RiCo: Neural Simulation of Rigid-Body Interactions via Local Contact Reasoning

Embodied AI and Robotics SRT World Models
2026年10月08日
对刚体相互作用的精确模拟,是构建具备预测能力的物理世界模型的关键前提。尽管近年来在物体动力学建模方面已取得显著进展,但如何准确刻画物体表面之间局部接触关系对其运动行为的影响,仍是一项具有挑战性的任务。当前端到端的世界模型通常以整个场景或整件物体为单位预测交互行为;然而在现实中,刚体接触本质上是一种局域现象——唯有邻近表面才能直接传递接触力。受此观察启发,我们提出了“刚体接触推理”(Rigid-body Contact Reasoning, RiCo)方法:该方法通过稀疏选取的接触表面点邻域来表征物体间的相互作用。RiCo 将每个接触点的状态信息,与其邻近表面的相对几何构型、运动状态及物理属性相融合,并在物体内部各接触点之间进行跨点推理,从而综合判定这些局部接触如何协同影响物体的整体运动。该方法将跨物体的交互推理严格限定于邻近表面之间,同时在单个刚体内传播接触信息,既保留了细粒度的交互细节,又避免了对场景中所有点对进行建模所带来的高昂计算开销。上述特性使 RiCo 在预测精度与接触保真度两方面均获得显著提升。在 MOVi 基准测试集上的实验表明,相较于各类基线模型,RiCo 将 100 帧预测中的位置误差与朝向误差分别降低了 31–35% 和约 38%;此外,其接触保真度表现优异:相对于真实接触状态,穿透发生时刻的相对误差仅为 11.0%,平均穿透深度误差为 2.22 毫米。更进一步,RiCo 具备出色的零样本泛化能力,可直接从仅含少量物体的小规模训练场景,推广至包含多达 270 个物体的复杂大场景。我们在真实世界中开展的多球碰撞实验,亦为该方法从仿真到现实(sim-to-real)的有效迁移提供了初步实证支持。
Accurate simulation of rigid-body interactions is essential for predictive physical world models. Despite recent progress in modeling object dynamics, capturing how local contacts between surfaces shape object motion remains challenging. While end-to-end world models predict interactions across entire scenes or objects, in practice, rigid-body contact is inherently local, and only nearby surfaces can directly exchange contact forces. Motivated by this observation, we introduce Rigid-body Contact Reasoning (RiCo), which represents interactions between objects through sparse neighborhoods of contact surface points. RiCo combines each point's state with the relative geometry, motion, and physical properties of nearby surfaces, then reasons across the object's points to determine how these local contacts jointly affect its motion. By confining cross-object reasoning to nearby surfaces while propagating contact information within each rigid body, RiCo retains fine-grained interaction details without the cost of modeling every pair of scene points. Such properties enable RiCo a higher accuracy and contact fidelity. Experiments on MOVi-benchmark demonstrate that RiCo reduces 100-frame position and orientation errors by 31-35% and approximately 38%, respectively, compared with baselines. Moreover, RiCo achieves high contact fidelity, with ground-truth-relative penetration-time and mean-depth differences of 11.0% and 2.22 mm, respectively. RiCo further generalizes zero-shot from small-scale training scenarios to scenes containing 270 objects. Our real-world multi-ball collision experiments further provide preliminary evidence of sim-to-real transfer.
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