The development of assistive robots for dressing tasks serves to augment human convenience and improve the quality of life for individuals with physical impairments. However, due to the intricate contact interactions between garments and the human limbs during dressing, most robot-assisted dressing algorithms treat clothing as an assembly of discrete segments, thereby struggling to manage the partial worn garments under contact constraints. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel robotic dressing control algorithm that integrates realtime differentiable clothing simulation. The simulation algorithm employs explicit iterative scheme with intentionally introduced higher-order perturbations to enhance computational efficiency while maintaining stability under large time-step conditions. Through simulation, we resolve the garment state under contact constraints, which then enables a multi-phase control strategy for successful coat dressing assistance. To further improve real-time performance, we introduce a constrained local model along with its corresponding optimization solver, permitting high-frequency local compensation for the differentiable simulation based global controller. Finally, we experimentally validate our approach through both simulated and physical dressing scenarios, conclusively demonstrating its feasibility and efficacy
Simulator-in-the-loop optimization offers a promising inference-time mechanism for robot manipulation. It uses a physical simulator as a backend rollout engine to evaluate candidate trajectories in parallel and refine nominal actions online, a paradigm proven effective in rigid-body manipulation where state and contact are relatively tractable. We bring this paradigm to real-world cloth manipulation from a single RGB input through three pillars. (i) We design a scalable synthetic-data generation and inference-time rollout pipeline built on FLASH, a deformable-object simulator that provides a practical balance among physical fidelity, numerical stability, and rollout efficiency. (ii) We develop a real-to-sim module, trained purely on synthetic data, that maps a single RGB observation to simulation-compatible cloth state by fusing pretrained visual features with learnable canonical tokens. (iii) We perform online planning by coupling a sparse-mesh rollout backend with prior-guided MPPI, anchored at an offline-distilled policy trajectory, preserving manipulation-relevant deformation and contact while enabling sufficient parallel rollout batches. Real-robot experiments show higher success rates and stronger robustness than baseline methods.
Deformable linear objects (DLOs) such as wires, cables, and ropes are common in robotic manipulation tasks, yet simulating them with both visual realism and physical accuracy remains challenging. Existing visual simulation methods typically rely on procedural geometric primitives that lack physically grounded deformation behavior, while physics-based approaches with robot learning support often approximate DLOs as rigid-link chains or generic soft bodies, failing to accurately capture the bending, twisting, and shear mechanics of slender elastic structures. In this work, we introduce DeformX, a co-simulation framework that integrates a dedicated Cosserat rod physics engine with NVIDIA Isaac Sim, enabling DLO simulations that are both physically faithful and visually realistic. Our Cosserat rod engine simulates the dynamics and self-collisions of DLOs, and contact interactions with arbitrary free-form meshes. To achieve high-fidelity visualization, we employ mesh skinning to map discrete rod deformations onto imported CAD models. To the best of our knowledge, DeformX is the one of the first frameworks for DLO simulation that unifies realistic visualization, principled physics, and compatibility with robot learning pipelines. We demonstrate its versatility across synthetic data generation and policy learning for DLO manipulation, and validate visual and physical fidelity through comparisons against real-world experiments. Notably, fine-tuning Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3) on DeformX-generated data yields a 10.2% mAP@75 improvement in real-image wire segmentation, and a rope-swinging policy trained entirely in DeformX achieves a mean target-hitting error of 6.6 cm on a UR5e manipulator in real-world trials, highlighting its strong sim-to-real transfer capability.
Unified and scalable Transformers have recently achieved remarkable success in modeling diverse phenomena traditionally associated with computer graphics, such as 3D visual effects, rendering processes, and motion in videos. In this work, we take a step further by investigating whether modern Transformer techniques can tackle the challenging task of cloth simulation. To this end, we present ClothTransformer, a framework that reformulates cloth simulation as autoregressive sequence modeling in a learned latent space. Existing neural cloth simulators are largely specialized to single scenarios, intrinsically coupled to the mesh discretization, and lack robust collision handling. Our approach addresses these limitations through three contributions: (1) a unified Transformer architecture that handles diverse scenarios -- body-driven garments, robotic manipulation, and free-fall collisions -- under a single model and achieves approximately 4--9× lower error than prior state-of-the-art methods across all scenarios; (2) a scalable latent-space formulation that compresses arbitrary-resolution meshes into a fixed-size set of latent tokens, making temporal dynamics computation independent of mesh resolution; and (3) a diverse-scenario high-fidelity penetration-free dataset of ∼493.4k frames spanning all three settings, which enables a differentiable Continuous Collision Detection (CCD) module to suppress penetration artifacts. Project Page: https://yucrazing.github.io/clothtransformer/