Papers for

robotic process automation engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Lie-group spline policy improves smooth robotic arm movements and success rates

LieSpline-DP: Lie-Group B-Spline Diffusion Policy for Smooth Robot Manipulation

Abstract: Diffusion Policy (DP) is a powerful Learning from Demonstration (LfD) method for robotic manipulation, yet it suffers from discontinuous and non-smooth trajectories. Spline-based action representations promote smooth motion within individual action chunks, but existing spline-based methods neither guarantee cross-chunk $C^2$ continuity nor account for the group structure of $\mathrm{SE}(3)$. We therefore propose LieSpline-DP, a Lie-group B-spline diffusion policy that generates end-effector trajectories directly on $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ and couples consecutive plans by sharing their boundary control poses, ensuring $C^2$ continuity throughout the entire planned trajectory. Across three real-robot tasks, LieSpline-DP produces lower trajectory jerk and higher task success rates than the DP baseline. The gains are particularly pronounced in real-world tasks involving liquids and flexible objects: in our real-robot experiments, LieSpline-DP achieved a 100% success rate on both pouring and bucket hooking, whereas the DP baseline achieved only 10% and 30%, respectively.

Mon 14 SeptRobotics
The gist
Robots often move in jerky or uneven ways when copying demonstrations, which can cause problems especially with delicate tasks. The authors created a new method that plans smooth, seamless motions by using math that respects how robot arms move in 3D space. This makes the robot’s hand movements much smoother and helps it successfully complete tasks like pouring liquids or hooking flexible objects. The new method worked better than older ones in real robot tests, making the robot more reliable and precise.
Open 2609.15162v1