Latent Diffeomorphic Co-Design of End-Effectors for Deformable and Fragile Object Manipulation

Manipulating deformable and fragile objects remains a fundamental challenge in robotics due to complex contact dynamics and strict requirements on object integrity.Existing approaches typically optimize either end-effector design or control strategies in isolation, limiting achievable performance.In this work, we present, according to our knowledge, the first co-design framework that jointly optimizes end-effector morphology and manipulation control for deformable and fragile object manipulation.We introduce (1) a latent diffeomorphic shape parameterization enabling expressive yet tractable endeffector geometry optimization, (2) a stress-aware bi-level codesign pipeline coupling morphology and control optimization, and (3) a privileged-to-pointcloud policy distillation scheme for zero-shot real-world deployment.We evaluate our approach on challenging food manipulation tasks, including grasping and pushing jelly and scooping fillets.Simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.