MorphIK: Morphology-Conditioned Neural Inverse Kinematics for Unknown Robots

Abstract:Neural models can learn to generate various solutions to the inverse kinematics problem from data, but are usually limited to a single robot. We present MorphIK, a flow-matching model that solves inverse kinematics for revolute-joint-based kinematic chains it has never seen during training. The model uses a transformer architecture to encode the robot's morphology along with the target pose. This encoding then conditions a flow-matching head that generates poses from noise. Trained on purely synthetic data from procedurally generated robots, the model reaches a precision of about 5 cm on unseen real-world robots with 6 to 9 Degrees of Freedom. For higher precision, the model serves as an excellent Prior for further optimization algorithms, reducing error to less than 1 cm after a single step of Damped Least Squares optimization and to sub-1 mm error after 3 steps in most cases. Building on flow matching's generative capabilities to produce highly diverse outputs, our model can efficiently sample the robot's null space, providing a wide variety of configurations for the same pose. Thus, overall, MorphIK allows learning and generalizing neural inverse kinematics for a multitude of known and unknown robots.

Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.29908 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.29908v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.29908 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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