[2603.21421] HyReach: Vision-Guided Hybrid Manipulator Reaching in Unseen Cluttered Environments

Computer Science > Robotics arXiv:2603.21421 (cs) [Submitted on 22 Mar 2026] Title:HyReach: Vision-Guided Hybrid Manipulator Reaching in Unseen Cluttered Environments Authors:Shivani Kamtikar, Kendall Koe, Justin Wasserman, Samhita Marri, Benjamin Walt, Naveen Kumar Uppalapati, Girish Krishnan, Girish Chowdhary View a PDF of the paper titled HyReach: Vision-Guided Hybrid Manipulator Reaching in Unseen Cluttered Environments, by Shivani Kamtikar and 7 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:As robotic systems increasingly operate in unstructured, cluttered, and previously unseen environments, there is a growing need for manipulators that combine compliance, adaptability, and precise control. This work presents a real-time hybrid rigid-soft continuum manipulator system designed for robust open-world object reaching in such challenging environments. The system integrates vision-based perception and 3D scene reconstruction with shape-aware motion planning to generate safe trajectories. A learning-based controller drives the hybrid arm to arbitrary target poses, leveraging the flexibility of the soft segment while maintaining the precision of the rigid segment. The system operates without environment-specific retraining, enabling direct generalization to new scenes. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate consistent reaching performance with errors below 2 cm across diverse cluttered setups, highlighting the potential of hybrid manipulators for adaptive and rel...