Xin Wang
Publications
Shape-Interpretable Visual Self-Modeling Enables Geometry-Aware Continuum Robot Control
Continuum robots possess high flexibility and redundancy, making them well suited for safe interaction in complex environments, yet their continuous deformation and nonlinear dynamics pose fundamental challenges to perception, modeling, and control. Existing vision-based control approaches often rely on end-to-end learning, achieving shape regulation without explicit awareness of robot geometry or its interaction with the environment. Here, we introduce a shape-interpretable visual self-modeling framework for continuum robots that enables geometry-aware control. Robot shapes are encoded from multi-view planar images using a Bezier-curve representation, transforming visual observations into a compact and physically meaningful shape space that uniquely characterizes the robot's three-dimensional configuration. Based on this representation, neural ordinary differential equations are employed to self-model both shape and end-effector dynamics directly from data, enabling hybrid shape-position control without analytical models or dense body markers. The explicit geometric structure of the learned shape space allows the robot to reason about its body and surroundings, supporting environment-aware behaviors such as obstacle avoidance and self-motion while maintaining end-effector objectives. Experiments on a cable-driven continuum robot demonstrate accurate shape-position regulation and tracking, with shape errors within 1.56% of image resolution and end-effector errors within 2% of robot length, as well as robust performance in constrained environments. By elevating visual shape representations from two-dimensional observations to an interpretable three-dimensional self-model, this work establishes a principled alternative to vision-based end-to-end control and advances autonomous, geometry-aware manipulation for continuum robots.
Mirage2Matter: A Physically Grounded Gaussian World Model from Video
The scalability of embodied intelligence is fundamentally constrained by the scarcity of real-world interaction data. While simulation platforms provide a promising alternative, existing approaches often suffer from a substantial visual and physical gap to real environments and rely on expensive sensors, precise robot calibration, or depth measurements, limiting their practicality at scale. We present Simulate Anything, a graphics-driven world modeling and simulation framework that enables efficient generation of high-fidelity embodied training data using only multi-view environment videos and off-the-shelf assets. Our approach reconstructs real-world environments into a photorealistic scene representation using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), seamlessly capturing fine-grained geometry and appearance from video. We then leverage generative models to recover a physically realistic representation and integrate it into a simulation environment via a precision calibration target, enabling accurate scale alignment between the reconstructed scene and the real world. Together, these components provide a unified, editable, and physically grounded world model. Vision Language Action (VLA) models trained on our simulated data achieve strong zero-shot performance on downstream tasks, matching or even surpassing results obtained with real-world data, highlighting the potential of reconstruction-driven world modeling for scalable and practical embodied intelligence training.