Robotic Multiphase Interaction: Manipulating Coupled Liquid and Solid Dynamics with a World Model

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Article Summary

This work presents \textit{Robotic Multiphase Interaction (RMI)}, a setting in which liquid enters a porous material and interacts mechanically with its deforming solid skeleton. Manipulation can therefore change pore volume, expel or redistribute retained liquid, and alter grasp stability at the same time. Spilled liquid can also create safety risks in domestic and manufacturing settings. This differs from most manipulation of solid objects and from tasks that involve both liquid and solid while keeping the phases spatially separate. We study a sponge filled with water as the first RMI example. We use implicit incompressible porous flow with smoothed particle hydrodynamics as the dynamics engine and enable robotic manipulation by adding Coulomb contact memory, hybrid velocity and force regulation, and a stability gate for lifting. The resulting environment connects robot commands to changes in the coupled liquid and solid state. A world model conditioned on actions predicts how this state evolves under candidate commands, while a temporal UNet generates actions using either Diffusion Policy or rectified flow matching. Our world model reduces retained water prediction error by more than $60\%$ compared with the baseline. The best action sequence selected by the world model from policy proposals further reduces the predicted terminal water error by about half. These improvements show that modelling the coupled liquid and solid state helps the robot predict how its actions affect both the porous object and the liquid held inside.

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