VacuumVLA: Boosting VLA Capabilities via a Unified Suction and Gripping Tool for Complex Robotic Manipulation

TL;DR

VacuumVLA introduces a hybrid robotic end effector combining gripping and suction to enhance manipulation capabilities, enabling robots to perform complex tasks previously unfeasible with standard grippers.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel integrated hardware design that combines a mechanical gripper with a vacuum suction unit, expanding the task range of vision language action systems.

Findings

Successful execution of complex tasks like wiping and drawer opening

Enhanced task versatility with hybrid end effector

Validation within state-of-the-art VLA frameworks

Abstract

Vision Language Action models have significantly advanced general purpose robotic manipulation by harnessing large scale pretrained vision and language representations. Among existing approaches, a majority of current VLA systems employ parallel two finger grippers as their default end effectors. However, such grippers face inherent limitations in handling certain real world tasks such as wiping glass surfaces or opening drawers without handles due to insufficient contact area or lack of adhesion. To overcome these challenges, we present a low cost, integrated hardware design that combines a mechanical two finger gripper with a vacuum suction unit, enabling dual mode manipulation within a single end effector. Our system supports flexible switching or synergistic use of both modalities, expanding the range of feasible tasks. We validate the efficiency and practicality of our design within two state of the art VLA frameworks: DexVLA and Pi0. Experimental results demonstrate that with the proposed hybrid end effector, robots can successfully perform multiple complex tasks that are infeasible for conventional two finger grippers alone. All hardware designs and controlling systems will be released.