Skip to content

Wiggle and Go! System Identification for Zero-Shot Dynamic Rope Manipulation

Arthur Jakobsson Abhinav Mahajan Karthik Pullalarevu Krishna Suresh Yunchao Yao Yuemin Mao Bardienus Duisterhof Shahram Najam Syed Jeffrey Ichnowski
Sep 2026
Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Robotics

Abstract

Many robotic tasks are unforgiving; a single mistake in a dynamic throw can lead to unacceptable delays or unrecoverable failure. We introduce Wiggle and Go!, a two-stage framework for zero-shot rope manipulation: a brief, safe wiggle action is observed to predict descriptive rope parameters, which then conditions a trajectory optimizer for zero-shot goal-conditioned execution. Unlike prior dynamic rope manipulation methods that require large real-world datasets or iterative real-world refinement, our identification module is task-agnostic, supporting diverse manipulation policies without retraining. We achieve a 3.55\,cm average accuracy on 3D target striking in real using rope system parameters in comparison to 15.29\,cm for uninformed baselines, and over 50\% success on multi-objective lobbing and draping tasks. Predicted parameters transfer to unseen motions with 0.95 Pearson correlation between simulated and real rope dynamics, indicating that the identification module generalizes across the task corpus. Project website: https://wiggleandgo.github.io/

View source

Similar papers

#machine learning Review Open access Oct 2014

Software development in startup companies: A systematic mapping study

The results indicate that software engineering work practices are chosen opportunistically, adapted and configured to provide value under the constrains imposed by the startup context.

Nicolò Paternoster, Carmine Giardino, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al. · 394 citations · ⚡54

Diffusion models as plug-and-play priors

The possibility of inferring high-dimensional data inference in a model that consists of a prior and an auxiliary differentiable constraint given some additional information is considered, thereby allowing a range of potential applications in adapting models to new domains and tasks.

Alexandros Graikos, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, N. Jojic et al. · 316 citations · ⚡15

Trajectory Balance: Improved Credit Assignment in GFlowNets

It is proved that any global minimizer of the trajectory balance objective can define a policy that samples exactly from the target distribution, and empirically demonstrate the benefits of the trajectories balance objective for GFlowNet convergence, diversity of generated samples, and robustness to long action sequences and large action spaces.

Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Moksh Jain, Emmanuel Bengio et al. · 302 citations · ⚡60
#artificial intelligence Open access May 2023

Evaluating the Performance of Large Language Models on GAOKAO Benchmark

GAOKAO-Bench is introduced, an intuitive benchmark that employs questions from the Chinese GAOKAO examination as test samples, including both subjective and objective questions that contribute a robust evaluation benchmark for future large language models and offers valuable insights into the advantages and limitations of such models.

Xiaotian Zhang, Chun-yan Li, Yi Zong et al. · 216 citations · ⚡17
#machine learning Review Open access Jun 2014

Why Early-Stage Software Startups Fail: A Behavioral Framework

This state-of-practice investigation was performed using a literature review followed by a multiple-case study approach and presents how inconsistency between managerial strategies and execution can lead to failure by means of a behavioral framework.

Carmine Giardino, Xiaofeng Wang, P. Abrahamsson · 175 citations · ⚡19
#artificial intelligence Open access Jul 2024

Gender, Race, and Intersectional Bias in Resume Screening via Language Model Retrieval

This work investigates the possibilities of using LLMs in a resume screening setting via a document retrieval framework that simulates job candidate selection and finds that the MTEs are biased, significantly favoring White-associated names in 85% of cases and female-associated names in only 11.1% of cases.

Kyra Wilson, Aylin Caliskan · 131 citations · ⚡8

Related blog posts

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.