English

A High-Fidelity Digital Twin for Robotic Manipulation Based on 3D Gaussian Splatting

Robotics 2026-05-05 v2

Abstract

Developing high-fidelity, interactive digital twins is crucial for enabling closed-loop motion planning and reliable real-world robot execution, which are essential to advancing sim-to-real transfer. However, existing approaches often suffer from slow reconstruction, limited visual fidelity, and difficulties in converting photorealistic models into planning-ready collision geometry. We present a practical framework that constructs high-quality digital twins within minutes from sparse RGB inputs. Our system employs 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for fast, photorealistic reconstruction as a unified scene representation. We enhance 3DGS with visibility-aware semantic fusion for accurate 3D labelling and introduce an efficient, filter-based geometry conversion method to produce collision-ready models seamlessly integrated with a Unity-ROS2-MoveIt physics engine. In experiments with a Franka Emika Panda robot performing pick-and-place tasks, we demonstrate that this enhanced geometric accuracy effectively supports robust manipulation in real-world trials. These results demonstrate that 3DGS-based digital twins, enriched with semantic and geometric consistency, offer a fast, reliable, and scalable path from perception to manipulation in unstructured environments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.03200,
  title  = {A High-Fidelity Digital Twin for Robotic Manipulation Based on 3D Gaussian Splatting},
  author = {Ziyang Sun and Lingfan Bao and Tianhu Peng and Jingcheng Sun and Chengxu Zhou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.03200},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted By Journal of Robot Learning