Latent Diffeomorphic Co-Design of End-Effectors for Deformable and Fragile Object Manipulation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17921v1
• Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:33:20 GMT
• Title: Latent Diffeomorphic Co-Design of End-Effectors for Deformable and Fragile Object Manipulation
• Authors: Kei Ikemura, Yifei Dong, Florian T. Pokorny,
• Abstract summary: We present the first co-design framework that jointly optimize end-effector morphology and manipulation control for deformable and fragile object manipulation.<n>We evaluate our approach on challenging food manipulation tasks, including grasping and pushing jelly and scooping fillets.
• Score: 11.839375212218412
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Manipulating deformable and fragile objects remains a fundamental challenge in robotics due to complex contact dynamics and strict requirements on object integrity. Existing approaches typically optimize either end-effector design or control strategies in isolation, limiting achievable performance. In this work, we present the first co-design framework that jointly optimizes end-effector morphology and manipulation control for deformable and fragile object manipulation. We introduce (1) a latent diffeomorphic shape parameterization enabling expressive yet tractable end-effector geometry optimization, (2) a stress-aware bi-level co-design pipeline coupling morphology and control optimization, and (3) a privileged-to-pointcloud policy distillation scheme for zero-shot real-world deployment. We evaluate our approach on challenging food manipulation tasks, including grasping and pushing jelly and scooping fillets. Simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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