A stable grasp does not guarantee kinematically feasible robotic insertion because the object-in-gripper transform may force the robot towards singularities or joint limits along the prescribed insertion path. We study post-grasp kinematic feasibility repair through object-in-gripper reorientation. Given an achieved grasp and a fixed insertion path, we seek a small reorientation that restores kinematic feasibility. Sequential IK can miss such candidates by following an unfavorable joint-space path, while the nonsmooth feasibility landscape makes the search computationally expensive. We evaluate candidates using a branch-aware IK graph that maximizes the minimum feasibility margin over the discretized insertion path and use a learned task-conditioned prior to improve query ordering. The selected reorientation is executed through tactile-based extrinsic manipulation. In UR5e simulations, the planner without learned ranking reduces mean reorientation over successful trials by 51.5% compared with grid-based sequential IK. Adding learned ranking reduces this planner's mean planning time by an additional 51.1%. Real-robot experiments validate the complete pipeline.
Figures & tables
Fig. 2 : Illustration of a constrained pickup scenario with four test tubes placed in a holder. The robot cannot reach an alternative grasp pose for the target object without colliding with a neighboring tube.
Fig. 3 : Overview of the proposed framework for post-grasp kinematic repair for robotic insertion via object-in-gripper reorientation.
ID
Method
Search
Verifier
Success (%)
Repair (deg)
Median (deg)
Cand. evals
IK calls
Time (s)
M0
No repair
–
Seq. IK
20.0
0.00
0.00
1.00
6.0
0.03
M0-B
No repair
–
Branch graph
28.8
0.00
0.00
1.00
87.5
0.37
M1
Grid-seq.
5 ∘ grid
Seq. IK
94.4
15.92
8.54
441.00
2646.0
16.37
M2
Active-seq.
Ray active
Seq. IK
94.8
11.98
6.88
59.47
356.8
2.03
M3
Mesh-seq.
Adaptive mesh
Seq. IK
94.8
11.68
6.56
73.53
441.2
2.57
M4
Grid-branch
5 ∘ grid
Branch graph
94.4
13.00
7.07
441.00
39288.7
204.36
TABLE I : UR5e insertion repair benchmark on 250 category-controlled test instances. Repair statistics are computed over successful trials for each method.
OOD factor
Condition
Success (both)
Calls M6
Calls M7
Red. (%)
Goal position
Nominal
20/20
69.15
34.60
50.0
+100 mm
18/20
67.50
41.10
39.1
+150 mm
17/20
67.50
49.55
26.6
Cylinder length
−15%
20/25
51.12
30.72
39.9
−30%
20/25
39.44
25.00
36.6
−60%
20/25
39.52
25.40
35.7
TABLE II : Frozen-model sensitivity under controlled OOD variations. M6 and M7 achieved identical success in each condition. Calls denotes the mean number of verifier evaluations, and Red. denotes the percentage reduction achieved by M7 relative to M6.
Fig. 4 : Real-robot experimental setup with three objects: a test tube, an Allen key, and a USB stick. The planned reorientation ρ was executed by pushing the grasped object against the environment using tactile object-state feedback.
Proposed pipeline (Successes/Attempts)
Object
Configs.
Trials
Reorientation success
Post-action verifier pass
End-to-end insertion
Allen key
3
15
15/15
15/15
13/15
USB stick
3
15
15/15
15/15
12/15
Test tube
3
15
15/15
15/15
15/15
Overall
9
45
45/45
45/45
40/45
TABLE III : Real-robot evaluation results for three objects.
Non-prehensile manipulation is often used as a preparatory step for robotic grasping, yet existing approaches typically require a predefined target object pose. In practice, however, objects admit multiple graspable configurations and the desired pose is not known in advance. We reformulate non-prehensile manipulation for grasping as optimizing an object centric graspability objective rather than reaching a specific pose. We construct a graspable set from synthesized grasps and define a graspability field that measures how suitable an object configuration is for successful grasp execution. The scalar measure provides a dense learning signal for reinforcement learning and determines when to terminate manipulation. This yields a closed-loop manipulation-to-grasp pipeline driven by a single policy. Experiments in simulation and on a real robot show that the policy reliably reconfigures objects into graspable states and transitions to grasping without external planners or manually specified stopping conditions. The predicted graspability distance correlates with real world grasp success, which indicates that the learned representation captures grasp feasibility of object configurations.
Licheng Zhong, Gim Hee Lee
Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore
A geometrically valid placement can still be difficult to execute because the selected grasp changes the required end-effector pose, collision geometry, and transport motion. Placement is formulated as a pre-execution ranking problem in which supplied grasp-placement candidates are scored before planning. The model combines a typed target-conditioned point cloud with three pose descriptors and hierarchical heads for planning success and execution success conditioned on planning. On a 30-object, 1,235-scene dataset with scene-group-held-out splits, three-seed top-1 success on covered test groups reaches 85.63 +/- 1.08% for joint selection and 79.84 +/- 0.16% for fixed-target ranking. For the designated frozen seed-42 checkpoint, top-1 success improves from 72.84% to 85.78% over full-pool cuMotion for joint ranking and from 59.65% to 79.67% for fixed-target ranking. Frozen transfer to xArm7/MoveIt requires no xArm-specific retraining. Across 27 locked cases, 13 complete end to end (48.15%). Of the 16 cases that pass Top-5 preflight and begin execution, 13 succeed (81.25%). Candidate-level deployment-feasibility prediction reaches 81.25% recall, 85.20% specificity, and 83.23% balanced accuracy.
Tianyuan Liu, Rutherford Agbeshi Patamia, Benjamin Champion +2
Regrasp planning is often required when one pick-and-place cannot transfer an object from an initial pose to a goal pose while maintaining grasp feasibility. The main challenge is to reason about shared-grasp connectivity across intermediate poses, where discrete search becomes brittle. We propose an implicit multi-step regrasp planning framework based on differentiable pose sequence connectivity metrics. We model grasp feasibility under an object pose using an Energy-Based Model (EBM) and leverage energy additivity to construct a continuous energy landscape that measures pose-pair connectivity, enabling gradient-based optimization of intermediate object poses. An adaptive iterative deepening strategy is introduced to determine the minimum number of intermediate steps automatically. Experiments show that the proposed cost formulation provides smooth and informative gradients, improving planning robustness over other alternatives. They also demonstrate generalization to unseen grasp poses and cross-end-effector transfer, where a model trained with suction constraints can guide parallel gripper grasp manipulation. The multi-step planning results further highlight the effectiveness of adaptive deepening and minimum-step search.
Liang Qin, Weiwei Wan, Kensuke Harada
All authors are with the Graduate School of Engineering Science, The University of Osaka, Japan.