SWIM: Vision-Language-Grounded Soft Whole-Body Interactive Manipulation

Abstract:Soft and continuum robots enable manipulation through distributed body deformation and contact, yet translating language and visual context into executable whole-body actuation remains a fundamental challenge. We present SWIM, a framework that maps an initial RGB observation and a language instruction to a complete actuation-command sequence. Its vision-language-action (VLA) policy, SWIM-VLA, combines a diffusion action head with Visual Soft Proprioception (VSP) through a shared representation of RGB observations, language instructions, and tendon states. The diffusion head models conditional distributions of expert command chunks, while VSP supervises ordered body-anchor predictions using simulation ground truth, encouraging the representation to retain body geometry when learning from limited demonstrations. Embodied mechanical intelligence supports physical execution of command sequences generated through iterative virtual rollout from evolving simulated observations, with intrinsic compliance providing local contact adaptation without online policy queries. We evaluate SWIM on packing, reaching, and grasping on a planar tendon-driven soft robot, with grasping targets anchored. In simulation, SWIM-VLA achieves success rates of 100\%, 96\%, and 88\%, respectively, outperforming an adapted OpenVLA-OFT baseline and controlled ablations. On hardware, SWIM achieves success rates of 100\%, 80\%, and 75\%, compared with 75\%, 40\%, and 25\% for direct online deployment of the same policy checkpoint.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.17035 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.17035v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.17035 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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