Fetch My Beer: Synthetic-to-real Hierarchical Policy for Smooth Pick-and-place

Published September 17, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2609.18119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many real-world robotic applications require dynamically sensitive manipulation, where success depends not only on reaching a target state but on maintaining stable object dynamics throughout execution. We study the stable transport of liquid-filled containers, where a robot must move objects to target locations while suppressing sloshing and preventing spillage. Unlike conventional pick-and-place, this task imposes stringent requirements on motion smoothness and trajectory-level stability, exposing clear limitations in existing systems. Specifically, fluid simulation remains too costly for online reinforcement learning; human teleoperation introduces unintended accelerations that induce sloshing during imitation learning; and current policy pipelines optimize for task completion rather than dynamic stability. We propose a synthetic-to-real framework coupling physically validated data generation with a hierarchical, diffusion-based controller. The scalable data pipeline synthesizes grasps, filters unstable poses via a vision-language model, and validates transport trajectories through fluid simulation. The policy is organized with a high-level module that translates language and visual observations into SE(3) control targets, and a latent diffusion controller that first plans efficiently in a compact latent space and then decodes dense action chunks, enabling the high control frequency needed for smooth and stable motion. Extensive experiments show our system outperforms state-of-the-art manipulation policies in transport smoothness and dynamic stability. Our project page: https://fetch-my-beer.github.io/

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

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