# Sim2Real2: Actively Building Explicit Physics Model for Precise Articulated Object Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10693 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10693/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Feb 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [URDFormer: A Pipeline for Constructing Articulated Simulation Environments from Real-World Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11656/) (2024)
- [ARNOLD: A Benchmark for Language-Grounded Task Learning With Continuous States in Realistic 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04321/) (2023)
- [ArtGS: Building Interactable Replicas of Complex Articulated Objects via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19459/) (2025)
- [Vid2Sim: Realistic and Interactive Simulation from Video for Urban Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06693/) (2025)
- [ASID: Active Exploration for System Identification in Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12308/) (2024)
- [VideoArtGS: Building Digital Twins of Articulated Objects from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17647/) (2025)
- [Part-Guided 3D RL for Sim2Real Articulated Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17302/) (2024)
- [ScrewSplat: An End-to-End Method for Articulated Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02146/) (2025)
- [GEAR: GEometry-motion Alternating Refinement for Articulated Object Modeling with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07728/) (2026)
- [ForceTwin: Physics-informed Digital Twins for Robotic Manipulation from Instrumented Human Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21751/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurately manipulating articulated objects is a challenging yet important task for real robot applications. In this paper, we present a novel framework called Sim2Real2 to enable the robot to manipulate an unseen articulated object to the desired state precisely in the real world with no human demonstrations. We leverage recent advances in physics simulation and learning-based perception to build the interactive explicit physics model of the object and use it to plan a long-horizon manipulation trajectory to accomplish the task. However, the interactive model cannot be correctly estimated from a static observation. Therefore, we learn to predict the object affordance from a single-frame point cloud, control the robot to actively interact with the object with a one-step action, and capture another point cloud. Further, the physics model is constructed from the two point clouds. Experimental results show that our framework achieves about 70% manipulations with <30% relative error for common articulated objects, and 30% manipulations for difficult objects. Our proposed framework also enables advanced manipulation strategies, such as manipulating with different tools. Code and videos are available on our project webpage: https://ttimelord.github.io/Sim2Real2-site/