Fabrica: Dual-Arm Assembly of General Multi-Part Objects via Integrated Planning and Learning

TL;DR

Fabrica introduces a dual-arm robotic system that combines hierarchical planning and reinforcement learning to enable autonomous, generalizable multi-part object assembly in real-world settings without human demonstrations.

Contribution

The paper presents an integrated system with hierarchical planning and learned control policies for general multi-part assembly, achieving zero-shot transfer and high success rates.

Findings

Achieves 80% success rate in real-world assembly steps.

First system to combine global planning with robust local control for general multi-part assembly.

Demonstrates zero-shot transfer of policies to real-world objects.

Abstract

Multi-part assembly poses significant challenges for robots to execute long-horizon, contact-rich manipulation with generalization across complex geometries. We present Fabrica, a dual-arm robotic system capable of end-to-end planning and control for autonomous assembly of general multi-part objects. For planning over long horizons, we develop hierarchies of precedence, sequence, grasp, and motion planning with automated fixture generation, enabling general multi-step assembly on any dual-arm robots. The planner is made efficient through a parallelizable design and is optimized for downstream control stability. For contact-rich assembly steps, we propose a lightweight reinforcement learning framework that trains generalist policies across object geometries, assembly directions, and grasp poses, guided by equivariance and residual actions obtained from the plan. These policies transfer zero-shot to the real world and achieve 80% successful steps. For systematic evaluation, we propose a benchmark suite of multi-part assemblies resembling industrial and daily objects across diverse categories and geometries. By integrating efficient global planning and robust local control, we showcase the first system to achieve complete and generalizable real-world multi-part assembly without domain knowledge or human demonstrations. Project website: http://fabrica.csail.mit.edu/