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

Kei Ikemura*, Yifei Dong*, Florian T. Pokorny
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
RSS 2026
*Indicates Equal Contribution
Paper Code (Coming Soon)

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.

Method Overview

Method overview: diffeomorphic design space, bi-level design-control optimization, policy distillation, and sim-to-real transfer

Real-World Manipulation Rollouts

Poster

BibTeX

@inproceedings{ikemura2026latent,
  title={Latent Diffeomorphic Co-Design of End-Effectors for Deformable and Fragile Object Manipulation},
  author={Ikemura, Kei and Dong, Yifei and Pokorny, Florian T.},
  booktitle={Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS)},
  year={2026},
  eprint={2602.17921},
  archivePrefix={arXiv}
}