Visual Sculpting: Visually-Aligned Planning Representations for Long-Horizon Robot Clay Sculpting
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866911692177276928 |
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| author | Schaldenbrand, Peter Oh, Jean |
| author_facet | Schaldenbrand, Peter Oh, Jean |
| contents | Clay sculpting is a nuanced, artistic task involving dexterous manipulation with long-horizon planning to achieve high-level goals. As a robotics problem, we formulate clay sculpting as a shape-to-shape matching challenge. Prior deformable object manipulation work either requires retraining a policy per goal or relies on dynamics models which represent state as sparse point clouds which do not capture important clay features, such as textures, well. We present a method for modeling the dynamics of deformable materials and planning for robotic sculpting in a representation that is visually-aligned, capturing lighting and texture features. With three different deformable materials and various end-effectors, we demonstrate that our dynamics model is comparable in performance to the state-of-the-art with the added benefit of being compatible with visual planning. Our actions are represented as parametrized pushes into clay with a single end-effector, which proved to be suitable for long-horizon (>100 actions) clay relief sculptures. Lastly, we show the benefits of planning in a visually-aligned representation, but also provide analysis providing evidence as to why this representation is challenging to plan in compared to 3D representations. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_17556 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Visual Sculpting: Visually-Aligned Planning Representations for Long-Horizon Robot Clay Sculpting Schaldenbrand, Peter Oh, Jean Robotics Artificial Intelligence Clay sculpting is a nuanced, artistic task involving dexterous manipulation with long-horizon planning to achieve high-level goals. As a robotics problem, we formulate clay sculpting as a shape-to-shape matching challenge. Prior deformable object manipulation work either requires retraining a policy per goal or relies on dynamics models which represent state as sparse point clouds which do not capture important clay features, such as textures, well. We present a method for modeling the dynamics of deformable materials and planning for robotic sculpting in a representation that is visually-aligned, capturing lighting and texture features. With three different deformable materials and various end-effectors, we demonstrate that our dynamics model is comparable in performance to the state-of-the-art with the added benefit of being compatible with visual planning. Our actions are represented as parametrized pushes into clay with a single end-effector, which proved to be suitable for long-horizon (>100 actions) clay relief sculptures. Lastly, we show the benefits of planning in a visually-aligned representation, but also provide analysis providing evidence as to why this representation is challenging to plan in compared to 3D representations. |
| title | Visual Sculpting: Visually-Aligned Planning Representations for Long-Horizon Robot Clay Sculpting |
| topic | Robotics Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17556 |