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Yashraj Narang

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9 papers

2 author rows

ICRA Conference 2025 Conference Paper

MatchMaker: Automated Asset Generation for Robotic Assembly

Yian Wang 0001
Bingjie Tang
Chuang Gan 0001
Dieter Fox
Kaichun Mo
Yashraj Narang
Iretiayo Akinola

Robotic assembly remains a significant challenge due to complexities in visual perception, functional grasping, contact-rich manipulation, and performing high-precision tasks. Simulation-based learning and sim-to-real transfer have led to recent success in solving assembly tasks in the presence of object pose variation, perception noise, and control error; however, the development of a generalist (i. e. , multi-task) agent for a broad range of assembly tasks has been limited by the need to manually curate assembly assets, which greatly constrains the number and diversity of assembly problems that can be used for policy learning. Inspired by recent success of using generative AI to scale up robot learning, we propose Match-Maker, a pipeline to automatically generate diverse, simulation-compatible assembly asset pairs to facilitate learning assembly skills. Specifically, MatchMaker can 1) take a simulation-incompatible, interpenetrating asset pair as input, and automatically convert it into a simulation-compatible, interpenetration-free pair, 2) take an arbitrary single asset as input, and generate a geometrically-mating asset to create an asset pair, 3) automatically erode contact surfaces from (1) or (2) according to a user-specified clearance parameter to generate realistic parts. We demonstrate that data generated by MatchMaker outperforms previous work in terms of diversity and effectiveness for downstream assembly skill learning. Project page: https://wangyian-me.github.io/MatchMaker/.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

One-Step Diffusion Policy: Fast Visuomotor Policies via Diffusion Distillation

Zhendong Wang 0005
Max Li
Ajay Mandlekar
Zhenjia Xu
Jiaojiao Fan
Yashraj Narang
Linxi Fan
Yuke Zhu

Diffusion models, praised for their success in generative tasks, are increasingly being applied to robotics, demonstrating exceptional performance in behavior cloning. However, their slow generation process stemming from iterative denoising steps poses a challenge for real-time applications in resource-constrained robotics setups and dynamically changing environments. In this paper, we introduce the One-Step Diffusion Policy (OneDP), a novel approach that distills knowledge from pre-trained diffusion policies into a single-step action generator, significantly accelerating response times for robotic control tasks. We ensure the distilled generator closely aligns with the original policy distribution by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence along the diffusion chain, requiring only $2%$-$10%$ additional pre-training cost for convergence. We evaluated OneDP on 6 challenging simulation tasks as well as 4 self-designed real-world tasks using the Franka robot. The results demonstrate that OneDP not only achieves state-of-the-art success rates but also delivers an order-of-magnitude improvement in inference speed, boosting action prediction frequency from 1. 5 Hz to 62 Hz, establishing its potential for dynamic and computationally constrained robotic applications. A video demo is provided at our project page, and the code will be publicly available.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

RobotSmith: Generative Robotic Tool Design for Acquisition of Complex Manipulation Skills

Chunru Lin
Haotian Yuan
Yian Wang
Xiaowen Qiu
Tsun-Hsuan Johnson Wang
Minghao Guo
Bohan Wang
Yashraj Narang

Endowing robots with tool design abilities is critical for enabling them to solve complex manipulation tasks that would otherwise be intractable. While recent generative frameworks can automatically synthesize task settings—such as 3D scenes and reward functions—they have not yet addressed the challenge of tool-use scenarios. Simply retrieving human-designed tools might not be ideal since many tools (e. g. , a rolling pin) are difficult for robotic manipulators to handle. Furthermore, existing tool design approaches either rely on predefined templates with limited parameter tuning or apply generic 3D generation methods that are not optimized for tool creation. To address these limitations, we propose RobotSmith, an automated pipeline that leverages the implicit physical knowledge embedded in vision-language models (VLMs) alongside the more accurate physics provided by physics simulations to design and use tools for robotic manipulation. Our system (1) iteratively proposes tool designs using collaborative VLM agents, (2) generates low-level robot trajectories for tool use, and (3) jointly optimizes tool geometry and usage for task performance. We evaluate our approach across a wide range of manipulation tasks involving rigid, deformable, and fluid objects. Experiments show that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines in both task success rate and overall performance. Notably, our approach achieves a 50. 0\% average success rate, significantly surpassing other baselines such as 3D generation (21. 4\%) and tool retrieval (11. 1\%). Finally, we deploy our system in real-world settings, demonstrating that the generated tools and their usage plans transfer effectively to physical execution, validating the practicality and generalization capabilities of our approach.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

SRSA: Skill Retrieval and Adaptation for Robotic Assembly Tasks

Yijie Guo
Bingjie Tang
Iretiayo Akinola
Dieter Fox
Abhishek Gupta 0004
Yashraj Narang

Enabling robots to learn novel tasks in a data-efficient manner is a long-standing challenge. Common strategies involve carefully leveraging prior experiences, especially transition data collected on related tasks. Although much progress has been made for general pick-and-place manipulation, far fewer studies have investigated contact-rich assembly tasks, where precise control is essential. We introduce SRSA} (Skill Retrieval and Skill Adaptation), a novel framework designed to address this problem by utilizing a pre-existing skill library containing policies for diverse assembly tasks. The challenge lies in identifying which skill from the library is most relevant for fine-tuning on a new task. Our key hypothesis is that skills showing higher zero-shot success rates on a new task are better suited for rapid and effective fine-tuning on that task. To this end, we propose to predict the transfer success for all skills in the skill library on a novel task, and then use this prediction to guide the skill retrieval process. We establish a framework that jointly captures features of object geometry, physical dynamics, and expert actions to represent the tasks, allowing us to efficiently learn the transfer success predictor. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SRSA significantly outperforms the leading baseline. When retrieving and fine-tuning skills on unseen tasks, SRSA achieves a 19% relative improvement in success rate, exhibits 2.6x lower standard deviation across random seeds, and requires 2.4x fewer transition samples to reach a satisfactory success rate, compared to the baseline. In a continual learning setup, SRSA efficiently learns policies for new tasks and incorporates them into the skill library, enhancing future policy learning. Furthermore, policies trained with SRSA in simulation achieve a 90% mean success rate when deployed in the real world. Please visit our project webpage https://srsa2024.github.io/.

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ICRA Conference 2023 Conference Paper

DefGraspNets: Grasp Planning on 3D Fields with Graph Neural Nets

Isabella Huang
Yashraj Narang
Ruzena Bajcsy
Fabio Ramos 0001
Tucker Hermans
Dieter Fox

Robotic grasping of 3D deformable objects is critical for real-world applications such as food handling and robotic surgery. Unlike rigid and articulated objects, 3D deformable objects have infinite degrees of freedom. Fully defining their state requires 3D deformation and stress fields, which are exceptionally difficult to analytically compute or experimentally measure. Thus, evaluating grasp candidates for grasp planning typically requires accurate, but slow 3D finite element method (FEM) simulation. Sampling-based grasp planning is often impractical, as it requires evaluation of a large number of grasp candidates. Gradient-based grasp planning can be more efficient, but requires a differentiable model to synthesize optimal grasps from initial candidates. Differentiable FEM simulators may fill this role, but are typically no faster than standard FEM. In this work, we propose learning a predictive graph neural network (GNN), DefGraspNets, to act as our differentiable model. We train DefGraspNets to predict 3D stress and deformation fields based on FEM-based grasp simulations. DefGraspNets not only runs up to 1500x faster than the FEM simulator, but also enables fast gradient-based grasp optimization over 3D stress and deformation metrics. We design DefGraspNets to align with real-world grasp planning practices and demonstrate generalization across multiple test sets, including real-world experiments.

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ICRA Conference 2023 Conference Paper

DeXtreme: Transfer of Agile In-hand Manipulation from Simulation to Reality

Ankur Handa
Arthur Allshire
Viktor Makoviychuk
Aleksei Petrenko
Ritvik Singh
Jingzhou Liu
Denys Makoviichuk
Karl Van Wyk

Recent work has demonstrated the ability of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to learn complex robotic behaviours in simulation, including in the domain of multi-fingered manipulation. However, such models can be challenging to transfer to the real world due to the gap between simulation and reality. In this paper, we present our techniques to train a) a policy that can perform robust dexterous manipulation on an anthropomorphic robot hand and b) a robust pose estimator suitable for providing reliable real-time information on the state of the object being manipulated. Our policies are trained to adapt to a wide range of conditions in simulation. Consequently, our vision-based policies significantly outperform the best vision policies in the literature on the same reorientation task and are competitive with policies that are given privileged state information via motion capture systems. Our work reaffirms the possibilities of sim-to-real transfer for dexterous manipulation in diverse kinds of hardware and simulator setups, and in our case, with the Allegro Hand and Isaac Gym GPU-based simulation. Furthermore, it opens up possibilities for researchers to achieve such results with commonly-available, affordable robot hands and cameras. Videos of the resulting policy and supplementary information, including experiments and demos, can be found on the website.

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ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Accelerated Policy Learning with Parallel Differentiable Simulation

Jie Xu 0028
Viktor Makoviychuk
Yashraj Narang
Fabio Ramos 0001
Wojciech Matusik
Animesh Garg
Miles Macklin

Deep reinforcement learning can generate complex control policies, but requires large amounts of training data to work effectively. Recent work has attempted to address this issue by leveraging differentiable simulators. However, inherent problems such as local minima and exploding/vanishing numerical gradients prevent these methods from being generally applied to control tasks with complex contact-rich dynamics, such as humanoid locomotion in classical RL benchmarks. In this work we present a high-performance differentiable simulator and a new policy learning algorithm (SHAC) that can effectively leverage simulation gradients, even in the presence of non-smoothness. Our learning algorithm alleviates problems with local minima through a smooth critic function, avoids vanishing/exploding gradients through a truncated learning window, and allows many physical environments to be run in parallel. We evaluate our method on classical RL control tasks, and show substantial improvements in sample efficiency and wall-clock time over state-of-the-art RL and differentiable simulation-based algorithms. In addition, we demonstrate the scalability of our method by applying it to the challenging high-dimensional problem of muscle-actuated locomotion with a large action space, achieving a greater than $17\times$ reduction in training time over the best-performing established RL algorithm. More visual results are provided at: https://short-horizon-actor-critic.github.io/.

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ICRA Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Sim-to-Real for Robotic Tactile Sensing via Physics-Based Simulation and Learned Latent Projections

Yashraj Narang
Balakumar Sundaralingam
Miles Macklin
Arsalan Mousavian
Dieter Fox

Tactile sensing is critical for robotic grasping and manipulation of objects under visual occlusion. However, in contrast to simulations of robot arms and cameras, current simulations of tactile sensors have limited accuracy, speed, and utility. In this work, we develop an efficient 3D finite element method (FEM) model of the SynTouch BioTac sensor using an open-access, GPU-based robotics simulator. Our simulations closely reproduce results from an experimentally-validated model in an industry-standard, CPU-based simulator, but at 75x the speed. We then learn latent representations for simulated BioTac deformations and real-world electrical output through self-supervision, as well as projections between the latent spaces using a small supervised dataset. Using these learned latent projections, we accurately synthesize real-world BioTac electrical output and estimate contact patches, both for unseen contact interactions. This work contributes an efficient, freely-accessible FEM model of the BioTac and comprises one of the first efforts to combine self-supervision, cross-modal transfer, and sim-to-real transfer for tactile sensors.

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ICRA Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Inferring the Material Properties of Granular Media for Robotic Tasks

Carolyn Matl
Yashraj Narang
Ruzena Bajcsy
Fabio Ramos 0001
Dieter Fox

Granular media (e. g. , cereal grains, plastic resin pellets, and pills) are ubiquitous in robotics-integrated industries, such as agriculture, manufacturing, and pharmaceutical development. This prevalence mandates the accurate and efficient simulation of these materials. This work presents a software and hardware framework that automatically calibrates a fast physics simulator to accurately simulate granular materials by inferring material properties from real-world depth images of granular formations (i. e. , piles and rings). Specifically, coefficients of sliding friction, rolling friction, and restitution of grains are estimated from summary statistics of grain formations using likelihood-free Bayesian inference. The calibrated simulator accurately predicts unseen granular formations in both simulation and experiment; furthermore, simulator predictions are shown to generalize to more complex tasks, including using a robot to pour grains into a bowl, as well as to create a desired pattern of piles and rings.

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