between end-effector and handle, leading to limited generalization and destructive collisions. To address this, we propose GSAM, a generalizable and safe robotic framework for articulated object manipulation. Specifically, a vision-based perceiver generates the kinematic parameters. Considering that pre-trained markers in perceiver yield raw estimations that may deviate from commonsense, we present a f ine-tuned VLM-based refiner, using chain-of-thought (COT) commonsense reasoning to refine perception. To prevent destructive collisions, we design an interaction constraint function generator, integrating articulated object, interaction pose, and obstacle avoidance knowledge into a base. LLM then functionalize these constraints and apply them to trajectory and posture planning. A kinematic-aware manipulation planner verifies reachability for trajectory and posture. Experiments on 50 hinge tasks across 5 object categories and 50 randomly initialized end-effectorhandle configurations show that GSAM reduces standard deviation by 3.1% and improves manipulation success rate by 36.0% compared to the best baseline, respectively demonstrating the superior object generalization and interaction safety of GSAM in practical scenarios.
Category-level in-hand manipulation of articulated objects is a formidable yet underexplored challenge for dexterous robotic hands. This difficulty stems from two core bottlenecks: first, controlling an object's internal degrees of freedom is tightly coupled with maintaining grasp stability on a free-floating base; second, acquiring diverse object models and functional grasps at scale is highly labor-intensive, yet vital for generalization given the system's sensitivity to initial configurations. In this work, we present ArtManip, the first category-level articulated in-hand manipulation method that generalizes across object instances and diverse initial grasps. For initial configuration construction, we develop an automated pipeline that procedurally generates diverse articulated objects and synthesizes task-oriented functional grasps. For policy learning, we propose a robust two-stage training strategy that incorporates articulation physics randomization, reward curriculum, and latent representation distillation to handle complex contact and joint dynamics during deployment. Extensive experiments across four object categories demonstrate that our policy generalizes to unseen instances and varied configurations in simulation, and achieves zero-shot transfer to 12 real-world objects featuring diverse shapes and joint mechanics.
We are surrounded by various objects with movable, articulated parts, e.g., box, handle, door. An accurate and generalizable perception of articulated parts is essential to enhance robotic manipulation capabilities. Building on this need, recent efforts in articulated parts perception have followed two main directions: One line of work uses pose-based representation, which requires high manual cost; in parallel, affordance-based methods extract future object motion from point tracking without additional manual efforts, but suffer from low-quality data. In this paper, we propose a new representation of articulated parts, Geometric Primary Structure (GPS), an abstraction of the part geometry structure to balance scalability and quality. For efficient and scalable data collection, GPS is integrated with a portable Virtual Reality (VR) device and requires only one minute to annotate one object sequence. This direct human annotation provides higher quality than the estimated affordance. With this efficient VR-GPS system, we collect 41K frames for 234 objects across six part classes, and train a generalizable GPS model with a single RGB-D object image as input. For object manipulation, we deploy a heuristic policy based on GPS prediction. Without any in-domain fine-tuning, our method achieves an 73% success rate, covering 270 initial states for 9 objects. Our code, data and reusable tool are available at https://enlighten0707.github.io/gps.
Articulated object manipulation requires an understanding of kinematic structure that is difficult and costly to learn from robot demonstrations alone. We introduce the Kinematic-Aware Articulation Interface (KAI), a structured intermediate representation that captures the kinematic structure of articulated objects. By embedding interpretable geometric and kinematic priors into policy learning, KAI provides a strong inductive bias aligned with the underlying structure of articulated motion. This design effectively improves sample efficiency, with gains particularly pronounced in low-data regimes: across six simulation tasks, our method achieves an average success rate of 82.9%, matching or surpassing baseline performance while using only half the demonstration data. Our method also exhibits robust generalization to unseen backgrounds and visual distractors, transferring from a single clean training environment to cluttered real-world scenes. KAI's action-agnostic design further enables co-training with human interaction videos to enhance real-world robustness: under diverse visual distractions, our method with video co-training achieves over 70% average success rate.