AuRA: From Atoms to Bits through Autonomous Robot Interaction

Overview & Synopsis

Simulation enables robot-learning experiments at scale, but acquiring physics-informed digital twins often requires human manipulation and manual annotation of recorded interactions. To reduce this reliance on human effort, we present AuRA, a system that automates robot interaction and data preparation for digital-twin reconstruction. AuRA combines execution-aware grasp selection, gripper-motion measurements derived from robot states, and registered pre-interaction geometry and appearance priors. These choices enable autonomous collection, avoid reliance on visual gripper tracking, and recover object information obscured by the robot. Across 13 deformable objects, AuRA reduces active human labor and wall-clock collection time per successfully reconstructed asset by 88.5% and 55.4%, respectively. Relative to the human-collected PhysTwin baseline, AuRA improves seven of nine metrics for future prediction under known gripper motion, including a 28.1% reduction in one-way $L_1$ Chamfer distance. It also achieves similar mean silhouette IoU and Chamfer distance under the evaluated unseen interactions. These results highlight the potential of autonomous robot interaction to support more efficient digital-twin acquisition with comparable reconstruction quality.