TwinTrack: Bridging Vision and Contact Physics for Real-Time Tracking of Unknown Objects in Contact-Rich Scenes

TL;DR

TwinTrack is a physics-aware perception system that combines vision and contact physics to achieve robust, real-time 6-DoF pose tracking of unknown objects in contact-rich scenes, outperforming existing methods in challenging scenarios.

Contribution

The paper introduces TwinTrack, a novel system integrating Real2Sim and Sim2Real for contact physics-aware, real-time object tracking in complex scenes, which is a significant advancement over prior vision-only approaches.

Findings

Achieves over 20 Hz tracking speed in contact-rich scenarios.

Outperforms baseline methods in robustness and accuracy.

Effectively estimates physical properties like mass and friction.

Abstract

Real-time tracking of previously unseen, highly dynamic objects in contact-rich scenes, such as during dexterous in-hand manipulation, remains a major challenge. Pure vision-based approaches often fail under heavy occlusions due to frequent contact interactions and motion blur caused by abrupt impacts. We propose Twintrack, a physics-aware perception system that enables robust, real-time 6-DoF pose tracking of unknown dynamic objects in contact-rich scenes by leveraging contact physics cues. At its core, Twintrack integrates Real2Sim and Sim2Real. Real2Sim combines vision and contact physics to jointly estimate object geometry and physical properties: an initial reconstruction is obtained from vision, then refined by learning a geometry residual and simultaneously estimating physical parameters (e.g., mass, inertia, and friction) based on contact dynamics consistency. Sim2Real achieves robust pose estimation by adaptively fusing a visual tracker with predictions from the updated contact dynamics. Twintrack is implemented on a GPU-accelerated, customized MJX engine to guarantee real-time performance. We evaluate our method on two contact-rich scenarios: object falling with environmental contacts and multi-fingered in-hand manipulation. Results show that, compared to baselines, Twintrack delivers significantly more robust, accurate, and real-time tracking in these challenging settings, with tracking speeds above 20 Hz. Project page: https://irislab.tech/TwinTrack-webpage/