# RoPotter: Toward Robotic Pottery and Deformable Object Manipulation with Structural Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.02184 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02184/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [PinchBot: Long-Horizon Deformable Manipulation with Guided Diffusion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17846/) (2025)
- [Visual Sculpting: Visually-Aligned Planning Representations for Long-Horizon Robot Clay Sculpting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17556/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humans are capable of continuously manipulating a wide variety of deformable objects into complex shapes. This is made possible by our intuitive understanding of material properties and mechanics of the object, for reasoning about object states even when visual perception is occluded. These capabilities allow us to perform diverse tasks ranging from cooking with dough to expressing ourselves with pottery-making. However, developing robotic systems to robustly perform similar tasks remains challenging, as current methods struggle to effectively model volumetric deformable objects and reason about the complex behavior they typically exhibit. To study the robotic systems and algorithms capable of deforming volumetric objects, we introduce a novel robotics task of continuously deforming clay on a pottery wheel. We propose a pipeline for perception and pottery skill-learning, called RoPotter, wherein we demonstrate that structural priors specific to the task of pottery-making can be exploited to simplify the pottery skill-learning process. Namely, we can project the cross-section of the clay to a plane to represent the state of the clay, reducing dimensionality. We also demonstrate a mesh-based method of occluded clay state recovery, toward robotic agents capable of continuously deforming clay. Our experiments show that by using the reduced representation with structural priors based on the deformation behaviors of the clay, RoPotter can perform the long-horizon pottery task with 44.4% lower final shape error compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.