ULOHA: An Underwater Bimanual Robot System for Robot Learning

Published September 18, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2609.19200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Underwater visuomotor policy learning has focused primarily on single manipulators, while bimanual imitation learning has been studied largely in air. We present ULOHA, an underwater bimanual robot learning platform that combines custom-designed leader--follower hardware with software extensions to LeRobot, integrating teleoperation, multi-view sensing, demonstration collection, policy training, and autonomous deployment. Real-robot experiments demonstrate a range of coordinated underwater bimanual behaviors, including inter-arm transfer, shared-object manipulation, and buoyancy-driven interception. We evaluate ACT, Diffusion Policy, and the vision--language--action model SmolVLA on the platform. We investigate how learning methods and execution strategies developed for manipulation in air perform underwater, examining bubble disturbances, buoyancy-driven object motion, action-execution horizons, and real-time chunking. A separate single-arm study examines policy transfer between air and water and shows that demonstrations spanning both media support execution in both under the tested conditions. ULOHA provides a unified experimental platform for studying underwater bimanual robot learning under the coupled perceptual and physical effects of underwater environments. Additional material: https://mertcookimg.github.io/uloha/

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

Related Articles

• GAVEL: Graph World Models for Verified and Efficient Long-Horizon LLM Task Planning
• Time-Efficient Iterative Learning Planning for Safety-Critical Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance
• MoWAM: Explicit Future Motion Prediction for Efficient World Action Models