Portfolio item number 1
Short description of portfolio item number 1
Posts by Collection
portfolio
Portfolio item number 2
Short description of portfolio item number 2
publications
Emerging Extrinsic Dexterity in Cluttered Scenes via Dynamics-aware Policy Learning
Published in Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2026, 2026
Extrinsic dexterity leverages environmental contact to overcome the limitations of prehensile manipulation. However, achieving such dexterity in cluttered scenes remains challenging and underexplored, as it requires selectively exploiting contact among multiple interacting objects with inherently coupled dynamics. Existing approaches lack explicit modeling of such complex dynamics and therefore fall short in non-prehensile manipulation in cluttered environments, which in turn limits their practical applicability in real-world environments. In this paper, we introduce a Dynamics-Aware Policy Learning (DAPL) framework that can facilitate policy learning with a learned representation of contact-induced object dynamics in cluttered environments. This representation is learned through explicit world modeling and used to condition reinforcement learning, enabling extrinsic dexterity to emerge without hand-crafted contact heuristics or complex reward shaping. We evaluate our approach in both simulation and the real world. Our method outperforms prehensile manipulation, human teleoperation, and prior representation-based policy by over 25% in success rate on unseen simulated cluttered scenes with varying densities. Real-world success reaches around 50% across 10 cluttered scenes, while a practical grocery deployment further demonstrates robust sim-to-real transfer and applicability.
Authors: Yixin Zheng, Jiangran Lyu, Yifan Zhang, Jiayi Chen, Mi Yan, Yuntian Deng, Xuesong Shi, Xiaoguang Zhao, Yizhou Wang, Zhizheng Zhang, He Wang
Download Paper
talks
Talk 1 on Relevant Topic in Your Field
Published:
This is a description of your talk, which is a markdown file that can be all markdown-ified like any other post. Yay markdown!
Conference Proceeding talk 3 on Relevant Topic in Your Field
Published:
This is a description of your conference proceedings talk, note the different field in type. You can put anything in this field.
teaching
Teaching experience 1
Undergraduate course, University 1, Department, 2014
This is a description of a teaching experience. You can use markdown like any other post.
Teaching experience 2
Workshop, University 1, Department, 2015
This is a description of a teaching experience. You can use markdown like any other post.